Incense fogged up the Food District—not the official name, a moniker only because of the food stalls, including Hui selling her pig’s blood cake. Even though the ersatz pig was from protein growth tanks and the blood not exactly blood but leftover protein nutrient baths. Instead of the light pink, mildly red of actual pig’s blood cake, Hui’s dishes had a dark red, almost black color. A bit of garlic, some chives and radish, and ridiculously expensive rice, and Gabriel felt right at home.
Save for the thick nitrogen atmosphere overhead and the looming walls of the caldera.
Necropolis sat in the crater of a caldera, creating a natural bubble to capture the thin oxygen, some from the initial reclamation with carbon dioxide scrubbers, others from the gene-mod bamboo growing in wild, chaotic, clustered patches. Geothermal piping provided some heat, but everyone wore heat-insulated jackets. Everyone also carried blood oxygenator injectors like gold, except gold was non-existent here, too much mass to carry on a ship and not important enough to exclusively mine for.
“Do you have tea?” Gabriel asked.
“Too expensive this time around.” Hui shook her head. She avoided looking directly in his eyes. “How many?”
“A hundred and six days.”
Hui now looked directly at Gabriel, giving an expression he recognized, a look she gave all the old timers, the ones hitting a couple hundred, three hundred-plus days. A look of pity, sympathy, but also a “WTF is wrong with you” look. An auntie look. A look reserved for memory-eaters.
A smattering of travelers coming to Necropolis are rich tourists or funding-starved archeologists, those with the means to stay and explore the city. The rest bring the ashes of their dead in hopes the city can help them commune with their memory. A lucky few do find some catharsis. Most leave disappointed. Some stay, delving into one memory or another, getting lost more and more. Memory-eaters.
Before they get called memory-eaters, the people who arrive in Necropolis call themselves pilgrims. Each carry their loved one’s ashes in a small container: pendants, lightweight polymer spheres or cubes, small urns. Like all of the other pilgrims, Gabriel had stood disappointed on the landing pad, looking out over the caldera, a wasteland with sulfuric steam lazily wisping up the caldera walls. (Necropolis orbits close enough to the rogue ice giant Hades that its gravity causes only mild volcanic activity, good for geothermal power with the occasional earthquake.) Following the trail of mourners, pausing to inject some oxygen, Gabriel swore he could smell a dry, acrid, perpetually autumnal air, while keeping an eye on the pale, red light strips on both sides of the well-worn path.
People clustered ahead, and he welcomed the rest. Some people sat on the ground, others bent over, breathing heavily, heads down and hands on knees. When he finally reached the cluster, he saw them all touching a column of some lighter-colored concrete-like material, embedded in the volcanic stone. Everyone had removed their gloves. He could see shapes and patterns on the column, worn down by weather or by human hands, Gabriel couldn’t tell.
When he placed an ungloved hand onto the column, he
feels the strong fingers of his hand wrap around his tiny one, crushing his phalanges in an awkward way as he pulls him across the field away from the others as the sharp, orange scent of freshly cut grass bites at his olfactory organs and his ambulatory limbs stumble over his loose bindings even as he cries, “Please, I’m sorry, father!”
Gabriel pulled away and stumbled, falling to the ground, as the other pilgrims stood or sat or laid transfixed in memories. Those who hadn’t touched the wall helped him up, but they all asked, “What did you see? Who did you see? Is it true?”
“My father…no, a father…”
The pilgrims gasped and most rushed to touch the column but a few grabbed Gabriel, not to help him up, but to take part in his vision. The crowding, the pushing, the shoving, the shouting…too much commotion and not enough breathing, and for Gabriel it all went dark.
Gabriel had woken up in a first aid tent, halfway between the landing pad and the column. He had not noticed it when he walked past, as he kept his gaze down on the red-light strips. The people here weren’t medical doctors, mostly flight personnel with first aid experience. They had oxygen injectors, but also the tent was pressurized with oxygen.
