Mortal Remains

by Christopher Evans

  She smiled and raised a hand to his cheek. She ran a fingernail along its smooth surface. There was always a slight edge of menace about even her simplest affections. That was part of the attraction, he supposed.

  “We’ve stolen something,” she reminded him. “Something that’s important to some very powerful people. Nobody is even sure what it is, but everyone who knows about it wants it. With luck, your duplicate will keep them fooled for a day or two, buying us time. Without luck, they’ll already be on our trail. If they have to kill us to get it back, you can be certain they will.”

  Her ice-blue eyes were fierce. Imrani gave a little burst of laughter.

  “OK, I’m scared.”

  “You need to take this seriously.”

  “I do.”

  He had been stroking the pipes so hard that one of its eyes had half-risen from its socket, bleary yet quizzical. He smoothed it down again, felt it settle.

  “Can we snack?” he said. “I’m peckish.”

  They ordered a light meal, unblanking the privacy hood. Imrani studied the other passengers, sober and solemn, scarcely a murmur of conversation between them.

  “Are we going where they’re going?” he asked.

  Shivaun’s glance was pure exasperation, but something told him he’d hit the mark.

  So it was Charon. Cemetery world. He thought of asking if they could stop off at Pluto to sample the pleasuredomes of Orpheus. But decided against it.

  He transpared a window, peered out at empty space. A star-dusted blackness that didn’t alter after ten minutes, thirty. He readily agreed when Shivaun suggested he went off for a simswim in the water pod on the recreation deck. It was his first experience of a pod, which created the excellent illusion that he was floating alone in the warm shallow waters of a Venusian lake, its shores fringed with silver sand and palmbush. He did an hour’s steady crawl and emerged feeling fully toned.

  Shivaun was wrestling with the bagpipes when he returned to his seat. He took it from her and fed the sac the meal he’d laced with tranquillizer. A flight attendant appeared and asked him if he cared to play something suitable for the rest of the passengers, something soothing or reverential.

  “Sorry,” he said. “No can do. She’s in no condition for playing, see?”

  The attendant focused its optic on the instrument. “Unwell?” it enquired politely.

  “Pregnant,” Imrani replied.

  When the attendant had gone, Shivaun said, “You shouldn’t have drawn attention to it.”

  “If I’d tried to play it, I’d have certainly drawn some attention.”

  “You don’t need to tell anyone anything they don’t need to know.”

  She sat straight-backed in her seat, jaw set hard.

  “You’re tense, aren’t you?” he said.

  “I’ve told you, this isn’t a game.”

  “Want a neck rub?”

  She sighed. Her console started blinking.

  It was a call from Triton. A man’s face came up on the screen.

  “Hello,” he said to Shivaun when she identified herself. He was a husband of her daughter, Niome, who had gone for a ten-day walkabout in the Poseidon Desert, common practice there, the man assured her, a chance to be alone for a while. But it meant she couldn’t be contacted. Did Shivaun want her message passed on when she returned?

  Shivaun blanked the call abruptly, without voicing a reply.

  Imrani hadn’t known about any children other than those with Cybille until now.

  “She’s your eldest?” he asked.

  “The same age as you.”

  It sounded like a challenge. He did an exaggerated wince, as if she had sworn at him. “Anything I should know?”

  “If it was any of your business, I’d tell you.”

  “My, my,” he said, “you are irritable.”

  He spent the rest of the voyage dozing or trawling the entertainment channels. Space travel had always seemed romantic to him, but now he knew it as dull, dull, dull.

  Gill-mask clamped to his nose, he was locked in dread combat with a huge and hairless underwater wrestler when Shivaun wrenched him unceremoniously back into real space time. The ship was going into orbit around Charon.

  Shivaun made him give the bagpipes another dose of tranquillizer sufficient to knock it out for forty-eight hours. Imrani packed the creature neatly into his flightbag, concertinaing its legs with great care. With all the indignities it had suffered, it would probably never play properly again.

