Miles, Mystery & Mayhem - Lois McMaster Bujold [153]
"Do you wish a final view of the deceased?" Helda inquired of them.
They shook their heads, a middle-aged man among them remarking, "Ye gods, the funeral was enough." He was shushed by a middle-aged woman beside him.
"Do you wish to stay for interment?" asked Helda, formally and unpressingly.
"Absolutely not," said the middle-aged man. At a look of embarrassed disapproval from his female companion, he added firmly, "I saw Grandpa through five replacement operations. I did my bit when he was alive. Watching him get ground up to feed the flowers won't add a thing to my karma, love."
The family filed out, and the ecotech returned to her original aggressively businesslike demeanor. She stripped the corpse—it was an exceedingly ancient man—and took the clothes to the corridor, where presumably someone had lingered to collect them. Returning, she checked a data file, donned gloves and gown, wrinkled her lip, and attacked the deceased with a vibra-knife. Ethan watched with a professional fascination as a dozen mechanical replacement parts clanked into a tray—a heart, several tubes, bone pins, a hip joint, a kidney. The tray was taken to a washer, and the body to the strange machine at the end of the room.
Helda unsealed a large hatch and swung it down, and shifted the body on its catch basin onto it. She clamped the catch basin to the inner side, swung it up—there was a muffled thump from within—and resealed it. The ecotech pressed a few buttons, lights lit, and the machine whined and hissed and grunted with a demure even rhythm that suggested normal operation.
While Helda was occupied in the other end of the room, Ethan risked a whisper. "What's happening in there?"
"Breaking the body down to its components and returning the biomass to the Station ecosystem," Quinn whispered back. "Most clean animal mass—like the newts—is just broken down into higher organics and fed to the protein culture vats—that's where we grow steak meat, and chicken and such for human consumption—but there's a sort of prejudice against disposing of human bodies that way. Smacks of cannibalism, I guess. And so that your next kilo cube of pork doesn't remind you too much of your late Uncle Neddie, the humans get broken down much finer and fed to the plants instead. A purely aesthetic choice—it all goes round and round in the end—logically, it doesn't make any difference."
His carrot had turned to lead in his stomach. "But you're going to let them put Okita—"
"Maybe I'll turn vegetarian for the next month," she whispered. "Sh."
Helda glanced irritably at them. "What are you hanging about for?" She focused on Ethan. "Have you no work to do?"
Quinn smiled blandly, and rapped the green cartons. "I need my float pallet."
"Oh," said the ecotech. She sniffed, hitched up one sharp, bony shoulder, and turned away to tap a new code into the degrader's control panel. Stamping back with a hand tractor, she lifted the top carton and locked it into position on the hatch. It flipped up; there was a slithery rumble from within the machine. The hatch flopped down again, and the first carton was replaced by the second. Then the third. Ethan held his breath.
The third carton emptied with a startling thump.
"What the hell . . . ?" muttered the ecotech, and reached for the seals. Commander Quinn turned white, her fingers twitching over her empty stunner holster.
"Look, is that a cockroach?" cried Ethan loudly in what he prayed might pass for a Stationer accent.
Helda whirled. "Where?"
Ethan pointed to a corner of the room away from the degrader. Both the ecotech and the commander went to inspect. Helda got down on her hands and knees and ran a finger worriedly along a seam between floor and wall. "Are you sure?" she said.
"Just a movement," he murmured, "in the corner of my eye . . ."
She frowned fiercely at him. "More like a damned hangover in the corner of your eye. Slovenly muscle-brain."