by J. S. Volpe
* * *
When Reynard arrived at the Final Voyage’s inanely named Departure Hall he thought for a moment he had come to the wrong funeral. For some reason, he had always pictured Solace as a private, introverted person with only a select few friends at any given time. But beyond the double doorway, the bright, high-ceilinged hall was packed with several hundred sentient entities: humans, robots, gnomes, saddarites, caulimbos, nyow-ha, ssleth, dwarves, elves, and more, including several species he didn’t recognize. Voices of various pitches and timbers conversed in dozens of languages. Skin and hair and scales and casings of all hues shone under the overhead lights. Mechanisms whirred. Wings rustled. Tentacles and tails curled and undulated.
A hush fell over the immediate crowd as Reynard walked in. Practically everyone present wore funeral garb that was in tune with the era’s lazy unisex styles—most wore loose-fitting black gowns and pull-on cloth shoes. Reynard, on the other hand, was decked out in a black three-piece suit and tie. His black dress shoes gleamed as if they had been carved from obsidian. His slacks’ front creases were sharp enough to slit a throat.
He didn’t know if Solace would have liked the style, but he was pretty sure that she alone of all the people in this room would have remembered days when clothes like these were worn, days so ancient he hadn’t been able to track down a genuine suit in any size or condition, and had had to have one fashioned for him based on images from a crumbling magazine housed in the archives of the Early Human History Museum on Skron 3. He had had to drain one of his Inner Rim MyCred accounts to get everything done in time for the funeral, but money was for spending, and he could think of no better way to have spent it.
As he strode through the gawping crowd, dress shoes clacking conspicuously in the midst of all these cloth-shod padders, he glanced around in search of the casket and soon spotted the sleek black metal cylinder sitting at the far end of the room beyond dozens of arrow-straight rows of black folding chairs. The casket rested on a magnetic track that led to an airlock. At the ceremony’s climax, the casket would be fired from this airlock on a trajectory that would take it into the heart of Lü, this system’s star.
Since the sight of a genuine corpse rather than, say, a PsyCom entertainment simulation would be too traumatic for this age’s delicate sheep with their neurotic fear of anything that wasn’t artificial, funerals were always closed casket affairs, with a final view of the dearly departed provided by an EMbed memorial, a short free-floating audiovisual recording that played on a perpetual loop above the casket. Usually these recordings depicted the deceased laughing, or reciting a short, upbeat speech, or uttering some characteristic phrase.
Solace hadn’t wanted any of that. No EMbed images, no silly catch-phrases, and no hiding. An ancient-style open-casket funeral would have been far too boorish and provocative a gesture for someone of her considerate sensibilities, so as a halfway measure she had demanded in her will that her casket be equipped with a small square window to display her face to the mourners. Even this was deemed so extreme that the management of the Final Voyage had felt compelled to send a warning message to the funeral’s attendees.
Indeed, many mourners avoided approaching the casket during this informal pre-ceremony viewing, and most of those who braved a look at the face behind the glass came away pale and distressed. One old man stared through the window a long time, then turned away, his stringy neck quivering as he swallowed hard, his eyes lost and bewildered.
“She still looks like a normal person,” he spluttered. “Except…she doesn’t move.”
Reynard hung back until the casket was clear of mourners, then slowly walked over to it. His heart felt tight and dense and achy as if it were compressing itself smaller and smaller, like a spent star collapsing into a black hole.
From the moment he had learned of her death until now, he had been constantly busy, what with the mad rush to procure his outfit and then make it here in time for the ceremony. These tasks had consumed all his thought and energy, leaving none for Solace herself.
But now all of that was done. All the items on the list had been crossed off, all the light-years devoured. Now there was just him and the casket.
He stood beside it and gazed down at the face behind the glass window. The old man had been right: She looked perfectly normal, her countenance smooth and calm, her closed eyes restful, her long black hair neatly arranged, not a strand out of place. It was an old, old cliché, he knew, to say that the freshly dead looked like they were sleeping, but that was indeed how she looked. So much so, in fact, that for one brief moment he tried to tell himself that this was all an elaborate trick she was playing on him, that she had decided to trick the trickster to teach him some silly lesson about how wrong it was to mess with people’s lives, and at any moment she would open her eyes and crack a smile, revealing those perfect teeth, and—
She didn’t move. The old man had been right about that, too. Her face never changed. Her eyes did not—would never again—open. She was gone. This thing laid out before him was not her. It was just an assemblage of slowly decomposing meat and bone. Soon it wouldn’t even be that. It would be a billion scattered atoms whirling about inside a solar furnace.
In his mind he suddenly heard her voice saying something she had said thousands of years before in reference to her daughter:
“The world—my world—was a better place with her in it.”
There was a soft, deliberate shuffle of feet behind him, a timid sheep signaling impatience without risk of rudeness or confrontation. Reynard glanced back and saw a small crowd awaiting their turn to pay their respects.
Barely hiding his irritation, he took one more look at her still, calm face and walked away.
