"It's your fault," said the woman. "What did you expect the men to do when you kept me to yourself! You shared me with them nearly two years. You shouldn't have locked the men out of your quarters."
"I was drunk!" the commander said bitterly. "I didn't think they'd go berserk—wreck the synthesizers—fight among themselves—"
"I had a husband, once," said the woman. "You let him freeze to death, suffocate, all because he would have wanted to keep me for himself. You turned around and did the same thing." Musingly, she eyed a large jagged stone, lifted it in her hand, and approached the weary, sprawling form on the ground. "If he deserved to die, why not you?"
"That was different," said the commander. "I'd have shared you when I sobered up. He'd never—" He hadn't time for even a gasp as the woman brought the stone down with both hands upon the nape of his neck, shattering the bone beneath the thin flesh there. He fell forward, drooling blood on the sun-baked black rock.
"No," said the woman, brushing her hands firmly against her thighs to cleanse them of the feel of the rock. "Martin would never. That's why I loved him."
Tiredly, she began to walk, away from the ship and the memories of degradation it held for her, out across the hot, blazing plains of arid rock, humming a lilting waltz that had been played at her highschool prom.
When she could walk no further, she lay down on the rock, rolled onto her back, and smiled emptily at the stark blue skies overhead until unconsciousness stole over her.
A hundred miles away, a naked boy knelt before a cairn of rock, frowning in concentration, his tongue tucked against the corner of his mouth as he carefully arranged smooth red pebbles before the cairn until their design pleased him. Under the cairn lay a steel-and-concrete door, and within the chamber beyond it lay the mummified bodies of his parents and siblings, as he'd found them when he was old enough to crawl. He was walking now, pretty well for his fifteen months of life. He could only judge his progress by the progress of others like him, children conceived amid the radiation and gene-mutating chaos of those first months in the shelters.
He'd determined to be a leader. He didn't know the word "leader", of course, but he would soon coin a sound that conveyed that meaning to himself and the others. He didn't know why his parents were dead, or the parents of the others like himself. Perhaps one always died when one reached a certain age. Still, why had his brother and sister died, then, since they had so much growing to do before they matched that of his parents?