  Pluto’s moon was the only major inhabited satellite where there was no customs, and a shuttle carried the passengers down promptly to its drab surface, everyone donning bulky warmsuits comprising armour-like panels lined with bodycoddle and elastic thermal polymers for manoeuvrability. The suits were luminous fruity colours, each one having a bulbous space in its midriff for carrying luggage: Imrani stored the pipes inside while Shivaun packed away the womb with her luggage. Big-visored recycling hoods enveloped their heads. Imrani laughed at their reflections in the suiting room mirror, he a study in shocking strawberry to Shivaun’s electric lime. An intercom informed them that the ridged soles of their boots incorporated cryobacteria that could digest the moon’s rock ice, supplementing the suit’s air with extra oxygen, cycling hydrogen to thermal nodules throughout its layered skin where additional heat was generated through biofusion. The temperature outside was only twenty degrees above absolute zero.

  Charon Prime, the main settlement on the moon, was a regular array of dark angular modules that sat in a frozen crater sea like a black snowflake. It was lit by pale blue stalk-lamps which gave it an eerie, dolorous air and turned the surrounding ice the colour of steel. Around and beyond it rose rippled ice ridges, while above the great crescent of Pluto arched like a luminous bridge across the star-fierce blackness. There were dark-suited politia everywhere, at checkpoints, in bulky slidecars on the ice. They were armed.

  “There’s one thing I want to know,” Imrani said jauntily across the suit radio to Shivaun. “What do people around here do for fun?”

  Conspicuously, Shivaun did not reply.

  Few people ever came to Charon except to visit the Valleys of the Dead, and the routine for such pilgrimages was well established. The flight attendants were on hand to escort the passengers across the runway to the terminus so that they could practise walking in their warmsuits. Imrani had one pratfall before finding that slow, loping strides with arms outstretched was best for steady balanced movement in the low gravity. Beneath their feet the scarred and pockmarked ice was as hard as any rock.

  Inside the terminus building, the passengers were divided into two groups: those bringing dead relatives to be laid to rest, and those visiting the already entombed. Imrani followed Shivaun into a wide-windowed room where aides were waiting with colour-coded maps of the valleys, which radiated out from the ceremonial centre of Acheron at their heart. Each valley had a different zone number, and the pilgrims would be marshalled into appropriate groups before being taken to the omnibuses that waited beyond the frosted plass window, slow moving beasts whose stately progress meant that they still had several hours’ travel ahead of them. Little puffs of steam jetted from the buses’ nostrils, and their warty hides were rimed with bright carbon monoxide frost.

  Imrani fell in behind Shivaun as they shuffled along at the end of a queue towards one of the transit points. Shivaun warned him to say nothing unless he was directly addressed and to keep his answers to a minimum even then. He was to agree with everything she said.

  When it was her turn to face the official at the desk, Shivaun showed her identity disk and asked for a private two-seater sled.

  The official looked out at her through his visor, a heavy-featured man with a prominent brow.

  “What’s the nature of your visit?” he asked.

  “I’m here to see my first husband. He was entombed here eighteen years ago.”

  Imrani knew nothing about any previous husband of hers, let alone one that had di
ed. She told the official his name—Rajandre—and the entombment coordinates. He checked it on his console, then said, “There’s a bus going to that sector. You can join the others.”

  Shivaun shook her head inside her helmet. “I have additional business. Official business. I need a sled to take me and my companion to Acheron.”

  The official didn’t move or speak. Imrani started to feel nervous. He tried a winning smile as the man scrutinized him, then realized it was wasted inside his warmsuit.

  The man slotted Shivaun’s disk into his console. The unseen optic below the desk splashed shifting colours across his visor, a privacy murmur blotting out the disk’s commentary.

  Finally he looked up. He instructed Shivaun to eyeball the retina scanner.

  “You’re an expediter,” he said.

  “Do we get the sled?”

  “And your companion?”

  “A spouse. He’s just sightseeing.”

  Imrani had to step forward and have his eyeballs light-probed.

