Fic: To the Pioneers and Their Covered Wagons [In Memoriam Challenge]
Title: to the pioneers and their covered wagons
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3000
Warning: themes dealing with grief, death, and dying.
Summary: The sea threw them up on the docks; the wind spat them back into their own faces. Or, compartmentalization as a way of living.
TO THE PIONEERS AND THEIR COVERED WAGONS
At first they tried to throw them to the sea, but the sea refused to take them. Fragments washed up on the piers; they crunched underfoot when the Marines on patrol went out there to weep, or jerk each other with the rhythm of the breakers, and a few badly scratched up the city's floors this way, dragging bone in their boot-treads. In the midst of everything else, the gouges went largely unnoticed until soon after the non-denominational Christmas party, which was held late - in the summer season, with the botanists' donated hothouse flowers bursting about their heads - mostly because the punch was always spiked, no matter what they were celebrating, and no one had thought it wise to tempt anyone with alcohol so soon after the incident. By then they had run out of what little alcohol the sympathetic quartermasters had allowed them to smuggle through the baggage check, in shampoo bottles and cradled with a multitude of socks; in desperation someone tried the local stuff, what the scientist referred to affectionately as rotgut, graduate school style. It was strong, and the unsuspecting drank as if it was not. Combined with the summer air it sent them to bed, and when they woke in the mornings they dragged their heads, avoiding light, and so saw what had been under their feet all along. The biologists, when they tracked down the source of the scratches, were ecstatic; they thought they had found the skeletons of birds, or fish, steeped in the nutrients of this alien place. The fact that the bones were human only slightly curbed their enthusiasm, until they started to recognize the teeth.
There were a ladder's worth of meetings about that, starting from the top and going all the way down. The leader used words like "insufficient", and "deserve", often in conjecture with "better", or "respect". The psychiatrist occasionally added "traumatic". She was not often there to do it, as the bones had brought memories and with them, a multitude of night walkers, casually strolling by her door at 3AM. The anthropologists suggested they look to local customs. The chemists suggested acid.
"Are we really there yet?" the leader asked.
"More importantly, do we actually possess said acid?" the head scientist said, and the chemists admitted, no, they didn't.
"It's a matter of heat, I think," the head scientist continued. Exhibit A - neatly bagged with even a possible identification, written on it in Sharpie - was on the table in front of him. He picked it up, absently, and began toying with it, then abruptly dropped it, perhaps as he realized what it was. "I'll, uh, I'll get my people to crank up the heat. It's possible we can get the cremation facilities to a degree where everything is incinerated, and there are no - leftovers."
The meetings below that one were less polite. The head scientist did not use words like "insufficient"; the scientist used words like "idiots". In these meetings there was a fair amount of gagging, and though they tried to screen the participants, once the psychiatrist had to be called, and then the doctor, when the psychiatrist's wrist was broken. More common were the meetings that involved crying. Despite his penchant for hanging about the labs, the colonel, it must be said, was not present for any of these. It was summer, balcony season, in his opinion a time for sleep and waking up with a sunburn the negative size of War and Peace, and waking up, and waking up. Instead he looked at the venously-blue sky and did not think of anything. He was calm, and rational. The freezers were filling up at an alarming rate; soon they appropriated one of the kitchen's, which did not use ZPM power. When the heat roared to a crescendo of forty two, celsius, the kitchen workers leaned against them, panting. Perhaps cracking them open an inch, no more - careful to let no light, no illumination, in, as if it would disturb them, as if they would disturb themselves. Because of the dark inch the kitchen remained a desirable place to wait until the heat-wave broke. It was a place of basement coolness, like six feet under the earth, where it remained more or less a steady temperature all-year-round, thirteen to twenty-three degrees, depending on altitude, elevation, ascension. The geologists told the kitchen workers that the mountainous climates had the coldest soil, seven degrees. It was easy to be cool, looking down from such a great height.
