Outnumbering the Dead

15

Hakluyt's sickbay is just about as big as a hospital in an average Earthly arcology, and just about as efficient. Still, there is a limit to what any hospital can do for a short-timer nearing the end of his life expectancy. When, after four days, they wake Rafiel, he is in far from perfect health. His face is puffy. His skin is sallow. But he has left strict orders to wake him up so he can be on hand for the showing of Oedipus. As nothing they can do will make much difference anyhow, they do as he asks. They even fetch the clothes he requests from his room, and when he is dressed he looks at himself in a mirror. He is wearing his fanciest and most theatrical outfit. It is a sunset-yellow full dress suit, with the hem of the tails outlined in stitches of luminous red and a diamond choker around his neck. The diamonds are real. With any luck at all, he thinks, people will look at his clothing and not at his face.

Probably not every one of Hakluyt’s five thousand people were watching Oedipus as the pictures beamed from Earth caught up with the speeding interstellar ship. But those who were not were in a minority. There were twenty viewers keeping them company in the room where Rafiel and Alegretta sat hand in hand, along with Manfred and his brother and a good many people Rafiel didn't really know - but whom Manfred knew, or Alegretta did, and so they were invited to share.

It was a nice room. A room that might almost have been Rafiel's own old condo, open to the great central space within Hakluyt; they could look out and see hundreds of other lighted rooms like their own, all around the cylinder, some a quarter of a kilometre away. And most of the people in them were watching, too. When the four children of Jocasta and Oedipus did their comic little dance at the opening of the show, the people in the room laughed where Mosay wanted them to - and two seconds later along came the distant, delayed laughter from across the open space, amplified enough by the echo-focusing shape of the ship to reach their ears.

Rafiel hardly looked at the screen. He was content simply to sit there, pleased with the success of the show, comfortable with Alegretta's presence ... at least, in a general sense comfortable; comfortable if you did not count the sometimes acute discomforts of his body. He didn't let the discomforts show. He was fondly aware that Alegretta's fingers slipped from hand to wrist from time to time, and knew that she was checking his pulse.

He was not at all in serious pain. Of course, the pain was there. Only the numbing medications they had been giving him were keeping it down to an inconvenience rather than agony. He accepted that, as he accepted the fact that his life expectancy was now measured in days. Neither fact preyed on his mind. There was an unanswered question somewhere in his mind, something he had wanted to ask Alegretta, but what it could have been he could not clearly say. He accepted the fact that his mind was confused. He even drowsed as he sat there, aware that he was drifting off for periods of time, waking only when there was laughter, or a sympathetic sound from the audience. He did not distinguish clearly between the half-dreams that filled his mind and the scene on the screens. When the audience murmured as he - as Oedipus - took his majestic oath to heal the sickness of the city, the murmur mingled in Rafiel's mind with a blurry vision of the first explorers from Hakluyt stepping out of a landing craft on to a green and lovely new planet, to the plaudits of an improbable welcoming committee. It wasn't until almost the end that he woke fully, because next to him there was a soft sound that had no relation to the performance on the screen.

Alegretta was weeping.

He looked at her in confusion, then at the screen. He had lost an hour or more of the performance. The play was now at the farewell of the chorus to the blinded and despairing Oedipus as, alone and disgraced, he went off to a hopeless future. And the chorus was singing:

There goes old Oedipus.

Once he was the best of us.

Now he drowns in misery and dread.

Down from the top he is,

Proof that all happiness

Can't be known until you're dead.

Rafiel thought that over for some time. Then, blinking himself awake, he reached to touch Alegretta's cheek. 'But I do know that now,' he said, 'and, look, I'm not dead yet.'

'Know what, Rafiel?' she asked huskily, not stopping what she was doing. Which, curiously, was pressing warm, sticky, metallic things to his temples and throat.

'Oh,' he said, understanding, 'the show's over now, isn't it?' For they weren't in the viewing room any more. He knew that, because he was in a bed - in their room? No, he decided, more likely back in the ship's sickbay. Another doctor was in the room, too, hunched over a monitor, and in the doorway Manfred was standing, looking more startled than grieving, but too grieving to speak.

Rafiel could see that the boy was upset and decided to say something reassuring, but he drifted off for a moment while he tried to think of what to say. When he looked again the boy was gone. So was the other doctor. Only Alegretta sat beside him, her eyes closed wearily and her hands folded in her lap; and at that moment Rafiel remembered the question on his mind. 'The cats,' he said.

Alegretta started. Her eyes flew open, guiltily turning to the monitor before they returned to him. 'What? Oh, the cats. They're fine, Rafiel. Manfred's been taking care of them.' Then, looking at the monitor again, 'How do you feel?'

That struck Rafiel as a sensible question. It took him a while to answer it, though, because what he felt was almost nothing at all. There was no pain in the gut, nor anywhere else, only a sort of generalized numbness that made it hard for him to move.

He summed it all up in one word. 'Fine. I feel fine.' Then he paused to rehearse the question that had been on his mind. When it was clear he spoke. 'Alegretta, didn't you say you started the fashion of having pets?'

'Pets? Yes, I was one of the first here on Hakluyt, years and years ago.'

'Why?' he asked. And then, because he felt a need to hurry, he made his thickening tongue come out with it: 'Did you do it so you could get used to things you loved dying? Things like me?'

'I didn't know you were a psychotherapist, dear Rafiel,' she whispered. It was an admission, and she knew he understood it... though his eyes had closed and she could not tell whether he had heard the words. She did not need the confirmation of the screen or of the other doctor as he came running in to know that Rafiel had joined the minority of the dead. She kissed the unresponding lips and retired to the room they had shared, to weep, and to think of what, some day, she would tell their son about his father: that he had been famous, and loved, and brave ... and most of all that, certainly, yes, Rafiel had after all been happy in his life, and known that to be true.