Panic tightened around his heart and he patted himself and the cot he lay on. His vision turned red as he hyperventilated. The medic handed him the urn and leaned close with an injector. Gabriel pulled the urn tight to his chest and shook his head.
“I’m fine. I’m fine.”
Danny was the one who held him when he panicked: over Gabriel’s layoff, when the gestation procedures failed, when he had that health scare that eventually turned out to be nothing. (“See? We’re going to live together, forever,” Danny had said.) Gabriel always felt guilt over the fact that Danny had suffered too, but he just didn’t seem to show it.
From the medic, he learned the column, the Father Stone, had a gao memory of their father, but weathering, time, or constant human contact had weakened the memory property of the stone. Most felt nothing, a few a vague sensation of disappointment (though whether theirs or from the memory, no one can say definitively), and only a few, like Gabriel, got a full memory.
And he didn’t even want it.
He also learned the basic layout of Necropolis. Astrocartographers tried to name the rogue ice giant Mnemosyne. Archeologists called it Gaohome, but who cares what eggheads think? Several corporations had bought, renamed, and rebranded the planet, but when its import was the dead and its only exports memories and grief, the name Hades stuck.
And then you had Necropolis, one of Hades’s moons, its eponymous settlement divided into districts. The Food District had tent encampments and the food stalls, and was where most people buried their dead. The Water District had the human water reclamation systems and geothermal pumps.
But the Spirit District had the powerful, surreal memories: strange sensations and truly alien thoughts, of high concepts, ideas, bits of gao history. Archeologists and engineers lurked there. Rumors of drug users and sellers too. There were other rumors that someone had an alcohol still, but grain was too valuable to waste as alcohol. People who went there came back changed or wrong, including the scientists. The majority of the Spirit District population were the memory-eaters, bathing in the years, decades, maybe centuries of gao memories.
The medic shook her head and told Gabriel to bury his husband and get out. “Don’t become a memory-eater. Alien memories will just eat up your mind, over time.”
Whether the gao implanted their memory stones here as an archive or as a cemetery, no one could say yet. Some scientists thought the gao had made this moon a kind of amusement park. Only humans thought this place holy.
Walking into the Food District proper, he found that same concrete-like stone, shaped in statuary and architecture short enough to lie or sit on, like a commercial park in a busy city, but built into the earth, the side of the caldera crater. He found pilgrims lounging on the structures, contorting as if dreaming, eyes open and staring at nothing, sometimes whispering or shouting or weeping at a gao memory they mistook for their own. Trinkets with ashes in the center, urns, and small shrines decorated the whole space, a massive, makeshift columbarium. When Gabriel sat down, he
gasps for air as the current pulls him down again and this time some water gets into his breathing orifice causing him to cough out much needed air and the rising panic spreads to his appendages as they lash out at the water yet it does not let him go and he feels the fluids rush into his oxygenation organ threatening to dilute the blood pool and all he needs to do is find some solid land some anchor
It took all his will to pull away from the memory, his arms holding Danny’s urn so tight he bruised his ribs. Taking deep breaths in the oxygen-thin atmosphere did not calm his racing heart. Instead, the pain from the injector on the side of his neck provided the same stim.
Gabriel reminded himself he hadn’t come here to experience another being’s memories. He came here to reconcile his own.
The memory-eaters claimed truth seekers didn’t stay in the Food District for very long. The memories were too concrete, too obviously not-yours. Too real. Too gao. Memory-eaters looked for that soul-crushing loss, that gut-wrenching emptiness, the disturbing weirdness. The more crushing, the more weird, the better.
How did the gao mourn their dead? And in knowing, could it help us grieve?
A few tried the Water District only to get in trouble with the grumpy engineers. Memory-eaters weren’t looking for trouble or rational arguments about their safety, otherwise they’d have never come to Necropolis. They were still pilgrims, just a different kind.
Gabriel didn’t know what he was anymore. He clutched his polymer urn to his chest. As he feared, the memories of the Food District hadn’t given him any answers. Danny remained cold ash in the urn and not vibrant and alive. The urn was too small to fit in the hole in his heart. He needed to go deeper.