*
The sea threw them up on the docks; the wind spat them back into their own faces. In the meetings, it was suggested that perhaps it was the location of release. They experimented. The first unit they managed to incinerate completely they let go through the slats of the Walk between the North and East towers, the Walk that had two names, or none, depending on whom one asked. For once the pioneers did not name the place, as they did with the rest of the City, and even the planets that were not theirs to name, Hoth, Traal, Alpha, Beta, Omega; here there was a commemorative plaque, written in the angular tongue of the Ancients. Half the anthropologists said it read "for the widow", half "for the lover" and thus Widow's Walk and Lover's Walk, spiderweb-thin, as gossamer as a strand of saliva between two departing mouths. Etem: widow, lover, same word, different intonation. The rails were widely-spaced and thin, and there was no wind - dead drop - but no one called it Jumper's Point, yet. That was the balcony on West tower, where they waved at the spaceships.
When the leader released the ashes, she did so with little ceremony, and there should have been no wind, no invocation or reason for it, but somehow the wind came. It blew the ashes back into their opening mouths, up their nostrils, into their hair. It was very fine and grey. One of the colleagues screamed a brief note but quickly quieted himself; the leader coughed, and coughed. The colonel turned green and scrabbled at his lips. At the moment of release the head scientist's back had been turned, and the ashes speckled the back of his head, where he couldn't see them.
"What?" he asked, impatiently, when they pointed, wordless, still coughing up the grit. "What, what?"
*
The ovens broke, again. They were eternally breaking, eternally caught in the moment of breakage, separation, spirit from flesh, cog from cog. It had been less of a problem after the incident - the Wraith were clean, tidy, they took their damage with them - but now there were war wounds, surgery complications, a heart attack, natives. Most happened offworld but a few occurred within the confines of the City, enough to tax the small system, which was badly designed, easily overburdened. The ovens that the 'Lanteans used were intended for criminals, perverts, and the mad; the aliens who built the City ascended, and if they didn't their families smuggled their remains out to the mainland and buried them there in secret, for the shame. It had since been thousands of years, and at the time of the pioneers the soil was still unusually rich.
*
They tried acid next. The chemists had finally figured out how to create a batch, after one of them went to bed with a botanist and woke up alone, surrounded by huge, bitter flowers that thrived on sulfuric acid and smelled his mother's stories of Hell. "It's experimental, but we think it will work," a chemist told the head scientist. He spoke the English awkwardly, tenderly, like a young girl jostling for a date. "It's Patel today, isn't it?" One of his colleagues dropped their metal coffee mug, and the clang as it hit the floor rebounded in the silent room. Quickly, she picked it up, put it down onto the table, and walked out of the lab. The chemist smiled, wanly.
"Nothing but the best for our own, yes?" he said. "She signed the release form. If she didn't want us fucking around with her afterwards she should not have."
"It wasn't - " the head scientist started, but did not finish.
"I know," the chemist said. "It never is."
The acid was wheeled from the lab to the mortuary. The pallet it traveled on had been the second-to-last one through the wormhole, very long ago. It was not the first time it had served such a purpose since; in fact, the right back wheel squealed with overuse. They parked it in a cool basement corner, as close to the tub as possible, in which the torn and blackened pieces of the unit were arranged in even layers across the bottom. Thankfully there had been no need for resizing. Surgeons volunteered for only so much.
The chemists promised forty-eight hours, but by seventy-two all of the bones and much of the flesh still remained, bubbling slightly on the edges. By ninety-six the sides of the tub were beginning to be eaten away. A meeting was held, and it was decided to scrap the project; at that the few stolid Marines who had put it together wheeled the entirety of the tub into a transporter and down to the crematory ovens. They heaved it in just as it was starting to leak. The solitary oven ignited with a bubbling, choked gasp, the walls clanking like old armor, and one of the Marines crouched in front of the tiny window set in the oven door and peered through the shatter-resistant glass to the flames within, some of which were turning lavender, as soft and turning as cats. A heat-blush billowed across his face, and the other Marines turned from him. His lips were very red, from the heat, they pooled in his face, like blood spreading in snow. A moment later the head scientist burst through the door, screeching like some awful and prophetic bird.
"No," he said, flapping frantically, "turn it off, turn it off!"
The repairs had been botched, they deduced from his squawking; the words "Kavanaugh" and "idiot" featured heavily, usually in conjecture with each other. For some reason the cooling system around the oven was drawing ZPM power at a frankly ridiculous rate, it couldn't have been worse had he planned it, he didn't even know how the idiot had done it, and it was at this point that they turned him off in their heads - a low silent switch near the base of their skulls, where things like guns and refugee populations lived - and called for a jumper. The colonel piloted it himself, perhaps because the head scientist was involved; even though just tangentially, it was enough of an intersection. They bore the remains to the mainland in a biohazard bin, the type that back home would have been used for irradiated guts or pieces of glass. In the rich, rich soil they planted it. They declined when one of the Athosians offered to sing.
