After his mother got dementia, Bari became forgetful. It was little things, like hanging up the wet laundry on time so it wouldn’t stink; spraying pesticide on their patch of sea wall against the adventures of crabs and mutant fish; checking the AQI meter before leading his mother out for her evening walk along New Karachi’s polluted shoreline. Was cognitive decline contagious? Bari wondered. Did something break in your brain, too, when you took care of people who once held you on their lap, helped you count the last straggling trees in the mohalla courtyard? Overwhelmed by their needs and your grief, perhaps you were split into two halves, each perpetually being run into the ground.
It wasn’t like he had a sibling or a spouse to lean on. Just him and his waddling, bed-wetting, calling-into-the-dark-of-the-house mother: “Bari, baita Bari. Where are you?” At 3 in the morning, when he went into her room and slumped onto her bed, she clutched his arm and held it to her chest, whispering, “I had a dream I was alone. Your Abba died and I was alone. Bari, is he back from Amin’s shop yet?” Bari, running his fingers through her hair and shushing her, would say, “Any minute now, Ma. We’re good. You’re good. Sleep, Ma,” even as he began to doze and dream himself. Of a city with clear blue skies, a firm shoreline, and potable water, where large tanks owned by water mafias didn’t roam the streets like predators and sinkholes the size of buildings didn’t irrupt into an ever-rising, salty sea. Sometimes he sang softly her favorite couplet from Iqbal: sitaron se agay jahan aur bhee hain. Beyond these stars glitter other worlds, beyond this trial other tribulations of love.
Any minute now, Ma. We will be good.
In his better moments, he even believed it. He had a job when thousands didn’t. They had a five-marla home with its own strip of backyard abutting the sea wall that rose tall and concrete against the vagaries of the Arabian Sea. They could afford clean air and water at home and masks to venture outside.
Bari continued to worry, though. Unchecked oversights grow into big misfortunes. What if one morning, in his rush to the bus stop, he forgot to administer her blood thinner? His company’s insurance covered only weekly nurse visits to check on her pills. What if she had another mini-stroke when he was at work? The telemonitors wouldn’t get there for an hour, and Ma couldn’t follow remote prompts. What if Bari forgot to take his own insulin shot, ended up in a coma? Who’d take care of Ma, then?
The more he worried the more distractible he felt, the more mentally rumpled. Bari hated uncertainty. The irrefutability of Newtonian physics was why he had chosen engineering. Now that he could envision all the things that could—would—go wrong with her, he began to have anxiety dreams, and this more than anything else helped decide him when New Suns came knocking on his door.
Would he be interested? the suit inquired. Pioneering, world-changing work, as they were sure he knew. Paid very well. Comprehensive healthcare coverage, individual and family, was included, of course.
Bari asked for a month to consider the proposal, but his mind was already made up. He used the time to plan out exactly what he’d ask for, the minutiae of his demands.
Yes, he said when they returned. But I have conditions.
When he was a boy and the world was a more breathable place, Bari once listened to his daadi tell a story about a neighborhood couple.
After an accident on the highway, the man’s wife of 40 years fell into an irrevocable coma. The man brought her home and rearranged everything in the house to suit her needs. Every day he fed her, bathed her, turned her over so she wouldn’t get bedsores, wheeled her around the block, put perfume on her when friends and family came to visit. No one, not their kids or grandkids, were allowed to feed or bathe her. For years he did this religiously, with neither a nod nor a smile from his sleeping love.
One day the man fell ill. His son came over and tried to help, but the man fought him. Shivering, the man dragged himself from room to room, trying to follow his daily routine, and eventually collapsed. He was taken to the hospital, and his son and daughter-in-law moved in to take care of the comatose woman. When the son spooned some mashed potatoes into his mother’s mouth, the woman trembled. When he lifted his mother so his wife could clean her bottom and apply a lubricant, she sighed. The next morning, when they carried her to the bathtub and sponged her back and arms, the woman opened her eyes for the first time in seven years, looked at her son, and died.
Bari was greatly affected by this story. Why did she die? What happened to her husband? Did the children feel guilty that she died on their watch?
Sweeping aside the black curls spilling over Bari’s forehead, Daadi said, She died because, despite the way she was, she recognized their touch.
So what? Bari said.
In the way of grandmothers everywhere, Daadi shook her head and gave him a knowing smile.
Bari never forgot the way that story made him feel.
The little boy was staring at his duffel bag, which had a map of Old Karachi on it. Bari hadn’t flown before, and he’d thrown a couple of Lexotanils into the duffel. When the airship took off, he propped his head on a pillow and dry-swallowed a pill.
Bari turned to the boy. “It wasn’t pretty even then,” he told him. “The sky was too diluted, and we hardly had any green belts. But we did have incredible food. Lal Qila and Burns Road and Boat Basin. Camel rides at Clifton Beach. The sea wasn’t menacing back then, you see. Walking along its heaving blue made us sad and happy and lonely, but we weren’t afraid.”