He smelled no incense here in the Spirit, a sign this wasn’t a place for honoring the dead but to find them in katabasis, like the tale of the buddha searching the hells for his mother. No one had put up any lights along the path here, and so Gabriel stumbled across comatose bodies on the floor, his hand-held light glowing a faint red. Someone offered him what looked to be an oxygen injector and he declined, then realized it was for drugs. He already knew the names for the different varieties, from soft to harsh, from depressants to stimulants, hallucinogens to enhancements.
A stone sculpture shaped vaguely like a chair had no occupant, so Gabriel set his urn down on one of the “arms,” sat down, and pressed his hands onto the cold stone
a mating ball of lovers press their bodies against each other grabbing at appendages and touching exposed sweaty skin angrily stumbling to the floor as the sun turns dim bathing them in purple shadows highlighting by the infrared lights of the street and the bitter scent of dust mixes with the dizzying scent of desire
The sensations almost made him vomit. He couldn’t help but stumble to another empty section to plunge his hand into the stone, cracking his knuckles and hurting his fingers
coiled together scales rubbing against scales skin shedding in relief from the nonstop itchiness under a warm sun and the warm sand sliding underneath and the comfortable weight of the rodent in your belly slowly dissolving but your companion is starving having been less lucky their scales dry and scarred
more, he needed more, there had to be an answer, it can’t all be nonsense
laying your skull down in the roots of a tree to return to where you came from the dirt in your eyes stones in your mouth
A memory-eater lifted up an injector and said, “For nausea,” and this time Gabriel agreed. It was also a familiar relaxant and an invitation as probing hands reached for him, sliding between his jacket and his heat cycle shirt. In a moment, he melted into the touch, thinking, remembering, re-remembering, experiencing, and re-experiencing until he became that slurry of lust, comfort, death, surrender, loneliness.
These were the things of poets, but before he completely succumbed, Gabriel thought this planet should belong to the epic, historical novelists.
He had been here before. Not Necropolis, but the liminal, numbed nothingness of a drug stupor. His family had put him under after Danny died, supposedly for his own good. The funeral, the storing of their possessions, the closing of his rental account, his hospital stay—all melted into each other. The anti-panic drugs made time float on by, a blur of eating, pissing, shitting, and sleeping.
And then he was “cured,” as the doctors proclaimed, or more likely, the treatment costs and hassle got too onerous for his family. He returned home with a prescription of drugs.
Maybe those were placebos or generics, but he came out of the haze long enough to overhear his family talk about Danny’s ashes:
“We really need to inter this thing.”
“Gabe should be doing that.”
“You think he’s going to be able to do that?”
“We have a nice columbarium by the family plot.”
“Gabe should choose where Danny is put.”
“It’s only temporary. He can be reburied later.”
That night, Gabriel packed up a few clothes, Danny’s urn, and the remaining drugs. He walked out the door and shipped himself to Necropolis.
“How long have you been here?” Gabriel asked.
“A thousand four hundred and thirty-six days,” said the memory-eater, almost with pride.
It wasn’t the number that brought Gabriel out of the slurry. Who knows how many days he had been here since the drugs and memories had dampened his hunger, but he felt desiccated, drained, dried up like Earth’s old tree leaves.
It was the last memory he touched that did it
coiled around the support bar they can’t understand the why of it their eyes narrow to slits and out the side ship window the fading sun’s light resolves the asteroid tumbling in the emptiness they reach out with their phalanges to try to catch the ever-shrinking rock and all they can think of is the endless cold empty nothingness those inside will face forever and ever and ever and ever and ever
Nothing like the adrenaline rush of panic to shake off a stupor and then tears to clear the heart and head. He held on to the urn for as long as the sobs continued, and when they stopped it was as if his chest had opened like a flower in a newly emerging sun that Hades will never see.
Danny never considered where he’d be buried: “I’d be dead, so what would I care?” He had no family plot, no family beyond Gabriel, and life was what concerned him. But Gabriel couldn’t believe that he should scatter Danny to the stars or dump him in a pit in a random cemetery.