*
Behind a table in the head scientist's least favorite labs there was a scratch on one of the walls. The pioneers did not notice it when they moved in. There were many of its ilk scattered around the City, scratched into convenient doors and window-seats, but it was perhaps the most elegant: four glyphs, in a shaky childish hand, two and two, and a circle connecting them. The aliens who built the City liked circles, they designed their gates in them. Circles were skulls, livers, body's blood-circuit; it was a very sympathetic geometry. Mizar and Alcor, it read, scrawled at hip-height, connected by a circle. Translation: Mizar and Alcor in memoriam. As old as circles. Remembered forever. Lasting on and on and on and -
*
The sea would not take them, the wind spit with derision; fire had leached their most precious of currency. They went back to the earth. They employed what their leader referred to as "stop-gap measures", and when pressed, admitted were almost-maggots, to facilitate burial. Her pronouncements were a curt sort of soothing, as if she were being forced to sing nursery rhymes in a language she knew only the signposts of, the vaguest of map-lines. She spoke the dialect of the mountains, and tried to address the people of the flats. Vowels forked her tongue. The sibilance stuck in her teeth.
"It's only temporary," the leader had said.
"Not for them," the Satedan murmured, later. "I'd say it's pretty permanent."
The colonel crossed his arms and did not say anything. They were eating lunch in one of the corridor's alcoves, lovers' ancient bolt-holes. Thousands of years' worth of shadows thrust at each other in the gloom, and the head scientist dropped a piece of lettuce on the exact spot where, thirty years before the City sunk, a child had been conceived. The Athosian noticed the lettuce and frowned, but the head scientist did not notice her. One of his subordinates had stopped quite near to them. Setting down her tupperware, she stretched, groaning as she did so, twisting her back out of desk-chair contours. The head scientist stared at the woman and her box with the small white things wriggling within. She was young, and pretty. She looked like the word lithe.
"That's disgusting," the head scientist said.
"Everything eats," the biologist said, briskly, with a pointed look at the sandwich greens hanging from the corner of his mouth, a raised eyebrow. Picking up the box, she whisked herself out of the lab. Between her dusky breasts there was a scar in the shape of a handprint, from her single sojourn offworld. She emptied the container of almost-maggots out into the biohazard tub but did not stay. No one stayed; there were no witnesses, or volunteers. She had drawn a short straw. While she was shaking the last few grubs out of the bin she did not think of anything in particular. It was late summer, almost fall. The sky was a decomposing grey that day. She thought of that.
*
Unknown at the time, the almost-maggots emitted a odorless, slightly cloudy gas whose effects resembled chlorine. Plants around the graveyard turned a sour yellow; the sudden shocks of big game, once a common sight, disappeared as the forest drew back into its own nebulous mass. Clustered around the rough headstones, small animals began to rot. The Athosians became concerned, but did not tell the pioneers until, after a storm, the water puddling on the stones burned their skin. The biologists and chemists descended, as eager as shovels. They wore protective suits which should have been replaced but couldn't have been, and there were rips, the rubber was as fragile as old skin. One of the chemists lost sight in one eye. Back to the biohazard bins the remnants went, smeared with cacao-dark alien earth and swollen grubs now as big as fingernails. With some ceremony, they threw the boxes' contents through an open gate, into the slow-tilting whirl of a dying sun's gravity. The sun was a red giant, bloated and pustulent with fire, and in time, it would eat through its parameters even further, consuming the 'gate and its surrounding bone-yard. The centurial crematorium of space.
