Read Till the Mountains Turn to Dust (The Chronicles of Eridia) Page 51
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He hung around next to the refreshment table for a while, his thoughts straying from Solace to the living bodies in the room around him. In a weird way it felt like a betrayal of her to even consider thinking about anything else this soon. But that was exactly what he did, as if his brain needed to occupy itself with something beyond the fact of her nonexistence lest it go mad.
A scan of the crowd confirmed he didn’t know a single person here. Listening in on several conversations, he discovered that a large percentage of the mourners were either artists of one sort or another, or employees of various political and governmental organizations, many of them affiliated somehow with the Intergalactic Senate. He also learned that in recent years Solace had owned and managed Re:Sound, a popular nightclub on Krizz T-19, which seemed to be either a moon or a space station; he couldn’t tell which.
He was in the midst of an excruciatingly boring conversation with a pompous and half-inebriated dwarf named Doven do Kombeltot, who worked as a political analyst on Mezureth 5, when there was a sudden shift in the room’s pattern of noise, with some voices falling silent while others began whispering urgently. Reynard and Doven looked around. The funeral coordinator, an aging male elf, had stepped up to a podium near the head of the casket.
“Thank you for coming,” the elf said with a small smile that managed to radiate both sorrow and serenity. “Please, be seated.”
Everyone made their way to the rows of folding chairs. Reynard made sure to sit well away from Doven.
“We are here to deliver our final farewells to Solace 10-NT,” the elf said, and then launched into the usual string of soothing platitudes people expected on occasions like this.
After reciting a mawkish poem, the gist of which was that death was merely a gateway to other things beyond the ken of the living, the elf opened the floor to those who wished to say a few words about the deceased.
Many did. Over two dozen people gave speeches of varying length about Solace, her good heart, her optimism, her love of people, her keen aesthetic sense.
“Everyone loved her,” one man said, a ruggedly handsome fellow whose blue eyes and high cheek bones glimmered with tears. Reynard couldn’t help wondering if he had been Solace’s boyfriend. “She was a beautiful, wonderful, generous person, one of the best I’ve ever known.”
“Her taste in music was impeccable,” said an older woman with a pair of cybernetic eyes implanted in her forehead above her biological ones. “She always knew the best songs. She had a real knack for ferreting out the great new performers no one else had heard of yet.” The woman turned and looked at the casket, her face crumpling up, the smile she was trying for twisting out of her control. “Where am I going to find new music now, Solace?” She broke down and had to be escorted back to her seat by the funeral coordinator.
“What I remember best about her,” said a large, matronly woman, “was her writing. She was the most magnificent writer—poetry, prose, the occasional omnitainment. She always claimed her work wasn’t very good, but to those of us she allowed to read some of it, it was clear she was being overly modest.”
“She was so full of life,” said a yellow-haired gnome girl. “She had more energy than anyone else I ever knew. When we all went out hiking or skiing or whatever, she’d always be at the front of the group, laughing and living it up. She was always doing.”