Free Beyond the Farthest Suns by Greg Bear

didn’t use juvenates because—well, I never did find out exactly why, but even when her doctor told her she was going to die soon, she refused them. She also refused prosthetics and trans­plants.
    â€œThe last year, I couldn’t be her gigolo any more. She finally gave that up.” He smiled at the woman’s per­severance and Karen managed a grin of half-understand­ing. “But I stayed on her ship. She liked to talk with me. Everybody else was too scared to come near her. She kept me on her flagship until she died.” He stopped to regain his breath.
    â€œThat damned old woman, do you know what she had planned for her funeral? She was going to have her body sealed in a sublight ship and shot into a protostar in the Orion nebula. She thought she could radiate throughout the galaxy then and be immortal that way.
    â€œA few weeks before she died, with the flagship warping to the nebula, she realized what she was doing. She was contradicting her own beliefs. She wanted to call it off. But she hadn’t been thinking too well, she’d been getting senile—though I hadn’t noticed—and she had ordered that all the ship’s officers be fired without benefits if the original mission wasn’t fulfilled.
    â€œIt was very sad. Nobody would listen to her. Now she wanted to be buried like everybody else of her faith, without pretension, and she couldn’t. She told me and I tried to fight the officers, but they wouldn’t budge. They said there was no way out for them. I think maybe they were taking a little revenge on her for years of … Well, she was a strong woman.”
    â€œThat’s horrible,” Karen said.
    Alista nodded. “We were all waiting for her to die, and you know what I began to do? Me, tough old Cammis Alista, I swore I’d never let myself get so involved with another woman again. You know, she was ugly and wrinkled and her breasts were dry and flat, but what she’d been and done ; when she was dying, I loved her for those things. And I wanted to make her live. But there was no way out.” He swallowed. “I talked with her just like you and I are talking now, and she told me why she had never wanted to live forever.
    â€œâ€˜Alista,’ she said, ‘there’s something very odd about living. It’s not how long you live, not how long a bird flies, but how high you reach and what you learn when you get there. Just like a bird that flies as high as it can, and only does it once before going too near the sun. Think of the glory it must feel to go closer than anyone else!’”
    He closed his eyes to rest. They were pink with ruptured vessels. “I asked her, ‘What if we never get near the sun at all?’ And she said that none of us ever do, really, but we have to work to make ourselves think that way. To think that we really do. She said, ‘When I last saw the sun, the sun I was born under, it was something I didn’t even pay attention to. I didn’t care about it. When I last saw the Earth I was rich and young and it didn’t matter to me that I might never come back.’
    â€œThe doctor kicked me out of her room before she died. But she wrote a note later. When I read it she was dead and they had just shot her off into the protostar cluster.”
    â€œWhat was the note?” Karen asked.
    â€œA poem. I don’t know who wrote it, maybe she did. But it said, ‘When last I saw my final sun, I was cold and didn’t mind the dark. But now, so near, my chill needs your warmth, and I cry for the warmth denied, the dark to come. I want to sing more, say more words, love again.’ That was all she wrote.”
    â€œDo you know what she meant?”
    â€œNo,” Alista said. “I took juvenates like everybody else. I didn’t want to die as she had. When she was gone there was nothing left. A little bit of the dark world came in after her, and she