That wasn’t so bad — nothing for me to do but wait and stay out of trouble.
I decided my one and only order would be to have the ship-soul lower the temperature in the lounge: make it a big walk-in refrigerator. There were dozens of dead people lying around, and I didn’t want them starting to rot.
My first inclination was to sit out the week in my cabin… but soon I couldn’t stand moping there, wallowing all morose. The crazy thing was, I wasn’t really mourning; I was feeling bad for not feeling worse. All those people dead people who’d talked with me and flirted with me, and even one who’d kissed me — but now that they were out of sight, I felt more alone than sad. Pitying my live healthy self rather than all those blank corpses.
What was wrong with me? Shouldn’t I be crying and grieving and all? But the most I could do was touch my lips over and over, like maybe if I remembered the kiss exactly, I would melt into some decent sorrow, the way a normal person would feel.
No. I just felt dull. Deadened and distant and dumb.
After a while, I decided this was no way for a captain to act. A good captain doesn’t hang about sulking, trying to prod himself into emotion; a good captain looks after his ship. Maybe when the crew members died, one of them had left the water running, or a pressure pot boiling up coffee. In my years at the Troyen moonbase, it’d been my job to watch for things like that. So I decided to walk around Willow, every square centimeter, hoping maybe I’d find something productive to do instead of brooding all by myself.