FIFTY-TWOThe Coffin
Okay, I wasn’t being completely straight with you earlier. Part of the reason this story gets fucky with time is that memory really do be like that sometimes. And part of the reason it gets fucky with time is that I’m doing, like, literary shit about the great universal cosmological experience of being a tiny, finite human in a universe so big that space-time itself starts doing things that are completely, utterly, mind-bendingly, heartbreakingly beyond your everyday comprehension.
But if I’m honest, the biggest reason that the story gets fucky with time is that there’s a lot of things it took me way too long to do, or to think about, or to wise up to, and I’m trying to hide that.
For example. It took me way too long to go back to Q in medbay.
When I finally did, she was looking… better, I guess? Not a lawyer. Not financial advice. Not a medical professional. She was sitting up, her tattoos were glowing brighter, and she had the strength to glare.
“Hi,” I tried.
“Salve.”
The silence between us went on for long enough I thought it was making a postmodern comment on the nature of life. “I’m sorry.”
She reached, still somewhat stiffly, for her idol, spoke into it, and then looked back to me and said, enunciating very clearly, “Fuck you.”
I was pretty sure I deserved that. Then again I’d been raised to believe I deserved most things. And just like in childhood, I didn’t know how to respond except to say “I’m sorry” again.
She was silent, and her tattoos shifted from green to a pale blue.
“What can I do?” I asked. Because I’d been raised to believe in penance. Or at least in an efficient cash substitute for it.
At that, she sighed, and said—to herself, I thought—“Miser Catulle, desinas ineptire, et quod vides perisse perditum ducas.” Then, sighing again and more deeply this time, she spoke once more into her idol, looked at me like I was somewhere between a habit she couldn’t kick and a liability she couldn’t ditch, and said: “Coffin.”
We’d met at a place called the Coffin, so this might have been a mistranslation. Except I didn’t think so. “I thought you were getting better.”
She shook her head. “Don’t think. Make.”
“You want me to make you a coffin?”
“Yes.”
This was beginning to feel like she was straight-up trolling me. “Why?”
“Don’t ask.” She looked incredibly serious. “Do.”
“And if I do”—something unworthy and transactional squirmed inside me—“will you forgive me?”
“Quoties peccabit in me frater meus, et dimittam ei?” She gave me a look of such unbearable weariness that I wanted to choke myself to death. “Perhaps.” And then, softening the tiniest, tiniest fraction she added, “Probably.”
“How?” I asked. And then because that was ambiguous, I added, “How do I make it, I mean?”
“From metal,” she said, “and bone.”
She refused to explain further. And I didn’t have the will or the standing to press her on it. I just went and got started.
Skyfarers’ coffins were a strange business. Coming as we did from all over the system, we had all sorts of incompatible taboos and traditions about what you could and couldn’t do with a body. Then on top of that you had the complex set of demands that came from the practicalities of a years long deep-sky voyage. In the most extreme cases, corpses were sent to protein reprocessing to shore up emergency rations, but that was fairly rare on account of how a lot of ships had church sponsorship and they tended to have strict rules about the treatment of the dead.
The fact that Q had asked for a coffin at all surprised me. I’d gotten over the idea that all Terrans were cannibals, but it was rare in the wider system to actually inter a body, a whole one at least. The Church of Life taught that corpses should be harvested by the pharma-states and a lot of smaller communities cremated to save on space or laid their honored lost to rest in hydroponic gardens. Which had the same overall effect as mechanical reprocessing but felt a bit less icky. But the Churches of Prosperity and Liberty both went in for lavish funerals in their own different ways, which meant I did at least come from a coffin-using background and that meant I had somewhere to start.
Since funeral expenses weren’t covered by a voider’s boarding contract, the parts for Q’s coffin needed to be requisitioned out of either her lay or mine, or else scavenged from the waste-bays before jettisoning. And while I wasn’t expecting my payday from this run to be enormous, especially once fines and overheads were accounted for, paying for her burial was the least I could do. Of course, given how things had been going there was a decent chance she’d pull through, and then I’d be out a nontrivial sum of money for nothing. And honestly maybe that was the point. Sure, wasting a ton of time and cash on a completely useless activity was anunusualapology gift, but then again we had an unusual relationship.
I got incredibly lucky. Well, either I got lucky or Q had known exactly what she was doing from the start, becausethere was a modular transfer pod in waste. Ships use MTPs for all kinds of shit. Escape capsules, ship-to-ship cargo transfer, any time you might want a thing from inside to go somewhere outside without moving the whole damned ship towards it. I fixed the pod up as best I could and attached some basic foils and a small spermaceti engine so that if the worst did happen, it would fly, for a while at least, before my friend-shipmate-lover’s body was swallowed by the superfluid mirror of the hydrogen sea.
In a lot of ways I was glad of the distraction. If I was going to try to still the squalls in my brain by throwing myself into something, a craft project was probably a way healthier choice than a stranger’s bed or a monster’s throat. Maybe there’s a much shorter version of this book where instead of fleeing to the skies I just stayed at home and whittled. But in the version of this book you’re actually reading I sank my every free hour, for weeks, into the morbid activity of building a coffin for somebody I cared about.
It wasn’t therapeutic, exactly. And after a while, not wanting to repeat old mistakes, I did start checking back in with her. Keeping her updated. And I think she was glad of that.
