The postmortem confirmed that the branch had struck her on the temple, probably knocking her out instantaneously. Her dutiful IT had stopped the bleeding and protected her brain from the possibility of long-term damage, but it hadn’t been able to lift her head above the surface to let her breathe.

Many people can’t immediately take in news of the death of someone they love. The event defies belief and generates reflexive denial. I didn’t react that way, although some of the others did. We all had mortal parents—and we had all lost at least some of them—but Grizel had been a ZT like us, capable of living for centuries, and perhaps millennia. Camilla’s reaction was the most perverse; even after seeing the body she simply couldn’t get her head around the idea that Grizel was dead and wouldn’t hear the words spoken. The three Rainmakers admitted the fact readily enough but shrugged it off with set features and ready clichés.

With me, on the other hand, it was not merely belief that was instantaneous. I immediately gave way under its pressure. When I was told that her body had been found and the last vestige of hope disappeared I literally fell over, because my legs wouldn’t support me. It was another psychosomatic failure about which my internal machinery could do nothing, just like the seasickness that had saved me from the backflip of the Genesis.

I wept uncontrollably. None of the others did—not even Axel, who’d been closer to Grizel than anyone else, including Camilla. They were sympathetic at first, but it wasn’t long before a note of annoyance began to creep into their reassurances. I was disturbing them, putting a strain on their own coping strategies.

“Come on, Morty,” Eve said, voicing the thought the rest of them were too diplomatic to let out. “You know more about death than any of us. If it doesn’t help you to get a grip when you’re confronted with the reality, what good has all that research done you?”

She was right, after a fashion, but also very wrong. Jodocus and Minna had often tried to suggest, albeit delicately, that mine was an essentially unhealthy fascination, and now they felt vindicated. Unlike Camilla and Axel, who kept conspicuously quiet because they were having their own acute problems dealing with upwelling grief, they weighed in with Eve, presumably attempting to get over their own reflexive denial by criticizing my acceptance.

“If you’d actually bothered to read my commentary-in-progress, Evie,” I retorted, “you’d know that it has nothing complimentary to say about the philosophical acceptance of death. It sees a sharp awareness of mortality and the capacity to feel the horror of death so keenly as key forces driving early human evolution. If Homo erectushadn’t felt and fought the knowledge of his own mortality with such desperation and courage, sapiensmight never have emerged.”

“But you don’t have to act it out so flamboyantly,” Jodocus came back, ineptly using cruelty to conceal and assuage his own misery. “We’ve evolved beyond sapiensnow, let alone erectus.We’ve gotten past the tyranny of primitive emotion. We’ve matured.” Jodocus was the oldest of us, and he had lately begun to seem much older than ten years my senior, although he was still some way short of his first century. Had he been a falsie he’d have been booking a date for his first rejuve, and the rhythms of social tradition seemed to be producing some kind of weird existential echo in his being.

“It’s what I feel,” I told him, retreating into uncompromising assertion. “I can’t help it. Grizel’s dead, and I couldn’t save her. She might have told a few lies in her time, but she didn’t deserve to die. I’m entitled to cry.”

“We allloved her,” Eve reminded me. “We’ll all miss her. Nobody deserves to die, but sometimes it happens, even to people like us. You’re not provinganything, Morty.”

What she meant was that I wasn’t proving anything except my own instability, but she spoke more accurately than she thought. I wasn’t proving anything at all. I was just reacting—atavistically, perhaps, but with crude honesty and authentically childlike innocence. But I hadlaid the theoretical groundwork for that reaction in the still-unpublished Prehistory of Death.I hadargued that my reaction was the kind of reaction that had propelled the Old Human Race out of apehood and into wisdom, and I was damned if I was going to be told by a bunch of amateurs who were still in denial that I ought to put on a braver face.

“We have to pull together now,” Camilla put in, “for Grizel’s sake.”

If only it had been that easy. In fact, we all flew apart with remarkable rapidity. Our little knot in the fabric of neohuman society dissolved into the warp and weft, almost as if it had never been—or so it seemed at the time. Much later, I came to realize that it had made a much deeper and more indelible mark on me than I knew; I suspect that it was the same for the others in spite of all their stiff-jawed self-control.

It’s not obvious why a death in the family almost always leads to divorce in childless marriages, but that’s the way it works. Camilla wasn’t being foolish—such a loss doesforce the survivors to pull together—but the process of pulling together usually serves only to emphasize the fragility and incompleteness of the unit.

We all went our separate ways before the century ended, even the three Rainmakers. From then on, they worked on the management of separate storms.

TWENTY-ONE

The first edition of the introductory section of my History of Death, entitled The Prehistory of Death, was launched into the Labyrinth in 21 January 2614.

As with any modern work of scholarship, the greater part of The Prehistory of Deathwas designed as an aleph:a tiny point whose radiants shone in every direction and spread into the vast multidimensional edifice of the web to connect up billions of data into a new and hopefully interesting pattern. Many contemporary works did no more than that, and there was a zealous school of thought which insisted that a true historian ought not to attempt any more than that. A scientifichistorian, these zealots claimed, ought not to dabble in commentary at all; his task was merely to organize the data in such a way that they could best speak for themselves. In this view, any historian who supplied a commentary was superimposing on the data a narrative of his own, which was at best superfluous and at worst distortive.

My response to that argument was identical to Julius Ngomi’s: allhistory is fantasy.

I do not mean by this that history is devoid of brute facts or that historians ought not to aim for accuracy in the accumulation and cross-correlation of those facts. The facts of history are, however, documents and artifacts of human manufacture; they cannot be understood in any terms other than the motives of their makers. There is a tiny minority of documents whose purpose is to provide an impersonal, accurate, and objective record of events, but there is a wealth of complication even in the notion of a record whose purpose is accuracy, and anyone who doubts that the compilers of supposedly objective accounts might sometimes have deceptive motives need only ask themselves whether it really is possible for economic historians to obtain a full and true picture of the financial transactions of the past by examining account books prepared to meet the requirements of tax assessment.

In order for a historian to understand the motives that lie behind the documents and artifacts that the people of the past have handed down to us it is always necessary to perform an act of imaginative identification. The historian must place himself, as it were, in the shoes of the maker: to participate as best he can in the act of making.