Lovelock (8 page)

Immediately, dozens of people stood and walked to the front of the church. The seated audience buzzed with approval at the number of people who were queueing up.

“You can tell how important Odie Lee was,” Penelope said as she stepped over us to get to the aisle. “Usually, only a few people spread the word. Today, we may have as many as fifty.” When she reached the aisle, she followed her bosom to the podium, where she got in line about twenty people back.

When the crowd had settled down, the minister beckoned to the first woman in line. She stood at the microphone and carefully took the protective dome off her dandelion.

“I’d like to spread the word for Odie Lee,” she said. “Odie Lee was an angel in human form. She and her prayer partners were the first to help me when my husband Hyrum was down with prostate cancer. I’ll never know how they even found out we needed help, but she and the prayer partners were at my door, bearing food and leading us in prayers. That’s what I’ll remember about Odie Lee.”

When the speaker ended, she stood motionless at the podium. Then, hesitantly, the crowd murmured, “Spread the word!” Timidly, the woman held the white flower in front of her mouth and, filling her cheeks with air, blew mightily on it. Immediately the puffball disintegrated; white threads scattered in all directions. Many of them landed on the inert form of Odie Lee that was lying on its cart under the podium. Others were carried aloft by the air currents, and they flew haphazardly across the sanctuary.

One cluster of filaments landed on the head of a man two rows ahead of me. I leapt from Carol Jeanne’s arm and scampered over the shoulder and lap of the little girl directly in front of us; she gasped in delight. Standing on the back of the next pew, I reached up and picked the piece of white dandelion fur from the top of the man’s head. Several people turned to watch me, smiling or frowning or pointing, but I ignored them. I was only interested in the projectile. I carried it back to Carol Jeanne and held it out to her, but she shook her head and patted the crook of her arm for me to lie next to her there.

I settled next to her body and inspected my find. The white portion was as soft as down. I tickled my nose with it. Then I reached up and tickled Carol Jeanne’s nose with the featherlike strands. She looked down at me and smiled.

Attached to each filament was a pale brown seed.
That
explained it. Once I saw the reason for the buoyancy of the white threads, there was nothing for me to do but discard the fluff and eat the seeds. There was no substance to them, though; they were dry and tasteless.

The next voice from the podium was so loud and tearful and discordant that it piqued my interest. “I was a prayer partner of Odie Lee’s,” the woman said. “She was always the first to know who had a problem and lead the prayers on their behalf.”

I heard another woman’s voice mutter in the row behind us, “That’s because her husband couldn’t keep his mouth shut.” Someone shushed at her. “Cyrus told her everything we ever said to him in confidence.”

“Liz,
hush!
” another voice hissed.

Liz hushed. Not that many humans could have heard her anyway—she spoke very softly. Nevertheless, her words intrigued me. Maybe this Odie Lee wasn’t the saint that Penelope and all these other people thought she was. I wriggled up and peered over Carol Jeanne’s shoulder to get a look at Liz. She was a fairly attractive woman, very skillfully made up, with not a hair out of place. The bull-necked, overmuscled man sitting beside her had to be her husband. From the rigidity of her pose, she did not like it when he hushed her.

She looked down at me—not moving her head, not varying that perfect posture—and stared coldly at me until I turned back and looked at the podium.

“Spread the word!” the crowd was murmuring, more confidently than the first time. A puff, and the dandelion seeds were propelled across the church. The prayer partner, a young and tearful woman, marched down the aisle to her seat.

“I was another prayer partner,” the next woman said piously. “Odie Lee always told us who to pray for, and why they needed our prayers. She always took a dinner to the family and told them we were praying on their behalf.”

“
Pry
ing on their behalf is closer to it,” Liz whispered behind me. “She was only twisting the knife.”

I couldn’t help looking at Liz again—and this time everything had changed. It was her husband who held a rigid posture, staring coldly straight ahead, and Liz seemed much more relaxed. She even smiled at me. What kind of war was going on between these people? Why did people like that stay married, when life was a bitter contest between them, a wrestling match that never ended?

“Spread the word!” the audience commanded the tearful young woman. Each time the audience gave the command, they spoke a little louder. By the end of the service, they’d be hoarse.

