Blue Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson [288]
He only nodded. Spencer had been one of his best friends.
And then in the next few days an amazing number of people came to Odessa for the funeral. Sax, Nadia, Mikhail, Zeyk and Nazik, Roald, Coyote, Mary, Ursula, Marina and Vlad, Jurgen and Sibilla, Steve and Marion, George and Edvard, Samantha, really it was like a convocation of the remaining Hundred and associated issei. And Maya stared around at all their old familiar faces, and realized with a sinking heart that they would be meeting like this for a long time to come. Gathering from around the world each time one fewer, in a final game of musical chairs, until one day one of them would get a call and realize they were the last one left. A horrible fate. But not one that Maya expected to have to endure; she would die before that, surely. The quick decline would get her, or something else; she would step in front of a trolley if she had to. Anything to avoid such a fate. Well— not anything. To step in front of a trolley would be both too cowardly and too brave, at one and the same time. She trusted she would die before it came to that. Ah, never fear; death could be trusted to show up. No doubt well before she wanted it. Maybe the final survivor of the First Hundred wouldn’t be such a bad thing anyway. New friends, a new life— wasn’t that what she was searching for now? So that these sad old faces were just a hindrance to her?
She stood grimly through the short memorial service and the quick eulogies. Those who spoke looked somewhat perplexed as to what they could say. A big crowd of engineers had come from Da Vinci, Spencer’s colleagues from his design years. Clearly a lot of people had been fond of him, it was surprising, even though Maya had been fond of him herself. Curious that such a hidden man could evoke such a response. Perhaps they had all projected onto his blankness, made their own Spencer and loved him as part of themselves. They all did that anyway; that was life.
But now he was gone. They went down to the harbor and the engineers let loose a helium balloon, and when it reached a hundred meters Spencer’s ashes began to spill out, in a slow trickle. Part of the haze, the blue of the sky, the brass of sunset.
In the days that followed the crowd dispersed, and Maya wandered Odessa nosing through used-furniture shops and sitting on benches on the corniche, watching the sun bounce over the water. It was lovely to be in Odessa again, but she felt the funereal chill of Spencer’s death much more than she would have expected. It cast a pall over even the beauty of this most beautiful town; it reminded her that in coming back here and moving into the old building, they were attempting the impossible— trying to go back, trying to deny time’s passing. Hopeless— everything was passing— everything they did was the last time they would ever do it. Habits were such lies, such lies, lulling them into the feeling that there was something that was lasting, when really nothing lasted. This was the last time she would ever sit on this bench. If she came down to the corniche tomorrow and sat on this same bench, it would again be the last time, and there would again be nothing lasting about it. Last time after last time, so it would go, on and on, always one final moment after the next, finality following finality in seamless endless succession. She could not grasp it, really. Words couldn’t say it, ideas couldn’t articulate it. But she could feel it, like the edge of a wave front pushing ever outward, or a constant wind in her mind, rushing things along so fast it was hard to think, hard to really feel them. At night in bed she would think, this is the last time for this night, and she would hug Michel hard, hard, as if she could stop it happening if she squeezed hard enough. Even Michel, even the little dual world they had built—”Oh Michel,” she said,