SPEAKING
by Nathan Turowsky
Lady Cranch set down her glasses, yawned, and rubbed her eyes. This was very trying for her. Nana was important to her. It was always, perhaps, unfortunate when this happened; personally unfortunate even for those who did not personally know the afflicted, for the misfortune piled like a coastal shelf and spread across the galaxy from farthest Perseus to farther Crux-Scutum. This, however, was more than she wanted to handle.
She supposed it was one of the worse aspects of growing older, losing friends to these afflictions. She was ninety-seven years old, going on ninety-eight. Along with her thick black hair going thin and grey, and her joints getting all sticky, and the occasionally itchy bionic implants to replace parts of her withered hands and feet, and the necessity of a cane despite the painful and annoying bone-reinforcement treatments that she went in for twice a week, she was losing those closest to her. Losing parents was painful. Losing friends was in some ways even more painful, because one does not consider a friend an elder. It was entirely possible, of course, for a friend to in fact be an elder—indeed, Nana was about a year older than her—but ‘parent’ as a category was fundamentally related to the set ‘elder’; ‘friend’ was not, and it became painful at this point to think of such people suffering…this.
‘If your friend is suffering, it’s best not to just sigh, Rosy,’ said the man standing behind her gently.
Lady Cranch was in her home office, sitting in a swivel chair, hunched over her desk, not even looking at the dire messages pulled up on her computer monitor. ‘Dr Hwelveigst—Re: Nana’s condition??’. ‘Dr Dawling—Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Emergency report 1 Vendémiaire MMDCLXX’. ‘Nana—I THINK IM HAVVING A STRROJKKE’. ‘Federative Council President Solano—Re: Why the Hell does the new calendar year begin on 13 Nivôse of all days? Please tell me this won’t be renewed when your so-called ‘trial run’ expires in 2685 (I am NOT writing it in Roman numerals). There’s a reason why this didn’t stick when it was tried nine hundred years ago. I know you’re not a moron, Jaime’.
‘Sitting like that,’ observed the man standing behind her, ‘can’t be good for your back, you know.’
‘I know, Willie,’ said Lady Cranch softly. ‘Willie?’
‘What is it, Rosy?’
Lady Cranch’s shoulders heaved. Though she was trying to do so quietly, she was very obviously crying. ‘Cranch, O’Brien, Yamamura,’ she said. ‘Convocation of Edinburgh
O’Brien nodded. ‘That was us,’ he said dourly. ‘That was us.’
‘Willie,’ said Cranch, ‘I think we might visit her.’
It was said that Yamamura Nana’s speech centres were almost completely shot, so that she could say only the single word ‘kyū’—‘nine’. It was in some ways ironic, because ‘nana’ was a word for ‘seven’ in Yamamura’s mother tongue, but the irony was incomplete and without any apparent meaning, point, or teleology. The true irony of the situation only came into view when one remembered the equal uselessness of Yamamura’s hands, which she had had amputated two years previously in favour of prosthetics that had not worked even remotely. The run of good luck that had brought Yamamura Nana from an early life seemingly doomed to never leave a Japanese colony in the run-down old backwater that was Gliese 876 to a puissant position as one of the most important metaphysicians and ethicists since the ancient Lewis couple had run out, and the last few years had been Hell for her.
‘Nana is in hospital thousands of kilometres from her home,’ O’Brien pointed out. ‘And I need scarcely mention that JIS nationals, especially people from JIS Deep Space, don’t enjoy the greatest of reputations in Kashmir . It’d be like if one of us went on vacation in an Adriatic resort and got hospitalised there. Not fun times.’
‘Please don’t be flippant and sardonic about this, Willie.’
‘I’m sorry.’ O’Brien rubbed Cranch’s shoulder. ‘Rosy? I think it’d be good to visit her as well. It might cost a bit. That moron of a Governor-General, Mwemsewi, has decided to attack the Mediterranean Hegemon settlements on Uhunomi again. Travel’s tight in this part of the Galaxy.’
‘Even staying on-planet? She’s in Kishtwar, Willie, not some Kashmiri space station somewhere. It should be either a very long car trip or a relatively short bus trip even with these idiotic new security measures. I can’t imagine having to take surface transit of any kind, at least.’
‘Well…one rarely does, when one’s travelling from country to country.’ O’Brien made a little sound like ‘snerk’ in his throat; he was trying to express mild amusement without offending Cranch’s gravity at their friend’s situation.
