No, she couldn’t. The horror was beyond her imagining.
And while she knew her grandmother and a handful of other humans had come back from being dead, they hadn’t lived very long—and not very happily, either.
It had been several years since she had confronted this issue. The last time was when she was twelve—
Over the years, the HBs had transformed a small corner of the habitat into a human cemetery. Here, Yahvi knew, was where her grandmother Megan Doyle Stewart was buried, as well as a dozen HBs who had died in accidents or of various ailments since 2019, especially Daksha, the Bangalore engineer everyone loved. Also one of the yavaki, born with a life-limiting condition.
In keeping with Hindu traditions, there were almost no monuments . . . those that existed were small and handmade.
There were monuments to four humans who had perished, but whose remains were not recovered, among them Shane Weldon and Vikram Nayar, lost in space along with the prototype X-38 vehicle. . . . Also the Revenant Camilla and Zack Stewart, both of them vaporized in Keanu’s core during the “restart.”
Several animals had emerged from the Beehive in the early days. There had been cows (cherished by the Bangalores, ultimately butchered by the Houstons, which almost caused a war inside the habitat), and birds, and even a crocodile.
And also a dog named Cowboy, a Revenant, a long-lost pet belonging to Shane Weldon.
Cowboy had lived almost eighteen years in his second life, dying of old age just after Yahvi and her cohort hit the dangerous age of eleven.
The dog was buried in a glade at the opposite end of the habitat from the human cemetery . . . much closer to the Beehive.
Oh, the Beehive—it was the one place in the habitat children were forbidden to enter.
So, naturally, it was the first place Yahvi and her friends went when they began to roam the habitat freely.
It was Nick Barton-Menon who suggested the wicked task of digging up Cowboy.
“God, why?” Yahvi said.
“He wants to see what he looks like,” Rook said.
“Use your imagination!” Yahvi said.
“Don’t be a turd,” Nick said, shoving Rook. “I know what it looks like. I want to try an experiment!”
“You’re not an engineer,” Yahvi said.
“No one’s an engineer for this,” Nick said.
“For what?”
“For doing what the Beehive is for,” Nick said, smiling like a very bad young man. “To bring things back to life.”
Yahvi wasn’t at all sure this was a good idea in practical terms. She knew it wasn’t a good idea in moral terms; her grandmother had become a Revenant. But only for a few tragic days.
“It was all the Architect’s doing,” Rachel had explained, the one time she discussed the matter with Yahvi. “We all think, now, that it was him, or Keanu, or both of them, trying to find a way to communicate with us.”
“Seems cruel.”
“I don’t think they planned for the Revenants to die. I think the whole system was barely functioning.”
Which, now that Yahvi thought about it, was a good reason not to go messing around with it.
She said as much to Nick.
Who had an answer, of course. “We aren’t trying to revive a human being,” he said. “Just a dog.”
So, to Yahvi’s disgust, the three of them, with the help of Ellen Walker-Shanti and Dulari Smith, used “borrowed” shovels and, after much difficulty, managed to uncover the shriveled, barely recognizable remains of Cowboy.
The sight was just sad, more soft bones than anything else. Some fur.
“Shane Weldon would kill us all if he saw this,” Yahvi said.
“Then let’s make sure he doesn’t,” Nick said.
Rook had been ordered to bring a tarp, equipment left over from the original HB recreational vehicle, half of which still occupied a place of honor not far from the Temple. “How the heck did you get this?” Yahvi asked. All of the original HB materials were treated like historical artifacts. Most were kept in a special exhibit inside the Temple.
Not all, apparently. “I swiped it from the RV,” Rook said. “I figured we’d need something kind of rubbery.” It was true that, given the limits on HB manufacturing, blankets were as rare as anything else. And there had been no reason for anyone to fabricate a rubberized sheet like this.
And when Nick actually moved the remains with his bare hands, Yahvi felt like throwing up.
Then Nick and Rook and Ellen, who was taller and stronger than any of them, raised the sheet bearing the dog’s remains and began scuttling toward the Beehive, a couple of hundred meters distant.
“You two cover this over,” Nick told Yahvi and Dulari. That didn’t take long; the soil was light and loose. Of course, even scraping it all back into the grave left an obvious depression.
“This will fool no one,” Yahvi said.
Dulari shrugged. She likely didn’t care. Yahvi was sure she only came along because she had a crush on Nick.
Bringing up the rear, Yahvi and Dulari found that they had to act as lookouts, a post that required no orders or encouragement. Yahvi kept glancing back toward the Temple and the living area, wondering if some adult just happened to be checking on the girls’ quarters.
Or if one of the other girls just happened to wake up and realize that three were missing.
This wasn’t usually a huge problem; girls were frequently sneaking off to meet boys. Dulari, in fact, was one of the most active sneaks. But tonight . . . all it would take was one curious parent who decided to search toward the Beehive. Or, just as dangerously, happened to catch them coming back—
“Yahvi, come on!” It was Nick, furious with her for falling behind.
The others had carried their sad burden into the Beehive entrance, a cave mouth twice as tall as Yahvi and at least twice as wide as it was tall. It looked rocky, dirty, and moist, as if the evening mist-rains clung to it . . . or, more creepily, as if water or some other fluid were oozing out of it.
The whole area smelled, too.
Inside it was dark, except for a kind of yellowish glow from the many different-sized cells that lined the walls as high up as any of them could reach. All of the cells were roughly rectangular—“like coffins,” Rachel had told her, which then prompted a discussion about what a coffin was—and all had been laid open, leaving dried-out shards of some kind of casing in their openings.
“Okay,” Yahvi said, “we’re here with the thing. Now what?”
Brows furrowed, as if considering a problem in math, Nick was surveying the walls of cells. “Find one that looks as though it might work.”
“I think you’ll be looking a long time,” Rook dared to say. He rarely challenged Nick.
“And how will we know?” Ellen said.
“Look for one that seems . . . fresh.”
“And I don’t think you have any idea how these things worked,” Yahvi told Nick.
“How would you know?” he snapped. “I’ve been talking to Jaidev for a whole year.”
“Jaidev doesn’t know everything,” Yahvi said, though he was considered the smartest of all the HBs. She was a bit offended that Nick had overlooked her mother when making inquiries.
“Jaidev knows more than we do,” Nick snapped. “And tells more than anyone else.”
“Then why hasn’t he tried this experiment?” Ellen said.
Nick ignored that, though Yahvi thought it an excellent question. She had a pretty good idea why no one had done much experimenting with the Beehive since it stopped working almost twenty years ago, after disgorging human Revenants and several dozen terrestrial animal Revenants: It was just too terrifying to imagine what life in the habitat would be like if those who died kept coming back!