CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE #2
“I would have gone after her, but part of the ceiling collapsed. I was just kind of stuck in the middle of the stairs, with fire in both directions, and…” He took a shuddering breath, and I thought I felt wetness against my shoulder. I wasn’t going to move to find out for certain.
“I’d got halfway through climbing the railing – I figured I could climb up the side to get to her.
” His voice cracked halfway through the sentence.
“Then the firefighters broke down the door and… Honestly, I don’t remember a whole lot after that.
I remember being dragged out of the house by a firefighter, screaming that my sister was still inside.
It’s weird, but in my memory, one of the walls collapsed after they dragged me outside.
But if I was outside, I don’t know how I would have seen that happen.
I don’t remember the pain until I woke up in the hospital.
I was pretty doped up on drugs, but I remember going to see my sister.
She was…” He trailed off and didn’t finish the sentence.
The silence was filled by the incongruous sound of Mr Beans purring loudly.
“The cat didn’t survive,” my master said, a minute or two later. “I don’t really know what happened, just that the fire chief came to see me later, and he said the cat didn’t survive. She died two days later.”
I assumed he meant his sister, rather than the cat.
By the stars, I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
I'd been trained in a thousand different ways to bring a man pleasure, but not in a single one to bring him comfort.
But nonetheless, one glaring detail stood out from the story, a detail that should most certainly be attended to. “What was her name?” I asked him.
“Janice,” he whispered into my chest. “Janey. I did everything for her, made sure she had everything she needed. She wanted to be a pilot. To fly space ships to other planets, and explore new regions of the galaxy. She wanted to live. And then she died, and I’ve just sat here on this one property and pretended the rest of the galaxy doesn’t exist.”
“And now, we’re going to change the future for an entire species,” I reminded him, without thinking the words through before I said them.
But on reflection, I thought perhaps it wasn’t a terrible thing to say.
“It’s okay to take some time to recover after losing someone important to you.
But sooner or later, you want to start living again. And that’s okay too.”
The silence settled, and eventually, Mr Beans stopped purring, succumbing to sleep and kitty-flavoured dreams of chasing butterflies and climbing trees.
I wondered if my master had fallen asleep, but his breathing didn’t seem quite even enough for that.
Outside, a frog started croaking, soon to be answered by another frog, further away.
“May I ask you something personal?” I asked at length, still certain that my master was not asleep.
"Yeah," came his mumbled reply. “What’s up?”
“Earlier today, you said that Bribie would see his master again in the next world,” I said. “The Eumadians don’t believe anything much about the afterlife, but I’m aware that many other species do. So I was wondering… Do you think that I will see my master again, after I die?”
My master lifted his head off my chest, and I could feel his gaze on me in the darkness. I dared to look in his direction, and I could see his frown in the moonlight. “Do you want to see him again?” he asked finally.
“No,” I said firmly. “He was not a nice man. I don’t want to see him again. But he owned me, so…”
My master shook his head. “I told Bribie he’d see his owner because I assumed that’s who he’d want to see.
As far as I’m aware, he was very well looked after until his owner died.
But if you don’t want to see your old master again, I don’t see why you should have to.
I don’t have any particular beliefs about the afterlife, but I don’t see that it makes any sense for any given deity to go out of their way to make us miserable. ”
“Hm.” It was as good an answer as I was going to get, and I decided to accept my master’s view of the cosmic order of things. Life could indeed be full of challenges, but I didn’t see any benefit in any deity deliberately making things harder than they needed to be.
But several minutes later, as I was beginning to drift into sleep, my master spoke again. “Is there anyone you would want to see, after you die? I’d want to see my sister, and my parents, and a whole bunch of animals. But what about you?”
It seemed ridiculous, how rapidly I was becoming attached to my master.
I’d only been here for a week. He’d only had sex with me once, and there were so many things that would be changing in the near future with the new colony.
In a year’s time, our lives would likely look very different from the way they did now.
But nonetheless, I pressed my face against his hair and tightened my arm around his shoulder. “I think it would be wonderful to see you,” I said softly.
My master rubbed his cheek against my chest and stroked my ankle clumsily with his toes. “I think that sounds like a fantastic idea. But not for a long while yet. We’ve got a lot of living to do before we get there.”