This time, the speaker’s breath missed the mark. She had to blow three times before the dandelion stem was clean of white fuzz. She was red with exertion or embarrassment when she left the podium to return to her seat.

When Penelope reached the podium, she told the crowd that Odie Lee was the most honest person she had ever met. “In fact,” she said, “Odie Lee often recognized people’s predicaments before
they
did. How often she mourned because they couldn’t face the truth! Odie Lee prayed with them and counseled them until they recognized their problems and turned to God for help.”

I waited for Liz to respond to Penelope’s testimony, but she held her tongue. Of course, she knew we were with Penelope, and she knew I was listening to her, and she certainly knew that witnesses reported on what they heard. She could not have known that Carol Jeanne and I were not Penelope’s friends—that Carol Jeanne was going to laugh with me about Liz’s comments when I reported on them later.

When Liz remained silent, I turned and watched Penelope take a mighty breath and scatter her dandelion all over the church. Then, having caught the drift of what people were going to say about Odie Lee, I slept through the rest of the service. I could always skim through the rest of the word-spreadings when I did my memory dump later.

After a mournful closing hymn and a prayer, Odie Lee’s corpse was wheeled out of the sanctuary. I hopped over Carol Jeanne and Stef and Mamie and Lydia and Red to see the procession. Sitting on Emmy’s lap, I watched the cart bearing Odie Lee roll up the aisle and out the door. The dead woman’s body was covered with white dandelion filaments. A disproportionate number of them had landed on her chin, leaving her with a dandelion beardlet. Odie Lee didn’t look like the kind of woman who would enjoy having a goatee.

“Where’s she going?” Emmy asked me. It was a good question. They certainly weren’t going to bury her.

When no one answered her quickly enough, Emmy turned up the volume. “WHERE’S SHE GOING?” Heads turned, and I abandoned the screeching Emmy to sit with Carol Jeanne.

“Daddy doesn’t know,” Red said, and the answer seemed to satisfy Emmy. It didn’t satisfy Mamie, though. As soon as we left the church, she pulled Penelope aside.

“Where
did
she go?” Mamie asked.

“I assume you want to know the final destination of her
mortal
remains,” Penelope said.

“Of course. Where’s the cemetery?”

Penelope raised one eyebrow. “There’s no cemetery on the Ark,” she said.

Red tapped Mamie on the shoulder. “What she means,” he explained, “is that people who die on the Ark are jettisoned into space. It’s like a sea burial, only people are launched right into heaven.”

Penelope lowered the first eyebrow and raised the second. I wondered if she was aware of the tricks her eyebrows were doing, or if the brows moved up and down as an unconscious stupidity gauge. Red was almost as dimwitted as Mamie.

“That’s a romantic idea,” she said, “but it’s not at all sensible. Every object in space is a potential weapon. Sure, the odds are against a ship hitting Odie Lee, but if one did, the collision would be fatal. We don’t jettison anything from the Ark.”

“Then you bury them,” Mamie said. It was a statement, not a question.

Penelope rolled her eyes. “
You’ve
been underground. That’s where the tube runs. That’s where we have our offices. I’m not sharing
my
desk with a corpse. Not even with a saint like Odie Lee.”

“What, then?” Good grief! The woman was dense.

“It’s like they say in the Good Book. ‘Ashes to ashes…’ ”

I accessed my computer files under Bible, and I didn’t find “ashes to ashes” anything. But I was hardly surprised. Christians will say any old thing and if they claim it’s in the Bible, everyone nods wisely and accepts every word of it. That’s because nobody
reads
the book. They believe it—but they leave it unstudied and unread. Of course, there are scientists like that, too—the ones who accept the orthodoxy of the past without ever looking at the evidence themselves. But people like that never change the world; they move through it invisibly. Carol Jeanne questioned
everything
, and as a result she had transformed her field. And soon enough she was going to transform a world. She was living a life that was unfathomable to people who assumed that every cliché in their heads came from the Bible and was therefore not to be questioned.

Mamie didn’t care about the source of the quote—it was the idea of cremation that bothered her. “That’s barbaric!”

