Art was dealing with the medics, making arrangements. Sax tapped at his wrist and looked at a list of titles for articles on quick decline; 8,361 titles in this index. There were literature reviews, and tables assembled by AIs, but nothing that looked like a definitive paradigm statement. Still at the stage of observation and initial hypothesis . . . flailing. In many ways it resembled the work on memory Sax had been reading. Death and the mind; how long they had studied these problems, how long the problems had resisted! Michel himself had commented on that, implying some deeper narrative that explained their unexplainables— Michel who had brought Sax back from aphasia, who had taught him to understand parts of himself he hadn’t even known existed. Michel was gone. He wouldn’t be back. They had carried the last version of his body out of the apartment. He had been around Sax’s age, about 220 years old. It was an advanced age by any previous standard; why then this pain in Sax’s chest, this hot blur of tears? It didn’t make sense. But Michel would have understood. Better this than the death of the mind, he would have said. But Sax wasn’t so sure; his memory problems seemed less important now, Maya’s as well. She remembered enough to be devastated, after all. Him too. He remembered what was important.

Strange to recall: he had been in her company immediately in the wake of the death of all three of her consorts. John, Frank, now Michel. Each time it got worse for her. And the same for him.

• • •

Michel’s ashes, up in a balloon over the Hellas Sea. They saved a pinch for return to Provence.

2

The literature on longevity and senescence was so vast and specialized that Sax found it difficult at first to organize his usual assault on the material. Recent work on the quick decline was the obvious starting point, but understanding articles on the subject meant going back to their predecessors and coming to some fuller understanding of the longevity treatments themselves. This was an area Sax had never understood more than superficially, shying away from it instinctively because of its messy biological inexplicable semimiraculous nature. A subject very near the heart of the great unexplainable, really. He had left it happily to Hiroko and to the supremely gifted Vladimir Taneev, who along with Ursula and Marina had designed and overseen the first treatments, and many major modifications since then.

Now, however, Vlad was dead. And Sax was interested. It was time to dive into viriditas, into the realm of the complex.