In That Rich Earth a Richer Dust Concealed
Captain Keffenheller died after the old year ended, but before the sun rose on the new one. Although the spaceport had a glass ceiling and tall, airy windows through which they had watched the fireworks and departing shuttles, the fact didn’t register in Yang’s mind until the sun did rise, leaping up off the horizon with such speed and ferocity that he had to raise his free arm to shield his eyes.
He recalled the announcement as their shuttle had touched down, reminding interplanetary passengers that the solar days on Masjid were only about twelve hours long. Although the city was many lightyears away, the entire planet followed Heinessenpolis standard time and let their sun drift through the sky, unmoored from any clocks.
Captain Keffenheller’s body still leaned heavily against his shoulder, and he squinted into the light, watching the sky change from a blistered red to pink to blue. His gaze drifted across the passengers waiting in the cavernous spaceport lounge. Most were laconic and many were asleep. The general ire at delayed flights had been diffused by the brief collective celebration at midnight, and the beer had lulled all but the most energetic into still silence. There was nothing to do but wait, and the same was true for Yang.
He was still watching for Patrichev to return with a doctor, though by now it was far too late for anything to be done. Once a man had been dead for ten minutes, there was no longer any need for urgency, no need to be burdened with small hope. Better to not disturb the other people waiting in the lounge by causing a fuss, or letting them know they shared space with a corpse.
Yang didn’t mind that. If it hadn’t been repulsive to let the captain lean on his shoulder while asleep, it wasn’t much different now. He wasn’t a superstitious enough man to sincerely believe in any afterlife, and so had no reason to think that it mattered to Keffenheller any longer, but he felt that it nevertheless was a kind of duty to sit with him quietly.
Strangely, what came to mind as he sat with his arm around the body was one of the last days of his final year at school. He and Jean Robert, after finishing their shared last exam, had gone together to the huge nature park outside the city. They intended to get drunk and enjoy their tiny taste of freedom before heading off to their deployments. Jean, who had stayed up all night studying, didn’t even finish his second beer before he fell asleep on Yang’s shoulder, keeping him pinned to the tree they were leaning against. Those few hours when Jean snored on top of him were the last time that he had been companionably close to someone else like this. Yang hadn’t minded the weight then, and he didn’t mind it now.
He wondered how long it had been since Keffenheller had last had someone lean against his shoulder, before Yang kept his corpse upright. He seemed quite isolated from all the other men in the prison, by virtue of, and not despite, his position of authority. It couldn’t possibly have been the half-century since Keffenheller had been with his wife, but it might have been almost that long. There was no way of knowing now.
Patrichev appeared at the other end of the terminal, nearly dragging along behind him a harried looking woman in a white coat— the doctor, Yang assumed— but when they both arrived, Yang just looked up at them dolefully. He was reluctant to let go of Keffenheller’s body.
The doctor, at least, seemed to understand this. “May I see him?” she asked gently.
Yang finally disentangled himself from Keffenheller’s side, and the doctor helped lay him out flat on the bench before crouching down to examine him. Patrichev must have already told her the time they had realized the captain was no longer breathing, because she just calmly checked for his lack of pulse, and noted the time down in a notebook she pulled from her doctor’s kit. She pulled open the collar of his jacket, and if she was looking for some specific sign, it was invisible to Yang.
From her doctor’s bag, she pulled a small machine, about the size of her hand, and a jar of test strips. She picked up Keffenheller’s limp hand and pressed one of his fingers to the front of the machine. It clicked— the punch of a needle— and she squeezed a few drops of blood onto one of the strips, then fed it back into the machine. She wiped the remains of blood off Keffenheller’s finger, then laid his hand back down on his chest, then waited for a minute until the machine beeped and displayed something on its screen. She studied the readout, then nodded.
“Without an autopsy it’s impossible to tell what he died from, but there are no signs of the major transmissible diseases in his blood, so it was likely a heart attack,” she said, standing up from her crouch. “But you said he died in his sleep?”
“Yes,” Patrichev said.
“It was probably painless, then,” she said. “Which I think is often the best we can get in this world. Are you his family?”
“Er, no,” Yang said.
Patrichev stepped in before Yang could say anything, imposing himself between Yang and the doctor like a shield. “This gentleman was a defector from the Empire,” he lied. “Since he was important to the military, we were charged with escorting him to Heinessen. We weren’t authorized to deal with this kind of situation— we’ll have to find out from Heinessen what to do.”
