The immediate excitement had lifted them from the shock of finding out that the wathans were gone and the records erased. They were not concentrating on the numbing realization that they would be dead forever the next time they died. Or that those still alive in The Valley would not be raised again after they had died. Or that all that they had suffered to get here had been in vain.
No, he thought. It was not in vain, not wasted time. We have lived far longer than we thought we would when we died on Earth. Our youthful bodies were restored, and we fought and loved with the full vigor of youth and perfect health. We lived fiercely, we were active, and we worked hard for a goal. It has been worthwhile. And if we can live until the Gardenworlders come, we … no. This phase of the project will be over, and we must die to make room for the resurrected in the next.
He would worry about that when the time came. Just now, the only thing to consider was the Snark.
“There’s the screen,” Frigate said. Burton got up and walked to the console in the corner. Gull looked out from the display. Seeing Burton, he said, “Good morning. I don’t know what the matter is, but the door won’t open for me.”
“That’s strange,” Burton said. “Have you asked the Computer why?”
“Of course, but it says that it does not know.”
“We’ll see what we can do about it,” Burton said. “Meanwhile, you don’t have to starve. Get yourself breakfast, and we’ll investigate.”
When the screen had become blank, Burton asked that the screen in his bedroom be activated. It showed the room at once—Burton had not been sure that it would not have been cut off—and he saw that the bed was unoccupied. Star Spoon was not in sight, but she could be in the bathroom. He verified that his voice could be transmitted, and he called her loudly. Though he repeated her name several times, he was not answered.
“She’s gone.”
Frigate said, “Where’s her body?”
“I don’t know,” Burton said. “We’ll have to find out.”
They went down the bedroom hall, all armed with beamers. Burton and Li Po used them to burn the sealing agent off. Since the smoke had an acrid odor, which made them cough, they had to slow down the burning to give the air-conditioning time to suck the smoke away. When the last of the glossy violet substance was gone, Burton gave the codeword, and the door swung open. Cautiously, he entered first, the beamer ready. The bedroom and bathroom were empty.
“She must have killed herself by stepping into the converter cabinet and having it incinerate her,” Frigate said.
“That would make her disappearance more mysterious,” Burton said. “I wonder where she could be”
Alice said, “You don’t seem surprised, Dick.”
“No. I didn’t think that Gull had had time to learn how to operate the Computer well enough to do all the Snark has done.”
“For God’s sake!” Frigate said, “Why would she do that? What did she have against us? She must hate us! Everybody! Why?”
“I think,” Li Po said, “that she has always been very sad behind that merry face she put on. She has had a bad life, many bad times, anyway, so many that she thinks of her life as all bad, too horrible to endure any longer. She has suffered so much, been raped and abused so much, and the attack by Dunaway was just too much. 1 think—I could be wrong, though I doubt it—that she decided that we would all be better off dead. She’d be better off dead. Everybody would be. She told me more than once that she was sorry that we had been resurrected, that it was horrible that no one could take refuge even in death. Did she ever say anything like that to you, Dick?”
“Several times.”
“There has to be more than that to it,” Frigate said. “If she wanted to be dead forever, all she had to do was erase her own recordings.”
“She’s not sane,” Burton said. “She may have it in her mind that she’s doing everybody a favor by making sure that they don’t have to suffer as she did. Also, I suppose, she wishes to insure that those who made others suffer could no longer do that.”