The Emerald Forge (Pilgrennon's Children) Read Free Page A

that the body remains intact. They can only conclude this is some kind of tasteless joke.”
    “It’s horrible, isn’t it?” Graeme must have noticed something in Dana’s demeanour. “She was just a girl. They never even found out who she was, and now someone’s done that.”
    Dana couldn’t pay attention to the remainder of the news — Jananin wasn’t on it anyway, and the realisation that the girl whose grave had been dug up was Alpha shocked her and sent her mind working through a chain of questions. The first reason she could think of for Alpha being dug up was that someone had worked out how to bring her back to life, but she immediately dismissed that as irrational. Alpha had been dead far too long. So what had the news said? That the coffin had been dug up, but that nothing had been removed. Surely after this time, all that would be left of Alpha’s body would be bones, and this meant that the police, or whoever dealt with cases like this, had opened the coffin and found what they expected to find, bones, and counted them all and compared them with an inventory of the bones in a human body and found nothing amiss.
    But what if something had been stolen, something they hadn’t expected to be there: Alpha’s transceiver, the same as the one implanted in Dana’s brain. If it had been taken, the police who examined the remains wouldn’t know, because they’d have no reason to expect it to be there.
    Dana began carefully, “Graeme, you know when Bunce was dead?”
    Bunce had been a hamster whom Pauline had brought home one day. Dana had thought it a remarkably uninteresting little animal. For nearly three years it had eaten and drunk and slept and made the living room smell bad. It had a cage with transparent pipes coming out of it so it could climb around in them, and it had always done its business in the pipes, and that made it smell even worse. Pauline kept having to muck it out because no-one else wanted to. Towards the end of the last year, it had become thin and ratlike and balding, and one morning Dana had found it lying on its back in the bottom of its cage, legs in the air like when animals in cartoons are dead, lips pulled back over its ugly yellow teeth.
    So Pauline and Graeme had a funeral for Bunce in the back garden, and Dana went with Graeme and Cale to the garden centre to choose a plant to grow on Bunce’s grave, because Graeme said they could remember Bunce by the plant, and Bunce would turn into fertiliser in the ground and be good for the plant. Dana chose a plant with green and brown leaves called Oxalis , and Bunce must have made really good fertiliser, because nearly a year later there were Oxalises growing all over the garden and in the lawn, so that Pauline and Graeme uprooted them and hid them in the compost heap when they thought Dana wasn’t looking.
    “You know when Bunce was dead, and we buried it in the mud, and you said it would turn into soil and be good for the plant?”
    “That’s perhaps not something nice to talk about when people are eating,” Graeme said.
    “Why not?” said Dana.
    Graeme put down his cutlery and studied his half-eaten steak for a moment. “Never mind,” he said, smiling faintly. “What were you going to ask?”
    “You know when people and animals are dead and their skin and their brains and their guts all go rotten and turn into fertiliser, and there’s just a skeleton left?”
    Graeme took his plate off his lap and set it down on the coffee table. “Yes?”
    “Well what if you buried a computer? Would that rot and turn into the soil, or would it stay there like a skeleton?”
    Graeme sighed, leaned back on the sofa, and interlocked his fingers behind his head. “Well, I suppose it depends how long it was there. It takes about two years for a dead person or an animal about the same size as a person to rot down to the bones. After a few hundred years, usually the bones have rotted away as well. Some parts of a computer would never rot