Of the three of them, Yamamura Nana had aged the least well and Willie O’Brien the best. R.H. Cranch was upright but increasingly rickety as she approached her centenary. True, this had a correlation to their actual ages; Yamamura was ninety-eight going on ninety-nine, Cranch ninety-seven going on ninety-eight, and O’Brien had just a few weeks ago turned ninety-seven. But the actual difference there was negligible. Growing older was more or less the same experience no matter how far technology could advance. The discovery that what Yamamura had once (2616, Shiekki, debate with Hulmintarn and his cadre of academic fanatics) unkindly described as the Galactic powers’ ‘circle-jerks of transhumanism-related treaties and policy statements’ had absolutely no effect whatsoever on the Jamesian pure experience of the vast majority of actual old people had been a rather momentous one, though in retrospect it was so obvious. It had made Cranch rethink, aged thirty (this discovery had come before Yamamura’s unkind description; indeed, it had been even before their summer of 2605 and the so-called Great Monograph that had catapulted them to notoriety for their dredging up of Ninomiya’s old ideas), things that she had previously taken entirely for granted, ideas like science and progress that, while admirable, really meant less than they seemed to at first.
A quick Internet transaction was enough to secure ‘general passage’ tickets, a very rare subset of first-class tickets that did not specify a specific starting port or mode of travel, to Srinagar
‘Hey, Zeverrungaj!’ called Cranch.
‘Yes, Your Ladyship?’ Cranch’s lady’s-maid, a member of a nephropine species from somewhere in the general direction of Camelopardalis, came into the office.
‘We’re going to Srinagar
‘Probably, Your Ladyship,’ said Zeverrungaj. ‘I don’t see why not.’
‘All right,’ said Cranch. ‘Willie, help me up.’
‘To be sure, Rosy.’ O’Brien grabbed Cranch loosely around the waist and helped her upright.
‘It is amazing,’ Cranch said, ‘how much better-preserved you are than I physically.’
‘I could say the same thing for you and Nana mentally.’
‘Professor Yamamura is…in no fine mental state, Dr O’Brien,’ observed Zeverrungaj.
‘Yes she is,’ Cranch said, very quickly, very sternly. ‘It’s her physical mouth and the parts of the brain that control it that are the problem, not the parts that actually do the thinking.’
‘Don’t let’s get into Wittgenstein at a time like this,’ moaned O’Brien.
It was a little hard to get to the busport. Since it was only an hour’s drive away they took Cranch’s surface car, with Zeverrungaj driving (Cranch could drive but didn’t like to due to the issues that were still fundamental to the physical processes of aging). There was some traffic in London GPS made them go quite a bit out of the way.
Once they got to Heathrow, getting on to the actual airbus itself was quite easy, and within two hours of leaving Cranch’s home (almost exactly a day after they had bought the tickets) they were kiting through the stratosphere over Austria
‘I’m a little concerned,’ said Cranch. ‘For one thing, this flight’s hurting my joints.’
‘Mine too,’ said O’Brien.
‘I’m also concerned about seeing Nana. It might upset me to see her like this.’
‘Might? Rosy, it will upset you unless you’ve been replaced by one of David Chalmers’s zombies since the last time we did something together.’
‘You know what I mean.’
O’Brien yawned. ‘Aye, that I do. Zeverrungaj, you’re carrying Rosy’s computer?’
‘Yes.’ Zeverrungaj took out and unfolded the computer. ‘Would you like me to email our thanks to the lady on Sharf?’
‘Please.’ O’Brien turned back to Cranch. ‘Well?’
‘I’m just thinking,’ said Cranch, ‘how hard it is to imagine that, for the first half-century of its existence, the Internet didn’t even run on ansible technology. I was…lost in thought about the Great Monograph. That’s why I was thinking about such ancient things.’
‘What’s past isn’t necessarily prologue, though,’ said O’Brien.
‘Oh, of course not.’
They sat in silence for a few more hours. Then Cranch said ‘I’d really love to take one of those luxury space liners once more in my life.’
‘As I would,’ said O’Brien.
‘That’s one of my big regrets. I never really got off-planet all that much.’
There was a crackle from the speakers and the captain appeared on the screens, with the words ‘Captain Kelly Mwanase’ below her face for those on the bus who were not especially perceptive. ‘This is your captain speaking. We’re beginning our descent into Srinagar
‘That irks me a little, you know,’ said O’Brien after the screens and speakers went back to whatever it was that they had been doing previously for the passengers in question. ‘The fact that they feel the need to say ‘Srinagar Jevmisnuural City
‘You can’t assume everybody knows,’ said Zeverrungaj.
‘It’s the largest city in the bloody galaxy!’
The bus dropped smoothly down on to the runway at Srinagar
‘Name and citizenship?’ asked the bored-looking security guard.
