The Fountain of Age
Praise for Nancy Kress’s previous books
FOUNTAIN
OF
AGE
stories
NANCY KRESS
Small Beer Press
Easthampton, MA
This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed
in this book are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Fountain of Age: Stories
copyright © 2012 by Nancy Kress. All rights reserved.
www.sff.net/people/nankress
Small Beer Press
150 Pleasant Street #306
Easthampton, MA 01027
www.smallbeerpress.com
www.weightlessbooks.com
Distributed to the trade by Consortium.
ISBN: 978-1-931520-45-4 (trade paper); 978-1-931520-46-1 (ebook)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kress, Nancy.
Fountain of age : stories / Nancy Kress. -- 1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-931520-45-4 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-931520-46-1 (ebook)
I. Title.
PS3561.R46F68 2012
813’.54--dc23
2012001080
First edition 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Ebook text set in Centaur. Print edition text set in Centaur. Titles set in Menlo.
Print edition printed on 50# 30% PCR recycled Natures Natural paper by in the USA.
Cover by fonografiks (fonografiks.com).
The Erdmann Nexus
The Kindness of Strangers
By Fools Like Me
First Rites
End Game
Images of Anna
Laws of Survival
Safeguard
Fountain of Age
For Jack
“Errors, like straws, upon the surface flow,
He who would reach for pearls must dive below.”
—John Dryden
The ship, which would have looked nothing like a ship to Henry Erdmann, moved between the stars, traveling in an orderly pattern of occurrences in the vacuum flux. Over several cubic light-years of space, subatomic particles appeared, existed, and winked out of existence in nanoseconds. Flop transitions tore space and then reconfigured it as the ship moved on. Henry, had he somehow been nearby in the cold of deep space, would have died from the complicated, regular, intense bursts of radiation long before he could have had time to appreciate their shimmering beauty.
All at once the “ship” stopped moving.
The radiation bursts increased, grew even more complex. Then the ship abruptly changed direction. It accelerated, altering both space and time as it sped on, healing the alterations in its wake. Urgency shot through it.
Something, far away, was struggling to be born.
ONE
Henry Erdmann stood in front of the mirror in his tiny bedroom, trying to knot his tie with one hand. The other hand gripped his walker. It was an unsteady business, and the tie ended up crooked. He yanked it out and began again. Carrie would be here soon.
He always wore a tie to the college. Let the students—and graduate students, at that!—come to class in ripped jeans and obscene T-shirts and hair tangled as if colonized by rats. Even the girls. Students were students, and Henry didn’t consider their sloppiness disrespectful, the way so many did at St. Sebastian’s. Sometimes he was even amused by it, in a sad sort of way. Didn’t these intelligent, sometimes driven, would-be physicists know how ephemeral their beauty was? Why did they go to such lengths to look unappealing, when soon enough that would be their only choice?
This time he got the tie knotted. Not perfectly—a difficult operation, one-handed—but close enough for government work. He smiled. When he and his colleagues had been doing government work, only perfection was good enough. Atomic bombs were like that. Henry could still hear Oppie’s voice saying the plans for Ivy Mike were “technically sweet.” Of course, that was before all the—
A knock on the door and Carrie’s fresh young voice. “Dr. Erdmann? Are you ready?”
She always called him by his title, always treated him with respect. Not like some of the nurses and assistants. “How are we today, Hank?” that overweight blonde asked yesterday. When he answered stiffly, “I don’t know about you, madam, but I’m fine, thank you,” she’d only laughed.
Old people are so formal—it’s so cute!
Henry could just see her saying it to one of her horrible colleagues. He had never been “Hank” in his entire life.
“Coming, Carrie.” He put both hands on the walker and inched forward—clunk, clunk, clunk—the walker sounding loud even on the carpeted floor. His class’s corrected problem sets lay on the table by the door. He’d given them some really hard problems this week, and only Haldane had succeeded in solving all of them. Haldane had promise. An inventive mind, yet rigorous, too. They could have used him in ’52 on Project Ivy, developing the Teller-Ulam staged fusion H-bomb.
Halfway across the living room of his tiny apartment in the assisted living facility, something happened in Henry’s mind.
He stopped, astonished. It had felt like a tentative
touch
, a ghostly finger inside his brain. Astonishment was immediately replaced by fear. Was he having a stroke? At ninety, anything was possible. But he felt fine, better in fact than for several days. Not a stroke. So what—
“Dr. Erdmann?”
