Chapter Text
Out of the corner of her eye Lim noticed that Waldhar, the Secretary of Scription, came up and stood next to her. Lim had been standing apart from the bigger group of people, all of which seemed to know each other. She was observing the Kehrli funeral pyramid, which she assumed was yet to be completed. Lim cast a sideways glance at Secretary Waldhar; properly deferential, she waited for him to speak first, if indeed he wanted to say something. She did not recognize anyone else of the dozen or so guests who had gathered to see the dead alien off to zir final resting place. It was not as if anyone in the human-inhabited part of the Universe could have known a Kehrli on an intimate-enough basis to take part in zir funeral. If these people held cabinet positions similar to those of Secretary of Scription, she might have seen them on the news; but she had not, and could not begin to guess why they were invited to attend this extremely rare occasion.
That applied to her too.
The invitation she had received seemed a lot more like an order; it did not give her an option to decline. At least the other guests could be presumed to be of similarly high importance as the Secretary of Scription. But Lim, an unemployed nobody just a few years into adulthood, was the odd person out. This raised lots of questions in her mind.
With Secretary Waldhar standing silently by her side, she thought she might as well ask some of those questions. Not that the Secretary would be forthcoming with the answers, but perhaps it would help to break up the uneasy silence.
"Why does the dead Kerhli want to be buried here, on our planet?" Lim asked. "It's how many thousands of light years away from the Kerhli home?"
The Secretary of Scription appeared to take the quantitative part of the question as rhetorical, but seemed to concur in general. "I know, it's natural to think that zie would want to go home. Or, to be more accurate, that zir companion would want to bring zie home to rest."
As for the dead Kehrli's living companion, Lim had been trying to get any insight into the creature for a while now, and was not any closer to that. The whole time she was here, she tried to watch zir as inconspicuously as possible, but one could not tell if one remained inconspicuous to an alien that had eight eyes laid out in a spiral around zir conical body. The gusts of wind here on the mountainside had picked up her hair and plastered it across her face; she felt well-concealed peering at the alien through the lattice of her dark strands, and did not bother to claw them back from her eyes. The living Kehrli - the traveling companion of the dead one - fluttered, or perhaps undulated (Lim could not decide on a suitable verb to describe zir motions) in circles around the funeral pyramid, silhouetted against the backdrop of the neighboring mountain with its striated layers of red and brown. In the time she observed the alien, she had not made any progress in reading zir body language; zir cilia waved in seemingly random patterns. To speculate about zir motivations was that much harder. But as soon as the question left her mouth, a possible hypothesis occurred to her.
"Oh, I think I see. The two of them... They were planet-side only because their spaceship was waiting for permission to go through the Inertial Disjunction gate, and they had a lot of time to kill, right? They are probably still waiting, I assume? The wait is months, I've heard, and the surviving one is still planning to travel, right? So zie can't take the dead one home. It must be too expensive to go all the way back and then restart zir trip."
"That would be logical, but I think the real reason is different," said the Secretary of Scription. He scrunched up his face, bringing the bushy, greying eyebrows together into one imposing line, as if he was scrutinizing the funeral structure to discern its real purpose; but maybe that was just because the sun peeked out from behind the clouds and blinded him. "The Kehrli think it is beneficial to die away from home. The further from home a Kehrli dies, the better luck for their whole society. The deceased can and should remain - I mean, should make every effort to remain..." he painstakingly corrected himself, and Lim found that phrasing absurdly funny, "... at the place of death. Because by that zie will assume a very important role for the Kehrli civilization."
Lim contorted her mouth to squelch an inappropriate chuckle welling up inside her. When Secretary Waldhar looked at her oddly, she explained: "It sounds like the Kehrli are expected to do a lot of work after their death?"
He gave her a puzzled frown, then tilted his head and said: "You may be on to something. I'm still trying to make sense of what I've learned about them. I only got a crash course in Kehrli culture yesterday, and only because of the - the accident. By the way, have you had a chance to learn the names of the two Kehrli?"
Lim shook her head. She didn't see how she could have found out their names. Three days ago, when the Secretary of Scription had ordered to bring her, in great confidentiality, to a shabby hotel room on the outskirts of the spaceport where the dead Kehrli lay, no one had yet known the name of the unlucky alien, nor that of zir living companion. Furthermore, this morning, when a message arrived instructing her - not "inviting"; the tone of the message was very clear - to come to the funeral, the name of the deceased wasn't there either.
"I found out just yesterday," the Secretary said. "The dead one was called Glass-Among-Shadows - that's just our translation of zir name, for which we don't even have the organs in our mouths to pronounce. And zir friend is Leaf-On-Silence."
"Poetic," said Lim.
Secretary Waldhar nodded. "And so are their death rituals, in a way. Based on what's being built here," he pointed at the pyramid, "can you guess what their funeral ceremony will be?"
"Guess? No, not even remotely. But I have wondered about that," said Lim. "I mean, at the first glance this - platform? pyramid?.." she looked at Waldhar questioningly, asking for a more accurate word, which he did not provide, "... does not suggest that the Kehrli bury their dead in the ground."