“It’s a simple necessity, practiced in many places back on Earth,” said Penelope. “It was also fully explained in the prospectus.”

“Nobody’s burning me.”

“You won’t exactly be burned,” said Penelope cheerfully. “
Rendered
is more accurate. We’ll break you down to your component elements and recycle you. We’ll use you to fertilize plants and do all
sorts
of other things. It’s only the unusable parts that will be cremated.”

“That will
never
happen to me.” Mamie was near tears, and I almost felt sorry for her. Almost.

Penelope smiled sweetly. “You signed the Compact.”

“
That
was in there? That I could be—incinerated? Recycled?
Rendered
, like a bar of soap?”

Penelope smiled and shrugged—a slow, eloquent, voluminous gesture. “We’ll almost certainly wait until you’re dead.”

Mamie turned in fury at Stef. “Why didn’t you tell me that!”

Because you wouldn’t have listened, you poor dimwitted woman—certainly not to Stef. Of course I could say nothing, but I knew this pattern very well.
Red
was the one who had studied the Compact and decided not to tell his mother about cremation, and even Mamie must have been well aware of that. But since she could never be angry with her dear boy, it was Stef she turned on. Poor Stef. She never gave him the slightest power or influence over her, but held him responsible for anything that went wrong.

“I’m sorry, dear. I don’t know what I was thinking of,” Stef croaked.

“My goodness, Stephan! Your throat sounds as dry as sandpaper,” Penelope said, immediately solicitous. “We
must
get you something to drink.”

Never mind that it was Penelope’s fault that they hadn’t even been able to get a drink before the funeral. She was his rescuer now, in more ways than one. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he murmured.

“No trouble at all,” said Penelope, beaming. “We were going to the kitchen anyway. Once people have seen Odie Lee’s display, the next thing they’ll want is food.”

“Odie Lee’s display?” Red asked.

Penelope only dismissed them with a shake of her head. “Oh, you’ll have plenty of time to see it,” she said. “Right now all of us Mayflowerites have to help with the meal.” Then she looked down at Pink, who was dozing in Red’s arms. “Of course you can’t take a pig into the kitchen.”

“Pink is a witness,” said Red, wearily. “A heavy witness, in fact.”

“Well then,” said Penelope, “I’ll bet we can get someone to take the pig home for you.”

Red considered for a moment. I could imagine the internal debate. On the one hand, Pink, unlike the children, would be perfectly all right at home by herself, and she
was
tired. But on the other hand, it would be a confession that what Red was doing here wasn’t important enough to be witnessed. Of course
nothing
that he did was important enough to be witnessed, but that was one bit of reality that he wasn’t ready to face yet.

“Pink
is
tired and I really can’t carry her around,” said Red. He looked at the lazy little swine in his arms and she winked at him. “Yes, Pink would like to go to the new house.”

“Why don’t we all go home with Pink?” suggested Carol Jeanne.

Penelope looked at her with an ingenuous expression. “Oh, what a good idea. I’m sure people will understand. Everyone else in Mayflower is helping with the funeral, but the chief gaiologist’s husband’s
pig
is sleepy so of course she had to go home—”

Red intervened quickly. “Don’t be silly, Penelope, of course we’ll stay and help. But who are you going to have take her? Pink isn’t a pet or…or an ordinary animal.”

No, Pink was a walking doorstop.

“One of our young people—oh, Nancy!”

Nancy was a horse-faced girl whose every movement betrayed the fact that she thought she was even uglier than in fact she was. Her shoulders slumped and she seemed to shrink as she walked, as if she hoped that if she became unobtrusive enough she would entirely disappear. Of course her very ungainliness served only to call more attention to her, but I have learned that human adolescents never understand that the best way to avoid notice is to behave normally. Though in Nancy’s case, there was no need for her to disappear. When she looked up and smiled she seemed to be a very nice person. Very trustworthy. No sign of the hostility that most human teenagers have when an adult calls their name.

“Mr. Cocciolone’s witness needs to be dropped off at their new home,” said Penelope. “You know where their house has been set up, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” said Nancy. “It’s right up the street from us.”