Read The Very Best of Tad Williams for Free Online

ventilator tubes. As always, Edward Arvedson felt like little more than a suit full of bones, but somehow he had survived in this failing condition for almost a decade. “Where’s Jenkins?” Nightingale asked. “It gave me a start when I came up and the whole house was dark.”
    “Oh, I had him take the night off, poor fellow. Working himself to death. Pour me a small sherry, will you, there’s a good man, and sit down and tell me what you’ve learned. There should be a bottle of Manzanilla already open. No, don’t turn all those other lights on. I find I’m very sensitive at the moment. This is enough light for you to find your way to the wet bar, isn’t it?”
    Nightingale smiled. “I could find it without any light at all, Uncle Edward.”
    When he’d poured a half glass for the old man and a little for himself as well, Nightingale settled into the chair facing the desk and looked his mentor up and down. “How are you feeling?”
    Arvedson waved a dismissive hand. “Fine, fine. Never felt better. And now that we’re done with that nonsense, tell me your news, Nate. What happened? I’ve been worrying ever since you told me what you thought was happening.”
    “Well, it took me a while to find a volunteer. Mostly because I was trying to avoid publicity—you know, all that ‘Nightingale—Exorcist to the Stars’ nonsense.”
    “You shouldn’t have changed your name—it sounds like a Hollywood actor now. Your parents wouldn’t have approved, anyway. What was wrong with Natan Näktergal? It was good enough for your father.”
    He smiled. “Too old country, Uncle Edward. Remember, being well-known gets me into a lot of places. It also leads people to misjudge me.”
    Arvedson made a face. He still hadn’t touched his sherry. “Fine. I’m also old country, I suppose. I should be grateful you even visit. Tell me what happened.”
    “I’m trying to. As I said, it wouldn’t do to recruit just anyone. Ideally, I needed someone with special training...but who gets trained for something like this? I figured that my best bet was through my Tibetan contacts. Tibetan Buddhists spend years studying the Bardo Thodol, preparing to take the journey of dying, which gave me a much larger group to choose from. I finally settled on a man in Seattle named Geshe, who had pancreatic cancer. He’d refused pain relief and the doctors felt certain he only had a few days left when I met him, but he was remarkably calm and thoughtful. I told him what I wanted, and why, and he said yes.”
    “So you had found your...what was your word? Your ‘necronaut.’”
    Nightingale nodded. “That’s what I called it before I met Geshe—it sounded better than ‘mineshaft canary.’ But after I got to know him it...it seemed a little glib. But he was precisely the sort of person I was looking for—a man trained almost since childhood to die with his eyes and mind open.”
    Lightning flashed and a peal of thunder shivered the windows. In the wake, another wash of rain splattered against the glass. “Filthy weather,” said Arvedson. “Do you want another drink before you start? You’ll have to get it yourself, of course, since we don’t have Jenkins.”
    “No, I’m fine.” Nightingale stared at his glass. “I’m just thinking.” Lightning flashed again and so he waited for the thunder before continuing. “You remember how this started, of course. Those earliest reports of spontaneous recovery by dying patients...well, it didn’t seem like anything I needed to pay attention to. But then that one family whose daughter went into sudden remission from leukemia after the last rites had already been said...”
    “I remember. Very young, wasn’t she? Nine?”
    “Yes, a few weeks before her tenth birthday. But of course what caught my attention was when the parents started claiming it wasn’t their daughter at all, that she’d changed in ways that no illness could explain. But when I got in to see the child she was