We’ll have to beg someone else to pay for a funeral, is what he means , Yang thought. But the thought lacked any real emotion, and he kept looking down at Keffenheller’s still face. He seemed peaceful, if corpses could feel anything.
The doctor’s demeanor immediately changed once Patrichev delivered his lie, becoming much more professional. She was clearly glad to not have to comfort two young men mourning their grandfather, and instead chat with two soldiers presumably used to death. “I see. Well, we can hold the body in our ‘corpse accommodation camp’ until you figure out what you want to do with it.”
“You have a thing like that?” Yang asked.
She sighed, and pulled her phone out from her pocket. “I can hear your Heinessen accent,” she said. “The capital is a very different place. This is a frontier planet, and we have plenty of heavy industry, and not much else. It’s unfortunate that many people who end up here have no families of note. Plenty of people die without anyone to claim the body.” She was already typing out some message to someone, to get Keffenheller squared away. “We can hold the body for about a week, but we’ll need to free up space after that, so please try to get things cleared with your superiors before then.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Patrichev said.
“Do you expect you’ll need an autopsy?”
Yang and Patrichev looked at each other. “No,” Yang said. “No reason.”
The doctor turned around, and Yang saw that, coming in through the concourse doors, silhouetted against the lightening sky, there were paramedics pushing a wheeled stretcher, ready to take Keffenheller away. Patrichev gave the doctor his contact information, then pulled Yang to the side as the paramedics approached. Yang needed to be pulled— he would have kept staring at Keffenheller if Patrichev didn’t.
“That poor man is going to a camp again,” Patrichev said. Yang shook his head unhappily.
The doctor overheard Patrichev’s comments. “He was in an Imperial labor camp?” she asked. She, too, was watching the paramedics load the body onto a stretcher, and she didn’t wait for either Yang or Patrichev to answer. “He’s in good company, I suppose. Arle Heinessen died before he reached the promised land, too.”
Patrichev easily lied some more, repeating their story to the hotel booking agent in the airport, and got them squared away with lodgings, even if they were quite temporary and rough. While Patrichev dealt with their boxes and boxes of luggage, Yang tried to get in touch with anyone on Heinessen, though he only ended up getting Cazerne’s answering machine. He left a message, and hoped that even though it was the biggest holiday of the year, his workaholic friend would be checking his voicemail in the morning.
All that done, Yang returned to their tiny hotel room and sat down on one of the cot beds. It moved and rattled so severely that he was concerned it would fall apart. He bounced up and down, testing its strength, but earned nothing except a raucous of creaking metal.
Keffenheller’s small, battered suitcase was leaning at the foot of Yang’s bed. He would need to go through it, find an outfit for the captain to be buried in, look for an address to send his belongings to…
Contemplating the task made Yang feel exhausted and pathetically sad, so he flopped back on the cot bed and closed his eyes.
Patrichev had helpfully piled up the trunks so that they blocked the window through which solar daylight was still streaming, despite it being about four in the morning. Nevertheless, the sunlight worked its way through the cracks in between the stacks of boxes, along with the chill winter wind. The room didn’t have blackout curtains. People on this planet must be too used to sleeping in any brightness.
When the door to the tiny bathroom opened, Yang rolled over to see Patrichev come in. The bed squealed again as Yang moved.
“You’re a braver man than I,” Patrichev said. “I wouldn’t trust that cot any further than I could throw it.”
“You could probably throw it pretty far,” Yang mumbled. “Are you going to sleep?”
“Unless you think we need to keep watch over our collection of ‘vital military secrets’ we’re bringing back to Heinessen.”
Patrichev had already stripped down to his underwear, and he carefully laid his folded uniform on top of one of the trunks. He didn’t look any smaller without his uniform on, but he did look gentler: the thick fabric of the jacket made it so an onlooker had to imagine muscles like ropes of steel beneath his clothing, but Patrichev had a soft layer of fat that smoothed everything out, and a fuzz of curly, dark hair atop that. He turned away from Yang, and bent down to pull the mattress off his cot, revealing that the folding mechanism on the legs did look far too fragile to support the large man’s weight. He folded the cot and rested it against the wall, then laid down on the thin mattress on the floor. Yang leaned over the edge of his bed to look at him, and Patrichev gave him a pleasant grin.
“Are you going to sleep, Lieutenant Commander?” Patrichev asked.
“How are you so good at coming up with lies on the spot like that?”
“You don’t mind, do you?”
“Not really,” Yang said. “But I’m curious.”
