Ida sat on the bed of my spartan room in the dormitory hut while I tapped that day's journal into my laptop. Her wiry hair was a muted shade of taupe. She picked up the framed holo from my nightstand. "And who's this gorgeous blonde creature?"

All my life, people had made the same mistake. I kept her picture with me anyway. "That's my mom," I said. I hoped my tone would dissuade her from further questions. It didn't.

Ida whistled and put her face closer to the glass. "When was this taken, then? Before you were born, I bet."

I let a long moment go by. "That was taken when she was forty-eight, about five years ago. She always took excellent care of herself."

"I'll say," said Ida. "I'll be sixty-five this year and I'm nothing but a mess of thin bones and leathery skin. Pretty soon they'll be bringing my ashes down from the ghat in the High Field."

"Ghat? You have a crematorium here?"

"Yeah, for the Nepalese workers, and sometimes for the honored animals after they've been autopsied--if they're not going to be reclaimed, of course." She looked toward the window. "It's where I want to go when I die." She gave me an embarrassed grin. "Poetic as hell, huh?"

"Yep." I kept plugging away at the keys.

Ida cocked her head. "'Took excellent care' you said? You mean your mother is dead?"

"Cerebral hemorrhage."

"Ah." Ida put down the holo. "I'm sorry." But she was sharp; I guessed she'd read about the "Able Body" Act. "Excuse me if this is painful, Hank, but did she go into a coma and...?"

I sighed. This was Ida after all, unfailingly kind to me and a powerful woman to have on my side. "Yes, two years ago she went into a coma and was pronounced brain dead. The state reclaimed her body for dangerous work and put it into the reanimate work force, somewhere in Arizona they told me. So, yes; my mother is now a reviv."

Her tiny bird eyes were sharp on me. "But I hear with a little money and influence, you can evade the reclamation process."

My chest felt squeezed and my voice got high. "You can. But why would I? What kind of necroscientist would I be if I'd applied for a waiver like that? A hypocrite, that's what. No, you've got to stand up against that kind of superstition, in all its forms."

"Do you?" said Ida. She yawned and stood up. "I'm outta here. Early day tomorrow." At the door she stopped and turned back. "I hear Astrid takes a pretty mean holo." Then she was gone.

I looked down at my screen. Somehow I'd set the key pad on numeric lock. For the past few minutes I'd been typing garbage.

I had been overseas working on my masters thesis when the blood vessel burst in my mother's brain. She was between husbands at the time, and I was her only child. Friends of hers sat with her in the hospital where, as they said, she lay in her irreversible coma looking so young and beautiful it was hard to believe she'd gone. No one thought at the time she'd be claimed by the State; she was too old. But my mom had spent her whole life keeping her body young and vigorous.

The State moved in fast, saying the alloted two weeks had passed with no word from next-of-kin. The fresher the tissues are at the time of reclamation, you know, the longer the reviv lasts. By the time I got home, she'd already been reclaimed and placed. I kept insisting the Reclamation Office tell me where she was, that I had to see for myself that my mom was gone.

No, they said, it was their policy not to release information on the whereabouts of specific reanimated subjects.

I threatened them; with my newly acquired inheritance I had more than enough money to buy a waiver and get her body back.

That's when they dug into my background and found I was well on my way to being a necrozoologist. A canny director spoke with me and appealed to my sense of science. As a student of the process, surely I could see I was being unreasonable. It was hard for some of the more superstitious to accept that a body was not the person it had belonged to. We understood, didn't we, that once a person died, the body was little more than a piece of machinery best employed to save the living from dangerous and unpleasant work. What would my Thesis Committee think, he said, if they heard I suddenly developed such qualms?

So I left. I went back to Europe, I got my Masters. But it never seemed real. My mother's death, I mean. It was the ritual that I missed, I think. There's a reason man created ceremonies to mark the great transitions of life--christenings, weddings, funerals. It's not so much to honor the one in transit, I think, as it is to cue the rest of us on where to place them.