Expendable - James Alan Gardner [44]
“The sea?” I said. “Is that it? Do you want to be buried at sea?”
His whole body sagged. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxing because he’d got his message across or collapsing because his strength had run out. His grip on my arm went slack, and he sank back into the leaves.
One leaf drifted over his face, covering his nose and eyes. He didn’t even twitch.
More Expendability
It took Chee another hour to die.
I sat with him, his head cradled in my lap as I stroked his hair with my hand. His eyes fluttered open now and then, but I don’t think he was really seeing anymore. Occasionally he would grimace and grunt; then his face would relax once more into apparent calm.
From time to time, I used the Bumbler to check his vital signs. Eventually, the readings came up negative. No heartbeat. No EM activity in the brain.
As planet-down deaths go, it was more gentle than any Explorer expected.
More gentle than Yarrun.
To take my mind off that, I asked myself why it had been so important for him to be buried at sea…if that really was what he wanted. I knew some religions believed strongly in the practice—the Last Baptism, they called it, a return to the mother of us all. Did Chee belong to one of those faiths? Or had he perhaps come from a waterworld, an oceandome, a sargasso habitat…some birthplace near the sea, that would now gather him home?
I never found out.
I never found out.
I never learned why he had asked to be buried at sea…or if he had been trying to say something entirely different, and had died in frustration at not being understood.
For a while, I continued stroking his hair. “That’s what ‘expendable’ means,” I whispered, over and over again.
Then I began dragging his body toward the lake.
Part VII
MOONRISE
Moons
I stood at the edge of the bluffs and looked down at the water. The sky was clear and perforated with stars; to the southeast, a large white moon hung a hand’s breadth above the horizon.
The moon was the color of Old Earth’s moon. Ancient and melancholy.
I liked white moons—they had a subduing effect on their planets. When a world has a red moon in the sky, nights tend to be desperate…you’re fighting angry, or you scramble for someone, anyone, to lie sweat-slick entangled with you, till the morning comes and you’re exhausted enough to sleep. Greenish moons can make you happy on the right day in spring, but any other time they look fetid and sickly; when a planet’s dominant moon is green, the people are whiners, filled with petty resentments. As for blue moons….
Blue moons are rare for populated worlds. The only one I’d ever seen loomed in the skies over Sitz, the planet where all cadet Explorers got sent for inoculations that everyone knew were pointless. To avoid reactions with the shots, you had to abstain from all other medications…which meant that my memories of Sitz were centered on fierce menstrual cramps, unaided by the usual swatch. I passed my single night on Sitz huddled on the floor of the cadet hostel, staring at the bluish glow in the sky and outraged that something so mundane could hurt so much.
In the back of my mind, I wondered how many swatches I’d find in the first aid kit. Not enough to last a lifetime on Melaquin. How long until my next period? Twelve days, unless the stress of the last few hours threw my chemistry off…which it probably would.
Suddenly, the moon rising before me was more ominous than it had been.
Still, it was a white moon, and that was a point in its favor. White moons are aloof and formal—like a bachelor uncle who will leave you alone when you need to cry. People born under white moons know how to be silent; they don’t feel the need to fill every quiet moment with conversation.
Then again, most people aren’t born under moons at all. Most people are born under roofs—at least their souls are. And they sluggishly live their lives under roofs. At night they pull the curtains for fear some moon will shine in and