“It’s easy. You just have to say something reasonable that no one has the ability to contradict.” He yawned, then rubbed his eyes. “The only danger is if someone like Commander Murai has a paper trail…” His voice trailed off into another yawn. “It’s something you have to get good at, if you’re the runt of the litter like me.”
“That’s not a plausible lie at all.”
“I haven’t shown you any pictures of my family. No paper trail.”
Yang continued to look down at him for a second, his arms folded beneath his chin, studying Patrichev’s honest looking face.
“You’re already probably pretty good at it, Lieutenant Commander,” Patrichev said, meeting Yang’s eyes. He had a crooked, funny smile.
“How do you mean?”
“You could have used your name to get us into a better hotel,” he said. “You made me fill out the check in forms, though.”
“That’s not a lie.”
“It is, if the plausible story you want to tell is that we’re two unremarkable officers.”
Yang frowned and rolled back over. The cot beneath him squealed again, sounding more like a dying animal every second.
“I’m kidding, Lieutenant Commander,” Patrichev said.
Patrichev was correct, of course. “I know,” Yang said. He sighed. “I’m just thinking about what we’re going to do about Captain Keffenheller.”
“To be honest, sir, that’s a problem that doesn’t need to be solved until morning.”
“Can you reach the light?”
Patrichev could, indeed, stretch out one great paw and flick the overhead light off, though with the sun still trickling in through the windows, the room was only dim and not dark. Yang shut his eyes against the light.
Despite his tiredness, sleep was elusive. He could hear the moment when Patrichev slipped into unconsciousness, the sudden evening-out and slowing of his heavy breath. Yang listened to it, not afraid exactly that Patrichev would stop breathing, but unable to put away the awareness that sleep was cousin to death. No matter how he rolled over, trying to get comfortable on the thin mattress, he couldn’t find the magical position that would let him escape from his own thoughts. He tried to move quietly, so that the squeaky bed wouldn’t wake Patrichev up, but there was no way to stifle the noise.
Eventually, as the sun finally set on this corner of Masjid, Yang gave up on trying to sleep. He got up out of bed, wrapped the rough blanket around himself, grabbed Captain Keffenheller’s suitcase, and went to sit outside to examine its contents. He had to carefully step over Patrichev’s legs to get out the door.
Their hotel room was on the first floor, and the door opened directly onto the sidewalk, beneath the upper floor’s balcony. Although the sun had set, everything was well lit from an abundance of buzzing lamps up above. As long as Yang didn’t wander out into the gloom, towards the line of pine trees that edged the parking lot, he’d be able to read just fine. Distantly, he could hear the occasional car go by, though very few people would be going to work this early on a holiday. There was a bench next to the door, and he sat down, pulling the scratchy blanket tight around his shoulders. His breath steamed in the air, and he rubbed his hands together to warm them before he undid the stiff zipper of the suitcase.
There wasn’t very much inside. For more than forty years, Keffenheller’s daily clothing had consisted of prison uniforms. The prisoners were allowed to wear their own clothing only at holiday meals, or for funerals. Yang discovered that the jacket and slacks that Keffenheller had been wearing were probably the only nice outfit that the captain owned. He had likely been planning to buy more on Heinessen when he could begin withdrawing his pension properly— there was not much in the way of shopping in the tiny town that abutted the prison.
Yang shook out the ancient Imperial captain’s uniform that was rolled into the corner of the suitcase, and discovered that it was in too bad of a condition to be worn: the elbows were patched, and the decorative embroidery on the collar and wrists was frayed out into almost nothing. Yang laid the jacket aside on the bench and continued to dig through the suitcase, past socks and underwear, looking for other things Keffenheller might have kept from his life on the other side of the galaxy.
Most of Keffenheller’s belongings were the massive stacks of books that were piled in boxes. The books themselves were a motley collection— Keffenheller, as a token of appreciation for his work in keeping the atmosphere of the camp civil, had been given an allowance of funds by several previous wardens, and this had allowed him to order specialty texts that would otherwise never have ended up in a prison library. Over thirty or so years, that kind of steady accumulation added up into a massive collection. But the real treasure of the books were Keffenheller’s journals, and thousands of handwritten transcripts of interviews— mainly from his fellow prisoners, but some from camp staff and retired civilians in the town who had humored him in his historical research.
The prisoners were not given computer access, so Keffenheller’s first hand accounts had all been written out longhand. Yang had flipped through the hardbound journals and been slightly jealous at Keffenheller’s beautiful penmanship: in comparison to his own clumsy print, Keffenheller’s script was light and flowing, even when it was written in whatever poor writing implement had been at hand— scratchy ballpoint pens or dull pencils. Even the labels on the spine of the books were written in perfect, heavy blackletter, each character completely uniform.