  “We don’t get many expediters here,” the man said to Shivaun. “Especially all the way from Venus.”

  “As I said, I have a husband buried here. That’s the only reason I volunteered.”

  “Subject?”

  “I’m not required to reveal that. You can make an official request to any arbiter’s office. Without delay to me.”

  Imrani didn’t like this. The man was one of those officials who wasn’t about to let go.

  “I can’t say we welcome them,” he said. “Our population’s small and hard to hold on to as it is. Life isn’t cheap here.”

  Shivaun gave a patient sigh. “I have the greatest respect for human life, I can assure you. I believe it should be lived to the full. But we each have our legitimate term. You’ve voiced the documentation. You know I’m merely carrying out the law.”

  Still he would not budge; he just sat there.

  “There’s only one person here I know who’s over the limit. Elydia. Elydia Chan-Vetterlein.”

  Shivaun retrieved her authorization disk; she said nothing.

  “She’s a good woman. One of the best we have.”

  “Then you have my sincerest regrets. She’s one hundred and twelve years old.”

  “You’ve come a long way for her.”

  “As I’ve told you, I also wanted to visit my husband. High Arbiter Miushme-Adewoyin of Melisande was most understanding in giving me the commission.”

  Now there was a distinct note of irritation in Shivaun’s voice. Imrani felt uncomfortable in more senses than one: the bagpipes were twitching in their sleep against his belly. He wondered if they were dreaming, if they were capable of dreaming. He did not turn around, but he was sure that everyone in the building was watching them, waiting for them.

  “That means nothing to me,” the man was saying to Shivaun. “Here we believe in live and let live. There aren’t that many of us, and we take care of our own. Maybe I’ll just have you sent straight back—”

  In one swift movement Shivaun reached out, grabbed his arm with both hands and pulled him across the desk. She held him fast, putting pressure against his elbow. Imrani wondered if she could break it even through his suit.

  “That would be particularly stupid,” she told the man, their visors touching. “I’ve been more than polite, and I’ve no more time for your games. You’ve delayed us long enough.”

  Her voice was fierce across the comlink. This time Imrani did glance around. The rest of the pilgrims were already filing through the airlocks to the buses: no one was paying them the slightest bit of attention. No one, that is, except for another official who was standing nearby watching them. She came over to the desk. There was a fat-barrelled pistol in a belt holster, but she did not get it out.

  “What’s going on here?” she said.

  “Who’re you?” Shivaun asked angrily.

  “Gwilever. Transit Coordinator. Is there a problem?”

  Shivaun explained, not releasing the man. She had the flat of one hand against his elbow, the other tugging his wrist in the opposite direction.

  The woman checked the details on the console. “I presume you intend to carry out your duties immediately,” she said.

  “That is my usual practice,” Shivaun told her.

  “Then we need delay you no further. A sled will be provided for your use.”

  Ten minutes later, Shivaun and Imrani were jetting out of the city on the broad bowed back of the sled, a low-slung creature whose thermal snout and ground-pads melted a thin layer of ice as it scooted along, powered by nutrient sticks which Imrani had been instructed to feed into its maw at regular intervals. The maw was a cartilaginous slit at the centre of the steering ridge. It dilated when the sled was hungry.

  In the low-gravity near-vacuum, they made good speed, Pluto’s sweeping arc providing sufficient light for Imrani to see the granite-coloured ridges that stretched in all directions, hollows filled with ammonia ice and methane snow. The bleakness of the scene entranced Imrani, who had known nothing but the muggy dampness of the Venusian lowlands. The far-distant sun was a mere dot of light at their backs, but the stars were so bright he couldn’t resist enthusing about them, knowing that he was behaving like a typical tourist. Shivaun steered the sled, saying little. But Imrani was not one to be daunted by silences.

  “Who is this Lydia woman, anyway?” he asked.

  “Elydia,” Shivaun corrected him. “Elydia Chan-Vetterlein. She put my husband to rest when I brought him here.”

  Imrani hazarded a guess: “Was he Niome’s father?”

