Gunai seethed with sorrow and rage as she helped to prepare Kula's corpse for its final journey.
Kula had always delighted in her body, its warm and golden glow, the way it flowed into a thousand useful and expressive shapes. She had explored the universe with its senses and reached out with its fields. Now it was nothing but a senseless lump of flesh and brain and polymer, a cold mockery of what she had been. Kula the person was gone. Taken by a wolf.
The torn and ravaged corpse floated between Gunai and Old John, barely visible in the dim starlight. The other members of the tribe were gathered in a sphere around them, their glowing forms held in angular shapes of grief as Old John spoke the words of Kula's eulogy.
More than Kula's life had been lost in the attack. Kula had carried a child, conceived at their recent meeting with the tribe of Yeoshi. Gone now, along with whatever fraction of the father's memories it had carried. Even Kula's intuition, one of the best in the tribe, was gone. A compound tragedy.
"We mourn and remember Kula," Old John concluded. "For as long as we remember her, in a very real way she still lives."
"We mourn and remember Kula," they all said, and paused for silent reflection.
Unwillingly, Gunai's mind returned to the moment when Kula's screams had been their first notice. She blamed herself. Kula should not have strayed so far from the tribe, she knew; Enaji and Huss should have kept a better lookout; Yaeri should have called a warning. But Gunai, as tribe leader, was ultimately responsible. She should have recognized the danger, should have prevented it somehow. That knowledge pained her, burned from the inside like the hunger that chewed at her belly.
Old John caught Gunai's attention. His form did not show emotion like a normal person's; it was fixed in an archaic five-lobed shape. But through long acquaintance Gunai had learned to read his attitudes and intentions. Without a word, Gunai and Old John grasped Kula's body with their fields and accelerated it toward the nearest star.
The cold and lifeless thing quickly faded from view--just another bit of dark matter in a cooling universe. The tribe stared after it long after it had vanished, then gathered together in a group embrace of sorrow and reassurance. They held each other for a long time, but eventually, one by one, they drifted away to forage for food. Not even grief was stronger than hunger.
Gunai made sure all four lookouts were at their stations before she allowed herself to begin foraging.
After a time she found a small patch of zeren. She spread across it, taking a little solace from its sparkling sweetness. "Zero-point energy" was what Old John called it, but to Gunai and the rest of her tribe it was zeren, delicious and rare. Gunai recalled a time when zeren was something you could almost ignore--a constant crackling thrum beneath the surface of perception--but now there were just a few thin patches here and there. These days the tribe subsisted mostly on a thin diet of starlight, and even that was growing cold. Soon they would be forced to move on again. Yeoshi had told her the foraging was better in the direction of the galactic core, but it was so far...
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