101: GRIEF

The structure of a Texan funeral is jarringly unfamiliar to me in practice, but I’m well versed in the theory. Death rites tell you a lot about a culture, and there’s probably no sociologist alive in any society who doesn’t understand how to bury a body.

The Texans say that the soil isn’t quite deep enough for their traditionin the greenhouse ring, and want to dig all the way down to the ceramic, but I persuade them that it’s better for the bodies to have a good layer of soil underneath them as well as on top. So we pile the soil higher instead into tiny burial mounds, over on the far side of Greenhouse Ring 1 where there’s very little foot traffic, and build grave markers, and leave flowers.

We bury Renn and the Friend along with the latest dead. They were crew, too.

Some of the surviving crew do eulogies. They ask if I want to do one, but I have nothing to say. I do my best not to hear theirs, either. Arboreans don’t wait for death for that sort of thing. The Texans seem to have a ritual, seem to know what they’re doing, seem to feel something in the rite; even the Public Universal Friend, though mostly quiet, seems to know what it’s doing, as does Sam. Only Tinera looks as disquieted as I feel. Afterwards, we all go and eat together and have a wake, and this part of the ceremony I understand, although the lack of human flesh on offer is a little disquieting. It seems strange to be eating honey cakes and fruit at a funeral. And to be doing it in this confined space, without the open sky and the water, committing our crewmates’ bodies not to the oceans and roots of our home but to a large terrarium, is almost revolting. What are we going to do when we reach Hylara? Dig them up again? Or just leave them here in an unoccupied space garden in the stars, where they’re of no use to anyone?

I take a bite of honey cake. Adin’s gotten really good at making them, but I can barely bring myself to swallow.

“Are you okay?” Tinera asks, suddenly at my elbow.

I rustle up a smile for her. Yeah.

“It’s okay not to be. It sucks to lose people. It sucks every time.”

“Even when they tried to kill you?”

“Only one of them tried to kill me.”

“You’ve lost a lot of people, haven’t you.”

She rolls her eyes. “I was a Lunari convict miner.”

“Right. Of course.”

Later, when everyone’s gone to bed, I go back to the graves. I’m not really sure what to do for them. I can’t exactly dig them back up.

There are traditions in place for when a cluster member can’t be consumed. Every node has a cluster who tends a substitute animal that can be eaten in their place; the Greaves had the Tamis, who bred dwarf goats. I don’t recall ever having to use their services, but if we can’t eat the body, that’s what we do. (Such animals aren’t really suited to Arborea, so outside of funerals, most of our meat comes from fish and birds. In the first few months of my exile, I’d been shocked to see beef and pork and goat being eaten everywhere, like I was living in a perpetual wake.)

We don’t have any such animals here. There are plenty of frozen humans in the corpse freezer, but the idea of eating one person as a substitute for another person is revolting. It’d have to be somebody from the cluster – the crew – at least, if I were going to do that, and they’re all in the ground.

I hadn’t askedthe others to wait while I took some flesh. Foreigners never understand. I’d figured I could just go along with their rites, but… I don’t know. It feels like I need to do something.

I go to Storage Ring 2 and grab some thirty seven year old flash frozen beef, which is the closest thing we have to an animal sacrifice, and cook it quickly and quietly in the microwave. Then I grab a needle from the medbay and, with an unpracticed hand, several missed jabs and while bruising the absolute shit out of my arm, manage to extract some blood and squirt it into a cup. It doesn’t look right; still tinted orange, and a little watery. Low on platelets, the needle wounds clot slowly.

I take the cup back to the graves. Eyes blurred with tears, I can’t make out the individual markers; they’re just one long line of regret and wasted potential. I drink from the cup and then, lacking a node tree to water, sprinkle the dregs over the graves. There’s a rain scheduled in twenty five minutes that will wash the evidence away.

“May you strengthen your cluster,” I whisper. “May your cluster strengthen your node, may your node strengthen your world.”

Words that don’t apply here. There are no clusters, no nodes. And we’re a long, long way from any world.

May you strengthen your crew, I think. May your crew build a new world. But they have no power to do that, not in this environment, with such a short history on board and with no floating island to support with their bones, so I’ll have to do it for them. I’ll have to put everything I have left into this crew. I’ll have to get us to Hylara.

Then I go and eat my beef, and go to bed, which is the proper way to end a funeral.

Tinera finds me in the greenhouse ring the next morning. “Captain Klees says I’m supposed to psyche you,” she says, “but I have no idea how.”

“Neither do I, to be honest.”

“I read some of the books in the computer, but…”

“Yeah, they’re not particularly helpful.”

“So. How are you feeling?”

“Fine, I guess.”

“Well, that’s obviously not true. You nearly died a few days ago.”

I shrug. “We’ve all nearly died before.”

