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81.
They came to the lake.
Tzoofaa pointed. He was a younger man, quicker of step, and he walked out into the lake up to his thighs. He pointed with his spear. “She is in there,” he said, pointing to the gloomy mustard-green water that flowed slowly. Bits of debris floated on the surface, and thousands of insects and tiny birds flitted about.
Keetoo stood on the bank with a dark and troubled look. “Leave her alone. Her spirit is in the river.”
Tzoofaa said: “We put the dead LooWoo! in the ground, but if the river takes one we do not take him back. The river will be mad at us.”
“I just want to see her,” Alex said. He had no idea why. It was a human thing, he supposed. Maybe these people did not have the urge to gaze on their dead one last time to say goodbye. “I have to wish her well.”
“That is correct,” Keetoo said, brightening. “That you must. Go. She is waiting.” He pointed at the opaque surface.
Alex looked about, triangulating to the best of his ability. Then he took a deep breath and dove in.
He was filled with a mixture of dread and anticipation. His heart pounded in his ears, and his stomach was in knots. He was terrified of how she might look, but he had to see her, touch her, just one last time. He did a gentle dive, head and arms forward, into the water.
The water was cool, as he eased in, and rich with tiny life. A slow but strong current pushed to his right, and he had to resist being nudged from his path. The soft, silty ground dropped away and he found himself swimming in deeper water. Light fell in from above and diffused into a wide bluish glow with pale edges that lay in gradients within the murky greenish water. Little bits of black debris twirled slowly as they moved with hidden currents. And the water was alive with tiny wriggling life forms. Wormlike things wriggled about in schools, one layer over the other, in complex patterns. Tiny fish darted here and there. Tadpoles, frogs, or their descendants, all busily trawled through the water looking for their daily sustenance.
Alex rose for air several times. He snorted, blowing tiny wrigglers from his nose and mouth. He couldn’t feel them, but he knew they were there looking for microscopic morsels. Tzoofaa and Keetoo stood silently on the muddy bank, keeping watch.
Alex dove back down, paddling among submerged boulders and fallen trees whose broken branches stuck up like bleached bones. Everything under the water, touched by that light, had an unnatural light-green glow, almost like radiation.
He found her on a bare bank of mud, naked and peaceful. She lay on her back with her legs loosely outstretched. The shaft still penetrated her torso. Her left arm lay palm-down by her side, and the right arm was slightly upraised, flung upward in her dying moments, so that it looked as if she were gesturing. In fact, her index finger was curled less than the other fingers, as if she were making a point. Her face was relaxed and without expression. Her eyes were open just a tiny bit, so that unseeing eyes glittered faintly behind them. Her head was turned slightly to one side, and her hair floated gently around her cheeks. Her lips looked blue, her nose white, and tiny bubbles still came from her ears, nose, and mouth.
Alex rose to the surface for a long breath. He signaled to the two LooWoo! that he’d found her, then jackknifed and dove back down with paddling motions until he landed on his knees in the silt. Ravaged and shaken by a grief pressing him on all sides like the water itself, he moved into position so that his face was just two feet from hers, almost to pretend somehow that he could lock gazes with her. The illusion almost worked for a second. Debris and wrigglers drifted by. He shooed away a small fish that came to explore her pale thigh.
He swam back up to the surface for air, then dove back down for a last look.
As he regarded her lovingly, in his bereavement, he reached out to run his hand along the smooth, firm undulations of her abdomen and belly.
As his fingertips exerted the slightest pressure on her skin, the water clouded and her abdomen collapsed into her ribs, and clouds of tiny wriggling things rose brightly, green and yellow, toward the sunlight.
In a spontaneous motion of regret and horror, he touched her cheeks. He was thinking apologies, as if he had hurt her. Again, her face changed, and the wrigglers puffed up around her as her skin sank down over the contours of her skull.
He touched two more spots, full of disbelief, her ankle and her forearm, and the same thing happened. Just as the earth took care of itself, cleaning its wounds and taking its children back into its bosom, so the intricate design of L5 acted like a copy of the mother world. L5 was digesting her body.
Exhaling with horror and shock, Alex left a trail of air bubbles from his mouth as he shot quickly to the surface. He gasped, treading water and holding his head in his hands in disbelief at what he had seen.
This much was true: He had said goodbye, and he now knew for sure that part of his life was over. Once again, fate had struck him with a hammer blow, and he must move on. He did not want to see what was down there, ever again. It would be best to remember her as she’d been in life.
L5 would take good care of this child of earth, he knew, and of him when he went, which might as well be soon for he had lost the love to live.
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