by John Barnes
Margaret arrived with lunch brought up from the kitchen. We had now thrown bail for about a dozen students, and we had them plus one other person as new residents. "They're just added numbers in the existing problem, fortunately," I said.
She poured coffee before answering, and handed me a sandwich. "It's early to eat, but we might not be able to when the remains arrive."
I had almost been able to forget. "It's just Elizabeth Lovelock we have to bury?" I asked.
She nodded. "The problem of finding a Pastor to make it legal, however, is solved. The Chairman—I mean, Aimeric's father, he's not Chairman anymore, but—"
"He'll always be the Chairman to me, too. At least compared to what's sitting in the chair right now. He's agreed to do the funeral for us? That's terrific politically if it doesn't get him sent to prison."
"Even if it does," she said, chewing quickly, "it's still a pretty good thing politically. But it's more than his agreeing to do the funeral. What I wanted to ask you was whether we could convert one more space and afford to grow a sink and toilet in there, because I'd like to give Chairman Carruthers a private room."
"He's here?"
"Yap. Enrolled for Occitan cooking, Occitan poetry, and Basic Occitan. Says he knows too much about God's will to attempt painting or music, and that dancing and dueling are not things for a man his age."
"Hmmph. I'm not so sure about dueling. He must have given this as his address to get his house arrest set up here. How are we going to get it cleared for him to go with us to the cemetery for the burial—or do we only need him for the funeral here?"
"What's a cemetery?"
It was a Terstad word, so I was quite surprised. "Um, where you bury people."
"You mean—literally?" She seemed more than a little shocked.
I had a suspicion I would be much the same in a moment "In Occitan we put their bodies into the ground, yes," I stammered. "What do you do here ... cremate them, or—"
"Well, we..." Her voice got very soft, and she looked down at the floor. . "It's all right, I'm almost a grown-up, you can tell me."
"I just realized—we saw that extended vu of your friend— Raimbaut?"
"Raimbaut," I said. "You mean of the burial service on Serra Valor. I realize you must do things differently here—"
"Yes, but when you hear how differently, I think you're going to be horrified, and even though I really like you, Giraut, sometimes you're so prissy about things, and make them so complicated—"
"Wait a moment here, companhona. I'll grant you that I often react badly to your customs, but give me the privilege of reacting badly for myself."
She looked like she was about to flare back at me, but then she swallowed it and nodded, apparently deciding my request was fair. "All right. There are no cemeteries here because we don't keep corpses around after the funeral. After the funeral a few of Elizabeth's close friends—if she had any here, and so far I haven't found any—will take her body downstairs to the main door on the regenner system and put her in there, along with all her personal possessions."
"That's disgusting."
"I knew you would react like that."
I got up from the chair, but with the cots in there, there was nowhere to pace, so I ended up with my rump on the desk and my feet in the chair, still eating. After a moment she said, "I'm sorry but you had to find out sooner or later and it is what we do."
The image now taking up all of my brain appalled me. Everything—kitchen scraps, floor sweepings, dirty dishes, the toilet!—went into the regenner system, where an ultrasound gadget converted it all to something you could mix with water, and the slurry was then piped away and fed into the city's fusion torch, so that literally every atom of refuse in the city could be reused. I suddenly realized what Anna's poem had really been about and was glad that I had not known while I was listening. Elizabeth's poor battered body would be stripped down to ions and mass-spectographed; most of her would end as fertilizer or simple fresh water, some bits as valuable light metals ... and on the way she would mix with the city's garbage.
Finally I sighed. Raimbaut was mummified in his stone chamber, -which was quite waterproof and on the dry desert side of Serra Valor. We had left a little device that induced ferocious shortlived radioactivity an hour or two after he was covered, so that there was literally nothing in the hole to eat him; whenever the Grand Academy elected a dead artist a saint, even generations later, and they dug him up to make relics, the bodies were always perfect preserved. My own lute had cost me a year's allowance because it contained three knucklebones of Saint Agnes shaped into tuning pegs. (Saint Agnes the painter, to be sure—musician relics made into instruments were out of my financial reach and always would be unless I somehow earned a peerage in perpetuo.)
