“Of course he was your friend,” Marguery Darp soothed. “Sandy? I know you don’t want to think of such things now, but—well, are there any special Hakh’hli funeral arrangements that should be made?”
“Funeral arrangements?”
“For the disposal of the body,” she said. “They’ve, uh, picked it up in an ambulance, but what do we do now?”
He stared at her. It did not seem the time to remind her what the Hakh’hli used for “funeral” arrangements, especially as there was no possible way to manage them in this place. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Ask Polly.”
“But Polly’s not here,” Marguery pointed out. “She’s in her room, talking to somebody—the people on the big ship, I suppose. And when we asked her she said she didn’t care.”
“Well, she doesn’t,” Sandy muttered. “I don’t suppose any of them do. What do you do here for that kind of thing?”
“It depends. Whatever the family wants. Burial sometimes. Cremation, usually.”
“Burial?” He winced at the thought; Obie’s corpse thrust into the Earth, to rot and decay? He shuddered. “Whatever you think best. Cremation’s all right—but, oh, Marguery, this is terrible!”
When at last Polly came grumpily out of her room she showed little enough interest in what had been done with Obie’s body. It was the future that concerned her. “This is terrible,” she said, in Sandy’s exact words but a context all her own. “HoCheth’ik ti’Koli-kak was our only—what? Oh, Oberon, then. Oberon was our assigned astronomical specialist. ChinTekki-tho says the Major Seniors do not wish to send another one down.”
Marguery asked tentatively, “Does that mean you don’t want to go to York for the conference?”
Polly sniffed and writhed her torso in disgust. “Not at all! The Major Seniors direct that I take Oberon’s place; after all, I am well informed in the area of astronomy, too. So I suppose we might as well go on with it. And anyway,” she added, looking almost amiable for a moment, “I do think it would be interesting to ride in a ‘blimp.’ Don’t you, Sandy?”
But Sandy was too deep in misery to agree.
Chapter 13
If a world traveler of the twentieth century were brought back he would wonder greatly at the map of the Earth. The coastlines are all different. All the land San Francisco and Chicago had stolen from the lake and the bay the waters have won back as they rose. Libya’s Qattara Depression is a brackish lake, half rainwater and half overspill from the Mediterranean Sea. Bermuda is a memory. The polders of the Netherlands are part of the North Sea again, and a sluggish oozing of the lower Mississippi River has drowned out New Orleans—the main channel of the river has long since broken through the dams put up by the Corps of Engineers and forced its way through the Atchafalaya. Hawaii has lost the tourist traps of Waikiki, though there is plenty of the islands left—they began as volcanic mountains, after all. All along the east coast of North America the low, sandy barrier islands are only shoals now. Sharks nose hungrily through the gambling casinos of Atlantic City, and coral grows on the golf courses of Georgia’s sea islands. New York Bay is three times its former size, pocked with islands, and the Statue of Liberty stands with her feet wet up to the ankles. When the ice around the North Pole began to melt it made no difference. It was floating anyway, and so it added nothing to the oceanic water levels. The glaciers were a different matter. But even they were as nothing, nothing at all, compared to what happened when Antarctica lost the Ross Ice Shelf. So the edges of the continents are awash; and in their centers the searing, drying winds have left new dust bowls.
Aboard the blimp, Polly perched on a settee that groaned underneath her weight. She was peering out through the slanted windows at the ground and commenting acidly on what she saw. “Your Earth people,” she commented dispassionately to Sandy, “certainly are wasteful. Look at all this space down here, and hardly anyone using it.”
Sandy didn’t answer. He wasn’t thinking about the faults of Earth humans. He was thinking of his dead friend. Halfway across what had once been the province of Manitoba, he had not yet gotten used to Obie’s loss.
Yet . . . he was on a “blimp,” and the blimp was taking him to new experiences in the world of mankind.
It was certainly an interesting experience. It wasn’t in the least like any of the other forms of transportation he had already experienced. The blimp was helium filled and carried three hundred people with staterooms, music rooms, lavatories, and a dining room. One didn’t sit strapped in a seat on the blimp, one moved around. And yet it wasn’t like the interstellar vessel, either, because it moved underfoot; it throbbed with the noise of its engines and bobbled in the winds that struck it, and most of all it had windows you could look out of to see the ground.
As the blimp found an altitude without much turbulence, Sandy began to get used to the physical sensations, and his mood lightened. When Marguery Darp knocked on the door and invited him to join her for a drink, he accepted, glad enough to get away from Polly; even more glad to have Marguery for company.
They sat side by side on a light, soft settee, gazing out. The trip, Marguery said, would take a day and a half, and the dark of the first night was coming early, because they were heading toward it. Below them the darkening plains rolled past, and Marguery took Sandy’s hand.
“I’m really sorry about what happened to your friend, Oberon,” she said.
He squeezed her hand—gently, as she began to wince. “I know you are. He was my best friend, you know.”
“Yes.” She was silent for a moment, regarding him. Then she said, “Do you want to talk about him?”
“Oh, can I?” And, yes, he discovered, that was exactly what he wanted, very much. He wanted it even more than he wanted to work on the new poem he was meditating—even more than any of the other things he wanted to do with Marguery Darp. And so she listened, quietly sympathetic, while he told her about their childhood on the Hakh’hli ship, and the scrapes they’d gotten into together, and the way Oberon would be his buffer and bodyguard in the roughest of the Hakh’hli games, and how they’d share their “cookies and milk,” sometimes, just off by themselves—and about the funny scene when Oberon came into season with the Major Seniors, and how proud he was to have fertilized the Fourth Major Senior’s eggs. “And I miss him,” he said, squeezing her hand again.
She didn’t wince this time. She squeezed back. Then she said, “There’s something that surprises me. I mean, the other Hakh’hli don’t seem really broken up about it, do they?”
“Well, death isn’t a big thing with the Hakh’hli,” he explained. “See, there was my old teacher—well, maybe you’d call her a nursemaid. Her name was MyThara, and she was pretty nearly a mother to me.” And he told Marguery about the way MyThara had gone uncomplainingly to the titch’hik when the medical examination showed she was wearing out. Marguery shuddered. Sandy said quickly, “That’s the way they are. MyThara felt she was doing the right thing, you know? She was making room for another egg to hatch. Nobody ever really objects when it’s time to die, that I ever heard of. And nobody mourns.”
“But you do, Sandy,” she pointed out.
“But I’m not a Hakh’hli,” he said with pride.
The door opened and Polly stalked into the lounge toward them. “Sandy,” she complained, “it is sleeping time. I wish you would come to bed with me. I’m, what is the word, lonesome!”
“But I don’t want to come to bed with you,” Sandy said reasonably. “I want to be with Marguery.”