TWTBACD Ch.85 - The Final Net

Chapter 85

The Final Net

2081 — Dmitri, 99

2081: Dmitri at 99, one perch, one hour, one river

[PETROV FAMILY — Dmitri's Last Season]

Dmitri Petrov was ninety-nine years old in 2081. He sat by the Sava River on a morning in May with a fishing rod — a rod, not a net— he had given up the net three years ago when his arms could no longer manage the cast — and he waited.

The river was running at ninety-four percent of the seasonal norm. The fish population was at eighty-seven percent of the 2020 baseline. The monitoring network had forty-six nodes. Mila had added four more the previous year. The data was better than it had ever been. The river was better than it had been at its worst. It was not what it had been at its best, which was before his grandfather's time, when the water ran clear to the bottom in summer and the fish were so numerous that the net came up full every morning without fail.

But it was a river. It was the river. It was his river in the specific way that a river belongs to the person who has spent a life attending to it: not ownership, but relationship— not possession, but knowledge.

He caught one perch. He held it for a moment — the cool weight of it, the specific texture of the scales, the fish's eye looking at him with the complete incomprehension of something that was entirely where it was supposed to be. He let it go.

He sat for another hour. Mila came at midmorning. She was sixty-three now. She sat beside him on the bank without speaking, the way she had always sat beside him when she was a child, the way he had always sat beside his father.

'The ASI announcement is expected next year,' she said after a long time.

'I know,' he said.

'Will you see it?'

He was quiet. A hundred years old next year. His body had its limits. His mind had none. 'I might,' he said. 'I should very much like to.'

'What will you say to it?'

He looked at the river. 'I'll show it the data,' he said. 'Sixty-one years of data. That's what I have to offer. I don't know what else to say to a thing that knows everything. I'll say: here is what I watched. Make of it what you can.'

Mila took her father's hand. They sat by the river until the afternoon, not speaking, listening to the water.