I wondered how a Caledon would have reacted to knowing that. Would it strike them as sensible recycling, or as homage the way it did me, or—would they have found the idea of carrying bits of corpse around with us revolting?
"I'll get over it," I said. "It's taking me a bit of time to adapt to your ways, and you've got to allow me an occasional reaction, but I will get over it."
I don't think Margaret had expected that. She gave me a small smile and said, "Well, then, good, because we may end up being Elizabeth's friends for the burial. At this point I think we might even have to deliver her eulogies."
"How many does she need?"
"Our custom is three, but one is from the Pastor and one from the family, normally. We'll have to find things we can tell Pastor Carruthers about her ... and all we've got for family is one distant cousin who can't remember ever having talked with her. Luckily it's Thorwald. You, or I, or somebody is going to have to be the friend, I'm afraid. She doesn't seem to have had any."
"Poor girl." I shuddered. "And she was here at the Center?"
"She enrolled first thing. As far as I can tell it was her one and only act of rebellion ever, unless you count attending the OMC—and the overlap between those must be ninety percent. So she had a regular job, and because she wasn't deviant she got everything she asked for: Aimeric's poetry class, the one on reading it that is, and Basic Occitan from Bieris, who just remembered her face, and doesn't think she ever did much individual conversation—and your music appreciation class."
I ran my mind over the thirty people in the class, and finally settled on her as one of three people who sat in the back, seemed to listen intently, and never spoke. "Do we know anything else about her?"
"She was an only child. Apparently very shy. Her academic schedule matches that of one young male coworker that she may have had a crush on, but he didn't go to the OMC and he's one of the few who asked for a full refund of tuition. She'd never had a copy made for psypyx after the age of eighteen, when they stop requiring them, so she's three stanyears out of date, and they can't find anyone to wear her that she was close to. I might have to volunteer, or maybe I can talk Val into it if she'll get off this hysterical act she's been doing and volunteer to be useful."
"She came up to see me and seemed normal enough. Very much Valerie, but normal."
Margaret sighed and scratched her head; there was something distinctly apelike about it to me. "Well, I guess that's progress."
"She didn't get anywhere," I said, softly. Perhaps I just wanted to see how Margaret would react to that piece of information.
She grinned. I liked that. "So you've noticed that she's developed a fascination with everything Occitan, also."
"I confess I could return the fascination, but Paul is so much ... er..."
"So much more valuable? He certainly is. And she's certainly managed to upset and hurt him more than enough over the years."
"He helps her to do it," I pointed out. "In a way it's a shame I can't give him a crash course in Occitan approach to such matters. As a point of enseingnamen, he'd long since have dumped her—because we make ourselves so vulnerable to each other in finamor, we also have a well-developed art of storming out in a fury."
"He could certainly
use it," Margaret agreed. A thought seemed to hit her, and before the shy smile I could see starting had a chance to turn into an awkward question, I said, "So poor Elizabeth Lovelock seems to have been a person from nowhere. How in the world did she end up as she did?"
Margaret's expression shifted as quickly as I had hoped it would. "It looks like it was just a case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a tiny little anti-Saltini demonstration by some ultradrthodox believers—not more than twenty of them—in the street near her home, and the city police tried to protect it from the peeps. At least four policemen died when the peeps jumped them; some of the demonstrators are still in the hospital. Elizabeth Lovelock was coming home from the OMC—the timing suggests to me that she was actually one of the people who helped us stack chairs and tear down, and still none of us noticed the poor thing— and between the trakcar and her front door—well, they grabbed her and the rest happened. I don't suppose we'll ever know much more than that. Several of the autopsy details are just horrible, Giraut, things that the coroner said indicated 'systematic torture aimed at sexual humiliation.' I think the coroner is liberal and must have been trying to make sure there'd be indictments. Poor girl. It must have seemed to her that she suffered eternally before they finally killed her."
