She tried not to resent it as John eroded her time, assaulted her emotions. Moods were one thing he could communicate: for days he would alternate between rage and depression, and then there would be days of contrition, weeks of cooperation. Sometimes, in bittersweet silent communion, she felt she loved him as much as she ever had; other times—as she told me but not her diary—enslaved by his vulnerability, she helplessly wanted him to die. Years before, he had asked her to spare him a lingering painful death by providing him some means to end it. A handful of CNS depressants and a liter of boo; an intravenous pop of potassium chloride. She agreed in principle but, even then, wasn’t sure she would have the courage to do it.

She confessed to me that she thought of that sometimes, but he wasn’t in actual pain, and besides, if a quick death was what he wanted, he communicated well enough with expression and gesture to get across that simple idea. Maybe he felt that even a dim spark of life was worth living. Maybe he just wanted to spare her the awful decision.

Dr. Shawn suggested to her that John might be enjoying his enforced freedom from responsibility, and might even be feeling less physical pain than he had suffered all his life. Elderly patients with degenerative bone diseases often reported less pain, or even a complete cessation of pain, after a stroke or accident caused paralysis. It might not be a trade-off anyone would choose, but it was some compensation.

John had some use of his left hand, though all his life he’d been clumsy with it. He could manipulate the cube remote, but refused to have anything to do with the keyboard or any of the rehabilitative crafts projects that O’Hara brought him. He could read, but very slowly, and seemed to have a limited span of attention. He gave up on technical papers, with one exception: at the time of his stroke, John had almost finished writing his book-length history of the Deucalion project, Sons of Prometheus. O’Hara fleshed out his notes to complete the last two chapters, with John looking over her shoulder, sentence by sentence.

She found out that you could do a lot of editing with three words, if they were yes, no, and shit.

Three weeks out, they had the first fairly accurate chart of their water world. The Planetfall Committee released this map and sketchy description:

Better pictures are going to be available almost hourly, but this seems like a good time to start.

The smallest details we can see here are about ten kilometers wide; the tiniest island visible in the Reef is bigger than all of ’Home’s floor levels put together. The Mainland’s central lake has a greater area than Earth’s Lake Chad or Lake Superior.