Chapter Three

It was a quiet ride to the media center once owned and operated by the late Percival Barnum, the humans I was with were all pensive and thoughtful. Fauve rested her arm on the base of the window and propped her head up in her hand while she watched the traffic go past outside.

William and Rebecca were silent in the front seat, while Byron looked out the opposite window and Boatswain and I sat in the rear seat in silence of our own. But where he was indifferent to the silence, I was observing it.

Humans are one of the only species on their planet to truly understand ‘death’. For all other forms of life, death is either only understood in the immediate sense, or not at all. A few, such as elephants, understand it in retrospect, but the ability to understand death for themselves as a natural and inevitable thing is unique to their species.

There are even intelligent species that do not fully grasp their own ends, even though they can grasp the deaths of others, it is simply a mental block they are unable to apply to themselves.

Humans however, live with this knowledge from childhood onward, and seeing the loss of someone they know, even briefly, can affect them deeply. The funeral rite we went through was relatively brief, fitting given the relative brevity of their lives, they can only spend so much time on anything, especially death.

But in the end, the funeral it seems, was not for the dead, rather it was for the living. They joined in common grief, brought him to his final resting place, and as I write this we are en route to celebrate his existence and settle his final affairs.

For all their unity in mourning however, each one was lost in their own thoughts, the Walker family knew Percival for only a brief time, they met him only once after all, but in that brief moment his impact was so powerful and so overwhelming that they felt his loss as if he were their own grandfather.

As if he were family.

The human capacity for grief, I believe, played directly into their capacity to love, they are from what I can see, creatures of great extremes. The human who picked up his severed arm and beat a Zenti cutter to death with it, had extreme rage. The human who set us all on our current course, was an extreme failure, with an extreme sense of selfishness. The human Percival was extreme in his eccentricity. Even the very moderate William was extreme in his love for his family, and Rebecca was no different.

I wanted to say something while I watched Fauve’s reflection in the clear window. I could see her eyes twitch, her face was flushed red, but she wasn’t crying. She was wearing a stoic, steady expression that seemed odd in her ‘Barnum costume’.

I think she wanted to cry, but she didn’t want to do it around anyone. It seemed very much like her. She never, as far as I know, revealed the extent of the harassment she received, and even I only knew a fragment of it. When she wept and was in distress, she hid it. This may seem strange, given her openness toward me and the excellent relationship she had with her family.

But herein lies another oddity of humans, you will recall I’m sure how William acted to save face for me, coming up with an excuse for me to leave the waterpark and not telling Fauve why we’d come back. Appearances and dignity are of great concern to even the most open humans, their capacity for shame is as great in its extremes as anything else.

Strangely, looking back, I wonder if that might have been part of Wolfbeard’s failing, he had no sense of shame, and so he never bothered to learn how to behave?

I couldn’t be sure, but it is worthy of further study, shame, or the fear of it, acts as a deterrent to negative behavior, however in this instance, it acted as a deterrent to positive behavior.

By ‘positive behavior’ I mean that while watching Fauve bite her lower lip to stop it from quivering and occasionally she touched the corner of her eye to hide a stray tear, I can’t help but think that she must have been suffering.

The brief time with Percival changed everything, in some human stories, a knight rides in out of nowhere and saves the day, charging in to save people in a time of desperation. To Fauve, the arrival of the old man and the way he prepared her to turn it all around, must have been like that. Now he was gone, his brief appearance altered everything in the darkest hour of her young life, and just like that time snatched him away.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

And yet she was afraid to show how much that mattered to her.

To her left, Byron appeared to feel somewhat less, at least he didn’t seem to struggle to control it. As a veteran soldier who lived through somewhat chaotic times and places while Earth modernized and danger was still to be found, I couldn’t help but think he’d lost people before.

Perhaps that was it, humans call it ‘case hardening’ where a person is exposed to something enough, it loses its impact. Much like most races are able to gain immunity to poison by frequent exposure, they are able by the same token, to build up resistance to strong emotions that are brought up by loss.