There were tears forming in Margaret's eyes, and without thinking I moved over to her cot and sat beside her, putting an arm around her. She almost fell against me, but it wasn't desire; she was simply exhausted and had been looking after far too many people for far too long, with no time for her own feelings. "This is stupid," she said, still snuffling into my shoulder.
"No, it's natural. You've been carrying too much of a load for too long, and we can't do anything to lift it off you, and what happened to Elizabeth would wring tears from rock."
"I just keep thinking—if she had had even one friend, someone who might have been with her or delayed her even a few minutes ... or if there were just someone to speak for her now—"
I held her close, and gently rubbed the back of her neck, and wondered how I had ever gotten into the kind of world where these sorts of things could happen. She held on for a long time, and when the grip broke it was because Margaret sat back to wipe her face. "Well," she said, "now, that was a total loss of dignity."
"I won't tell anyone," I said, and handed her a tissue to wipe her face. "Don't give up yet; keep looking. She might have a friend as quiet as she was. And there has to be someone whose arm you can twist to wear her psypyx. The way you feel about her couldn't be good for her anyway—too likely to get her into self-pity. Though deu sait if anyone was ever entitled to self-pity ... now, don't start again, or I'll join you."
She sort of forced a happy face, for which I was grateful, and left. It occurred to me that I had held plenty of donzelhas in tears in my time, but this was the first one where there had actually been something to worry about, let alone where I had worried about her after the tears were over.
Well, after all, I had come to Caledony, in part, to have experiences that were new to me.
I got the rest of the course-scheduling finished in an hour or so and looked at the clock to see that I had now used up all the time I had allotted for the First Dark nap, and moreover had not been downstairs in quite a while. In a real crisis someone would have called me, of course, but as the person ultimately responsible I did not want to learn of things only when they became real crises. With a mournful glance at my bed, and no more than a splash of water on my face and a quick brush of my hair, I headed downstairs.
THREE
The first thing I discovered on my way down the stairs was one more thing to work into the schedule; very apologetically, Aimeric's father stopped me on the stairs and asked if there would be any time at which he could have one of the larger rooms for chapel. That, at least, was fairly simple to fit in, so I made a quick note in my pocket unit and told him I'd have an official time for him soon.
"Thank you. I'm—er—sorry to deal with what was really a very small matter first, but I'm afraid a life of government and administration has biased me that way. The other reason they sent me up, and did not use regular communication, was to let you know quietly that young Lovelock's body has arrived. Thorwald and Margaret are moving it down to a cold storeroom below the kitchen."
"You've seen ... her?"
Carruthers nodded, and his face was set in iron. "I have. I've proposed, and the others have accepted, that we not have her embalmed or restored, and we let her casket be open. The essential correctness of the decision, I think, is verified by the fact that the Reverend Saltini has commed me four times in the last hour to accuse me of 'politicizing' her death, and of 'creating martyrs where there is only misfortune and irresponsibility:' "
I exploded. " 'Irresponsibility!' After what his goons did to her—" I was too furious to speak further.
Carruthers lip twitched a tiny bit, as if he had seen humor he would not admit to. "I must confess, I reacted the same way. Furthermore, and more to the point, the General Consultancy agreed that it was rational for me to do so, thus losing Saltini his chance to have me committed as insane or senile. To quote a politician whose style I've always rather liked, now that Saltini has gotten onto the tiger, let us see if he can ride it."
By the time I got down to the loading dock, mercifully, the job was done and Elizabeth Lockwood's body decently covered. Thorwald, Paul, Aimeric, and Margaret were down there, badly upset, and it took some coaxing to get them upstairs and away from the situation. "The funeral will be early tomorrow," I pointed out, "and after that we can probably get classes back under way. Everyone here could use a little normality."