“Yeah, and it sucks!” She throws an arm around my shoulders. “Come on, let’s get drunk.”

“That’s definitely not therapeutic.”

“It’s an ancient form of therapy.”

“Why did the captain pick you for this job, exactly?” I shrug her arm off, not in an unfriendly way. “I’m not allowed to drink alcohol until all my blood’s grown back.”

“… Ah. Well. Fair.” She sits down among the plants instead. I sit with her.

“Three out of eight,” I say. “That’s ridiculous.”

“Huh?”

“Three out of eight of our non-convict crew, the people who are supposed to be professionals and civilians, almost immediately committed truly awful and largely violent crimes. Four, if you count me with the CEO, but Earth stuff is kind of muddying the waters. I mean, what kind of luck gave us that Friend, Heli, and Captain Sands? And I didn’t see any of it coming! None of us did! Either that was the unluckiest draw of colonists possible, or we’ve got the worst selection of colonists ever. Is there something about this ship that just turns ordinary people into violent criminals, or what?”

“Um, yeah.” Tinera blinks at me. “Of course there is.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this was doomed from the start. This whole venture is just shoving a bunch of people for years at a time in a long tube that’s designed to make people go crazy. Honestly, the whole thing makes perfect sense to me. I would’ve killed Renn, in that Friend’s place.”

“You were very clear that you wouldn’t have killed Renn.”

“I wouldn’t. In my place. In its place, I probably would. I’ve been awake on this ship for a long time. I’ve been crew for a long time. I have friends here, something that Friends are physiologically incapable of making, and stability, and perspective, and I don’t think that one unscrupulous scientist would be able to get the new colony to start Lysonning people so Renn’s garbage opinions were a moot point. But that Friend woke up very, very recently. It wasn’t forced to be here; it signed on, expecting to help build a colony. Instead it was awoken on the ship itself, far too early, with a fractured and unstable crew and a frankly incompetent captain, and immediately learned that forty per cent of the colonists, including itself, were part of some weird genetic engineering, brain-invading mad science program. Then right after if learned about Project: Invade People’s Brains With A Computer Without Asking, and we start to uncover Kinoshita’s bullshit, the ship’s third-in-command is like, ‘You know what I think is really awesome? Controlling people with brain damage!’ So yeah, in those circumstances, I might pull out a knife, too.”

“You wouldn’t do what Heli or Sands did, though.”

“I don’t think any of us has a Heli in us. But there’s a lot of Helis out there. A lot. It’s not surprising to randomly draw one.”

“There can’t be that many!”

“Why, because most of them don’t get prosecuted, so they don’t show up in the statistics? Most of them, I’d wager, never even do anything. It’s probably really likely that Heli never laid a hand on anyone against their will before Captain Klees. And she probably thought that what went on with him was totally fine – after all, he agreed, with enough blackmail. She probably thinks that’s consent.”

I narrow my eyes. I’m a sociologist; I’m perfectly aware that there are cultures out there, even today (or even when I left Earth, at least) where that would still be the prevailing opinion. But. “She knew it was evil, or she wouldn’t have hidden it.”

“Blackmail only works if you hide it,” Tinera shrugs. “And yeah, she knew that other people on the ship would think it’s evil. But everyone thinks their own actions are justified.”

Like when you murdered a thirteen year old and then stabbed his mother? I think, but I don’t say it. I don’t want to get off-topic. Besides, Tinera’s still talking.

“But Earth and Luna are full of people who’ve never harmed anyone, who’d do what Heli did. It’s no surprised to find one on the crew.”

“Why, because getting on a spaceship suddenly turns them into rapists?”

“Because opportunity does. Why do you think we have these problems with prison guards? We’re in a confined space, she had a way to bribe and blackmail him, and she probably thought that Sands and the crew would overlook the situation even if she was caught.”

I remember Heli pinning me to the floor, so confident that Sands would forgive her crimes if she was useful to him, rather than turning around and locking her up the instant he had a cooperative crew. She was even more delusional than Sands, I think.

“Speaking of Sands,” I say. “What the fuck. I knew he hated you guys, but I swear I had no idea he’d try to – ”

Tinera, for some reason, laughs at that. “He didn’t hate us. Well, he hated Lina, for some reason, and I think Public Universal Friends made him feel awkward. But he liked Tal and Denish. He was frustrated that I never took his shit and that Captain Klees was too shy and took too much of his shit, but other than that he was fine with us.”

“I didn’t pick up on that at all.”

“Well, of course not when the great Aspen Greaves was around. He had to be a super serious and important captain and not risk disappointing Doctor Aspen Greaves.”

“But… but one of the first things he said to me was about the kill switches, and then in the end he – ”

“Aspen. That man didn’t hate us. But he was utterly terrified of us.”

