Fear not the dying of the flesh, only the slaying of the soul.
OUR FIRST DEATH
Juny Vewlan died at about 400 hours of the morning and we buried her that same day before noon at 1100 hours, because we had no means of keeping the body. She had not wanted to be cremated; and because she was our first and because some of her young horror at the thought of being done away with entirely had seeped into the rest of us during her illness (if you could call it illness—at any rate, as she lay dying), an exception was made in her case and we decided in full assembly to bury her. As for the subsidiary reasons for this decision of ours, they were not actually clear to us at the time, nor yet indeed for a long time afterward. Certainly the fatherless, motherless girl had touched our hearts toward the end. Certainly the old man—her grandfather Gothrud Vewlan, who with his wife, Van Meyer and Kurt Meklin made up our four Leaders—caught us all up in the heartache of his own sorrow, as he stood feebly forth on the platform to ask of us this last favor for his dead grandchild. And certainly Kurt Meklin murmured against it, which was enough to dispose some of the more stiff-necked of us in its favor.
However—we buried her. It was a cold hard day, for winter had already set in on Our Planet. We carried her out over the unyielding ground, under the white and different sky, and lowered her down into the grave some of our men had dug for her. Beneath the transparent lid of her coffin, she looked younger than sixteen years—younger, in fact, than she had looked in a long time, with her dark hair combed back from around the small pointed face and her eyes closed. Her hands were folded in front of her. She had, Gothrud told us, also wished some flowers to hold in them; and none of us could imagine where she had got such an idea until one of the younger children came forward with an illustration from our library’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, showing Snow White in her coffin with a bunch of flowers that never faded clasped in her hands. It was clear then, to some of us at least, that Juny had not been free from the dream of herself as a sort of captive—now sleeping—princess, merely putting in her time until the Prince her lover should arrive and carry her off.
But we had, of course, no flowers.
After she had been lowered into the grave and all of us had come up to look at her, Lydia Vewlan, Gothrud’s wife and colony doctor as well as one of the Leaders, read some sort of service over her. Then, when all was finished, a cloth was laid over the transparent face of the plastic coffin and the earth was shoveled back. It had been dug out in chunks—a chunk to a spadeful; and the chunks had frozen in the bitter air, so that it was like piling angular rocks back upon the coffin, heavy purple rocks with the marblings of white shapes that were the embryos of strange plants frozen in hibernation. Because of their hard awkward shapes, they made quite a pile above the grave when they were all put back; and in fact it was not until the following summer was completely gone that the top of the grave was level again with the surrounding earth. By that time we had a small fence of white plastic pickets all around it; and it was part of the duty of the children in the colony to keep them scrubbed clean and free of the gray mold.
After the burial we all went back to the mess building for our noon meal. Outside, as we took our places at the tables, the midday wind sprang up and whistled around our metal huts and the stripped skeleton of the ship, standing apart at its distance on the landing spot and looking lonely and neglected in the bleak light from the white sky.
The Leaders of our colony sat at the head of the file of tables that stretched the length of the mess hut. Their table was just large enough for the four of them and was set a little apart from the rest so that they could discuss important matters in relative privacy. The other, large tables stretched away in order, with the ones at the far end with the small chairs and the low tops for the very young children—those who were just barely able to eat by themselves without supervision. These, the children, had as a group been unusually silent and solemn during the burial procedures, impressed by the emotions of their elders. But now, as they started to eat, their natural energy and exuberance began to break free of this restraint and show itself all the more noticeably for having been held down this long. In fact they began to pose quite a small disciplinary problem, and this necessitating the attentions of their elders, a diversion was created, which together with the warmth and the good effect of the hot food, bred a lightening of spirits among us adults as well. Our natural mood of optimism, which the Colonial Office had required in selecting us for a place on the immigration rosters, pressed down before by the awareness of death in our midst, began to rise again. And it continued to rise, like a warm tide throughout the length of the hut, until finally it reached the four who sat at the head table. But here it lapped unavailingly against the occupied minds of those who, twenty-four hours a day, breathed the constant atmosphere of responsibility for us all.
To talk and not be heard, they must lower their voices and lean their heads together. And this, while a perfectly natural action, had a tendency to impart an air of tenseness to their discussions. So they sat now, following the burial, in such an atmosphere of tenseness; and although the rest of us did not discover what they were then saying until long afterward—indeed until Maria Warna told us about it months later—there were those among us at the long tables who, glancing upward, noticed something perhaps graver than usual about their talking at that meal.
In particular, it had been Kurt Meklin—Kurt, with his old lined face thrust forward above his plate like some gray guardian of ancient privilege, who had been urging some point upon the other three all through the meal. But what it was, he had avoided stating openly, talking instead in half-hints, and obscure ambiguities, his black hard eyes sliding over to glance at Lydia, and then away again, and then back again. Until, finally, when the last plates had been removed and the coffee served, Lydia rose at last to the challenge and spoke out unequivocally.
