You could burn it, bury it, eat it, or let it be eaten—by worms, microbes, molecules. You could put it outside, aboveground, preferably somewhere humid and hot, and let it be eaten there—by beetles, ants, vultures, jackals, and the like, and the weather. You could freeze it, then transport it to one of Earth’s remaining pockets of eternal ice and snow, and tuck it into bed there. You could embed it in plastic. Drop it into a lake of tar, or of toxic waste. Compress it to near nothingness. Blow it to smithereens with explosives.
On Earth there were options. On Gleem One, orders of magnitude fewer.
Cremation was impractical and risky. Burial was impossible. You could stow the body somewhere, but that would only leave the problem for someone to deal with later. There were no carnivores on board, save one, and that one couldn’t very well eat his own body if he were already dead. Not to mention that eating a dead human, regardless of the circumstances, was gross.
You could suit up and send yourself into space, point toward Earth, ignite the thrusters, and become a meteor in someone else’s sky. A reliable way to dispose of the body, and a quick way to die. Too quick—and too painful—for his purposes.
You could avoid this by aiming the thrusters in the opposite direction, fighting orbital decay, and become a new planetary body littering the sky, at least for a while. Cav hated litter, but felt backed into a corner. It didn’t hurt that he’d been leaning toward ending his life this way from the start: half-knowingly before his arrival on station, then through the long hours of gazing into space, into his heart and mind, awe in ascendance, terror in decline. The idea had been steadily growing.
He felt a shiver of fear and excitement thinking about it now.
Death was a journey, composed of little deaths, little steps along the way. Sometimes the steps were close together, tightly packed, and death came rapidly. Sometimes they were spaced far apart, and it approached at a crawl. Suicide offered a choice of speeds. It was the ultimate in self-determination.
Cav figured six to eight hours start to finish. Most people choose a quicker exit, but he didn’t want to rush. Didn’t want to drag things out, either. Figured time would do its own thing anyway. A minute could last a year; an hour, a second. Six to eight hours seemed about right.
He ran through the steps in his mind. Space suit, jetpack, airlock, outer hatch. Nothing fancy. A simple defenestration. Stand at the brink, take the leap, ignite the burners, and embrace the unknown.
It wasn’t complicated.
Nothing to clean up. No hole to dig. No ashes.
The only thing left to decide: premedicate or not?
He had pills, but didn’t want to take them. Preferred to be awake and alert, alive to every sensation, every thought. He wanted to be fully in possession of himself in order to fully appreciate the experience. His sole concern: he might panic, and screw everything up.
Panic was a killer of the here-and-now. It was death to contemplative observation. It twisted reality, made it frightening and hideous.
He wasn’t panic-prone, had only panicked once in his life, and that was after waking up from juving, a fairly common occurrence. He doubted it would be a problem, but also knew that panic didn’t care about intentions, that it had a life of its own, came when it came, suddenly, out of nowhere, without invitation. The smallest thing could set it off, and this was hardly small.
He was bringing pills, just in case. Not to sleep, but to calm the nerves, if necessary. Composure, not unconsciousness. That was the plan.
His came in the form of capsules. Each capsule contained hundreds of tiny granules that looked like poppy seeds, but pink and white, the color of cotton candy. Colors favored by Gleem, which manufactured the medicine, and had named it, imaginatively, NOCKOUT, or NOK, as it was commonly called. Not to be confused with the beer of the same name, which had the same effect, if you drank a truckload. The name was a nod to days long past, when it meant glamour, bedazzlement, wow wow wow. Just the kind of double entendre PR and marketing departments fell out of their chairs for.
The word was stamped, along with the helpful icon of a sleeping beauty, on a sleeping beauty bed, on the capsule’s protective, gelatinous shell. It was a mid-list drug—reliable, no-nonsense, and a steady seller. He’d brought enough to put down a horse.
He planned to carry four, attached to his helmet within reach of his tongue and mouth, but separated, so that he could take as many or as few as necessary. He unscrewed the top of the bottle and shook out a handful.
A bad idea. A mass of capsules spilled out and immediately dispersed, like a genie freed from captivity. He grabbed at them, but it was like grabbing at a school of fish, and he merely managed to drive them farther away. He focused on one. His hand-eye coordination was not a thing of beauty, but he finally managed to pinch it between thumb and forefinger, and pushed it back in the bottle. Then he got a second one. Thinking, this is ludicrous, like moving a sandbox grain by grain.
What if it happened outside? They came loose in his helmet, then floated around in front of his face, a total distraction and annoyance, not to mention out of reach of his mouth?
A setback.
The upside: better to know now.
What could be done?
Go without them. That was one possibility. But it felt like giving in, and also risky. Besides, he liked puzzles, even now, at this late stage of the game.
It wasn’t much of one, as it turned out. Capsules and pills were made to dissolve. Optimally, in a stomach. Less optimally, in plain water. But water worked, particularly if you heated it up.
He didn’t have to eat his medicine, he could drink it.
He tried pulling a capsule apart, with the idea of dumping the contents directly into a beaker, where they’d dissolve much quicker without their protective coating. But the halves were sticky and hard to separate, especially for old, trembling hands, and grains were no more willing to be poured than the pills themselves, and in fact much less manageable. They dispersed in a particle cloud, then hung there, like a swarm of midges. He cautioned himself not to inhale.
Subsequently, he didn’t try what he couldn’t do, and instead used the whole capsules, and a closed system. Keeping busy kept him from looking too far ahead, and second-guessing himself.
It took an hour under low heat to dissolve them, then another for the solution to cool. While he was waiting, the comm came to life.
It was Laura Gleem. He recognized her voice, which preceded her image, and the perfectly modulated cadence of her speech. He assumed that, like her image, there was software involved.
She looked the same as always. Pert, attractive, businesslike. Abruptly, the screen went blank. Moments later, someone else took her place.
At least it looked like someone.
The person was sitting up, if “sitting” was the right word, in bed. She, if it was a she, was the color of ash and nearly hairless. What hair she did have was stringy and valentine pink, as though dyed by a morbid beautician. Her body was gnomish and deformed; she looked like a gnarl of wood. She was hunched forward, as though she had no choice. No fat or muscle. Drooping, loose skin. Strikingly, there were grapefruit-size lumps on her arms, legs, and torso.
The figure was draped in a formless gown. Didn’t seem to care if it covered her or not. A network of tubes and wires were attached to her, and ran off-screen.
He kept his composure, even as his stomach churned. He wasn’t entirely sure who or what he was seeing.
Laura Gleem’s voice answered the who. “What do you think?”
His mind, uncharacteristically, was blank.
“That bad?”
“Is this you? For real?”