“You have a crowd of well-wishers outside,” Cardenia said.īatrin smiled at that. “What is that?”Ĭardenia cocked her head slightly. “Easy for you to say.” They both lapsed into a quiet, companionable silence for a few moments, until Batrin grimaced silently at a noise and turned to his daughter. “Try not to think about it,” Cardenia said. “This is, I’m afraid, all too foreseeable.” Everything is in maintenance mode for the foreseeable future.”īatrin laughed at that, weakly, as that is how he did everything at this point.

“Everything right now is in the hands of the executive committee. I’m pretty sure every time you leave this room to go to the bathroom, you’re accosted by minions who need your signature on something.” “Don’t you have better things to do than to sit around here?” Batrin joked to his daughter and sole surviving child, as she sat to begin her morning session with her father. Cardenia, who had been aware for some time that the end was close, had cleared her schedule until further notice and had a comfortable chair installed near her father’s bed. For the week leading up to his death, Cardenia Wu-Patrick stayed mostly at the bedside of her father, Batrin, who, when he was informed that his condition had reached the limits of medical competence and that palliative care was all that was left to him, decided to die at home, in his favorite bed.

The collapsing empire by john scalzi