“All right, Kurt!” she said—she, the strong old woman, meeting the clever old man eye to eye. “You’ve been hinting and hawing around ever since we got back from the burying. Now, what’s wrong with it?”
“Well, now that you ask me, Lydia,” said Kurt. “It’s a question—a question of what she died of.”
Gothrud, who had sat the whole meal with his head hanging and eating almost nothing, now suddenly raised his eyes and looked across at Kurt.
“What kind of a question’s that?” demanded Lydia. “You saw me enter it on the records—death from natural causes.”
“I’ll tell you what she really died of,” said Gothrud, suddenly.
“Well now,” said Kurt, interrupting Gothrud, and with another of his side-glances at Lydia. “Do you think that’s sufficient?”
“Sufficient? Why shouldn’t it be sufficient?”
“Well now, of course, Lydia . . .” said Kurt. “I know nothing of doctoring myself, and we all know that the Colonial Office experts gave Our Planet a clean bill of health before they shipped our little colony out here. But I should think—just for the record, if nothing else—you’d have wanted to make an examination to determine the cause of death.”
“I did.”
“Naturally—but just a surface examination. Of course with the colony in a sentimental mood about the girl—eh, Van?”
Van Meyer, the youngest of them all, was turning his coffee cup around and around between his thick fingers and staring at it. His heavy cheeks were slablike on either side of his mouth.
“Leave me out of it,” he said, without looking up.
Lydia sniffed at him, and turned back to Kurt.
“Stop talking gibberish!” she commanded.
“Gibberish . . . sorry, Lydia,” said Kurt. “I don’t have the advantages of your medical education. A pharmacist really knows so little. But—it’s just that I think you’ve left the record rather vague. Natural causes really doesn’t tell us exactly what she died of.”
“What she died of!” broke in Gothrud with sudden, low-voiced violence. “She died of a broken heart.”
“Don’t be a fool, Gothrud,” said his wife, without looking at him. “And keep your voice down, you, Kurt. Do you want the whole colony to hear? Now, out with it. You sat with us and agreed to bury her. If you had any questions, you should have come out with them then.”
“But I had to bend to the sentimentality of the colony,” said Kurt. “It was best to let it go then. Later, I thought, later we can . . .” He fell silent, making a small, expressive gesture with his hand.
“Later we can do what?” grated Lydia.
“Why, I should think that naturally—as a matter of record—that in a case like this you’d want to do an autopsy on her.”
“Autopsy!” The word jolted a little from Lydia’s lips.
“Why, certainly,” said Kurt, spreading his hands. “This way is much simpler than insisting on it in open Assembly. After curfew tonight, when everybody is in barracks—”
A low strangled cry from Gothrud interrupted him. From the moment in which the word autopsy had left Kurt’s lips, he had been sitting in frozen horror. Now, it seemed, he managed at last to draw breath into his lungs to speak with.
“Autopsy!” he cried, in a thin, tearing, half-strangled whisper. “Autopsy! She didn’t want to be touched! We agreed not to burn her; and now you’d—No—”
“Why, Gothrud—” said Kurt.
“Don’t ‘why Gothrud’ me!” said Gothrud, his deep sunk eyes at last flaming into violence. “A decision’s been made by the colony. And none of you are going to set it aside.”
“We are the Leaders,” said Kurt.
“Leaders!” Gothrud laughed bitterly. “The ex-druggist—you, Kurt. The ex-nurse and—” he glanced at Van Meyer—“the ex-caterer’s son, the ex-nothing.”
Van Meyer held his cup and stared at it.
“And the ex-high school teacher,” said Kurt, softly.
“Exactly!” said Gothrud, lifting his head to meet him stare for stare. “The ex-high school teacher. Me. As little an ex as the rest of you, Kurt, and as big a Leader right now. And a Leader that says you’ve got no right to touch my Juny to settle your two-bit intriguing and feed your egos—” He choked.
“Gothrud—” said Kurt. “Gothrud, you’re overwrought. You—”
Gothrud coughed raspingly and went on. “I tell you—” He choked again, and had to stop.
Lydia spoke swiftly to him, in low, furious German. “Shut up! Will you kill yourself, old man?”
“That’s being done for me,” Gothrud answered her in English, and faced up to Kurt again. “You hear me!” he said. “We’re nothings. Leaders, Great executives. Only none of us has been five miles from the landing spot. Only none of us organized this colony. None of us flew the ship, or assigned the work, or built the huts, or planned the plantings. All we did was sign the roster back on Earth, and polite young experts with twice our brains did it all for us. By what right are we Leaders?”
“We were elected!” snapped Kurt.
* * *
END OF SAMPLE
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