In the end they sent all their bodies to this address. It was easier. They made it an item on the unofficial chore wheel that certainly did not exist in the leader's office in corporeal form, cobbled together out of paperclips and the backs of requisitions forms, and spun the spokes often enough that it was evenly distributed, among the more sane. After the first breakdown, they were even flexible about opt-outs. There were only two people who witnessed all of the dial-outs, and one did not know of the other. On the operations floor the gate tech beat out the address as if he were conjuring it into being, quick but sure with the hard edge of sorcery. At first he would bow his head when the remains went through but then he got phantom neck-aches, pains shooting through his spine, and tension headaches that ate their dwindling aspirin. The doctor proscribed Athosian tea, instead, the variety whose name translated to something along the lines of smoke-in-throat. The gate tech drank that. It warmed him, and his hands soon became slick on the dials. Above him, unnoticed, the leader watched, mouth as tight as a firing pin. Her office was glass but not specifically aligned towards the 'gate. She had rearranged it - alone, in the night - in order to see.
*
There was a room in the bowels of the City, between the armory and the morgue, where everything was flooded in a pale blue miracle of light but smelled - faintly, dankly - of the dark. In this room, there was a chair, for those who felt they couldn't bear to stand, and beside the chair there was a tupperware box, with a radio for emergencies, and permanent markers for grief. On the top of the radio there was a piece of masking tape, and someone has scrawled on it: CALL ME! It was not a place for levity. It was. A threadbare beam of light hit the colonel and he shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, watching the head scientist write, painstakingly, on the wall. It was late winter, the last breaths taken before the planet heaved spring out of its womb. The head scientist capped the pen, hesitantly, and stepped back.
"That's good, right?" the head scientist asked, his mouth crooked, borne down with solemnity. "It's not crooked, or anything?"
"No," the colonel said. "It's good."
They both looked at the names scrolling across the wall, Athosian symbols and the pioneer's own script, a hysterical jumble of black. They were written in black permanent marker instead of scratched, but circles abounded, in dates, in "30 yrs. old yesterday". Brendan Gaul; Lisa Mbuto. They were like tattoos on monarchal skin. Aiden Ford. In some places the lists stretched to the floor.
"I never - " the head scientist started, but did not finish.
"Yeah, buddy," the colonel said. "Me neither."
Elizabeth Weir, the wall intoned, new, resounding in the empty space, and the head scientist and the colonel looked at each other and did not think of anything in particular. The day after they went to the wall they ran into trouble offworld. The colonel pulled his gun and the head scientist copied him. Above them the sky was a nothing shade of grey. They shot. They kept on shooting.
fin.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: ~3000
Warning: themes dealing with grief, death, and dying.
Summary: The sea threw them up on the docks; the wind spat them back into their own faces. Or, compartmentalization as a way of living.
TO THE PIONEERS AND THEIR COVERED WAGONS
At first they tried to throw them to the sea, but the sea refused to take them. Fragments washed up on the piers; they crunched underfoot when the Marines on patrol went out there to weep, or jerk each other with the rhythm of the breakers, and a few badly scratched up the city's floors this way, dragging bone in their boot-treads. In the midst of everything else, the gouges went largely unnoticed until soon after the non-denominational Christmas party, which was held late - in the summer season, with the botanists' donated hothouse flowers bursting about their heads - mostly because the punch was always spiked, no matter what they were celebrating, and no one had thought it wise to tempt anyone with alcohol so soon after the incident. By then they had run out of what little alcohol the sympathetic quartermasters had allowed them to smuggle through the baggage check, in shampoo bottles and cradled with a multitude of socks; in desperation someone tried the local stuff, what the scientist referred to affectionately as rotgut, graduate school style. It was strong, and the unsuspecting drank as if it was not. Combined with the summer air it sent them to bed, and when they woke in the mornings they dragged their heads, avoiding light, and so saw what had been under their feet all along. The biologists, when they tracked down the source of the scratches, were ecstatic; they thought they had found the skeletons of birds, or fish, steeped in the nutrients of this alien place. The fact that the bones were human only slightly curbed their enthusiasm, until they started to recognize the teeth.
There were a ladder's worth of meetings about that, starting from the top and going all the way down. The leader used words like "insufficient", and "deserve", often in conjecture with "better", or "respect". The psychiatrist occasionally added "traumatic". She was not often there to do it, as the bones had brought memories and with them, a multitude of night walkers, casually strolling by her door at 3AM. The anthropologists suggested they look to local customs. The chemists suggested acid.
"Are we really there yet?" the leader asked.
"More importantly, do we actually possess said acid?" the head scientist said, and the chemists admitted, no, they didn't.
