Death in the Stars

I. Maximum Life Expectancy - 9-3

“Grandmother?” she asked with embarrassment in her voice.

“Yes, I’m your grandson, Jean-Francois Bellanger, the youngest. I got my father’s name.”

Laurence tried to put back the cup onto the table, but the tea spilled out, drenching the old photo of her son and her she had just placed there. The tea messed up the ink of the print the same way as the old memories washed away from her brain. She desperately tried to hold anything up that was real in this world. But nothing was real anymore. The room started to turn around her. She grabbed the back of the seat. Monique jumped to catch her.

“And my son? What happened to him?” Laurence asked gasping hard.

Monique glanced meaningfully at Jean-Francois from the corner of her eyes.

“Laurence, Granny,” said Jean-Francois softly, “they did not say in the Center what happened with him?”

“Unfortunately he inherited the disease and… ” started Monique, but Laurence did not hear her anymore. She had fallen into the hole of her memories.

Back to where everything was still in order or even earlier….

*

“Mother, mother…”

There was dead silence in there. The silence travelled back into the time.

“Mum, mum… wake up!”

The time between the silence and the voice became firmly short.

“Mum, please, wake up. Do you think she is all right?”

“She had no complaint this morning. I will check her.”

Another long pause, mixed with touches and the sound of crumpled sheets, while hands turned over her.

These are still the noises of the hospital….

So the recovery was just a dream … again.

Only death remained.

*

“Mum, mum … wake up!”

“She had no complaint this morning. I will check her,” said Dr. Foucault.

“The side effect of the new treatment is that she lost days, weeks, sometimes months from her life, although we suppressed the disease already.” The doctor and the nurse tried to free Laurence’s chest from the clothes twisted around her. She’d had a seizure.

“The drug erases all memories when it fixes the neuron cells. We expected this with the healing process, but not in this extent. But everything comes back in time.”

“How old is she exactly—I mean really—now?”

“Nearly 42.”

“God, I’m only 5 years younger than my mother!”

“Yes, almost unbelievable that time has this strange behavior,” nodded Dr. Foucault and pumped some drug into the tubes coming out of Laurence’s vein. “The marvelous factor of this time travel was that we had found the solution for the problem. She can live a long and healthy life now although the life expectancy was only 42 years.”

“I understand. Could the seizures be a serious complication of the treatment?”

“I don’t think so. I gave her an anticonvulsant, it will reduce the cramps and relax the muscles.”

They silently watched the nurse when she adjusted Laurence’s waist-long hair.

“She still has remains of busted capillaries and the red rush on the skin, but all this will disappear in few months.”

“So you’re confident?”

“Yes, absolutely. Your mother is a truly amazing woman. I have to admit that I admire her stamina. She suffered a lot…”

“Thank you, Doctor. I am convinced.”

“And what about you?”

“I’m perfectly all right. I got the result of the checkup. There is no mutation in mine or in my son’s gene.”

Meanwhile the nurse finished the sheets on the bed. Jean-Francois gently squeezed his mother hand. Dr. Foucault watched them for a moment from the doorway, then silently left the room.

***

“Wake up, Madame Bellanger.”

“No,” she said stubbornly, as she said before. “I want to finish this very last dream.”

“Enough of the dreams! This is the time for reality! The voyage is finished!” She was the nurse with Latino features and the gentle silk touch. The greyish-charming Foucault doctor had similar skin in her dreams.

She slept through the approach maneuvers while the Hospice Spaceship reached the orbit. The radiant blue crescent of the Earth was more beautiful than any dream. Laurence burst into tears.

“What’s the matter, my dear?” the nurse wiped the tears off Laurence’s face. She swallowed the rest of her tears.

“I really don’t know which part was real…”

“About the dreams?’ asked the nurse and gave a light tranquilizer into the infusion. “Here you can dream a lot. You can dream the best and longest dream you’ve ever had. Almost everybody has a dream here. But you can be sure many parts of your dreams can be true at the end. I can tell you the best part: they’d found the solution to your disease on Earth while we were travelling around outer space! The specialist will start your treatment tomorrow.”

Laurence remained silent.

“You don’t look so happy,” the nurse gently stroked Laurence’s face.

“I am happy, but not surprised. I know all this from my dreams. But there is something that I don’t know: what happened with my son?”

“That, I’ll tell you, Madame Bellanger,” said a man in a white coat, and turned to the nurse. “Would you leave us alone, please?”

The grey-haired, charming Dr. Foucault himself was standing beside her bed. Laurence was relaxed by his gentle touch and fragrant hands again. He was still good-looking, with his grizzled temple.

“I have good and bad news about your son. I’ll start with the good one: his beautiful wife, Monique, gave birth to their son. They called him Jean-Francois. So congratulations, you became a grandmother!”

He paused for a moment.

“I have to continue with the bad news. Your son inherited Genetic Cell Disorder. His maximum life expectancy was 38 years at the time we made the diagnosis. He’d boarded another Hospice Spaceship to an exoplanet, he’ll pass his journey too. Two years ago we didn’t have the solution for this disease, so he had to fly away to gain some time. He’ll be back in 12 years, and I’m sure, that we will have a far better method, which will not cause the loss of memory that you might have experienced.”

“I know,” said Laurence, “the side effect of the healing process will cause loss of memories for days, weeks, sometimes months…”

Dr. Foucault looked surprised.

“Oh, you had prepared somehow on this long trip,” he said, smiling at her.

“Certainly,” answered Laurence. “And you know what? I’m prepared about you too. You’re unmarried, you had no relationship, but you’re a habitual seeker looking for the brown, intelligent woman I had been one day. Your office is green where we will meet three times a week. I admit I’ll never reject you in any case.”

Dr. Foucault shook his head in disbelief.

“You’re truly amazing. Where did you get this?”

Laurence was finally completely sure that she had found the way back to the reality.

“From my dreams.”