Cards of Grief

by Jane Yolen

  “Don’t worry, N’Jymnbo. If I pull through, it will be just as bad culturally as if I hadn’t taken the Lumin at all. Probably start a whole new religion: Fat Is Beautiful.”

  I laughed.

  “I vote we feed the nuts to Aaron,” said Clark. As Hopfner’s right hand, she was always first to agree with him or to make his less agreeable statements aloud.

  I looked at Hopfner’s face. He was smiling grimly.

  Dr. Z picked up the nuts one at a time. “Since when,” she said cheerfully, “is a ship’s company a democracy? The only vote that really counts here is mine. After all, Her Royal High Mucky-Muck gave these nuts to me, Queen to Queen.” She chuckled. “And believe me, I’m not planning to die to satisfy either Aaron’s curiosity or the Queen’s pleasure. I have other plans for my old age. But I am thinking that some kind of stratagem, some kind of sleight of hand, would be welcome here. N’Jymnbo, what are you carrying in that medkit of yours?”

  N’Jymnbo took the white medkit from around his neck and spread it open before us. It contained a limited supply of bandages, bone plaster, one pair of forceps, three scalpels, some spray anesthesia, disposable syringes, and a couple of ampoules of morphix.

  Dr. Z fingered the ampoules and laughed out loud. “Well, well, what we have here, my friends, is the makings of a fairy tale scenario.”

  Hopfner and his three aides gawped, but we anthros were used to Dr. Z’s pronouncements. She has an antic sense of humor, a broad reading knowledge of cultures, and her specialty is Old Earth Analogues.

  “Imagine, if you will,” she began in her tale-telling voice, “a three-hundred-pound Snow White tended by her devoted seven dwarfs.”

  Only I understood the reference immediately.

  Better let me in on it, too, son.

  It’s a class 2 Mythic Structure, sir. Motif #37 in the Index: rescue of sleeping princess. Supplemental Motif #13, Fairy Companions, in this case seven dwarfs.

  Is it important to… Oh, never mind. Just continue your story.

  It’s important to understand Dr. Z’s plan, sir, which was brilliant. But I think you can get a rough idea of it even without understanding the full implications of the fairy tale trappings.

  Then I’ll do with the “without.”

  “Well, Doc,” Dr. Z said to N’Jymnbo, “can you put me into transsleep with these things?” She fingered one ampoule and fixed the doctor with a caramel-colored eye. “I want to be as far down as any colonist on a long haul transship.”

  “It’s slightly dangerous, Z. With your weight problems and—”

  “I’ve had my so-called weight problems forever, N’Jymnbo. And I’ve climbed mountains in the Sigel Range and descended into the slime pits of the Outer CanFields. I may huff and puff more than your average anthro, but I get there. Never mind my weight problem, we have a more immediate problem, the one that Dopey here…”

  Dopey?

  I’m glad you asked, Lieutenant.

  She meant me, sir. That’s one of the names of the dwarfs in a visual variant of the Snow White tale. That was Dr. Z’s sense of humor.

  D-o-p-e-y. Got it.

  “This new problem is the one we have to deal with now.”

  “Please, Dr. Z, let me take the morphix.” I reached out, touching her on the arm.

  She let my hand remain on her arm; in fact, she covered it with her own hand and looked intently at me. “Aaron, you’re a pretty boy, as the Queen would say, but you’d make a terrible Snow White. Besides, there are three things you’d best start remembering; that is, if you want to become a great anthro, as I think you do.”

  “I do, Dr. Z.”

  “First, stop being such a damned romantic about these cultures. They are—simply—cultures. Not better or worse than the one you grew up with, only different. And sometimes the same. Remember—analogues! Second, start thinking before speaking, which means reduce your protracted adolescent twittiness to an acceptable minimum. And three, do your job and let others do theirs.” She turned to Hopfner. “The difficult part will be convincing that prince, B’oremos, to accept our Cup of Sleep instead of his. That is a purely anthro problem, so you and your advisers better clean your weapons or whatever it is you do before bedtime. Let me and mine make final plans.”