Cranch leaned rather heavily on her cane. Her legs hurt. ‘Willie, do you have our passports?’
‘Yes, Rosy,’ said O’Brien. He took them from his wallet and read aloud: ‘Her Ladyship the Lady Rosalind Hoxne Cranch, DPhil, LL.D. William Patrick O’Brien, Ph.D.’
‘Citizenship?’ said the guard.
‘Dual citizenship,’ said Cranch, ‘Federal Republic of New England and Holy Land of Albion.’
‘Proud citizen of the Republic of Ireland
‘Suzerainty if any?’
‘In my day,’ Cranch said, deliberately very loudly and non-deliberately quite obnoxiously, ‘people knew where the Gallo-Hibernic Federative Nations was without having to ask.’
‘Ma’am,’ sighed the guard, ‘we have to do this by the book.’
‘I’m ninety-seven years old.’ The guard was unimpressed. ‘I need to visit a friend in hospital.’ The guard was unimpressed. Cranch pulled her ace. ‘The First Countess of Brattleboro of happy memory gave us the Presidential Order of the Lily and Shamrock!’
‘Does the Presidential Order of the Lily and Shamrock give you the licence to be condescending to security guards, Your Ladyship?’ snapped the guard, her hands on her hips.
‘I apologise,’ said Cranch.
Zeverrungaj stepped forward and held out her passport. ‘Zeverrungaj Ziump-Hallegar,’ she said. ‘Citizen of the Combined Republics of Northern Escra , resident in the Holy Land of Albion.’
‘Combined Republics of…’ said the guard.
‘The Escra system used to be part of Rzakum space.’
‘I see.’ The guard had some hushed words through a localised specialised mental ansible with her superior. ‘Go right on through, then, Your Ladyship. Plus two.’
‘You know,’ said Cranch, ‘I’m three thousand and sixth in the Nobility and Honours Roster. It’s not as if I’m my brother. There’s no need to be incredibly deferential now!’
‘Your brother’s nineteenth in that roster, isn’t he?’ asked O’Brien.
‘Twentieth,’ said Cranch.
And they went up to Kishtwar. It was a sad and horrible thing for a woman like Yamamura Nana, who had made her living and her name for three quarters of a century through the judicious application and interweaving of critical thought and ideas taken on faith, to be condemned to lie in a hospital ward, still thinking with exactly the same breakneck swiftness and terrifying precision which had made her, possibly, the profoundest master of the world of thought since Catherine Huttering, while utterly unable to communicate them, either by written or by spoken word.
This was a level of cruelty that by itself was not unheard-of. A writer of long ago, one of Yamamura’s countrymen, had written a short story addressing this called ‘Silence’. He had won the Nobel Prize. He had also killed himself. And so that idea weighed heavily enough on one.
But what about being able to speak, but only without relevance? To have one word, one pedestrian workaday word, not even a word, a number, caught on and tripped over one’s lips…forever, for the rest of one’s life?
And they entered the hospital room.
Yamamura Nana was a being ravaged by age almost beyond recognition of humanity. Not yet a hundred, she was at the same decrepit stage of life as those men on the news, veterans of the War of Italian Secession (and subsequently of Mediterranean Unification), a hundred and forty-nine, a hundred and fifty years old, who were breaking all the longevity records. She was almost entirely naked, but a thin hospital gown had been drawn around her for modesty’s sake. It had fallen a bit, partially exposing her wrinkled breasts.
Cranch pulled a face. The last time she had seen Yamamura’s breasts had been over sixty years ago, and while that context (swimming in Lake Baikal together when Siberia had yet to balkanise) had not been sexual, it had sure as Hell not been medical, either.
This was Yamamura Nana as Rosalind Hoxne Cranch and Willie O’Brien very much did not want to see her.
‘Hello, Nana,’ said Cranch. Yamamura’s eyes tracked her across the room. ‘How are you doing?’
‘nine,’ said Yamamura.
Cranch continued her circumnavigation of the room. The support and monitoring systems were almost all tucked into the bed itself or else invisible and immaterial, so it was as if Yamamura was just…lying there. As if it was a morgue slab. Cranch suppressed this thought.
‘Have you thought about doing some work with mental link ansibles?’ asked O’Brien. Yamamura suddenly looked very angry. ‘Don’t worry,’ Cranch hastily added. ‘They’re getting to the point where they don’t break down the barriers of consciousness. Velkan Corp. has been doing some actually good work in that field for once lately.’
Disgruntled silence.
‘Had any new ideas?’ asked Cranch.
‘Rosy!’ snapped O’Brien. ‘It’s as if you’re pressuring, tormenting, or provoking her! STOP IT!’