We were afraid of other things, he thought. We could go missing and turn up in gunnysacks. Get shot in the face at signals by cellphone snatchers.
He didn’t feel the need to tell the boy that. Instead, he closed his eyes in the airship; and opened them next to his mother. It was 3 am, and she was moaning in sleep. Bari, baita Bari. He knelt down and kissed her forehead with metal teeth. She fumbled in the dark for his hand, and he gave her his cold aluminum paw. Her forehead crinkled, but she didn’t let go. Whispering “I’m here, Ma,” he slid into bed next to her and stayed there stroking her forehead till she fell sound asleep.
Bari blinked, and with a rise and a swoop he was back in the airship, the aftersense vertiginous, as if he were rocking in the sea. The little boy was snoring, an intermittent teakettle whistle. Bari popped ear buds in and listened to the pilot announce that they would dock at the IPSS in three hours, after which the real journey would begin.
Seven years, Bari thought as his eyelids drooped. Seven years, three months, and four days.
He’d have plenty of time to spend with his mother.
The problem wasn’t splitting his consciousness in two, Dr. Shah had told Bari. It was traveling when split.
Bari said he knew. He’d been studying their work for years and had done the calculations himself.
Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time. Therefore consciousness—which Penrose and Hameroff argue arises because of quantum coherence in the brain—has potential for omnipresence. The trick, as New Suns discovered, was to lift consciousness into a superposition, akin to the superposition of subatomic particles, and help it lock into distinct space-time coordinates.
Their work, however, was limited to rabbit and murine models. Human consciousness was another matter.
“We’re reasonably confident that we can lift your mind without killing you and allow it to move between calibrated consensus points,” Dr. Shah said. He was a short man with a military cut, salt-and-pepper mustache, and a brisk manner that reminded Bari of a certain Pakistani general who was often on PTV when Bari was a kid. “But there’s no saying what might happen once the starship picks up speed.”
“You’re talking about time dilation,” Bari said.
“You’ve done your homework.”
“Yes.”
“So you understand that when you decide to flip back and forth between the starship and your mother’s house, your consciousness wouldn’t just be locking into another physical space but another velocity of time’s passage.”
“Yes.”
“One month of your interstellar travel would age her by nearly 20 years. If what you’re proposing doesn’t work, you’d effectively have killed your mother by climbing aboard that starship. At least as far as you’re concerned. Perhaps yourself too. All bets are off with an unmoored mind.”
“I will assume the risk.”
“No one’s ever done this, you know.”
“Someone has to.” Bari smiled. “It’s the future, right?”
“Well, we’re sure as hell not publicizing it.” Dr. Shah looked at him for nearly a minute. “I hope your reasons for doing this are worth it.”
Bari told him they were. But on his way home, he wondered.
At 13:00 on October 9, 20__, three days before his 45th birthday, Bari, along with 699 other passengers, took off from the InterPlanetary Space Station on New Suns V for a neighboring star. Not one of them would return to Earth—there was no point—except Bari. He would visit Earth several times a day, thousands of times a month.
Bari made sure he was interfaced with the home AI for his mother’s 3 am night terrors. Breakfast, pill time, her morning bath. He’d be there when the Imtiaz van shrieked to a halt outside their door twice a week and masked men in drab shalwar kameez unloaded and carried her groceries inside. There for lunch, for the biweekly afternoon poetry reading, and the 6 pm sundowning with her subsequent confusion and fright. On rubberized wheels he’d roll over to her, take her hand, and lead her to the dinner table, where, in his simulacrum voice, he’d ask her how her day went, whether she took all her pills, knowing full well she had, and if the food was too salty, because that might worsen her blood pressure. In the time it took him to finish emptying his bowels on the starship, he’d be done with all of her doctors’ appointments.
It was satisfying, this split existence. A long interstellar travel had been transformed into the most meaningful time of his life.
“I can’t explain it,” he told Mari, a pretty 37-year-old dentist who’d escaped an abusive husband and hoped to make a new life on another world. They’d clicked at breakfast on the third day, and he saw no point in withholding this part of himself, his journey. “I just have to decide where I want to be, and I’m there.”
Mari was fascinated. “Do you feel older when you return here?”
“You mean 20 seconds later?” He laughed. “Not really. Sometimes I feel hazy. As if a part of my head is still in a different time zone.”
“Well, isn’t it?”
He upended the protein can over his mouth and crumpled it. Chocolate paste dribbled onto his tongue. And he was back at home with Ma, staring at the leftovers of last night’s chicken karahi. “Finish that, Bari,” Ma said, her voice unusually strong today, carrying an authority he remembered from childhood. “Can’t waste food, especially these days.” But he had no mouth to eat the karahi with. He picked at it with a fork to make her happy, and they watched the news for an hour before she settled down for her midday nap.
Bari flicked back to the breakfast table, the taste of chocolate bitter and chalky on his tongue. “I suppose it is,” he told Mari.
