Death Rites

Posted on 01 Jun 2023 @ 11:11pm by Lieutenant JG Lisald Vaat

954 words; about a 5 minute read

Mission: Outbreak

ON:

Lisald sometimes missed the hustle and bustle that was Bridge duty. He also sometimes missed being in the loop on everything, and being a part of the greater machination that was the Cygnus.

However, right now was not one of those times. Currently, he was doing exactly what he had trained for and went to school for back on Bajor before he joined Starfleet. Orbiting the planet Antioch III, with some of the crew, including the Captain, on the surface conducting First Contact, and the rest on the ship entertaining a group of Antiocian dignitaries, Lisald found that being sequestered away in Science Lab I was the perfect place to be, and the perfect place for him. He didn't have to be on the planet, awkwardly talking to the locals, fielding ridiculous questions and having to be on his very best behavior. Not that he was a trouble-maker, far from it, but having to watch your every movement and every word could be tiresome. Right now, he was analyzing the information that Lieutenant Spangler, his best friend, had sent up from the planet.

At some point, he had gotten access to their computer terminals and had sent to him their funerary and last rites rituals. For Vaat, this was a treasure trove of information. He had been used to piecing together this sort of information based on artifacts and writings left from long-gone civilizations, or forgotten towns and settlements from history immemorial. Where the Bajorans light a Duranja and keep it lit for the entire mourning process, and do a death chant for the departed, and the humans viewed the body and shared memories of the departed, the Antiocians froze the body of the departed completely, then shattered the body with a press, then put the remains in a small bag, usually plastic covered by canvas, then put into a heavy canister and finally dropped the canister into a vast lake on the western-most continent. The Antiocians would make a pilgrimage to this lake several times in their lives to honor and pay respects to their loved ones when not there to put their loved ones to rest.

Another interesting fact about the process was that in each village, hamlet, town, or city that the recently deceased was born in would have their name written on a scroll. This scroll was kept in the town central building, usually called the Center House. These scrolls were sometimes incredibly thick and incredibly long. The scroll was written on a cottonesque-style paper by a single person. This person was selected at the twentieth year of their life based on their patience, their temperament, and most importantly, their handwriting, and stayed in this job until the first day of their seventieth year, unless they died earlier through accident or disease. In the smaller towns and hamlets, the Death Writer, as they were known, were feared greatly by the children, their parents using them as a bedtime story to keep them behaving and in line. In the towns, the Death Writers were revered greatly for their knowledge of the towns, the people and the closeness in which they interacted with the survivors of the recently departed. In the cities and megalopolis', they were overworked, over-burdened, and thought little of, for the fact that all they did was write names down. Sometimes it would take weeks for the name to get onto the paper because of the sheer volume of people that died daily in the larger cities.

Lisald researched this and catalogued it carefully in the database that the crew compliment of the ship was building on this planet. A great deal had already been compiled by the long range sensors and probes that had been sent in the years prior to the Cygnus arriving, but the minutea, the little things that could not be gathered by machinery and telemetry alone. Far more data had been gathered in the week they had been here than all the years and all the probes and all the long range data combined had gathered.

The way the Antiocians treated their dead was as telling and as rich a resource as almost anything else they could gather. It spoke of ritual, of ceremony, of grief and processing, and gave insight into their religious and spiritual beliefs. It also allowed the opportunity, if the situation would present itself, for Starfleet to be able to record the names and count the generations of Antiocians from several millennia ago. It could speak to the longevity of people of their race, and the longevity of their race as a whole. It would show migration patterns, naming patterns, how families interacted, came together and broke apart. It could even give rich detail in their history, properly catalogued and referenced, of course.

Lisald found it fascinating that the Antiocians did things this way. He had never seen anything like this before in his travels, nor had he heard of it in his own studies and researching when he was doing his undergrad, grad and post-grad degrees on Bajor. He wondered idly how the Death Writers would have fared during the Occupation, trying to keep up with all the names the Cardassians had killed. Thankfully, Bane thought, they would likely never have to deal with something as catastrophic as the Occupation, where millions upon millions died in such a relative short time.

The young Bajoran scientist put the final touches on this particular research item, made sure it was catalogued properly, and closed the file. The computer saved it to be submitted to Starfleet Command during the next data dump.


OFF

Lieutenant junior grade Lisald Vaat
Alien Archaeologist/Anthropologist
USS Cygnus

 

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