‘I just hoped that her mind could find some outlet; it’s not as if she’s a vegetable!’
And yet they were treating her like that. Yamamura, they knew, could hear and understand everything they said; she just could not respond. She could hear and understand that they were arguing about her consciousness; she could hear and understand that they were treating her as if she were not present.
This greatly upset and saddened Yamamura and she tried to tell her lifelong friends so, but all that came out was ‘nine nine nine nine nine!’
‘Are you upset?’ asked O’Brien.
‘nine nine nine’
‘You’re upset.’ O’Brien sighed. ‘Look, we’re both vera sorry, but…medical technology’s been bad about…we can’t just wave a magic wand and…’
Now Cranch felt her turn to shut up O’Brien. She lifted a frail hand to his wrinkly mouth. He understood and fell silent, leaving the two ancient women to a silent conversation of now sympathetic, now empathetic, now imploring smiles that went on for several minutes, interspersed with the occasional soft, sweet, loving ‘Nana’ and crisp, sharp, inflexionless ‘nine’.
‘It’s astounding,’ said Cranch at last, ‘that we managed to do the Great Monograph, isn’t it, Nana? It was on Ninomiya, and on two things on which we’ve usually disagreed—how society works and how people are moral.’
‘nine nine,’ agreed Yamamura.
‘We usually agreed on the nature of religion and the absolute, though,’ observed O’Brien. ‘Funny, isn’t it, how we can agree on so much, and disagree on so much, of what’s important in this world, in our vocation?’
‘nine nine nine nine,’ said a clearly amused and pacific Yamamura.
‘Wait,’ said Cranch. Yamamura still had visible and audible emotions. The single word ‘nine’, the single character九, had in Yamamura Nana’s mouth become everything, and it contained everything. That natural number, three to the second power or the square root of eighty-one, eight plus one, ten minus one, was everything, because with it, in multifarious inflexions and changes in expression, pitch, volume, and tone, Yamamura had discovered the way, the only way, to say nothing of significance and everything that mattered.
‘My father was Governor-General of Autonomous Federative Interstellar Space,’ said Cranch. ‘Christopher Narragansett Cranch, Seventeenth Duke of Presque. He could have gone on to greatness, even become President of the Federative Council in his time, but he died of Whitman’s fever in 2600, two years into his term, at the age of sixty. I was twenty-seven at this point. We three here in this room had known each other for a year. This much is historical fact available to anyone with access to an Internet ansible. Now, do you remember how I cried and how you and Willie comforted me when Dad died?’
‘nine,’ said Yamamura simply, scrunching her eyes tight shut. O’Brien ran a sympathetic hand along Yamamura’s collarbone.
‘Jaime says there might be a war with the Mediterranean Hegemon,’ said Cranch. ‘Mr Zellner is already arguing the case against allowing its continued expansion at the Federative Parliament House in Dublin
‘nine nine nine nine nine nine nine,’ said Yamamura. Her tone was, simply put, that of one who did not consider an unfortunate contingency either likely or impossible.
‘Nana, do you have any ideas about philosophy right now?’ asked O’Brien.
‘nine.’ It was ‘yes’. O’Brien stifled a simultaneous chuckle and trickle of tears.
‘Is it about philosophy of religion?’ asked Cranch.
‘Wait,’ said O’Brien before Yamamura could answer. ‘Nana…it’s June. You’ve been in this condition since last September. That’s nine months.’
‘nine.’
‘Nine, aye, Nana. Nine months and we haven’t visited you once.’ O’Brien hung his head. ‘That is…I’m sorry, Nana. That was inexcusable of us.’
‘I’ve cared,’ said Cranch, raising one crooked, arthritic finger. ‘We’ve cared about one another’s aging. I cared about you, when this happened to you. I tried…well, I tried to get you returned to the JIS. When that didn’t work I tried to bring you to Gallo-Hibernia so Willie and I could look after you; that didn’t work either, so here you stayed in Kashmir .’
‘nine nine,’ said Yamamura, apparently meaning that she knew this already, with a more general undertone of she was not stupid, they knew.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cranch. ‘I’m sorry if we weren’t here for you enough.’ A silence. ‘Do you even want to do philosophy any more, Nana? That was the question we forgot to ask.’
‘nine.’ It was ‘no’. O’Brien nodded sombrely. Cranch bent over her friend’s bed and wept.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Cranch. ‘You know, this sort of trauma was only first recorded a few decades ago. This never happened back in our day, Nana. I’m sorry. There are ten treatments for what you have, but eight had their interstellar bans reasserted in the Bisma Conventions and both of the other two would be metaphysical betrayals of our work. Would you rather metaphysically betray our work or not do any more work?’