They made love on the third day of their meeting, and on the fourth, but the second time Bari was distracted. Ma had aged 13 years and had suffered a fall that nearly fractured her pelvis. He still couldn’t believe he forgot to secure the living room rug. Which reminded him he still needed to install the bathroom handholds. Sensing his mood, Mari pulled him close and whispered, “Stay. Don’t go” but, mid-thrust, he was already in Saddar Bazaar with a human escort, arguing with a vendor about the price of aluminum fixtures. He couldn’t have been away more than a few ship-seconds, but when he blinked, he saw Mari had rolled away from him.
“What?” he said.
“Your pupils,” she said, watching him from the end of the bed. “They dilate, you know.”
He didn’t know. “I wanted to make sure she was safe.”
She nodded, eyes distant. “I understand.”
They remained friendly, but didn’t make love after that.
Bari began to have headaches. As a child he had migraines with a premonitory phase: his mood changed before the onset of a headache. This was followed by numbness in his left arm and finally the eruption of pain in his occipital area. These interplanetary headaches, though, were different. They occurred after each trip and were succeeded by throbbing behind his eyes, fatigue, and brain fog. He felt at once caged and uprooted, as if gravity had given up on him and he was floating inside a balloon. Chronically jetlagged, he thought. His mind felt stretched like taffy. Sometimes he couldn’t remember whether he was about to go to Ma’s or had already been.
Mari noticed it. “You don’t look so good,” she told him in the exercise room, where he was trudging after a soccer ball.
He kicked the ball to her, and the movement made him dizzy. “I’m fine. Just not sleeping too well is all.”
“Well, you are up with her half the night, aren’t you?”
“My sleep hygiene is pristine here.”
“You think your brain cares?” She tossed him the ball. “Bari, I can’t imagine the kind of strain your mind’s going through living in virtually two dimensions. You need a break. Take a day off.”
Sure, absolutely, he told her. Excellent idea.
But of course he didn’t.
As days/years slipped by, the boundaries between here and there grew porous. A blink and he’d be in Ma’s kitchen taking the roti off the oven. Another and she’d be sitting in his cabin chair aboard the starship, rocking back and forth, whispering longings about his father and their childhood home. She was by his side when they strolled along the graffiti-painted sea wall of New Karachi, and with him before the ship’s porthole, gazing at the darkness beyond.
Beyond these stars glitter other worlds, beyond this trial other tribulations of love.
Some nights he gasped awake, sure that his mother was dead. He’d flick to his mother’s bedroom and stand in the dark, watching her chest stutter, frail like a flattened dough pera. When the morning light yawned into the room, it was he who was lying in that bed, or another bed in a different place, being watched by himself.
When he told Mari about the nocturnal episodes, she recommended he talk to the ship doctor, get a sleep apnea study.
Bari learned that if he took melatonin before sleep, the hypnogogic osmosis tended to dissipate. No longer would Ma sit in the chair in his cabin, murmuring to herself— nor would he suddenly find himself by her side when he hadn’t intended it. He could close his eyes and not be pulled, like a restless tide, to the moon of her existence.
I’m tired, he thought often. So tired.
Yet it had only been a couple weeks on the starship.
He was in the TV room watching a rare episode of Uncle Sargam when the end came. Junaid Jamshed had just begun strumming the show’s theme song, the puppets clapping and swaying to the tune, when Bari felt an electric jolt up the back of his head. His nostrils filled with the smell of gulab jaman, a dessert he hadn’t had since he was 20. Before he could mull over either sensation, he was in Ma’s bedroom, looking down at her. She was on her back. The stroke had flattened out the worry creases from her forehead. It didn’t seem like she had suffered. If he strained, he could conjure a smile at the corner of her lips.
You were here, Bari-jaan, she would have said. With me before I went.
Bari was still murmuring Fraz’s Let it be heartache; come if just to hurt me again when the ambulance came to take her away.
He buried her next to his father. It was a surprisingly clear day, the AQI reading at 450, the din of waves against the sea wall loud in the graveyard. Ma would have liked to walk today, he thought, as they lowered her into the grave and shoveled dirt onto her. After, he stayed watching other bereaved wander among the graves, lighting candles. Such a pointless exercise. Sooner or later the sea was coming for their dead.
When he flicked back, Mari was waiting for him with a bowl of chicken soup. “Eat it,” she said. Later, clothed, she climbed into bed with him and held his head in her lap, until he fell into a place unmarked by time for the first time in weeks. Decades.
And if in his dreamlessness Bari cried out, a distress signal sent to the dark between the stars, Mari never mentioned it.
- Introduction: The Beguiling, Troubling Future of Work, by Diana M. Pho
- Work Ethics, by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
- Remembrance, by Lexi Pandell
- The Long Tail, by Aliette de Bodard
- Collaborative Configurations of Minds, by Lettie Prell
- Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love, by Usman T. Malik
- ars longa, by Tade Thompson