What did Danny want?
Danny would probably never have come here. It was Gabriel who knew the actual name of the moon (Acheron), who had read all the papers about the gao and the memory stones. Gabriel read the false rumors about the memory-eaters, how the stones changed their genetics, that the gao reproduced through these stones. Danny called that “xenophobic nonsense” and Gabriel stuffed the fascination down deep, unwilling to admit he wanted to travel to a rogue planet out in the middle of empty space between Earth and the Centauri system.
No, Danny would have appreciated this moon. But in his own way. He’d see the people making pig’s blood cake, the medics volunteering at the tent, even the memory-eaters undulating down below as if they were snakes, and remark on how weird humans were.
The air was moist and sticky, the walls of the caverns slick and dripping. Gabriel heard the shallow breathing, the air rushing past in gulps, the floor and walls exhaling and inhaling, but was that the sound of the memory-eaters or the water reclamation and purification pumps?
The memory-eaters all clung to him weakly as he got up, grabbed the urn, and stumbled away. Their arms extended in the air left an image of desperation, the willingness to interpret the memories how they wanted, a bit too space hippie. He needed something more concrete, he needed food, he needed real sleep.
He had assumed Danny would be there always. Just one more year of work. Save more money. Flights back to Titan too expensive. Just another year. With life extensions, they should have had all the time in the galaxy to explore other worlds. Except, shuttle accident.
There was a possibility that the ashes in the urn contained shuttle.
There was a possibility that the ashes also had space dust.
An irony or poetic metaphor for an astro-engineer?
Gabriel had a mild headache, perhaps from coming off of the recreational drugs, perhaps due to low oxygen, so he rented an oxygenated chamber and purchased a sleeping bag for an outrageous amount. (Now he realized why pilgrims insisted on bringing camping supplies.)
The chamber was heated. Without embarrassment, he took off his dirty clothing to change in front of everyone. No one looked or glared or stared. Grief had pulled everyone within.
The chamber dripped with condensation, the geothermal heating and the aquifer giving rise to escaped steam. He found a driest-as-possible spot. He picked up the urn
a nanowire blade thinned by determination can solve this difficult problem
his hand went slack but he caught the urn in his other hand
a heart stilled against a thunder of engines lets me maintain some armor for the mind
he placed both hands on the urn
proton and antiproton annihilation and creation -1 + 1 = 0 but never true the loss is always greater than the fill leaving the community diminished
how could this polymer urn have memories like a gao stone?
empty space is more than an absence but the promise it will be filled with time
yes, this was what he had been looking for
becoming a quantum state a particle with discreet boundaries but a waveform merging with another the frequency increasing or becoming complex
this was Danny
The funeral urn remembered. Can a thing “re-member,” if the memory was new? And did the urn itself remember or did the ashes contain the memory? Gabriel could not bring himself to answer this question by opening the urn to touch the remains. He had a momentary image of ashes on his tongue. (And ashes was a misnomer, since they were really pulverized bones.)
Instead, he held onto the urn
feeling the brush of stubble on Danny’s face against his own. Rough, scratchy, but like running your bare feet on warm carpet. Danny mutters, “Gabe, I just need a few minutes,” turning his head one way or the other, but does nothing to prevent Gabe from rubbing his cheek against his stubble.
Gabe lies against Danny’s warm and comforting chest, while his husband has one arm up holding the screen, thumb flicking up and down to read technical papers, the other arm wrapped around Gabe. This is Danny, lightly scolding, his mind always on something else, but his free arm around him, holding him firm, never complaining.
Danny kisses Gabe on the top of his head and says, “Okay, okay. I’m done reading. What did you want to do today?”
Gabriel slept. Since Necropolis had no sun, the lights stayed on, and people worked all hours; there was no physical way to tell time, only local chronometers. He hadn’t checked the time before he had fallen asleep. Maybe a whole Earth day’s worth?