"It's a matter of heat, I think," the head scientist continued. Exhibit A - neatly bagged with even a possible identification, written on it in Sharpie - was on the table in front of him. He picked it up, absently, and began toying with it, then abruptly dropped it, perhaps as he realized what it was. "I'll, uh, I'll get my people to crank up the heat. It's possible we can get the cremation facilities to a degree where everything is incinerated, and there are no - leftovers."
The meetings below that one were less polite. The head scientist did not use words like "insufficient"; the scientist used words like "idiots". In these meetings there was a fair amount of gagging, and though they tried to screen the participants, once the psychiatrist had to be called, and then the doctor, when the psychiatrist's wrist was broken. More common were the meetings that involved crying. Despite his penchant for hanging about the labs, the colonel, it must be said, was not present for any of these. It was summer, balcony season, in his opinion a time for sleep and waking up with a sunburn the negative size of War and Peace, and waking up, and waking up. Instead he looked at the venously-blue sky and did not think of anything. He was calm, and rational. The freezers were filling up at an alarming rate; soon they appropriated one of the kitchen's, which did not use ZPM power. When the heat roared to a crescendo of forty two, celsius, the kitchen workers leaned against them, panting. Perhaps cracking them open an inch, no more - careful to let no light, no illumination, in, as if it would disturb them, as if they would disturb themselves. Because of the dark inch the kitchen remained a desirable place to wait until the heat-wave broke. It was a place of basement coolness, like six feet under the earth, where it remained more or less a steady temperature all-year-round, thirteen to twenty-three degrees, depending on altitude, elevation, ascension. The geologists told the kitchen workers that the mountainous climates had the coldest soil, seven degrees. It was easy to be cool, looking down from such a great height.
*
The sea threw them up on the docks; the wind spat them back into their own faces. In the meetings, it was suggested that perhaps it was the location of release. They experimented. The first unit they managed to incinerate completely they let go through the slats of the Walk between the North and East towers, the Walk that had two names, or none, depending on whom one asked. For once the pioneers did not name the place, as they did with the rest of the City, and even the planets that were not theirs to name, Hoth, Traal, Alpha, Beta, Omega; here there was a commemorative plaque, written in the angular tongue of the Ancients. Half the anthropologists said it read "for the widow", half "for the lover" and thus Widow's Walk and Lover's Walk, spiderweb-thin, as gossamer as a strand of saliva between two departing mouths. Etem: widow, lover, same word, different intonation. The rails were widely-spaced and thin, and there was no wind - dead drop - but no one called it Jumper's Point, yet. That was the balcony on West tower, where they waved at the spaceships.
When the leader released the ashes, she did so with little ceremony, and there should have been no wind, no invocation or reason for it, but somehow the wind came. It blew the ashes back into their opening mouths, up their nostrils, into their hair. It was very fine and grey. One of the colleagues screamed a brief note but quickly quieted himself; the leader coughed, and coughed. The colonel turned green and scrabbled at his lips. At the moment of release the head scientist's back had been turned, and the ashes speckled the back of his head, where he couldn't see them.
"What?" he asked, impatiently, when they pointed, wordless, still coughing up the grit. "What, what?"
*
The ovens broke, again. They were eternally breaking, eternally caught in the moment of breakage, separation, spirit from flesh, cog from cog. It had been less of a problem after the incident - the Wraith were clean, tidy, they took their damage with them - but now there were war wounds, surgery complications, a heart attack, natives. Most happened offworld but a few occurred within the confines of the City, enough to tax the small system, which was badly designed, easily overburdened. The ovens that the 'Lanteans used were intended for criminals, perverts, and the mad; the aliens who built the City ascended, and if they didn't their families smuggled their remains out to the mainland and buried them there in secret, for the shame. It had since been thousands of years, and at the time of the pioneers the soil was still unusually rich.
*
They tried acid next. The chemists had finally figured out how to create a batch, after one of them went to bed with a botanist and woke up alone, surrounded by huge, bitter flowers that thrived on sulfuric acid and smelled his mother's stories of Hell. "It's experimental, but we think it will work," a chemist told the head scientist. He spoke the English awkwardly, tenderly, like a young girl jostling for a date. "It's Patel today, isn't it?" One of his colleagues dropped their metal coffee mug, and the clang as it hit the floor rebounded in the silent room. Quickly, she picked it up, put it down onto the table, and walked out of the lab. The chemist smiled, wanly.