Aimeric sipped his coffee and nodded. "If no one needs me here, I'm going to go over and visit Clarity. I've commed her, and she sounds a little better, but I'd like to see for myself." He left very quietly—a great weight seemed to have settled onto his shoulders, and he bore it, but the strain was still evident.
Classes did not resume the next day, despite the best intentions in the world. First of all, the funeral was more upsetting than I think even Carruthers, who wanted an uproar, had intended to make it. Not cleaning or embalming the body, "burying" Elizabeth in the clothes she had come to the morgue in, had left three inflammatory facts in full view: her brutally crushed mouth and broken jaw, the blood that had soaked her torn clothing everywhere from knees to waist, and the expression of terrible agony on what remained of her face. You could not see it without wanting to scream or throw up.
Carruthers took full advantage of that; his condemnation of the coup tied it directly to the crime even in Terstad, and the portion of the eulogy he delivered in Reason made what many people felt was an airtight case that Saltini himself was directly responsible for what had happened to the young woman.
Then Valerie, of all people, stood up, and I wondered how she had come to be a friend of Elizabeth Lovelock's—until I saw the fresh scar at the back of her neck. Obviously Margaret had turned up the pressure; at least Valerie would be doing something useful for a change, I thought sourly.
Valerie's eyes were cast down at the floor; she seemed shyer and quieter than she had when she performed. "I think ... this funeral is very ... well, unusual. I've now known Elizabeth for just a few hours. Uh, actually, she wants you to know her family always called her Betsy, and that's—how she'd like you to remember her. She's had to do a lot of catching up; remember her last personality copy was made before the springer even opened. But... well, things are, uh, working very well, the doctors say better than it normally ever does. We've kind of experimented, and, if you can all be very quiet and not startle me, I can sort of ... lend Betsy my voice so she can talk to you herself."
The room was so silent that I suddenly wondered if they all were holding their breath, or if perhaps everyone was concentrating on breathing silently. Then Valerie's voice began to speak with a slightly different accent, sometimes not in perfect control, but quite intelligibly. "I—I just wan-ted ... I just wanted t
o s-say that I was very lonely all m-my life and it seems like it was because of the way we Caledons live. This is a very c-cold culture, and we are not a h-happy people. And I look at Valerie's memories of the Center and the C-Cabaret and even though I cannot remember it for myself I f-feel so happy to know that those things were in my life before I died. They will t-try to tell you that the Saltinis and the peeps, and the men who did-did-did this to my b-body, are the exceptions, but they are wrong. Reverend Carruthers or Reverend Peterborough are the exceptions, people who t-treat people decently. This thing you see in the casket that w-was me is what h-happens when you try to make people fit to ideas.
"I was very shy but I will try to talk to more of you especially because now that I have Valerie with me I am not so afraid. And I will try very hard to b-be someone they can g-grow a body for the d-doctors say I'm doing well. So I expect-pect-pect to be back with you again in the flesh and meanwhile please w-win so the world will be f-fit to live in. That's all-all I want to say."
The voice had been a little whiny and a little ashamed, as if Betsy had been one of those souls who is crushed almost from birth, whether by external force or internal weakness. Yet she had affirmed her dignity, claimed her place among us, and in perfect absurdity, the funeral went up in a roar of tearful applause.
Maybe our response was all political; what she had said would be carried on the news channels, and would damage Saltini deeply, and we knew that instantly. Maybe it was simple courage that we admired, seeing a personality so badly out of date find its footing and choose its side so quickly.
But suggest either of those reasons to me and you'll face a challenge atz sang, even today. I think we applauded because when human beings are forced to hear—to really hear—a cry for love, they don't have much choice but to give it. At least that's what I'd rather believe about my species.
In a way it was an anticlimax, but when Thorwald, as relative, stepped up, there was another surprise, for he was carrying a lute.