My tether slid along the side of the ship as I shifted outside, and the unfiltered vacuum tightened around me like bathwater. In the distance, Hanu? was a silhouette within the purple storm. I was not afraid of anything except the silence. My suit was built to eliminate the hiss of oxygen release, and thus all I heard were the faint vibrations of my own lungs and heart. The noise of thought seemed sufficient in theory, but it offered no comfort in physical reality. Without the background racket of air conditioners, the hum of distant engines, the creaks of old houses, the murmur of refrigerators, the silence of nothingness became real enough to make any self-professed nihilist shit his pants.
I waited to reach the length of the tether before detaching from the ship, if only to tell the cosmos I remained a believer in small odds. The chance of rescue, be it JanHus1 miraculously coming back to life or a top secret American drone swooping in to carry me home, was astronomically low, and yet there was some chance, and where there was a chance there remained a desire to gamble. At last I unsnapped the tether and I was free, floating toward Hanu?. Like him, I was now a piece of debris sailing through Space until meeting its end, as most things do, inside a black hole or the burning core of a sun. I could reach into the darkness of eternity and grasp at nothing.
My Maximal Absorption Garment moistened. Cool water soothed my skin. I was thirsty. I felt discomfort around my abdomen, but the nausea hadn’t arrived yet. Ahead loomed the menacing haze of Venus, blood seeping through its craters, and I was grateful that I would not come any closer. The Chopra core rested over it like a calm, dedicated moon. Everywhere around me raged the sandstorm of dust, but the ring in which I made my way toward Hanu? offered the simplicity of vacuum. Floating through it wasn’t much different than spending the night in a long field, away from city lights—a latitude of darkness, with sparkling photographs of overwhelmingly plentiful dead stars. Only there was no hard soil under me, no grass, no dung beetles pushing their feces along like Sisyphus. Ending my existence here would be so simple. I would leave no flesh behind, nothing for hazmat cleaners to dispose of. There would be no funerals, no heavy stones with generous lies inflicted upon them in golden lettering. My body would simply vanish, burn out in Venus’s atmosphere, cause the smallest belch of an eruption. And along with my body would go everything else—the sensations, pleasures, and worries that I could not stop from unfolding in my mind: people I have loved, breakfasts served as dinners and dinner cocktails served as breakfasts, changes in weather patterns, fresh chocolate cake, my hair growing gray, Sunday crosswords, science fiction films, an awareness of the world consumed by financial collapse or environmental disaster or a flu named after yet another harmless animal. Death would be so much easier to dance with if it weren’t surrounded by the clutter of civilization. I reached Hanu?.
“Skinny human,” he said, “I wish to experience the ash of your ancestor.”
I felt the outline of the cigar box inside my pocket. This was the time. Nothing could make it clearer but the universe speaking it aloud. I removed the box from my pocket and opened it and looked inside the silk pouch. There rested the powdered calcium of bones that once held my grandfather together, along with bits of magnesium and salt, the very last chemical remnants of a body that had farmed and drunk beer and thrown punches with the verve of a Slavic god. Behind me, Hanu? studied the powder with all of his eyes.
“May I?” he asked.
“Yes.”
He delicately reached a leg over my shoulder and submerged the sharp tip inside the pouch.
“The magic of fire,” he said. “A human mystery I find difficult to understand. How do you feel about this, skinny human? Are you fond of fire?”
“It releases us from the constraints of the body.”
“We do not view bodies as prisons.”
“That’s magic too,” I said.
Hanu? removed his leg. I turned the pouch inside out and watched the immortal powder slip out, the specks divided and floating in all directions until they created a new pretend galaxy, the first one made by man, the first one made of man. A tomb worthy of Emil Procházka, perhaps the last Great Man of Earth, who, were he present to witness this dispersion of his own remains, would light a cigarette and shake his head and say, Jakub, all this foolishness, should’ve just put me in the ground so the worms could have a snack, but I knew that he would love me for it, that he would understand my need for the grand gesture. An honest good-bye. What kind of resting place purchased on Earth with my hero’s salary could ever match the silence and dignity of Space? The grains of dust floated toward the purple core until they vanished.
“This is the Beginning,” I told Hanu?.
“It is the Beginning I know,” he said. “Perhaps there was one before it, perhaps not.”
“Are we headed there?”
“Yes. But ask the question that is on your mind first.”
“Rusalka. Can you find it?”
Hanu? closed his eyes, and a faint, popping sound of the opera resonated within my mind. Occasionally, the recording was interrupted by random voices, snippets of pop music, the deep, dark voices of demons, the sighs of copulating lovers, sirens, dial-up modems, but Hanu? kept the recording clean enough to soothe my nausea, and to give me the kind of peace experienced on a Sunday morning among soft sheets and drawn curtains.
“What is it like, your death?” I said.
“Sooner or later, the Gorompeds of Death consume all. They have come for me.”
He lifted one of his legs. In the space where the leg attached to his torso, there were enormous transparent blisters, diseased and foreign. They were filled with a phosphorescent yellow liquid in which swarms of what looked like ticks floated from one side to another in perfect synchrony. There must have been thousands of them. One of the blisters popped, and the liquid leaked onto Hanu?’s belly as the miniature critters scattered into his pores.
“Soon,” he said, “they will weaken me enough to consume my flesh. But I will not let them. I will enter the Beginning with you, skinny human. Death cannot reach us there.”
“You’re dying?”
“Yes. I have been for some time now.”
“Hanu?. Does it hurt?”
“I feel it, this fear of yours. I hesitate to depart. If our Elders knew, they would strike me down with sharongu spears. To fear a truth! Blasphemy! Alas, fear is what I’ve found, here within the brilliance of Earthlings.”