"Nothing but the best for our own, yes?" he said. "She signed the release form. If she didn't want us fucking around with her afterwards she should not have."
"It wasn't - " the head scientist started, but did not finish.
"I know," the chemist said. "It never is."
The acid was wheeled from the lab to the mortuary. The pallet it traveled on had been the second-to-last one through the wormhole, very long ago. It was not the first time it had served such a purpose since; in fact, the right back wheel squealed with overuse. They parked it in a cool basement corner, as close to the tub as possible, in which the torn and blackened pieces of the unit were arranged in even layers across the bottom. Thankfully there had been no need for resizing. Surgeons volunteered for only so much.
The chemists promised forty-eight hours, but by seventy-two all of the bones and much of the flesh still remained, bubbling slightly on the edges. By ninety-six the sides of the tub were beginning to be eaten away. A meeting was held, and it was decided to scrap the project; at that the few stolid Marines who had put it together wheeled the entirety of the tub into a transporter and down to the crematory ovens. They heaved it in just as it was starting to leak. The solitary oven ignited with a bubbling, choked gasp, the walls clanking like old armor, and one of the Marines crouched in front of the tiny window set in the oven door and peered through the shatter-resistant glass to the flames within, some of which were turning lavender, as soft and turning as cats. A heat-blush billowed across his face, and the other Marines turned from him. His lips were very red, from the heat, they pooled in his face, like blood spreading in snow. A moment later the head scientist burst through the door, screeching like some awful and prophetic bird.
"No," he said, flapping frantically, "turn it off, turn it off!"
The repairs had been botched, they deduced from his squawking; the words "Kavanaugh" and "idiot" featured heavily, usually in conjecture with each other. For some reason the cooling system around the oven was drawing ZPM power at a frankly ridiculous rate, it couldn't have been worse had he planned it, he didn't even know how the idiot had done it, and it was at this point that they turned him off in their heads - a low silent switch near the base of their skulls, where things like guns and refugee populations lived - and called for a jumper. The colonel piloted it himself, perhaps because the head scientist was involved; even though just tangentially, it was enough of an intersection. They bore the remains to the mainland in a biohazard bin, the type that back home would have been used for irradiated guts or pieces of glass. In the rich, rich soil they planted it. They declined when one of the Athosians offered to sing.
*
Behind a table in the head scientist's least favorite labs there was a scratch on one of the walls. The pioneers did not notice it when they moved in. There were many of its ilk scattered around the City, scratched into convenient doors and window-seats, but it was perhaps the most elegant: four glyphs, in a shaky childish hand, two and two, and a circle connecting them. The aliens who built the City liked circles, they designed their gates in them. Circles were skulls, livers, body's blood-circuit; it was a very sympathetic geometry. Mizar and Alcor, it read, scrawled at hip-height, connected by a circle. Translation: Mizar and Alcor in memoriam. As old as circles. Remembered forever. Lasting on and on and on and -
*
The sea would not take them, the wind spit with derision; fire had leached their most precious of currency. They went back to the earth. They employed what their leader referred to as "stop-gap measures", and when pressed, admitted were almost-maggots, to facilitate burial. Her pronouncements were a curt sort of soothing, as if she were being forced to sing nursery rhymes in a language she knew only the signposts of, the vaguest of map-lines. She spoke the dialect of the mountains, and tried to address the people of the flats. Vowels forked her tongue. The sibilance stuck in her teeth.
"It's only temporary," the leader had said.
"Not for them," the Satedan murmured, later. "I'd say it's pretty permanent."
The colonel crossed his arms and did not say anything. They were eating lunch in one of the corridor's alcoves, lovers' ancient bolt-holes. Thousands of years' worth of shadows thrust at each other in the gloom, and the head scientist dropped a piece of lettuce on the exact spot where, thirty years before the City sunk, a child had been conceived. The Athosian noticed the lettuce and frowned, but the head scientist did not notice her. One of his subordinates had stopped quite near to them. Setting down her tupperware, she stretched, groaning as she did so, twisting her back out of desk-chair contours. The head scientist stared at the woman and her box with the small white things wriggling within. She was young, and pretty. She looked like the word lithe.
