In a distant future, long after humans have spread throughout the universe as a result of a great Diaspora, a young woman named Elen works onboard a spaceship that has been tasked with transporting alien artifacts to a museum. One of the artifacts is a tomb. In the culture to which the tomb belongs, wives would remove themselves from society and marry their husbands' tombs—where they would then live out the rest of their days in isolation—after their husbands died. This tomb is still believed to have the ghost of a Tomb Wife. Throughout their journey, Elen asks questions of her crewmates to learn more about the culture and visits the tomb in the ship's hold, looking for the ghost. Elen spends lots of time trying to unwravel the feminist implications of the Tomb Wives as well. Once the ship reaches its destination, Elen goes down one last time to visit the tomb. There she runs into the captain of the ship and realizes that she has mad a ruinous miscalculation. The Tomb Wife has been alive all this time and in the process of landing the ship, the captain made it so that the the Tomb Wife took over Elen's body and Elen was to be lost to the universe. As Elen is trapped in the ether, she realizes that the captain and the Tomb Wife are secret and forbidden lovers who have now been reunited.