Unearthly Neighbors by Chad Oliver Page A

songs and weeping relatives. I want to be cremated and I want my ashes to be spread in a flower garden, where they’ll do some good. You’ll see to it, won’t you Monte?”
    “Afraid I can’t,” he had said. “I’ve already promised you for a sacrifice to the Sun God.”
    The Sun God.
    Sirius?
    Sacrifice…
    There had been one consolation, he supposed, although that was hardly the word for it. Her body, stretched out in its makeshift box, was in space. It was drifting in the emptiness and the stars. Crazily, he wondered whether she was cold. At least she was not buried in the earth, with damp soil sealing her off forever from the light and the sun.
    In time, she might even fall into the sun. A strange sun, to be sure, a white furnace of a sun, but still a sun. She might have liked that…
    He could not believe that she was gone. Oh, he didn’t try to kid himself about it. She was dead, and his mind accepted the fact. He couldn’t console himself with any fuzzy notions that they would meet again in some Great Bye and Bye. But belief is something you feel, not just something that your mind cannot reject. Even when he knew that Louise was in a box in space, he found himself listening for her voice, watching for her to come walking through opening doors, wondering why she stayed away now that he needed her so much.
    It was unbearable. He shunned the room that they had shared, entering it only to try to sleep. (Sleep? He had forgotten what sleep was.) He didn’t drink much; drinking only made it worse. He knew that some men hit the bottle in an effort to forget, but that would never work for him. Alcohol only accentuated what he was already feeling; it had always been that way.
    But there were times when he had to go into their room. There were times when he had to lie on their bed, and be alone in the darkness. There were times when he saw her clothes and the books she had been reading. There were times when he could smell her perfume, still lingering in the bare, tiny room.
    Then he knew that she was gone from him forever…
    Then he knew.
     
    Admiral William York sat behind his polished desk and looked acutely uncomfortable. He was a tall man, tall and lean, and his gray hair was cropped close to his skull. He seemed to be at attention even when he was sitting down, but he was not an unduly formal man. He had warm brown eyes and a face that easily relaxed into a smile. In fact, Monte thought, he was the perfect officer—even to the slight limp that he had when he walked, a limp that hinted discreetly of past deeds of valor. He was a civilized man, and that didn’t make the interview any easier.
    Monte was aware of the contrast in their appearances. Monte’s clothes didn’t fit him the way they should; he had lost a lot of weight and was downright skinny. His beard was ragged and his eyes had dark circles under them. Monte was hard, harder than he had ever been, but he was too hard to be flexible any longer. He didn’t bend and snap back. He—broke.
    It didn’t all show, of course; he was glad of that. He was still Monte Stewart, no matter what he felt like inside. But he felt oddly ill at ease, like a schoolboy summoned before the headmaster. He didn’t belong here, in this room, with this man. The hum of the air vents bothered him, and the stale metallic smell of the gray ship. The air seemed cold and dead after the warm irritating atmosphere of Sirius Nine; he always seemed to be cold now…
    “Drink, Monte?”
    “Thank you.”
    Admiral York poured out a shot of whiskey for each of them. He sipped his, but Monte tossed it down like medicine. York made quite a thing out of lighting a cigarette, doing his best to make Monte relax. Monte didn’t want to disappoint him, so he fished out his pipe and began puffing on it. The smoke did taste good. That, at least, had not changed.
    Admiral York fingered a stapled pile of typewritten pages on his desk. There were fourteen pages, Monte knew, with his signature on