At ten o'clock the old, the long out-of-print science fiction writer announced it was his bedtime
There was one last thing he wanted to say to us, to his family
Like a magician seeking a volunteer from the audience, he asked someone to stand beside him and do what he said
I held up my hand
"Me, please, me," I said
The crowd fell quiet as I took my place to his right
"The universe has expanded so enormously," he said
"With the exception of the minor glitch it put us through, that light is no longer fast enough to make any trips worth taking in even the most unreasonable lengths of time
Once the fastest thing possible, they say, light now belongs in the graveyard of history like the Pony Express
I now ask this human being brave enough to stand next to me to pick two twinkling points of obsolete light in the sky above us
It doesn't matter what they are, except that they must twinkle
If they dont twinkle, they are either planets or satellites
Tonight, we are not interested in planets or satellites"
I picked two points of light maybe ten feet apart
One was Polaris, I have no idea what the other one was
For all I knew, it was Puke, Trout's star the size of a BB
"Do they twinkle?" he said
"Yes, they do," I said
"Promise?" he said
"Cross my heart," I said
"Excellent!" he said
"Now then:
Whatever heavenly bodies those two glints represent, it is certain that the Universe has become so rarified that for light to go from one to the other would take thousand or millions of years
But I now ask you to look precisely at one, then precisely at the other"
"OK," I said
"I did it"
"It took a second, do you think?" he said
"No more," I said
"Even if you had taken an hour," he said, "something would have passed between where those two heavenly bodies used to be, at, conservatively speaking, a million times the speed of light"
"What was it?" I said
"Your awareness," he said
"That is a new quality in the Universe, which exists only because there are human beings
Physicists must, from now on, when pondering the secrets of the cosmos, factor in not only energy and matter and time, but something very new and beautiful, which is human awareness"
Trout paused, ensuring with the ball of his left thumb that his upper dental plate would not slip as he said his last words to us that enchanted evening
All was well with his teeth
This was his finale:
"I have thought of a better word than awareness," he said
"Let us call it soul"