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conversation back to Vicki: "I read that she'd gone to Salud Afar," he said. "Yes. She wanted to get away." "It's a long way out. Even with the new drive, it's a month. One way." "I know. But she wanted to go." She started looking around for a way to extricate herself from us. "You say she wasn't working on a book? I mean, that would be the ideal place to work, on a long trip like that." "The reality is that she was always working on a book. More or less." "Did you see her after she got back?" "No. I haven't seen her for eight or nine months." I got the impression that she'd tried to dissuade Vicki from making the flight. "Vicki needed to fill her tank, Mr. Benedict. It's as simple as that." She adjusted her jacket. "If it weren't so far, Salud Afar would be the perfect place for a horror writer on vacation." "Really? Why's that?" "Read the tourist brochures. It has lost seas and beaches where monsters come ashore and God knows what else." "You're kidding." "Of course I am. But those are the stories. I know she'd paid a virtual visit to Salud Afar in the spring. But if you understand writers, you'll understand that's not enough. If you write horror, and you want atmosphere, Salud Afar is your world."
    Somebody had put a picture of Vicki Greene in the center aisle. She looked bright and happy, holding a kitten in her lap. They could have used an avatar, of course, and a lot of people do that. You go to a funeral, and they have a replica of the deceased delivering a few final sentiments. It's always struck me as creepy. Instead, they'd settled for a picture. Vicki had been a lovely woman. I don't think I'd realized how lovely. As ten o'clock approached, the guests wandered toward the main room. It wasn't big enough to accommodate everyone. We joined the crowd, watching the proceedings from a passageway. Precisely on the hour, somebody sat down and played "Last Light," the moderator appeared, and the service began. There was no religious element, of course. According to all reports, Vicki and her family were believers, but she wasn't really dead. So it was a memorial, and no more. Friends and family members went forward one by one to talk about her, to remember her, and to express their regret that, for whatever reason, she had resorted to such extreme measures. "So many of us loved her," said one man, who described himself simply as a friend but could not hold back tears. "Now she's gone from us." It was the first time I'd attended a service for someone who was still technically alive. Who could have walked through the doors at any moment. The last of the speakers finished, and the moderator turned things over to Cory, who thanked everyone for coming and announced there'd be refreshments in the dining room. He hoped, he said, everybody
    would stay. Some did. Others began to drift away. We wandered through the gathering, offering condolences, looking for someone who might know why she'd done it. I got introduced to a few other people whose names were familiar. "Horror writers," someone told us. "They're a pretty close-knit bunch." I tried to imagine what an evening at a bar would be like with a group of people who wrote about swamp monsters. She had a lot of friends. Women talked of good times, men spoke admiringly of her abilities, which were supposed to be references to her writing, but which I came to suspect were code words for Vicki's lustrous brown eyes and her up-front equipment. But maybe I'm selling them short. She'd had a lot of boyfriends, one of whom had apparently put together an avatar of Vicki and now sat talking with it for hours at a time. I wasn't aware of that fact when I met him. Found it out later in the day. But I remember sensing that he was obsessed with the woman. Most painful for him, probably, was knowing she was still alive, her personality more or less intact. But whatever he might have meant to her was gone. He was not even a memory. I found only one person who'd seen her since her return from Salud