  Of course Hopfner wouldn’t accept that and so all eight of us sat down for the discussion, which ranged half the night. But in the end it was clear that as angry as Dr. Z had been about what had happened—what I had done—she accepted the next step easily, that of putting it right by means of an elaborate performance. I think she positively looked forward to her own “death.”

  For your information, Aaron, all anthros score remarkably high on acting ability in the Morigi-Coville Test. I suspect that the best actors in the known universe are anthropologists.

  Thank you, sir. I take that as a compliment.

  I’m not sure I meant it as a compliment, but take it any way you please. Only go on.

  We slept only a few hours at best and were awakened by the ringing of the breakfast alarms and the smell of fresh caf in the air vents.

  At the table, Dr. Z complained. “The only problem with playing Snow White is that N’Jymnbo won’t let me have anything to eat or drink this morning. And suddenly I’m starved. Imagine playing a deathbed scene with stomach arumble.” She reached over to touch one of the little protein cakes and N’Jymnbo slapped her hand away.

  “Things are going to be tricky enough without your appetite complicating things, Z,” he said. “Be a good girl.”

  “Not even a lick of frosting?”

  “Not even.”

  She sighed loudly, which made us all laugh a bit nervously. At that she looked around and winked at me. “Stage fright, kids?” she asked, adding something strange, a reference that none of us really caught but made her laugh. “Well, we’ve got the barn, so let’s put on a show.”

  Then she stood. She was wearing another of her vast robes from jung! having set aside the borrowed silk from the Queen. This one was a dark green and the back was embroidered with great tsunamis, white-capped and ferocious. She had braided her hair and the white streaks patterned ribbonlike through the plaits. Standing, arms spread, she looked magnificent, like an ancient Hawaiian queen, one of whose nobility was measured by her vast girth.

  We had decided to dress in our landing gear again so that we all would look the same, though we left the bubble helmets aboard ship. And quite a party we made, with Dr. Z descending the silver stairs first, her green caftan billowing and the seven awkward silver-clad attendants behind.

  We marched in unison to the strumming of my guitar, which was quite a feat considering the bulk of the landing suits. The last two out of the ship, Hopfner’s two male aides, carried out Dr. Z’s hammock and frame.

  B’oremos met us at the bottom of the stairs and bowed his head. The archers with him inclined their heads as well. But Linni, whom I had not seen at first, for she had been standing to one side, did not move. She held a delicately faceted stone chalice in her hands.

  Come, sweet Death, I thought, a fragment of another old song running through my mind. I walked up to her, slinging my guitar over my back as I went.

  “The Queen’s Own Cup.” Her voice was so soft I almost missed what she said. She held the Cup out to me and I saw that her hands trembled.

  I put my own hands over hers to steady them for a moment and she looked up into my eyes. Her eyes were golden, but not a clear amber like B’oremos’s or the Queen’s. Rather they were flecked with a darker gold and there was a ring of that darker color around each iris.

  “For your Queen,” she said.

  “We do not have Queens.”

  “And you do not have plukenna or ladanna but something else. And you do not grieve,” she said to me, so quietly no one else remarked it. “So—I do not think that your Queen should take this Cup.” She looked down quickly. It was the most awful heresy she might have spoken.

  I bit my lip and hastened to assure her, to st
em the tide of contamination that threatened to overwhelm her. “Do not be afraid, Linni. Believe me, all will be well. Our…Dr. Z takes this Cup willingly.”

  “Then I will grieve for her, your not-Queen,” said Linni, still speaking to the ground, “your Dot’der’tsee. I will grieve for her as if she were my own.”

  I smiled at her bowed head, then remembered the ritual in time. “May your lines of mourning be long.”

  “May her time of dying be short.”

  While Linni and I had been speaking, hand on hand, Dr. Z had been playing out a different scenario with B’oremos. She accepted her dragon caftan back from him, handing it on to Paula with a queenly gesture. Then she told him that while she valued the Queen’s Lumin nuts, in her own world there was a substance that was far better for a queen of her—and she gestured to her body—vastness.

  B’oremos took this in, head cocked to one side, then nodded.