  A pause. “Yes.”

  He waited for her to say more. When she didn’t, he asked: “What happened? How did he die?”

  He’d never had much tact, he knew that; but they were lovers, husband and wife: surely she would tell him.

  “He drowned in a boating accident on a lake. A stupid paddler took in too much water and sank. Niome was lucky to survive. Her two brood-brothers also drowned. We only recovered Raj’s body.”

  So it had been a family catastrophe. He tried to imagine the grief. It was beyond him. Bad enough the three had died. Even worse with youngsters involved. And they’d never found the children’s corpses. He couldn’t help thinking of them rotting at the bottom of the lake, lives snuffed out before they’d scarcely begun. It was horrible. The very word “corpse” was enough to make him shiver. In all his time at the recuperatory, he’d managed to avoid ever seeing a dead body.

  “It must have been appalling,” he said.

  “It wasn’t one of my better moments. But eighteen years is a long time. Elydia was in her late eighties even then.”

  He thought about it. “But you weren’t an expediter.”

  “You remembered,” she said drily. “I told her I planned to become one. I even joked that I might come back to get her if she overstayed her welcome.”

  “And now you have.”

  “It gives me a reason to be here. I told Bezile I wanted to visit my husband’s tomb and terminate Elydia Chan-Vetterlein. She’s been on the wanted list for some time. People here are hard to get at.”

  “And you’re really going to terminate her?”

  She kept staring straight ahead, gloved hands tight on the steering horns.

  “You’re not, are you?” he persisted.

  Silence.

  “I think maybe you’re going to show her the womb.”

  Shivaun would not give him the satisfaction of a reply.

  They travelled on across rugged cratered plains and shallow scree-filled valleys. Here and there Imrani saw rocks streaked with luminous green thermoss, an attempt to provide the moon with year-round warmth and light from plantlife—an attempt that had failed. Even the hardiest of biodesigned species fared poorly on this bleak world. There was no other sign of life.

  Imrani’s breathing filled the dome of his hood. They skirted a crystalline sea, then passed a ridge where the planet’s tenuous wind had sculpted methane snow into frozen waves, lik
e huge breakers about to crash down on them. Imrani couldn’t contain himself.

  “Just think of it,” he said, “here we are at the very edge of the Solar System. Out there”—he pointed to the heavens—“is the space between the stars, going on and on. All that lies between us and the universe is the skin of this suit. Isn’t that amazing!”

  They were obviously travelling a well-worn path: he could see the bus tracks ridged into the ice. On either side low ice hills began to heighten and Shivaun remarked that they were entering the valley zone. The sled had a snorting fit and began to slow. Imrani fed it another nutrient stick.

  The tracks in the ice thickened as the slopes rose more sheerly on either side of them. Their flanks were carved with stairways and contoured ledges where the shining dead were entombed. There were hundreds, thousands of them, arranged in every conceivable pose from the statuesque to the informal. Some clutched favoured objects while others were surrounded by replics of their dearest—parents, children, lovers. The replics did not shine like the truedead; they were merely solid holos.

  Imrani drank it in with his eyes. The tombs were carved from ice, names and inscriptions embedded at their bases, final statements on their lives from family members who had outlived them. Like most people, Imrani could not read, but Shivaun told him the inscriptions vocalized if you went close. She recited some of those she remembered—descriptions of their dying along with expressions of utmost grief from their relatives. This was a place of no consolation, the true end of life for victims of accident or neglect or pure malice, only their bodies ensured of immortality on this bitterest and bleakest of worlds. Even the poorest of families were able to have their truedead brought here by virtue of communal funds, but this was scant consolation for the end of their very existence.

  The sled began to slow again, and its snorts turned into something that resembled distressed barks. It refused a further nutrient stick. Shivaun checked the fuel bag, examining one of the sticks minutely. She took a knife from her belt pack and slit it open. White flakes spilled out of it.

  “What is it?” Imrani asked.

  “Polymer shreds. Waste material. The sled can’t digest it.”