Expendable

Part X COMMUNICATION

Ears

The Chee on the screen looked younger — not so many lines on his face and only a few gray streaks in his black hair. He wore the hair down to his shoulders; but it couldn't hide the huge misshapen ears sticking out from his head like purple-veined plates.

Those ears looked like botched engineering: some ill-conceived project to achieve God knows what. Even though it was illegal, there were always fools who tinkered with their offspring's genes, failing to understand that a change in enzyme A might affect how the body used proteins B, C, and D. Most of the time, such alterations killed the child in utero; but occasionally, the fetus lived to full term, emerging from the womb with deformities like the man on the screen.

A man with the ears of a cartoon caricature. Or an Explorer.

Yes. Those ears would make him a prime candidate for the Academy… if he could still hear. If the malformed ears handicapped his hearing, Technocracy medicine would leap to the rescue: reconstructive surgery, prosthetic replacements, targeted virus therapy — whatever it took. But if the ears were merely grotesque, and the child was intelligent, healthy, psychologically pliable… on to the Academy.

Chee. An Explorer.

Was it really him? Could it just be a close relative, a brother, or even a clone? All were possibilities; but I could feel in my gut this was the real Chee.

Chee had known more about Exploring than any normal Vacuum admiral. When suiting up, for example, he had known to empty his bladder during Limbo.

An Explorer. An Explorer who somehow became an admiral.

How long ago had this recording been made? The signal could have looped for decades if it ran off a reliable power source. If Chee had been one of the first marooned here, some forty years ago… yes, I could believe it. The Explorer on the screen was a veteran, probably taking YouthBoost every few months. Forty years would bring him almost exactly to the Chee who had died a few hours ago.

Forty years.

Plus ear surgery.

And some way to escape from Melaquin.

Chee's Speech

With an effort, I forced myself to concentrate on his words, not his appearance. (Chee's voice — it was definitely Chee's voice.)

"…fully expect that more of us will get shanghaied here over time. If you are in that position, I invite you to join my partner and me in the enclave we've found. It's an underground city, fully automated and self-repairing… centuries old. The people are humanoid but glassily transparent; all seem dormant, though we cannot guess the cause. We have had no success in rousing them to consciousness for more than a minute at a time.

"We've had better luck with the technical facilities here: this broadcasting station, for example. If we've analyzed its structure correctly, our transmissions should be going out over a high-capacity network, perhaps reaching all around the world. We have also discovered very old machines capable of space flight… or at least they were capable of flight centuries ago. If we can restore one of these ships to working condition, we might use it to get off the planet. We have yet to find a ship with FTL capacity, but we don't need to get as far as another star system — we just have to escape the restricted airspace around Melaquin, then send a mayday.

"Therefore, fellow ECMs, I invite you to help us with this project. We may not be space-tech engineers, but we're smart and resourceful. In time, we can rebuild a ship and get out of here — if we work together."

Chee suddenly grimaced straight to the camera. "Shit, that sounded pompous, didn't it? But you know what I mean. We can get our asses out of here if we don't fuck up. Some of you must have landed way to hell the other side of the ocean and you'll never make it here under your own steam; but look around, see what you can scrounge up. This civilization had sophisticated goodies before it went to sleep. Maybe you can find a starship of your own… if not, maybe a boat or a plane that'll bring you to us, even if you're thousands of klicks away.

"And where is here, you might ask? To answer that, I'll turn the floor over to my partner who's drawn up a map to show exactly where this city is…"

Chee reached toward the camera, his hand looming in front of the lens before the shot swivelled to a new angle. In a moment, a woman came into view. She was holding a map, but that wasn't what I was looking at.

Her left cheek had a fierce purple birthmark, twin to mine.

And beneath that birthmark was the face of Admiral Seele.

My First Admiral, Again

Admiral Seele. My first admiral. The one who spent several days with me on the Jacaranda.

The one who paid me so much attention, I thought she wanted into my bed.

"Shit," I whispered. "Shit, shit, shit."

"What is wrong, Festina?" Oar asked. She glanced at the screen. "Are you angry this woman has copied your ugliness?"

Yes, that's why I'm angry, I thought. I'll sue her for stealing my trademark.

Admiral Seele. No wonder she took such interest in me. My mark was on the right, hers on the left; we were mirror images. On screen, as she pointed to her map and blathered about landmarks, she even looked the same age as me… but the recording was made forty years ago, give or take. I could well imagine those forty years had aged the woman I saw now into the admiral who cried for me.

But how had Seele lost her birthmark? How had Chee lost those monstrous ears? And how had they both become admirals?

I could think of only one explanation. The two of them had resurrected a spaceship. They had escaped, returned home, and reached a deal with the Council. What kind of deal? I could only think of one: Chee and Seele wouldn't blow the whistle on Melaquin, provided they were boosted up the chain of command and got the medical treatment needed to make them look like real people.

What else could it have been?

"Bastards," I whispered. "Traitor bastards."

They'd sold out their fellow Explorers in exchange for an admiral's gray uniform and plastic surgery. They'd had a chance to expose the High Council, but held their tongues. Forty years later, Explorers were still getting tossed onto Melaquin like trash.

"Damn it!" I growled. "How could you do it, Chee? How could you treat us like we were… expendable?"

The screen gave no answer. In time, the faces were replaced by static.

A Selfish Thing

I felt a touch on my shoulder. "Why are you sad, Festina?"

