‘Yeah, it’s cool.’ He rearranged himself on the mattress, facing her fully now. ‘It’s interesting. Just . . . part of life, right?’

Eyas studied him. ‘Yeah.’ She smiled. ‘Okay. So. Gaiist philosophy. “Our souls are tied to our planet of origin.” That’s their central tenet, yeah? Our souls are tied to Earth, and they essentially get sick if we go elsewhere. Since there’s no hard-and-fast definition of soul anywhere, we’ll go with what I interpret that to be: the quality of being alive. The thing that separates us from rocks or machines. By my definition, every organic thing has a soul – it’s not just for sapients.’ She gestured around the room. ‘According to Gaiists, the Fleet should be a place chock-full of diseased, malnourished souls. This is as far from organic as it gets. We live inside machines. We’ve replicated the systems on Earth. There is no wind to move our air, there is no water cycle, there is no natural source for photosynthesis. This is a lab experiment. A biologist could make no real conclusions about our natural behaviour. They’d have to add the caveat “born in captivity” to everything they recorded.’

‘That’s . . . oof. Okay.’

‘See, I told you I was going to ruin the mood.’

‘You haven’t, but I would like some of that,’ he said, nodding at the bottle. ‘Seriously, I want to hear this.’

‘Okay.’ Eyas poured him a glass. ‘I promise things look up from here.’

He nodded. ‘I trust you.’

Eyas inwardly noted that, and kept going. ‘So, despite everything about our environment, there is a natural cycle that remains, and it’s one that we can’t escape, that we couldn’t leave behind. It’s completely beyond our technological grasp to alter or replicate.’

‘You mean death.’

‘I mean life and death. Can’t have one without the other. If my work has taught me anything, it’s that death is not an end. It’s a pattern. A catalyst for change. Death is recycling. Proteins and nutrients, ’round and ’round. And you can’t stop that. Take a living person off Earth, put them in a sealed metal canister out in a vacuum, take them so far away from their planet of origin that they might not understand what a forest or an ocean is when you tell them about one – and they are still linked to that cycle. When we decompose under the right conditions, we turn into soil – something awfully like it, anyway. You see? We’re not detached from Earth. We turn into earth. And it’s an entirely organic process. We can’t substitute anything artificial. I can’t make a corpse compost without adding batches of bamboo chips to get the carbon–nitrogen ratio right. If I don’t remove the corpse’s bots, they’ll disrupt the bacteria the entire process relies on. Likewise, I have to take out any implants or mods the person had installed, or they’ll contaminate the finished product.’

‘But isn’t the core artificial, too? I’m not being contrary, I’m just trying to understand.’

‘It is,’ Eyas said. ‘But think about it: it’s an artificial system set up to accommodate something that would happen without it. We would still die and rot if the core wasn’t there. We’d rot differently, yes, but you could say that about someone who died in a desert versus someone who died in a swamp. In both cases, rot is inevitable. So all we’ve done is provide conditions that encourage the kind of rot we want, and facilities that ensure we’re not tripping over corpses all day. Sorry for the visual.’

‘That’s okay.’

Eyas nodded. ‘Despite growing up in an environment that is utterly artificial, we default to the rawest, purest state at the end. So you can’t tell me that our souls are sick and broken when they’re inextricably linked to a force that powerful. Whatever soul we got from Earth – whatever that even means – we took it with us when we came out here. And that’s why I do what I do. Yes, I’d love to see a forest, a real forest. I’d love to stick my hands down into the humus and touch saplings growing out of stumps. I’d love to see a system of decomposition and growth that just happened without any need for Human tending. But the system we built here does need tending, and that means it needs caretakers who understand the magnitude of that.’

‘It needs you.’

Eyas paused, considering the line between hubris and honesty. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It needs me. And I do believe that. I do love what I do. So I don’t know what this . . . this discontent is. I don’t know why I’m conflicted about it lately.’

Sunny swished his drink around. ‘Can I ask you a weird question? And I’m not trying to be disrespectful or negative, honestly. I just want to pick your brain.’

‘Go ahead.’

Her companion shifted his jaw in thought. ‘Is it the most efficient thing? Composting, I mean. In terms of resources, is it still the best thing for us to be doing?’

Eyas had been preparing herself for a question about funeral preparation, or states of decay, or what bodily functions a corpse can still perform. Those questions, she was used to. This, she was not. ‘What alternatives are there? You want to just space them?’

‘Of course not. You could fly people into the sun, though, right? Like we did after the Oxomoco. Wouldn’t that be easier? Less work?’

Eyas continued to feel thrown. She remembered the announcement that the Oxomoco victims would be flown en masse into their sun, and the second grieving that decision had prompted – the disbelief, the backlash, the endless requests for personal exceptions, the crowded lines at counselling clinics and emigrant resource centres and neighbourhood bars, the exhaustion, the resignation, the popular justification that the bodies would fuel the sun, and the sun fuelled their ships, so a similar end would be achieved. And now here they were, just a few standards later, talking about that recourse as matter-of-fact as could be. ‘You’re forgetting resources,’ she said, speaking words she’d never thought an Exodan would need to be reminded of.