by J. S. Volpe
Reynard was flying his private one-man cruiser Remember the Whatever-It-Was-Called through the Nerual System, on his way from Melikatara Red to the Wheel, when a call came through on the ship’s PsyCom interface panel. Seeing from the video screen’s InfoTab that it was from a lawyer, he nearly refused it, assuming it was an ad, or worse, a repercussion from some past misdeed. But before he could, the lawyer, a saddarite named Ebb Tw’twitto m’Mashgor whose dark green skin glistened with a fine coating of slime and whose long black horns were buffed and polished and adorned with a series of ornamental metal bands, said hurriedly, as if he suspected (or had been informed) that Reynard would be unlikely to give a lawyer much of a chance to speak, “I have been instructed to contact you by a Ms. Solace 10-NT.”
Reynard wasn’t sure which surprised him more: the fact that a lawyer was contacting him on Solace’s behalf or the fact that the lawyer was using her real surname.
“What’s this about?” Reynard asked, heart suddenly pounding too hard, too fast. Somehow he already knew.
“I, ah, I am regretful to inform you that Ms. 10-NT is no longer among the living. She has had a meeting with an unfortunate accident.”
He said nothing, could think of nothing to say, just slumped back in his force-mesh chair and stared unseeingly at the stars moving past on the main display screen.
“What…” He had been about to ask “What happened?” but wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. He remembered her unhappiness last time they met, and he feared she had committed suicide. If she had, he didn’t want to know.
The lawyer knew what he wanted, though, and had no similar qualms about discussing it.
“Ms. 10-NT was, ehm, the unfortunate victim of an unusual accident involving an outgassing of methane on a pleasure moon. She was hiking with friends and, as said, there was an outgassing, a stray spark, an explosion, and she was, ehm, unfortunately bisected by debris.”
The story was so bizarre and ridiculous Reynard had trouble processing it.
“Bisected?” he asked. Who the hell used a word like “bisected” in this context? Yes, he knew the saddarite brain functioned in ways that made the species excellent in matters of great complexity, such as law, logic, and psychohistory, while making them terrible in matters of common discourse, but this was particularly egregious.
The lawyer cleared his throat. “It was said to be, ehm, it was said, instantaneous. No pain. Probably no real awareness of what was happening.”
Reynard was silent. He was still having trouble getting past the absurdity of the whole thing. She, an immortal over twelve thousand years old, a survivor of the Cataclysm, the War of Unification, the Last Great War, the Toy Box Massacre, a career at Giv-Golos, and so many other things, she getting cut down in some senseless accident. How could something like that happen? He wanted to punch the universe.
The lawyer spoke on, as lawyers always do, saving Reynard the need to talk.
“The, uhm, the will (such as it is) does not name you, but you are, eh, listed among the listees in a document listing those to be notified in the event of her death.” A pause. “A document I noted, seeing the date upon it, that was prepared sixteen hundred years ago.” A longer pause, as if he expected Reynard to say something. When Reynard didn’t, m’Mashgor said in a low voice that suggested confidentiality, “She was a human, though, was she not?”
Reynard had been expecting him to ask if she were an Elder, but now realized that that was a silly thing to expect. The lawyer had probably never heard of Elders. Elders had been a big deal back on Eridia, but here in the larger universe, with hundreds of thousands of known sentient species, Eridia and all its history barely even qualified as trivia.
“She was very healthy,” Reynard said dryly.
“Ahm!” The sound was halfway between an exclamation of understanding and a laugh, as if the lawyer weren’t sure enough of his grasp of human physiognomy to know if Reynard’s comment had been a joke or not. “Yes. Ehm, the funeral is to be held on the Final Voyage Funerary Satellite in the Lü System in the Kirfa Galaxy on Stardate 9003.12.”
Reynard did the math. That was April 15, 12013, Eridian Standard Time. Two days from now. And here he was halfway across the cluster from the Kirfa Galaxy. From her. What was left of her.
Bisected.
Something the lawyer said earlier finally sank in.
“She didn’t leave me anything?” he asked, not caring if he sounded greedy or mercenary. It wasn’t that he wanted anything; he was 13,000 years old. There wasn’t anything she could give him he hadn’t already had or didn’t know how to get. At least no physical thing. No, what prompted the question was hurt. He was hurt that she hadn’t left him even some little token to show that she was thinking of him.
“Ehm, no?” It came out as a question, as if the lawyer were asking, “Should she have?”
Reynard said nothing, just stared off into space again, not feeling anything now. Or perhaps feeling too much, too many conflicting things for any one of them to predominate, with the result that they canceled each other out in a sort of emotional white noise.
“No message either?” he asked after a long pause.
“No, no message. Just the, ehm, the invitation.”
She surely hadn’t expected to die at all, he told himself. Whatever will she had drawn up had probably been a half-hearted, lackadaisical effort prompted by a whim that passed almost as soon as it had appeared.
Or perhaps he was just telling himself comforting lies. He realized he would never know for sure.
“Will, ehm, will you come?” the lawyer asked.
“Of course I will!” he snapped, and severed the connection.