‘nine nine nine nine nine.’ Yamamura would rather die than destroy her whole life’s work retroactively by not practising what she saw as the ethical implications of the metaphysical ideas that the friends had spent their careers preaching.
Yamamura Nana had found in this word a purity, something forceful and singular that varied even as it remained the same. This number in her hands was in this state of existence, completely aware, in no way a vegetable, but unable to respond, her sole output into the world. This word was her world. Every time she said ‘nine’ something minuscule and yet infinite, intangible, unidentifiable, fell into place, and her world grew that much larger and made that much more sense. A single word, a single pure experience, ever-changing, ever-growing, never disappearing, had become to Yamamura that which her philosophy could not. That was what that string of nines meant; that was why, even if there was a chance of recovering enough to regain the use of her hands, mouth, or both, Yamamura had curtailed her speech forever. In curtailing her speech her thought ran free and spoke for itself without the filter of meaning. And in the utter meaningless of her repeated nines Yamamura had found, and Cranch and O’Brien could see, the aeternus for which they had been searching for the past seven decades. That was what that string of nines meant. That was all.
‘I love you, Nana,’ said Cranch, the thought to say so, the saying so itself, coming upon her very suddenly. Yamamura smiled and sat up; Cranch kissed her on the cheek. Yamamura put an arm around Cranch’s shoulders.
‘nine,’ said Yamamura.
Cranch and O’Brien stayed overnight, without saying anything more to Yamamura. The three played chess; Yamamura used broad gestures to indicate the moves that she wanted to make. The next day they left after once again petitioning all relevant authorities to make exceptions to global-emergency protocol and let the UN repatriate Yamamura to Japan
On the bus flight back to London Cranch thought about the things said and done in their early days. She remembered something that Yamamura had said to her about a month into their friendship.
‘When I was little, growing up in a partially-terraformed asteroid colony, I was always around roughnecks. So I wanted to be muscular when I grew up. Well, that didn’t work out. But I got breasts, although rather small ones. And then the roughnecks had a drillhead explosion. So that was interesting. Uh...what were we talking about again?’
To go from that, through high-flown rhetoric and absolutely brilliant philosophy, to what Yamamura was now saddened and shocked Cranch. But she did not know what her friend’s own experience was like. Yamamura herself seemed at peace. Cranch supposed that that was all that should matter, but Cranch could not, no matter how she tried, find herself at peace with it.
A few days later, reading the news, Cranch and O’Brien saw this bulletin:
DECEASED—Japanese philosopher, author, and society woman Yamamura Nana, aged 99. She suffered a series of strokes last year that verbally and manually incapacitated her. Due to lobbying from members of the powerful Gallo-Hibernic Ducal Cranch noble family (descended from ancient writer and artist Christopher Pearse Cranch), especially her long-time colleague Lady Rosalind Hoxne Cranch, 97, and Lady Caitlin Shimako De Lacey Cranch, Marchioness Macwahoc and Heir to the Duchy of Presque, 65, the United Nations agreed to lift emergency travel restrictions for the ill to repatriate Yamamura from her hospital in the Principality of Kashmir to a hospital in her native Japanese Imperial State.
Professor Yamamura died in space en route from Kashmir to the Japanese colony world Capek late yesterday, Sunday 25 June 2671 , the day after her ninety-ninth birthday, from complications resulting from sedatives prescribed to lessen the shaking in her prosthetic hands. Her ashes will be buried either on her native JPTAC Gliese 786-II or in her family shrine on Lake Inawashiro in Terrestrial Japan
As her strokes prevented her from saying anything other than the Japanese word ‘kyū’, which means ‘nine’, Yamamura’s intended last words are unknown.
Lady Rosalind and fellow philosopher Dr Willie O’Brien, also 97, are the main beneficiaries of Professor Yamamura’s will, whose most recent form dates to just before her last stroke in November of last year.
‘I notice they’re not using the shite new calendar, at least,’ said O’Brien dryly. ‘God, I hope that thing doesn’t get renewed in fourteen years.’
‘Back in our day, change meant something,’ said Cranch. ‘Yes, yes. I know.’ She sighed. ‘Well, Nana…well.’
‘Any thoughts?’ asked O’Brien.
‘I don’t know. I just…don’t know.’
Cranch sat there, and a great joy came over her, which was also a great sorrow. She sat there, and she sat there, and she waited in vain for words to come.
I don't know any of the characters, and I don't know if I'm supposed to. But reading this made me sad and a bit happy at the same time, so I suppose it doesn't matter.
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