This was going to be a sprint, but Daylight Savings Time turned it into more of a drag. Oh well – speed is ultimately far less important than making it across the finish line.
–
How much must it have cost to haul an antique upright piano through a spaceport? Away from wherever it had once had sense and context, through cramped corridors and cryosleep-surly crowds and airlocks and years to where it now stood, against a backdrop of gliding stars?
Filmed with dust, striped only where he had dragged his fingers across its lid? Its stool still stood tucked neatly under it – at the angle where it had been set up, its benefactor could easily have glanced over from a complex melody at the door and a guest entering, an engineered, grotesquely rich moment of ah, I didn’t see you there. Asshole.
What were the chances someone like that had died in whatever mechanical or navigational capital-I Incident had made the ship go dark? Slim to none. More likely, they had jetted out in the sort of life pod that came with velvet seats, leaving the crew to limp to port at a doomed fraction of the speed required to arrive within a human lifetime.
No bones. That was the only thing, though. No sign that anyone had lain down, finally, and died in those long-dark, space-silent halls. No impromptu mummies poorly preserved in cryo units long since dry of power.
Only the one life pod socket, long since empty. He hadn’t searched every hall and cabinet to the stern yet, of course, but everywhere a person might want to die, everywhere they might lie down if they had a choice, if he imagined having a choice, was bare of life’s remains. So where had they all gone?
He lifted the piano’s lid. Place of honour in the ‘captain’s’ quarters, as if that title had meant more, in centuries, than the one with money enough to paint their name on the side. The one with a view of the stars, a little light, music, and a way out if everything went wrong.
He brought his hand down on the keys, testing them and the atmosphere for sound. He would have said there was none, just the dull, clunking feel of dead controls, except that-
Except that touching them filled him with the sudden, seen, guilty feeling of a cough in a silence. The stars glided past on a course that, unpowered, would reach no port before he and his hypothetical children were dust. His last act on that doomed derelict would be to plant the burn-out thrusters that would nudge its course just enough to point it nowhere instead.
A dead drift between the stars, forever. He hastily closed the piano’s lid. Too old in his trade for superstitions, far too goddamn old, but it seemed to him, suddenly, that he had best hurry on to that last act just as fast as he could.