“I threatened a guy with a knife! He knew about that!”

“You were Doctor Aspen Greaves. He already had an idea of who you were and clearly that was just a bad day, a mistake. You were clearly intelligent and had a beautiful mind, he probably thought, to write such books, and it was fine.” She shrugs. “He had no such preconceived notions about us. Wow, can you imagine what could’ve happened if you weren’t there? He could’ve gone off the rails way faster.”

If I wasn’t there, he wouldn’t have been in charge. I was the one who’d pushed so hard for that, who’d wanted to be ‘fair’. Not changing captains mid-mission was a perfectly valid option, but I hadn’t wanted resentment. Or the captaincy.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t handle him.”

Tinera snorts. “Handling him wasn’t your job. It was his. And Renn’s. Frankly, I’m impressed that most of you held up as well as you did.”

“Most of… us?”

“Y’know. You, Sam, Sunset, all you guys. None of you had any practice at this. Some people were bound to crack.”

“You mean the non-convicts? You guys didn’t have any practice at space travel either. I mean, Denish maybe, but – ”

“Confined spaces. Hostile work environments. Unusual levels of being monitored, variable and occasionally heavy workloads, limited interaction with people, unreliable equipment, the very real possibility that we’re not getting out of this place alive. We’ve been training for this mission for years, accidentally. You were thrown in cold. And that man, who expected half his crew to possibly flip out and kill him or someone else at any moment? He could’ve calmed down. It could’ve been alright. But the minute that knife went in Renn’s neck, nope; it was all over for him.”

I’m not so sure about that. Already jumpy over Kinoshita’s notes, having recently witnessed Tinera’s capacity for violence, worried that he couldn’t trust anyone and trying to maintain good relations only to be confronted with the murder of two crewmates that could only have been committed by one of the group he was most scared of? That had to have been stressful, sure, but we could’ve gotten through that. The death knell was when he’d been so certain it was Lina, so eager to get things back to a stable situation, to free the innocents and lock up Heli in a more suitable ring and soothe the growing unrest and uncertainty, so willing to do what needed to be done and so sure in his own conclusions (that stupid, stubborn, overconfident man who could never accept that his impressions might be wrong), that he was willing to try to force false confessions and push people to fabricate evidence. That was when it was all over, because though he’d been bad at it, he’d admitted what he was doing to me, and then… and then he’d turned out to be wrong. And the Public Universal Friend had known he’d been wrong, and was heading back to the others to tell them. And I’d known what he was trying to do, and he had to expect me to tell them that, now that it was clear that Lina was innocent. And what does a man who’s willing to take those measures expect from people who he thinks are more ruthless and violent and vengeful than he is? That was the point of no return, trying to falsify evidence against Lina and admitting it to me, because that was the thing that would’ve put him in real fear for his life. He wouldn’t assume a reasonable response; he would assume a violent coup. He would assume that they’d try to kill him.

So he tried to defend himself by stopping anyone from learning of Lina’s innocence, by killing the Public Universal Friend. It had recently almost died of a mystery illness; it wouldn’t be suspicious. To defend himself against imagined violent retaliation – for the good of the ship, he probably convinced himself – he decided to sacrifice two innocent lives; the Friend, and Lina. Which had backfired. Thankfully. And forced him to more desperate measures, that… honestly, I’m still not sure how he expected to explain the killing of all the convicts to us. Blame the AI, probably.

What a fucking coward.

It could’ve turned out better, sure. If Renn and the Friend hadn’t died violently, if he’d not had the role of captain thrust upon him, if he’d had more time to calm down and become reasonable. But, like Heli, it’s hard to see any of that; it’s hard to have respect for someone who would make those decisions in those circumstances. I don’t care how scared he was. He tried to kill innocent people to protect himself from his own bad decisions. All three of them made decisions that just… make them bad people, in my opinion. Decent people don’t make those decisions in those circumstances. And Tinera thinks this is a reasonable ratio? That this is to be expected?

Well, she’s spent a lot of time in the prison system. The kinds of people she’d meet there, on both sides of the bars, are hardly a representative sample of the population.

But neither is the population of the Courageous, is it? I’ve known from the beginning that this is a terrible way to choose a colony. The non-convict part of this population, the volunteers, aren’t ordinary people. They’re people who decided they wanted to get flung out into space and spend the rest of their lives as far away from Earth as humanity has ever been, separated from everything they’d ever known by both time and distance. And the vetting process sucks.

These are the people we’re going to have to colonise a planet with. Taproot and stars.

“It was clear from pretty early on that things might go bad with Captain Sands,” I say. “Do you regret not nipping things in the bud and having the coup earlier?”

Tinera smiles. “C’mon, Aspen. You know that my policy is to never regret anything.