The Oolom cemetery sat a good ways outside Bonaventure city limits — in the tundra forest, where every footstep got muffled by frost-green carpet moss.

I liked the quiet. Serene. Somber. No hint of maudlin.

Homo sap cemeteries were another story. Most looked like tarted-up boneyards — young as their fresh paint and thinly populated. Our species hadn’t lived long enough on Demoth to lose our oldest generation. Just accident victims like my father.

Dads had been buried in an empty field outside Sallysweet River: no trees, no Other gravestones, just a hectare of uncut yellow-grass with a coffin-sized hole in the middle. The only field near town with deep enough soil to dig a decent grave.

But at Chappalar’s interment, we had moss and trees and silence.

The thaw was four days old now. You could still see snow streaks hiding in crannies, but the open areas were clear and dry. If you pressed down hard with one foot, you could hear mud squishing under the moss. I don’t know why I kept doing that.

All the Bonaventure proctors came to the funeral, of course. Plus an Oolom I didn’t recognize — an older man wearing shade-mist goggles. My jaw clenched like stone at the sight of those goggles; they were worn by plague victims who’d never regained use of their eyelids. The goggles kept out dust, and preserved corneal humidity by spritzing up a wisp of mist every so often. In bright light they darkened: an artificial squint.

Simple things, those goggles. Not sinister — just a practical solution to a low-grade problem. But. They brought back unwanted memories of the Circus. A hundred and twenty white-on-white Ooloms wearing the same kind of goggles under the Big Top.

"Who’s the stranger?" I whispered to the person beside me: Jupkur, an Oolom proctor who’d taken my arm as we walked to the burial site.

Jupkur followed my gaze, then let his eyes slip past to pretend he hadn’t been staring. "Master Tic," Jupkur replied, barely mouthing the words. "Just arrived to replace Chappalar."

"He’s a master proctor?"

"Yes."

"And they bungholed him to Bonaventure?"

"Yes."

Jupkur turned away quickly and made some lame remark about the weather to the person on his other side. I took the hint… but only for here and now. Next time I got Jupkur in private, I’d coax the full story out of him.

Here’s the thing: the Vigil only granted the title "master" to a handful of people every generation — the keenest, the brightest, the best. Master proctors never got short-sheeted down to city politics, especially not to drowsy towns like Bonaventure. They scrutinized the world government and interplanetary affairs… like the trade treaty currently being hammered out between Demoth and the Divian Free Republic.

So what was a master proctor doing here? Whose wife had he been caught diddling?

Then again, you didn’t blackball an exalted master just for being caught on the wrong side of a bedroom door. And your average master proctor wasn’t interested in bed-hopping anyway — they were supposedly so near sainthood, you could use their peckers as night-lights.

If this Master Tic had got sent to Bonaventure, it was because the Vigil dearly wanted him here. Because there was important work for him to do.

What work? Especially with our city council on hiatus for a few weeks.

It had to be something to do with Chappalar’s death. And with the only proctor who’d survived the robot attacks.

My skin got a case of the goosecreeps. I had a feeling I’d be seeing a lot more of Master Tic’s goggly eyes in the days to come.

At the gravesite, Chappalar’s family had already planted the roots of a snake-belly palm. It was a native Demoth tree and lightning fast-growing under the right conditions. In tropical jungles, a snake-belly would seed itself at the base of another tree, then climb that tree’s exterior in a solid sheath, like a snake swallowing the host tree trunk from the ground up. With enough water and sunlight, a snake-belly could sprout up a hand’s breadth every day — just a reed-thin shell around the host, letting the inner trunk sustain all the weight. Typical parasite behavior. Once in place, the snake-belly would digest the host trunk it had swallowed, little by little creating wood of its own from the outside in… till after a few decades, the host was fully consumed, leaving only a snake-belly with a solid wood core.

Down south, snake-bellies could grow around other snake-bellies, growing around their swallowed-up hosts. In the Pistolet Museum, they had a stump showing five separate snake-bellies in concentric rings round a toothpick core of original raspfeather.

In the Bonaventure Cemetery, we’d soon have a single snake-belly round a core of Chappalar.

They’d wrapped his body in a shroud of froth white silk. Half a dozen Oolom mourners had turned white themselves, though they stood on light green moss… the phenomenon of sympathetic transference, taking on someone else’s color in moments of heart-deep emotion. I wished I could go white with them, to show Chappalar/his family/myself that I truly felt the grief. But I stayed lumpishly Faye-colored as the pallbearers eased the body onto a wooden support stand atop the snake-belly roots.

A single Oolom child toddled forward and splashed soupy brown juice on the plant at Chappalar’s feet. Jupkur whispered that the liquid was fertilizer, laced with a mix of growth hormones. In a week, the tree would have swallowed Chappalar up to the ankles. By fall, the whole corpse would be wrapped in a snake-belly sheath. In thirty years give or take, my friend Chappalar, the man who died saving my life, would be entirely absorbed by the tree.

Even his bones. Ooloms have such precious lightweight bones.

Around us, no ornamental landscaping, no headstones, no crypts — just a forest of snake-belly palms, each one the height of a person.

By the end of the burial service, every Oolom was sympathetic white… all but Master Tic. That irked me: a peevish indignation on Chappalar’s behalf. I’d turn white if I could; why didn’t Tic?

To be fair, it wasn’t Tic’s fault: Oolom color changes aren’t consciously controlled. For Tic to turn white, he’d have to be overcome with grief — not likely, considering he’d never even met Chappalar. Tic had come to the funeral out of courtesy, showing polite respect… who could ask more?

I could. Seething-steaming-indignant.

Whenever I go to a funeral, there’s always something that makes me furious.

Ooloms don’t do tea and sympathy after a funeral. Instead, Chappalar’s family and the Oolom proctors glided off to the cemetery chapel, where (Jupkur said), "We’ll pray for just hours and hours. The priests’ major source of income is selling knee pads."

Jupkur hated to speak seriously about anything; but he wasn’t the only Oolom who turned jokily offhanded when the subject of religion came up. Ooloms didn’t talk to humans about what they believed — none of them did. Maybe that was an article of their faith, keeping mum in front of outsiders. An article of all their faiths, I should say… because whatever their religion was, it had three major denominations, plus various splinter groups. Each sect identified itself by a gobbledygook name that no one ever translated into English.

Secretive bunch, those Ooloms.

So the Ooloms went off by themselves, leaving me to walk home alone. A couple hours on foot through the countryside. Of course, the other human proctors offered me rides; but I hadn’t trekked through open tundra in years, and the quiet of it suddenly called to me. Being out among the trees, breathing the wet smell of spring, I’d been grabbed by a bubbly heartache for girlhood — for times long ago in Sallysweet River, where you could follow the Bullet tracks five minutes out of town and feel all alone on the planet.