Cemetery World

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The Cemetery stretched away in the morning light, a thing of breathless beauty. The rows of gleaming monuments swept across the valley and covered all the slopes and hills. The grass, mowed and clipped with precise devotion, was an emerald blanket that gave no hint of the rawness of the soil into which it thrust its roots. The stately pines, planted in the aisles that ran between the rows of graves, made soft and moaning music.

"It gets you," said the captain of the funeral ship.

He thumped his chest to show me exactly where it got him. He was an oaf, this captain.

"You remember Mother Earth," he told me, "all the days you're gone, all the years in space and on the other planets. You call up in your mind exactly what it's like. Then you land and open up the port and walk out on its surface and it hits you, suddenly, that you've remembered only half of it, Mother Earth is too big and beautiful to hold it all in mind."

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