She appeared before him, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the room, and his heart lurched. The SIH had assessed the passage of time and changed Ella’s style of dress accordingly. It must have been evening back on Earth, bedtime, for his sister was wearing her crimson pyjamas.
She leapt up and stared around the room. She looked at Bennett and beamed. “Hi, Josh.” A frown. “Where are we?” She ran to the viewscreen, reached up on tip-toe, leaned forward and peered out.
Bennett watched her, some unnameable emotion, poignant almost beyond endurance, swelling in his chest. The sight of her here, out of the usual context of the memorial garden, served to heighten the reality of her image and so emphasise the fact of her non-existence. Bennett was reminded of the many places she had never been, the many experiences she had never lived to enjoy.
She turned to him, a look of wonder transfixed on her pretty features. “Are we in space, Josh? Are we?”
“We’re aboard a Cobra lightship, Ella. You always said you wanted to go into space.”
“Hey!” she exclaimed, turning to the viewscreen and staring out at the flickering tracer of starlight streaming around the contours of the ship. “This is fantastic, Josh! Thanks a million times!”
She jumped on to the padded seat before the view-screen, turned so that she could stare out at the void and glance from time to time at Bennett. She hugged her legs and gave a conspiratorial grin. “Is this my birthday present, Josh?”
“Your birthday?”
He smiled, caught. Her birthday was on the twenty-seventh, tomorrow, and in the past he had always avoided communion with Ella on her birthday, the anniversary bringing to mind thoughts and memories too painful to relive. The SIH was programmed so that it would present a never-ageing Ella, an Ella forever ten years old and full of health. Shortly after her tenth birthday, more than twenty years ago, she had died.
Bennett remembered the birthday party at the hospital, the forced cheer of the occasion, the almost desperate desire of his mother and father to celebrate the day as if nothing was amiss. But Ella had been woozy with powerful sedatives, increasingly fraught from having to endure the protracted, almost desperate festivities of parents too scared to admit to themselves that this birthday would likely be her very last. Bennett had bought her a present, spent much of his savings on a small computer diary, perhaps with the subconscious hope that she would be able to complete the year’s entries. But she had been too tired to open it. A few days after her death, Bennett had walked out into the desert and buried it in the sand.
“This is the best birthday present I’ve ever had, Josh! Are we going to Mars?” Her eyes widened at another thought. “Are we going to Jupiter, Josh? All the way out to Jupiter!”
Bennett smiled. “Even further, Ella. We’re travelling faster than light towards the Rim of the galaxy.”
“Far out!” she breathed, fingering a strand of hair from her eyes and gazing out at the light show.
Bennett watched her, understanding now why he had summoned her.
“Ella.”
She turned, still smiling.
“The last time I spoke to you…” he began.
She frowned with the effort of recollection. “Oh, four days ago—you’d just got back from Redwood Station, hadn’t you? And you said Daddy wanted… euthanalia?”
“Euthanasia,” Bennett said. “I visited him that day at the hospital. I was with him when he died. I…” He knew why the admission was so hard to make. “I didn’t go to his funeral, Ella. It was today, the day we left Earth. Do you understand, Ella?”
She nodded, very serious. “Of course I do. It’s okay, Josh. Daddy would have understood.”
“Do you think it matters, if you miss a person’s funeral?”
She pulled her thinking-cap face. At last she smiled. “I don’t think so,” she said, and with what might have been little-girl logic or computer sophistry went on: “I mean, the person doesn’t know you weren’t there, do they?”
He stared at her. He recalled what had happened, all those years ago, when he had returned from the desert after burying her stupid, useless diary. His mother had given him a suit to change into and told him that they were to attend Ella’s funeral, which seemed to Bennett in his youthful ignorance an event that could only compound his sense of loss. How could he have known that the funerary ritual was a necessary part of the grieving process, a cathartic experience that had to be endured?
Now he reached out to the touch-pad. Ella, in the process of swinging down from the seat, froze in mid-leap, one leg pointing to the floor, her mouth open to speak to him.
He stared at her suspended image and, involuntarily, found himself telling her: “The day of your funeral, Ella… It was so hot. I still couldn’t believe you were dead. I mean, I knew, intellectually. I knew I’d never see you again, but something inside me just couldn’t accept the fact. I suppose it was too terrible an idea to grasp.” He paused. “It was so hot and the thought of you in that coffin… They were going to cremate you, and I couldn’t take it. I’m sorry, Ella. I’m sorry I didn’t go to your funeral.” He paused again, wondering why he had waited until now to admit the guilt he had kept buried for years.
They had driven to the grave garden in Mojave, and followed the procession as Ella’s coffin was carried on an electric bier to the crematorium. At the sight of the building, pumping out the smoke of the previous cremation, something had snapped within him and he had vomited down his suit. He had complained of stomach pains and doubled over for effect, anything to be spared the trial of experiencing the funeral, the scattering of his sister’s ashes in the pit where a tree would be planted in her name. It had worked: a family friend had rushed him to her nearby house, where he had washed himself and changed into clothes too big for him, and said that he needed to lie down. From the settee in the lounge of the stranger’s house he had watched the smoke rise above the tree- tops.
He looked up, suddenly aware of a presence. Ten Lee was standing in the open doorway, staring at him. He wondered how long she had been there, how much she had seen.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I was passing…”
“It’s okay.”
With her diminutive stature and scarlet flight-suit, she was a strange mirror image of Ella in her bright red pyjamas.
Ten Lee was staring at the image of Ella, frozen mid-leap. “Who is this?”
Bennett stared at Ten Lee, challenging. “She was my sister, Ella.”
Ten Lee nodded, the composure of her features suggesting neither censure nor comprehension. “Was?”
“She died a long time ago, when she was ten.”
He reached out to the touch-pad. Ella completed her leap and landed on the floor before him. She saw Ten Lee and smiled. “Hi there. Who are you?”
Ten Lee regarded Ella, considering her response. She looked past the image at Bennett. “Joshua, please turn it off.”
“Ella,” he said. “I’ll see you later, okay?” He reached out and touched the pad and the image of his sister winked out of existence.
“What?” he said to Ten Lee, his aggression anticipating her criticism.
She gestured at the SIH unit. “Why, Joshua?”
“It helps,” he told her. “We were close when we were kids. Ella was a good friend. When she died…” He paused, gathering his thoughts. “I know she isn’t really Ella, but she’s the next best thing. Over the years we’ve developed a relationship that I value.”
“Even now?”
Bennett nodded. “Even now. She reminds me of the times we had together.”
“Joshua, we all live in the shadow of the fact of death. It is the purpose of one’s life to come to some acceptance of its inevitability, so that the idea of it does not destroy us. We must come to some accommodation of the fact of our own mortality.” She paused, her tipped eyes regarding him. “Joshua, you can’t accept the idea of your own death if you fail to accept the death of loved ones, if you cling to this… this fantasy.”
“It’s all I have,” he whispered, staring at her.
“It is all you have because you have never given it up.”
Seconds elapsed, and when next Bennett looked up he saw that Ten Lee had slipped from the room, leaving him to contemplate the meaning of her words, as a disciple tries to unravel the conundrum of a