  Dr. Z signaled and N’Jymnbo brought out the great glass beaker he used for measurements. The incised red lines and numbers glowed in the sunlight, and the half liter of morphix-laced apple juice was prismatic, casting rainbows onto the ship’s side.

  Dr. Z raised the beaker high and spoke sonorously in Standard English a wonderful mixture of old Earth poetry, the punchline of a robot joke, one of the famed Duncan translations of the jung! Rubiyats, and a smattering of other things I didn’t quite catch:

  Twas brillig and the slithy toves

  Cast in the fire of Spring!

  Double, double, toil and trouble

  Ask not for whom bells ring.

  For if I forget Jerusalem

  Upon my silent stalk

  Let my tongue cleft, my cunning hand

  Forget now how to walk.

  She added in the tongue of L’Lal’lor:

  And if I die before I wake,

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust

  I pray the Lord my soul to take,

  Let all robots come to rust.

  Then she drank the beaker straight down.

  I’d heard her use the same muddled verse before, because it sounds wonderful when declaimed, and she’s got one of those full operatic voices that can be heard even in the back of a large hall.

  “What is a soul?” Linni whispered to me.

  Caught up in the drama, I almost answered her but stopped myself in time. “That I am not allowed to say. It is a secret part of our own beliefs.” That’s the standard anthro line.

  She did not ask again but merely watched as Dr. Z sank down onto the hammock, handing N’Jymnbo the beaker. She settled against the pillows. We’d cannibalized all the bed linen on the skimmer, each giving up our own pillows and inflating twenty more from the store of flotation devices. It was a strange and uncomfortable mix, but it did not bother Dr. Z for long. Morphix works quickly, slowing the breathing down at once; soon the other vital signs follow…

  Son, I’ve ferried more colonists around star systems than you’ve got hairs. Don’t teach me what I already know. Tell me what I don’t know.

  Sorry, sir.

  As Dr. Z began to lose consciousness, she motioned me over to her and spoke in English.

  “Give me a great send-off, Aaron. And remember, don’t be a romantic. A good anthro observes, studies, learns. He does not go native—without a reason.” Then in the tongue of L’Lal’lor she added, “You will make them remember me?” and closed her eyes.

  I stayed kneeling by her side, for that was what we had practiced. I even murmured back to her, “Dr. Z, I will.”

  From behind me I heard Linni’s low voice say, “May your time of dying be short.” B’oremos echoed her.

  At that very moment, Dr. Z “died.”

  N’Jymnbo reached over, picked up her wrist, and counted the imperceptible pulse, then pronounced her dead. We all set up a wailing, a ululation, or at least we anthros did. Hopfner and his three were stiff and rather unconvincing, I thought. They howled and threw themselves to their knees, or rather Clark and the two younger guards fell down. Hopfner stood at attention and worked his jaw convulsively as if in great emotional distress.

  But of course not a one of us cried.

  B’oremos put his hand on Dr. Z’s forehead and his fingers wandered as unobtrusively as possible to below her nose but he could feel no breath. Linni put her palm on Dr. Z’s vast bosom but what respirations continued were, of course, so shallow as to be imperceptible.

  I stood. “We do not strip our corpses or set them out on pyre and pylon for the birds,” I said, keeping my voice tight as if with grief. “Though we shall, of course, leave Dr. Z’s body here for all your people to see before we take her back aboard and set her in a transparent casket for viewing.” I took a deep breath. Here was the troublesome part, for she would need to be encapsulated in the transsleep unit within seventy-two hours. “Will a day or two be sufficient?”

  “One day,” said B’oremos. “For it will take all of that for the court to come and view her.”

  I dared breath again. “As you will.” And bowed. The peculiar thing is that I believed him. I was convinced that he and the court wanted to pay their respects to our dead Queen and it would never have occurred to any of them that we had tricked them. Though the princes might scheme, such Earth trickeries were beyond their imagining, or so it seemed to me. What a Queen says is true, and Dr. Z had been—in B’oremos’s eyes—our Queen. But still, as Hopfner said, we didn’t want to take any extra chances.

  Dr. Z lay in state all that day with Hopfner standing at attention at her head, Clark at her feet, and a guard on either side. Whenever there was a break in the line of mourners, Hopfner complained to me.