Although there were many things about Keffenheller’s death that twisted Yang’s heart, the loss of this simple artistry, something that Keffenheller had clearly taken a quiet pride in, struck him deeply. There were probably many thousands of Imperial nobles who had been trained from a young age to have impeccable penmanship, but Yang doubted he would ever meet one again.
Keffenheller’s current journal, half full, was the only book in the suitcase. He wouldn’t— or at least no longer could— mind Yang looking, so he flipped through it. The name and address written inside the front cover only included his cell number and his prisoner identification code. Yang turned the pages until he reached the last entry. It was dated the day that Murai had told Keffenheller that he would be released from the prison. This was a short entry compared to many of the others, which seemed to go on for pages and pages.
People say you only serve two days: the day you go in, and the day you come out. What does it mean that I kept a record of every day of the last forty-seven years? Where did that time vanish to, if it fades away into nothing the moment that I step outside?
It must mean that a free man is different than a captive, that their lives are so incomprehensible to each other that when a man crosses the prison doorway, he can no longer even let himself remember what freedom was, nor captivity.
One man might have a continuity with himself on either side of that long forgetting— I’m sure I don’t. It’s been too many years, and the free man I must once have been is long dead. If I’m sent out of here, I’ll need to be born again, to find some new man within myself to be, and I have no desire to do such a thing. On this side of the great divide, I feel certain that there is no man within myself waiting to be born— when I awoke inside these walls, I was surprised to discover that it was a great relief to have that requirement taken from me in the first place.
The only continuity I, a creature of this place, have with the man who came in, is that I detest reinventing myself. Perhaps I would have found happiness long ago if I had swallowed my disgust, but I didn’t, no matter how many times the opportunity was presented to me. And I still don’t want to now.
The prisoner can easily dream of freedom, because he knows that it is not within his power to grasp. The free man’s dreams are much more troublesome.
I would have been content to die a natural death, but instead I’ll have an unnatural one, a vanishing into nothing. I would prefer not to be born again— but no man asks to be born. I certainly didn’t.
I doubt that I will write anymore here. I’m writing like a suicide, or the condemned— and at a certain point there’s nothing left to say.
Yang closed the journal. It wasn’t as though leaving the camp was what killed Keffenheller— if it was a heart attack, or something similar, he likely would have had one just the same in his prison cell. But frustrated tears nevertheless came to Yang’s eyes— he wanted to shake Keffenheller, tell him about the happy life he might have had on Heinessen, tell him how much he wanted to know the free man that he could be. But of course, it didn’t matter what Yang wanted or thought. Keffenheller was dead, like Alfred Rosas was dead, like his father was dead—
Yang rubbed at his burning eyes, taking deep breaths to try to steady himself.
It was unfortunately at this moment that the door to the hotel room swung open, and Patrichev came outside. He had pulled on his shoes, but was otherwise still in just his underwear. The person who had given them keys to their hotel room had been summoned from many kilometers away to let them in— the whole place was otherwise quite deserted, so Patrichev was taking advantage of the privacy. How he could stand the cold, Yang didn’t know. He stretched and yawned, shaking himself all over.
“It’s stifling in there,” Patrichev said. “Did you sleep at all, Lieutenant Commander?”
“No,” Yang said. His voice cracked as he tried to get the word out, so he repeated himself. “No.”
Patrichev noticed the suitcase at Yang’s feet. “I told you that could wait until morning, sir,” he said. His voice was gentle, and he sat down next to Yang, though he had to pick up the ratty Imperial uniform to do so.
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Patrichev sighed, looking down at the shirt. “That poor old man,” he said. “We can’t bury him in this.” He fingered the tattered uniform sleeve.
“He doesn’t have any clothes other than what he was wearing,” Yang said.
“Nothing?” Patrichev said. “What’s in there?”
“His journal. Socks. Little trinkets,” Yang said. “We’ll have to send at least some of that back to his family on Odin.”
“His estranged wife?”
“If she’s still alive.”
“Would he even want us to do that?”
“I don’t know. But it’s not like we can keep it.”
“We should mail it while we’re here, then,” Patrichev said. “No reason to haul it all the way back with us if we’re just going to send it away again.”
“Right,” Yang said.
“He didn’t happen to write down a mailing address, did he?” Patrichev picked up the suitcase and started rifling through it himself.