“I’m here.” He clunked to the door and opened it. Carrie wore a cherry red sweater, a fallen orange leaf caught on her hat, and sunglasses. Such a pretty girl, all bronze hair and bright skin and vibrant color. Outside it was drizzling. Henry reached out and gently removed the sunglasses. Carrie’s left eye was swollen and discolored, the iris and pupil invisible under the outraged flesh.
“The bastard,” Henry said.
That was Henry and Carrie going down the hall toward the elevator, thought Evelyn Krenchnoted. She waved from her armchair, her door wide open as always, but they were talking and didn’t notice. She strained to hear, but just then another plane went overhead from the airport. Those pesky flight paths were too near St. Sebastian’s! On the other hand, if they weren’t, Evelyn couldn’t afford to live here. Always look on the bright side!
Since this was Tuesday afternoon, Carrie and Henry were undoubtedly going to the college. So wonderful the way Henry kept busy—you’d never guess his real age, that was for sure. He even had all his hair! Although that jacket was too light for September, and not waterproof. Henry might catch cold. She would speak to Carrie about it. And why was Carrie wearing sunglasses when it was raining?
But if Evelyn didn’t start her phone calls, she would be late! People were depending on her! She keyed in the first number, listened to it ring one floor below. “Bob? It’s Evelyn. Now, dear, tell me—how’s your blood pressure today?”
“Fine,” Bob Donovan said.
“Are you sure? You sound a bit grumpy, dear.”
“I’m fine, Evelyn. I’m just busy.”
“Oh, that’s good! With what?”
“Just
busy
.”
“Always good to keep busy! Are you coming to Current Affairs tonight?”
“Dunno.”
“You should. You really should. Intellectual stimulation is so important for people our age!”
“Gotta go,” Bob grunted.
“Certainly, but first, how did your granddaughter do with—”
He’d hung up. Really, very grumpy. Maybe he was having problems with irregularity. Evelyn would recommend a high colonic.
Her next call was more responsive. Gina Martinelli was, as always, thrilled with Evelyn’s attention. She informed Gina minutely about the state of her arthritis, her gout, her diabetes, her son’s weight problem, her other son’s wife’s stepdaughter’s miscarriage, all interspersed with quotations from the Bible (“Take a little wine for thy stomach”—First Timothy.”) She answered all Evelyn’s questions and wrote down all her recommendations and—
“Evelyn?” Gina said. “Are you still there?”
“Yes, I—” Evelyn fell silent, an occurrence so shocking that Gina gasped, “Hit your panic button!”
“No, no, I’m fine, I . . . I just remembered something for a moment.”
“Remembered something? What?”
But Evelyn didn’t know. It hadn’t been a memory, exactly, it had been a . . . what? A feeling, a vague but somehow strong sensation of . . . something.
“Evelyn?”
“I’m here!”
“The Lord decides when to call us home, and I guess it’s not your time yet. Did you hear about Anna Chernov? That famous ballet dancer on Four? She fell last night and broke her leg and they had to move her to the Infirmary.”
“No!”
“Yes, poor thing. They say it’s only temporary, until they get her stabilized, but you know what that means.”
She did. They all did. First the Infirmary, then up to Seven, where you didn’t even have your own little apartment anymore, and eventually to Nursing on Eight and Nine. Better to go quick and clean, like Jed Fuller last month. But Evelyn wasn’t going to let herself think like that! A positive attitude was so important!
Gina said, “Anna is doing pretty well, I hear. The Lord never sends more than a person can bear.”
Evelyn wasn’t so sure about that, but it never paid to argue with Gina, who was convinced that she had God on redial. Evelyn said, “I’ll visit her before the Stitch ’n Bitch meeting. I’m sure she’ll want company. Poor girl—you know, those dancers, they just abuse their health for years and years, so what can you expect?”
“I know!” Gina said, not without satisfaction. “They pay a terrible price for beauty. It’s a little vain, actually.”
“Did you hear about that necklace she has in the St. Sebastian safe?”
“No! What necklace?”
“A fabulous one! Doris Dziwalski told me. It was given to Anna by some famous Russian dancer who was given it by the czar!”
“What czar?”
“
The
czar! You know, of Russia. Doris said it’s worth a fortune and that’s why it’s in the safe. Anna never wears it.”
“Vanity,” Doris said. “She probably doesn’t like the way it looks now against her wrinkly neck.”
“Doris said Anna’s depressed.”
“No, it’s vanity. ‘Lo, I looked and saw that all was—’”
“I’ll recommend accupuncture to her,” Evelyn interrupted. “Accupuncture is good for depression.” But first she’d call Erin, to tell her the news.