They stored his body with the others, in a damaged arklet that would serve as a mausoleum until such time as they could cut a grave out of Cleft’s surface. That would take a long time, but the survivors all shared the conviction that, having sacrificed so much to make it here, they should be interred and not burned. Doob would share a grave with Zeke Petersen, Bolor-Erdene, Steve Lake, and all the others who had died at about the same time.
Some of those remained conscious long enough to relate the stories of what had happened to them during the conflict with the people who had come in from the Swarm, and Endurance’s final, hectic passage through storm and stone. Their accounts were recorded and archived. One day some historian would piece the story together, comparing it with data logs to figure out who had slain whom in combat and which module had gone dark when.
A?da, of course, might have been their best source of information, had she felt like talking. But she didn’t. She had sunk into a profound depression, emerging from it at seemingly random moments to chatter about whatever stray thoughts were flitting through her head. No one wanted to talk to her. When she talked to you, she watched you too carefully with those avid, penetrating eyes, as if she saw, or imagined she saw, too deeply. It was impossible to be the object of that gaze without thinking of what she and the others had done, and without imagining that you were being sized up as food.
An epic tale was told by the three-year backlog of email, Spacebook posts, blog entries, and other ephemera that filled up all of their inboxes as soon as the network of the Swarm recombined with that of Endurance. The general arc of the story seemed to be a growing detachment from reality that had afflicted J.B.F. and some of her inner circle. Luisa likened it to the growth of spiritualism after the First World War. During the 1920s, many who had not been able to bring themselves to accept the loss of life in the trenches and the subsequent influenza epidemic had fallen prey to the belief that they could communicate with their lost loved ones from beyond the grave. They had, in effect, sidestepped grief by convincing themselves that nothing had happened.
The analogy was a loose one. The loss of life in the Hard Rain had, of course, been much worse. And few of the Arkies had adopted spiritualist beliefs per se. But after a particularly severe coronal mass ejection had slain nearly a hundred Arkies, Tav had written a blog post about the journey he had made to Bhutan with Doob and the conversation that they’d had en route with the king concerning the mathematics of reincarnation. It was a meditative piece, a secular eulogy for those who had fallen, but in retrospect it seemed to mark an inflection point in the survivors’ thinking. The Swarm had always had a sort of quasi-divine status to some, who had perhaps read too much chaos theory too superficially and were prone to believing that its collective decisions, lying beyond human understanding, partook of the supernatural.
The mishmash of techno-mystical ideation that had grown out of that one blog post was unreadable and incomprehensible to Luisa or to anyone else who read it after the fact, with a clear mind, but it seemed to have offered hope and comfort to many terrified young people trapped in arklets. Tav, to his credit, had backed away from any efforts to elevate him to prophetlike status. If anything, though, his modesty might have backfired.
“I have no idea,” Luisa said, “how anyone could read these threads and find hope in them. Or even meaning. But they did. Long enough to distract them from the real problems they were facing. And when A?da and the others finally came to their senses and began to push back against J.B.F. and the others, the reaction was just that much more severe. Because things had gone too far by that point.”