Hungry again. He headed back to the Food District, and Hui was there once more, chopping the blood cake into cubes. She caught his eye and paused. She still asked, “How many?” but a bit slower, as if she wasn’t sure she should ask.
“Too many.”
Hui paused, looked deeper into Gabriel’s eyes. He realized that this wasn’t a look of pity, maybe never was a look of pity, but of understanding. Of being exhausted from a long journey.
“Sit. Eat.”
She served him a bowl of the blood cake, radish, onions, chives, and rice. He tore into it, shoveling chopstick-scoops full into his mouth. He set the bowl down to breathe and saw a cup of dark red steaming tea in front of him.
“Where did you get that?!”
Hui shushed him, reached across the booth to lightly slap at his head, missing skull but catching a little bit of hair. “Don’t make a fuss. A secret stash. For finally waking up. You need to clear that messy head of yours.”
The cup took a little time to cool, or Gabriel’s fingers took a little time to warm up to match temperatures, before he could take a sip. It had a bitter, burnt taste, stronger than he expected but fainter than it should. The leaves must have been old. But it unclenched another flower in his head. He had a decision to make.
“Have you heard of human-made things gaining memories?”
Hui paused and then nodded near-imperceptibly. “It usually means the memory-eater has been here too long. Maybe they have become more gao than human.”
“What happens if you take a piece of Necropolis with you? Does it keep the memories?”
Hui shrugged. “The archeologists haven’t been able to bring a piece back. Maybe because it’s gao not human. Maybe there is a gao battery that powers the stones. But that doesn’t stop people from chipping away at a stone, erasing memories for their own selfish reasons. Pretty soon there won’t be anything gao left but rubble.”
“But does it keep the memory?”
Hui shrugged again. “They don’t come back to tell us.”
“Why are you here, Hui?”
She nodded, as if expecting the question. “I buried my husband here. Then I became a memory-eater. I came out and saw I was done grieving, but I also didn’t have anywhere else to go.” She leaned close. “This tea was the first thing I tasted after I came out of there.”
“Aren’t we supposed to bury our loved ones back home?”
“This was a home, a Gaohome, home for the gao. Humans were the ones who named this planet after a god of the dead and this moon after a river of sorrow. As if death and re-memory was something to bury and not cherish.”
This time, Gabriel wore gloves. He held the urn in both hands. In the Spirit District, he walked up to the archeologists and asked, “I heard you have a columbarium here?”
They nodded and took him to a chamber. This one was old, the edges of the walls worn down, the floor carved by thousands of long-dead appendages etching away at the stone. He saw hundreds of crèches all filled with containers of all shapes and sizes, simple cylinders, swirls, bottles of some kind, on and on. These were all covered in dust. Gao remains. Gao re-memories.
The archeologists brought him to where the crèches were mostly empty, and here he recognized human-made urns of black polymer. There were only a few, barely a dozen. And one with the face of the smiling buddha. Hui’s husband.
“All of these people don’t have homes to be buried at,” one of the archeologists said. “Seems a shame to send mourners away. Besides, we cleared this area already and everyone who asked has been respectful. We think the gao would want more memories here to keep this place alive.”
Gabriel picked a crèche next to Hui’s husband. Danny wouldn’t want to be separated from people. He felt other people were his home, so it seemed fitting. Gabriel placed the urn carefully in the crèche and it almost sank into the space, wanting to be there.
“Most people say some last, parting words. I can give you some privacy.”
“It’s okay. He remembers what I want to say.”


While being rained on adjacent to Portland, Oregon, Monte Lin edits, writes, and plays tabletop roleplaying games and writes short stories. Clarion West got him to write about dying universes, edible sins, dreaming mountains, and singularities made of anxieties. His stories have been published at Cossmass Infinities, Cast of Wonders, Flame Tree Press anthologies, and others. His nonfiction has been published at Strange Horizons. He is Managing Editor of Uncanny Magazine and Staff Editor of Angry Hamster Press. He can be found posting Doctor Who news, Asian American diaspora discourse, and his board game losses on Bluesky @montelin.bsky.social.