“Okay,” said Elián.
“Burning is not what your people would do,” said Atta. “And it is not what my people would do. But we can make it holy.”
“Well, you’re talking,” said Elián. “So that’s one miracle already.”
“Listen to me, Elián,” said Atta. His voice had become like a brass singing bowl. “We can make this holy.”
“Yeah?” said Elián, all harshness and challenge. And then, from nowhere, tears sprang into his eyes. Not rage, not horror, but grief. And he breathed out: “Yeah.”
“Yeah,” said Da-Xia, like a blessing.
“I’ve never burned a body,” said Elián, softly. “What do we do?”
The root of holiness, it turns out, is to do things deliberately. We wrapped the body of Wilma Armenteros in a shroud made out of ragged cheesecloth, and we laid it on a stretcher made out of shattered pumpkin trellis. But it still seemed holy. Han and Thandi, Atta and Xie, Elián and me. We carried the stretcher to the apple press, and put it in the place of the bottom stone.
As my friends worked into the evening, I found myself looking at them, wondering, watching. Da-Xia and Thandi, who I thought loved nothing better than to needle each other, were sitting knee to knee, braiding sage and scented grasses into a smudge. Han, who I thought knew nothing of the world, stood slim and small and self-contained, yet made larger by his loss.
And Atta, who I thought was silent, was singing.
He leaned over the body, his white clothing aglow, his skin aglow like old brass. Like old brass it was pure rubbed gold on the inside of his wrists and on his palms. When he turned his hands upward to draw down a blessing, he seemed to be holding the setting sun.
You made tools of us, Da-Xia had told Talis. But it wasn’t true. These were no one’s tools.
No one’s.
Something prickled at the back of my neck. I turned, and there was Talis.
We’d saved the crushing stone for the apple press—behold the horrible practicality of the Precepture—and Talis was sitting on it. He was leaning back against the wall, with elbows on his knees, chin in his hands, like a thoughtful child himself. He saw my glance and raised his eyebrows to meet it. I wondered how close he could come to reading my mind, and for once I hoped it was close. No one’s tools, Talis. I turned away.
Under the body we built a pyre of sagebrush and creosote bush, and apple wood from the orchard. Thandi leaned forward and set the end of the braid of grass and sage smoldering. Elián took it and moved the smoking thing up and down the white-wrapped body.
The sun went down behind the induction spire. The spire lit like a streak of silver. Then, as the light sank, a streak of black. It was as thin as a line of ink dividing past and future.
The smudge rope burned down.
Atta kindled a torch and handed it to Elián.
He stood there holding it out, silent.
With the infrared that Talis had added to my vision, I could see the blood heat of strong emotion creeping up Elián’s neck, outlining his mouth where words would not come. “Awww, damn it,” he whispered, and set the torch to the pyre.
The fire crackled and spat, caught and rose. I felt the heat on my face; strong and then stronger. Even Elián had to step back. There rose a smell I do not care to comment on. Time passed. The darkness thickened and rose up from the earth. It wasn’t until much later, when the sparks were spiraling up into a pure dark sky, that Elián spoke again, this time in a language I didn’t know. Soft words, hardly a breath, and not to me. They went up with the sparks.
And rising in me, for the first time, came knowledge that I hadn’t learned, hadn’t earned. Something implanted, something from the datastore. It was not like a memory, which rises into view like a whale from the sea. It was not like an understanding, which pulls pieces together to make a new picture, like stars resolving into a constellation. It was a click, a mechanical thing, as if my brain had new slots carved into it, ready to have knowledge dropped into them. My brain ticked. My teeth hurt. And I knew this, suddenly. Elián was saying the kaddish.
May God’s great name be blessed forever . . .
I had been programmed with the kaddish. I could have said it with him, Hebrew and all. But I didn’t. I was still at least that human.
I did not want to lose my human-ness; I did not want to change. But I was tumbling toward it already. And I could do it. I could save us.
Blessed and glorified, honored and extolled, adored and acclaimed . . .