“Not that I can tell.”
“I’ll have to call the office,” Patrichev said with a yawn. “What time is it there?”
Yang checked his watch, then did the mental math for how far off Heinessen time was from the prison. “Four in the afternoon. But it’s a holiday.”
“Staff don’t get to go home on holidays,” Patrichev said. “It’s a prison. Give me your phone.”
Yang obligingly pulled it from his pocket and handed it over.
“If we don’t mind a bit of a delay, and that it’s not a video call—”
“You’d have to get dressed for a video call,” Yang said. “I don’t know how you’re not freezing.”
Patrichev laughed, but Yang shivered. Patrichev navigated through Yang’s phone to hook up to the military network, and then requested an ansible call to the number Patrichev had memorized. It took several minutes for the call to be approved, and while they waited, Patrichev continued to paw through the suitcase, looking at one little thing after another: a heavy pen engraved with Keffenheller’s name, a crudely carved wooden figurine of a horse, a golden pocketwatch that was missing its winding mechanism. They emptied the suitcase: a pile of clothing on one side of the bench and a pile of miscellaneous trinkets on the other. Yang checked all the small pockets, looking for anything they might have missed— old identification tags or folded up letters, but found nothing of note beyond a fifty year old receipt for the bag’s purchase on Odin.
The phone finally beeped in Patrichev’s hand to let them both know that the call had connected. There was a noticeable lag in the voice on the other side of the line, the message having to go through a winding military network to get to the ansible, and then back out.
“Camp Econia Records Office, Dillons speaking. Please be aware that this call is monitored, and that records are only available to—”
“Dillons, it’s Patrichev! I need a favor, buddy.”
“—authorized callers.” A pause. “Patrichev? Man, I thought you had finally engineered your daring escape with a prisoner. What the hell are you calling for?”
“Bad news, I’m afraid. Captain Keffenheller died.”
“Died? Ah— man— why’d you have to tell me? Now I have to break the news to everybody.”
“Yeah, sorry—” Patrichev didn’t sound that sorry. “Anyway, Dillons—”
“What did he die of?”
“Could you tell me his wife’s address? It should be in his file— heart attack.” The conversation was disjointed by the distance.
“Wife’s address… That’s rough. He was married?”
“Well, estranged,” Patrichev said. “But we need to mail his trunk back home. I’m not gonna keep it.”
There was a long pause from the other side of the line. “I’m not seeing any wife listed in his file. Parents, but I assume his parents aren’t still alive. And a cousin. He might still be alive.”
“No wife?”
“None that I can see. If he was estranged, he might not have put her in the file.”
“Alright. Can you send me the cousin’s address?”
“Sure, man. Will do.”
“Appreciate it a lot.”
“Yeah, no problem. But you do me a favor: eat the fattest steak you can get when you’re on Heinessen for me, will you? I’m fucking tired of prison food.”
“Hey— don’t swear on the line. It’s monitored, remember?”
Dillons laughed. “Yes, sir,” and then hung up. The phone beeped loudly as the military network announced that the line had closed, and Patrichev handed it back to Yang, then leaned back on the bench. He was now cold enough that goosebumps had risen on his arms, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Yang, however, was shivering, no matter how tightly he pulled the blanket around his shoulders.
“No wife, hunh?” Patrichev asked.
“Or no paper trail.” Despite the sadness of the situation, it was almost funny. Yang ended up laughing, but the lump in his throat meant that it was either that or tears.
“Right. That’s right.” Patrichev laughed too. “He always was such an enigmatic guy.”
Yang fished through the pile of trinkets, looking away from Patrichev. “No wedding ring either.”
“Well, I’m sure he wouldn’t want to be buried in it, even if we found one.” Patrichev reached over Yang and took the suitcase. He started filling it back up, neatly putting everything back where it had come from. The journal went in last, at the top of the bunch. “You should get some sleep, Lieutenant Commander. At least until the sun comes up again.”
“The bed in there is terrible.”
“Then you can have mine,” Patrichev said. “It’s alright.”
“On the floor?”
“It’s not loud, at least. You probably kept waking yourself up trying to roll over,” he said.
“Did I wake you up with all my tossing and turning?”
“If you did, don’t worry about it,” Patrichev said. “Come on.” He nudged Yang to his feet, and then into the hotel room. It took about thirty seconds for Patrichev to get Yang’s mattress off the creaky cot and onto the floor next to his own.