"That's disgusting," the head scientist said.
"Everything eats," the biologist said, briskly, with a pointed look at the sandwich greens hanging from the corner of his mouth, a raised eyebrow. Picking up the box, she whisked herself out of the lab. Between her dusky breasts there was a scar in the shape of a handprint, from her single sojourn offworld. She emptied the container of almost-maggots out into the biohazard tub but did not stay. No one stayed; there were no witnesses, or volunteers. She had drawn a short straw. While she was shaking the last few grubs out of the bin she did not think of anything in particular. It was late summer, almost fall. The sky was a decomposing grey that day. She thought of that.
*
Unknown at the time, the almost-maggots emitted a odorless, slightly cloudy gas whose effects resembled chlorine. Plants around the graveyard turned a sour yellow; the sudden shocks of big game, once a common sight, disappeared as the forest drew back into its own nebulous mass. Clustered around the rough headstones, small animals began to rot. The Athosians became concerned, but did not tell the pioneers until, after a storm, the water puddling on the stones burned their skin. The biologists and chemists descended, as eager as shovels. They wore protective suits which should have been replaced but couldn't have been, and there were rips, the rubber was as fragile as old skin. One of the chemists lost sight in one eye. Back to the biohazard bins the remnants went, smeared with cacao-dark alien earth and swollen grubs now as big as fingernails. With some ceremony, they threw the boxes' contents through an open gate, into the slow-tilting whirl of a dying sun's gravity. The sun was a red giant, bloated and pustulent with fire, and in time, it would eat through its parameters even further, consuming the 'gate and its surrounding bone-yard. The centurial crematorium of space.
In the end they sent all their bodies to this address. It was easier. They made it an item on the unofficial chore wheel that certainly did not exist in the leader's office in corporeal form, cobbled together out of paperclips and the backs of requisitions forms, and spun the spokes often enough that it was evenly distributed, among the more sane. After the first breakdown, they were even flexible about opt-outs. There were only two people who witnessed all of the dial-outs, and one did not know of the other. On the operations floor the gate tech beat out the address as if he were conjuring it into being, quick but sure with the hard edge of sorcery. At first he would bow his head when the remains went through but then he got phantom neck-aches, pains shooting through his spine, and tension headaches that ate their dwindling aspirin. The doctor proscribed Athosian tea, instead, the variety whose name translated to something along the lines of smoke-in-throat. The gate tech drank that. It warmed him, and his hands soon became slick on the dials. Above him, unnoticed, the leader watched, mouth as tight as a firing pin. Her office was glass but not specifically aligned towards the 'gate. She had rearranged it - alone, in the night - in order to see.
*
There was a room in the bowels of the City, between the armory and the morgue, where everything was flooded in a pale blue miracle of light but smelled - faintly, dankly - of the dark. In this room, there was a chair, for those who felt they couldn't bear to stand, and beside the chair there was a tupperware box, with a radio for emergencies, and permanent markers for grief. On the top of the radio there was a piece of masking tape, and someone has scrawled on it: CALL ME! It was not a place for levity. It was. A threadbare beam of light hit the colonel and he shifted his weight from his right foot to his left, watching the head scientist write, painstakingly, on the wall. It was late winter, the last breaths taken before the planet heaved spring out of its womb. The head scientist capped the pen, hesitantly, and stepped back.
"That's good, right?" the head scientist asked, his mouth crooked, borne down with solemnity. "It's not crooked, or anything?"
"No," the colonel said. "It's good."
They both looked at the names scrolling across the wall, Athosian symbols and the pioneer's own script, a hysterical jumble of black. They were written in black permanent marker instead of scratched, but circles abounded, in dates, in "30 yrs. old yesterday". Brendan Gaul; Lisa Mbuto. They were like tattoos on monarchal skin. Aiden Ford. In some places the lists stretched to the floor.
"I never - " the head scientist started, but did not finish.
"Yeah, buddy," the colonel said. "Me neither."
Elizabeth Weir, the wall intoned, new, resounding in the empty space, and the head scientist and the colonel looked at each other and did not think of anything in particular. The day after they went to the wall they ran into trouble offworld. The colonel pulled his gun and the head scientist copied him. Above them the sky was a nothing shade of grey. They shot. They kept on shooting.
fin.