  “They are greatly honoring her,” I said. “Normally, the dead body is shoved up onto a pyre for the birds. Only Queens are viewed and mourned.” So he was stilled.

  N’Jymnbo knelt frequently at Dr. Z’s side, as if crying over her. In reality he was checking on the vital signs. Any change would be an indication of actual acute distress rather than transsleep, which would mean Plan B, or as Dr. Z had put it the night before, “which means getting me the bleep out of there. I’m not really a martyr type. Just a conscripted fairy tale motif.”

  As the last rays of the L’Lal’lorian sun were descending, and the gray fingers of night crept around our clearing, the Queen herself showed up, flanked by Linni and the priestess carrying the orb and rood.

  The Queen sobbed, pronouncing the words that began the period of a Royal Seven: “A Queen has died. Let the tears flow.” Then she left for the Hall of Grief, signaling us all to follow.

  We left Hopfner, Clark, and N’Jymnbo on guard duty. I explained this small break in their ceremony in terms of the medieval concept of vigil (Analogue, analogue, I heard Dr. Z’s voice in my mind), and though it was strange to B’oremos, it seemed likely. He did not insist that those three leave her side, though he left one of his own retainers, Mar-keshan, as a sign of further respect.

  The Hall was lit by torches that flared upward toward the open roof. Though the mourners walked slowly to the sound of great pounding funerary drums, the shadows on the walls danced madly, creating an orgiastic parody of the somber procession. Only I seemed disturbed by the irony.

  The L’Lal’lorians seemed really moved by Dr. Z’s death, though they had known her only a day. We sky-farers reacted more like tourists than like grieving friends. I only hoped the Queen and her retinue would take such gawping as our traditional show of grief.

  Linni mounted to the stage and, after her, B’oremos. They proceeded to speak and sing long throbbing dirgelike songs and sonorous poems backed by chordings of incredible minor progressions. This was grieving for a queen.

  It was while Linni was chanting the third long poem of the night, and the crowds of mourners stood gazing raptly up at the stage, arms around one another, swaying to the rhythms of her words, that I began to realize what a truly great artist she was. For as I attended, with the years of training of a professional listener, I understood that she had woven
in the few details of Dr. Z’s life that she had been able to glean, adding observations of a physical nature that astounded me. And she did it all as she spoke within the strict confines of the rhyme scheme—intricate, formal, contrapuntal—and within an elongated metaphor of grief. It was a masterful performance.

  The Queen standing near me sobbed openly, with little passionate gasps. She touched my hand and her fingers seemed to burn their prints onto my skin.

  “I liked her,” she said. “And I would have liked to know her more.”

  Biting back a quick answer about “Then why did you have her die?” I said instead, “She had already grown by your friendship. Had she known you longer, she would have grown more.” Some imp inside me, with Dr. Z’s voice, added, “Though some would say she had already grown quite enough.”

  “What did you say, A’ron, in that rough tongue of yours?” the Queen asked, and I realized with a start that I had spoken the last aloud in English.

  “I said…may she grow in the Light,” thinking again that light was something Dr. Z never was.

  “Then you know of the Light, too,” said the Queen. “We must talk of it. Come to my room now, that we may converse further.” Her hand burned on mine.

  “It is our custom to mourn by the side of our grieven one,” I said, explaining “vigil” to her.

  She looked at me through hooded eyes and left in a swirl of shadows, her servants following quickly.

  I don’t think I began to breath again until she was gone. Her hand’s fire still burned atop mine long after she had left.

  When the Queen had departed, the mourning ritual began to wind down slowly and at last Linni left the stage. Walking in a slow, cadenced manner to the beat of the drums, she marched over to me.

  “Man Without Tears,” she said, “I will grieve for you and yours not because the Queen commands it but because I sense that whatever else you tell the Queen, you do not—perhaps cannot—truly grieve.”

  “Perhaps I do not know how, Lina-Lania,” I said.

  “Perhaps there is no need,” she answered.

  I was stunned for a moment, wondering if she had seen through our charade. Then I decided that she was talking metaphorically about our lives in general as she perceived them.