I didn’t envy anyone that immunity.

When we arrived at the center, it was at the back entrance we used previously, though we parked much closer and found a slew of young men and women in matching ‘Barnum costumes’ standing by waiting to accept our keys. These were ‘valets’, their purpose being to take the car once it is parked for a moment, then move it somewhere else, then return it to you when you are ready to go.

It is a peculiar custom, but when I saw other cars begin to fill the parking lot, I began to see why the job was invented.

“The reading of the will.” Byron grumbled. “Percival was loaded.” He snorted a little, “The old man… he was a good one, but he wasn’t above cheating a little if he thought he was justified in doing it.”

“Cheating ‘how’?” I had to ask as we exited the vehicle.

Byron waited until the car was away and we were unobserved, “I don’t know the details, but a few times the old man had me act as a bodyguard for folks who had only one job. Hold on to money. Pretty clever, really, he’d hire somebody, put millions into a bank account in their name, they sign a contract promising never to spend it, and they get paid out of the accrued interest. I’m not supposed to know but…” Byron chuckled a little, “One of them talked in his sleep.”

“So he cheated on his taxes?” William asked as we headed toward the door a few dozen paces behind Teresa and her immediate family.

“Yeah, I guess. It was probably paid out of the bank accounts his hirees held, but it also meant that he had access to a lot more money than people are supposed to as private citizens.” Byron answered with a passive shrug.

“He wasn’t worried about being cheated? I mean if the money is technically theirs, a contract like that isn’t really… I don’t know, wouldn’t that get him into trouble?” Fauve asked, her boundless curiosity buried her silent grief for a moment, and again Byron only shrugged.

“The ones I met weren’t about to screw up a good thing, they were students, employees, people he hand picked, and Mr. Barnum, he knew how to pick people. He had a real sense about them, like he could sniff out corruption, he always said something, ‘It isn’t the power corrupts, it’s that it reveals corruption.’ After doing this for years… yeah, I think the old man was right.” Byron said and then stopped talking as we approached the reception desk and caught up with Teresa.

There was a book at the front where each person in turn stopped, bent over, and then moved on. When we got to the front I realized what it was. It was a ‘guest book’. These books are simple blank sheets of lined paper where people inscribe their names to mark their presence, and in this case each person also added a sentence beside their name.

When it came time for me to sign, I took up the little black pen and touched it to the paper, pretending to think over what to write, I was actually scanning what others wrote for themselves. Fauve predictably wrote simply, ‘Thank you, Mr. Barnum.’ Nothing flowery, but I had no doubt of her sincerity.

Don’t say much, but mean what you say, it’s the dlamisa way, and even after being here for a while now, it was still strange to see how our species sometimes overlapped.

At this particular juncture in time, my world and Earth were in negotiations over resource trades and the first joint force operations were being drawn up, and from what I saw on the broadcom channels, it was a shock to most of the other galactic nations that we were getting along so well.

Dlamisa has always had an aggressive foreign policy, but when our leaders met with humans, they seemed to simply ‘click’ and negotiations were moving at a rapid pace.

Fauve’s little four word sentence seemed to me to be a microcosm of our common ground, a tiny example of a much larger shared compatibility.

I couldn’t delay forever though, so I quickly wrote, “Bailey was here, and is glad he was.”

That was true enough, while it was hard not to like Percival, I just hadn’t felt the same way as Fauve or the others, though perhaps with time, I could have.

“This way.” Teresa said, and gestured toward a very familiar path, “It’s been set up as a dining hall for the occasion, and no expense has been spared for my grandfather’s last dinner party.”

I had to ask, “Isn’t it a little early for dinner?”

Teresa wiped her eyes and cracked a smile when she said, “He said to tell the one who asked that, ‘You’re asking an awful lot, to ask the dead to care about the time of day.’ now if you will?”

There was a round of laughter, from the lot of us at Percival’s final joke, and from there, we followed Teresa into the dining hall for the old man’s last ‘dinner party’.