Yang laid down on it, and Patrichev laid down too, then flicked off the light. A true darkness fell on the room, not the eerie half-light. This was immediately more comfortable to Yang, though he still didn’t fall asleep easily. He faced the ceiling, his arms beneath his head.
“Do you think he was telling the truth?” Patrichev asked after a few minutes.
“Hm?”
“Keffenheller’s wife.”
“I don’t know,” Yang said. “Does it bother you to think he wasn’t?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
Yang rolled over onto his side, facing Patrichev. They couldn’t see each other in the dark, but they were close enough that Yang could feel the ferocious warmth of his body. “Why should it?”
“He was your friend.”
“Was he?” Yang asked. “We didn’t really know each other.”
Patrichev was silent— it was an unsatisfactory answer from Yang, perhaps.
Yang tried again, though doing so brought the lump back to his throat. “He was my friend. But—”
“But what?”
“He wanted to spend the rest of his life in a prison camp,” Yang said. “I think that action was always going to tell me more about him than the story he used to explain it. And the story he uses—” Yang trailed off. “I guess it tells me something about him, too.”
“If you don’t mind me saying so— you and Captain Keffenheller are both very strange men, Lieutenant Commander.”
“Yeah,” Yang said. “You’re probably right about that.”
“Even when he told us that story— I was thinking the whole time about how even something like that couldn’t make me want to stay in a camp for my whole life. He was a good guy, but I don’t think I understood him at all.”
“Yeah,” Yang said. But the trouble was that when Yang closed his eyes, and vague anticipatory visions of returning to Heinessen flashed through his head, he realized that, story or not, he understood Captain Keffenheller all too well.
Several days later, when Cazerne had sent them funds and authorization to bury Captain Keffenheller on Masjid, Yang stood in the funeral director’s office, his hands hovering over a computer terminal with a gravestone design software that somehow managed to be kitschy, despite its serious subject. He dismissed prompts to add a laser etched picture of the deceased, or to cut the stone into a giant heart. He picked the simplest stone, and after putting in the name and dates of birth and death, there was still so much empty space that he had to fill.
Off to the side, he listened to Patrichev talk to the funeral director. He was holding up the tattered Imperial uniform shirt, and asking, “Do you think it’s better to bury him in uniform?”
“Didn’t you say he was a defector?” the funeral director asked.
“Well,” Patrichev said, and gave a sheepish smile. “It’s complicated.”
He had been a defector as much as anyone could be— a refusal to go home had the same effect as a willing desertion— but Keffenheller had been a defector to no-man’s-land. Yang almost said aloud, “He’d want to be buried in his prison jumpsuit,” but he stopped himself.
“This thing is in terrible condition,” the funeral director said. “And it’s not as though I have a spare laying around to give you. We’ve laundered the clothes he came in with— I think they’re perfectly suitable, and they fit.”
“Did you find anything in his pockets?”
“No, sir.” And then, somewhat suspiciously, he added, “Should we have? Was he holding military documents?”
“No, just— we were looking for his wedding ring, and didn’t find it in his suitcase,” Patrichev said.
“No. We didn’t find any ring, and he wasn’t wearing one.”
“I know that,” Patrichev said. “Well, alright. His suit is fine, then.”
“That’s good.” The funeral director peered around Patrichev towards Yang. “Have you found a stone, then? Do you need any help with the software?”
“No— I’ve got it,” Yang said. He turned his attention back towards the yawning empty space at the bottom of the headstone. He could leave it blank— the visual no-man’s-land. With his name alone, no one would know that Keffenheller was anything other than a sojourner on this industrial planet, like so many men without families who died alone here. But Yang decided against it. Keffenheller had spent so many years trying to pick apart the identity of defectors and spies, to bring them into the light. He valued the truth being free, even if he didn’t value the freedom of much else.
What did Yang know about Keffenheller to put as his epitaph? Not much.
He stared at the blank space on the granite slab, letting it occupy his entire vision.
Keffenheller’s lifetime of work, all his research and interviews, would be locked up in a vault for years and years. The gravestone, which anyone who visited the cemetery on this little frontier planet might walk past and think about, would be the only marker of his life, at least until the records were unsealed, the tomb opened. Other men, many years from now, would be the ones to learn if Keffenheller had figured out the truth. That certainty was beyond Yang’s grasp, as was any certainty about the captain himself.
Yang searched his memory for the scraps of the Imperial language he had learned as a child on his father’s ship, doing business off of Phezzan. He typed the words with one finger, clumsily, onto the digital gravestone.
In his lifetime, he saved the lives of a few people.
That, at least, Yang knew to be true.