Sawyer was just one death, but the indignity, the aberrance, the slackness brought on by improper storage made her think of the tendays following the Oxomoco. She remembered cleaning body after body after body, laid out not in the seclusion of her workroom, but in the chill of a repurposed food storage bay. She remembered the day spent aboard the Oxomoco itself, when it had been her turn to take a shift cleaning out the abandoned Centres. She remembered learning what bodies looked like when they’d only composted halfway, remembered the smell that lingered on her exosuit in the airlock, remembered spending a standard afterward hand-grinding bones that hadn’t disintegrated properly after exposure to air.

That time had been worse than this. An exponential amount worse. And yet, tame as Sawyer’s corpse was in comparison, she knew the details of this day were going to bolt themselves to a similar spot in her mind. She didn’t know this man, really, but he’d . . . he’d trusted her. Blindly trusted her, just like he’d blindly trusted the people who had led him to this table. If she’d been more patient with him, if she’d answered his letter and become his friend, if she’d given him a few more than five minutes of her time, would he – no, no, no. She knew better than to get dragged along by ifs in situations like these, and she shut that line of questioning down. The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.

She turned over the corpse’s right arm, studying the hole where his wristpatch had been. The removal had been rushed and clumsy, and there wasn’t much she could do about the damage. She wrapped it with a cloth bandage, for decency’s sake. She’d read about patch thieves who prowled the grittier sides of spaceports, but – even though she had no experience with such things herself – her gut said this wasn’t that. She’d never heard of that flavour of crime in the Fleet, and she doubted, under the circumstances, that someone had jumped on that particular bandwagon now. No, someone didn’t want anybody to know who this corpse had been. But she knew. She’d given patrol a name, a place of origin, and a scrib path. We can work with that, the patroller had said, visibly grateful. That was a shred of comfort, at least. That was something.

She lifted the corpse’s arm and inserted a length of thin, fluid-filled tubing connected to a bot reclaimer. She hit the switch and heard a mechanical hum as the reclaimer activated Sawyer’s imubots, directing them to parade up the tube and into the soon-to-be-sealed receptacle. Eyas would then send them along to the hospital, where they’d be sterilised and reset and injected into someone else. Nothing went to waste in the Fleet.

She looked at the thrown-away corpse, the skin bruised and blue. Nothing was supposed to go to waste.

The reclaimer finished its task. Sawyer’s body was ready for storage. Eyas wheeled it into the stasis chamber and shut the door. The corpse was gone, but she could still feel it in the room with her, a mess that would never be clean. She looked at the bag she’d put the clothes and trinkets in. There was a delivery label printed on the front of it, waiting for a name and family address. She found a heat pen, and wrote the only piece of information she had. She hoped the patrollers would fill in the rest.

She removed her mask, washed herself as hastily as good hygiene would allow, and left the room in a hurry, taking the belongings bag with her. She passed colleagues in the hall, but didn’t meet their eyes.

‘Eyas?’ someone called. ‘You okay?’

Eyas said nothing. She continued to the main chamber and took the elevator down to the cupola. She kept everything placid, everything inside, just in case there were any families down there, seeking the same quiet she was.

The elevator came to rest. Thankfully, thankfully, Eyas found herself alone.

She sat on one of the benches surrounding the domed window in the floor. Stars spilled out beneath her feet. The Centre wasn’t sunside, but it was right on the cusp. Bright fingers of light teased past the thick windowsill, upstaging the delicate glitter beyond. The constellations changed as the Asteria continued its unending orbit, but the view from this spot always felt the same. The constancy was a comfort, a reminder that whatever unpleasantness you’d just been through was only a moment, only a blink within a vast, slow splendour.

Or it was a comfort, most days. All Eyas could feel now was the smouldering, the shaking, the wrenching. Assured of her solitude, she did something she hadn’t done in a long time, not where bodies were concerned. She held the belongings bag in her lap, and she wept.

Part 5

We Are Not Lost

Feed source: Reskit Institute of Interstellar Migration (Public News Feed)

Item name: The Modern Exodus – Entry #14

Author: Ghuh’loloan Mok Chutp

Encryption: 0

Translation path: [Hanto:Kliptorigan]

Transcription: 0

Node identifier: 2310-483-38, Isabel Itoh

[System message: The feed you have selected has been translated from written Hanto. As you may be aware, written Hanto includes gestural notations that do not have analogous symbols in any other GC language. Therefore, your scrib’s on-board translation software has not translated the following material directly. The content here is a modified translation, intended to be accessible to the average Kliptorigan reader.]

*

Before I was Ghuh’loloan, my body belonged to someone else. Something else. By definition, I cannot remember this time, but I can tell you, from having visited my own offspring while they were in development, what it would’ve been like. The Being That Was Not Ghuh’loloan had no name, no identifying distinction beyond parentage. Xe was a polyp, an unfeeling mass anchored to a rock face alongside a hundred or so siblings. That being had the beginnings of the tentacles I do now – tiny buds waving in the simulated tides, pulling in the nutrient mix the minders routinely pour into the nursery pools. All Harmagians begin this way. For the first ninety tendays before we become ourselves, the polyps do nothing but hold fast and eat while engaged in the taxing business of growing a brain.