Oar looked at me earnestly.

"I'm sad," I told her, "because someone I thought was my friend did a selfish thing."

"That is bad," Oar said, her hand still touching me. "It hurts when people just do, do, do, without caring. It is very wrong."

"Yes, well… I don't have all the facts." I took a grudging breath that immediately let itself out again in a sigh. "It's been a long day for me, Oar; and getting choked unconscious for a few hours isn't as restful as you think. Is there a place I can sleep?"

"Jelca's bed is in the next room," Oar replied. She pointed toward a door. I felt like saying no — refusing to spend the night under the same roof as the television, as if hostility could punish Chee and Seele from afar. But it couldn't. And if Jelca had a perfectly good bed within a stone's throw, why go someplace else?

Why not spend the night in Jelca's bed?

"Damn, I'm a basketcase!" I muttered. "How many emotions can you squeeze into a minute?"

"I do not understand the question," Oar replied.

"Just talking to myself," I said. Without waiting for her to respond, I walked into Jelca's bedroom.

The bed was clear and transparent — a water-filled sack on the floor, with a hard plastic frame around the outside to prevent you from rolling off the edge. I wondered if Jelca had made this himself or if the bed was standard issue for Oar's people. Did Oar need to sleep? The engineers behind her glassy genes may have designed her to stay awake twenty-four hours a day.

"Do you sleep?" I asked her.

"Yes, Festina… whenever I want to. I could sleep now, for example."

The hint in her voice was not subtle.

And so we slept the night together in Jelca's bed: chastely, but not apart. She was lonely for company. And I had lost so much in one day, I wanted to hold something warm and solid.

Sick

I do not remember dreaming that night; but I woke in a dreamlike state, hard-pressed to believe my surroundings were real.

My arm was draped over Oar's quiet back. On the other side of her body, my hand looked as big as an inflated glove, magnified by a lens effect from her breasts. The sight disturbed me, as if my flesh was bloated with native microbes. Flustered, I untangled myself from her and rolled away; the water bed gurgled as I moved. After a moment, I settled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, trying to force back a sense of reality.

Reality.

How could I grasp reality when everything had a see-through, not-really-there quality? The walls, the bed, the woman beside me… all so elusive. I was marooned on a planet too much like Earth, I had killed my partner, I had watched Chee die, I had slept in Jelca's bed — but all of it felt so disconnected: details of some other woman's life. My mind floated, unattached to my body or my past; closed up, walled off. The sensation was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I had no interest in judging it; I simply let it wash past me.

After a while, a thought occurred: Maybe I'm sick.

Everything would be all right if I were sick. I could let the germs take responsibility for the coming hours… days… weeks. Sick people don't have to participate in their own lives.

I found myself visualizing the microorganisms that coursed through my bloodstream. Specializing in exobiology had its benefits; I could imagine some great microorganisms.

My favorite ones looked like eggs.

Metabolisms

Oar lifted herself on one elbow and asked, "Are you awake, Festina?"

"Hard to tell. Do awake people lie around, picturing needle-shaped microbes perforating their capillaries?"

"Perhaps you should ask my ancestors," she said. "You may have to tell them what a capillaries is, for they are not so wise as me."

"I think I'm sick," I said.

Oar put her hand on my forehead. "This is what my mother did when I was sick." She waited a moment, watching me solemnly. Then she removed her hand and asked, "Do you feel better now, Festina? Or shall I touch you again?"

I smiled. "I'll just lie here for a while."

"Are you sure? Would you like some food or water? Do you want to go to the bathroom?"

Hmph. If her goal was to get me out of bed, her words had more effect than a hand on the forehead. Suddenly, I was aware of intense hunger, thirst, and the urge to urinate. For a few seconds, I tried to return to my former comfortably dazed dislocation; but no matter how sick or emotionally overloaded I might be, I hadn't lost any basic bodily needs.

"Help me up," I muttered. "Please."

She rolled off the bed and held out a hand. As soon as I took it, she pulled me strongly to my feet, the water bed galumphing beneath me. Some part of me wanted to feel dizzy when I reached the vertical; but the clawing in my bladder focused my attention too effectively to allow light-headedness. "Show me the toilet," I growled.

There was a small one in the building's back room — a clear glass bowl with a conventionally-shaped seat. Oar entered the room with me and showed no sign of leaving… not that I'd have any privacy anyway, with walls of glass. I sat; I went; Oar wrinkled her nose. "It is yellow, Festina," she said.

"I suppose yours is clear?" Then I answered my own question. "Of course it must be — otherwise, I'd see your bladder floating inside your body. You have one hell of an eerie metabolism if even your wastes are see-through."

"I have a consistent metabolism," she sniffed. "And if you are finished…"

As I got up, I wondered if she had talked this same way with Jelca, three years ago in this very room. I didn't really want to know.

Three Days

When we were both finished in the bathroom, Oar volunteered to get food from the synthesizer. I warned I might be too sick to eat, but I knew it was a lie — I wasn't sick, I was merely wrecked. Shipwrecked, soul-wrecked, brain-wrecked.

And I stayed that way for three days.

Why did it hit me then — in those minutes when Oar was getting food? Why not earlier or later? I suppose it was being alone for the first time since landing on Melaquin: truly alone with nothing to do. No one to help, no bodies to bury… no orders, no mission, no agenda. It was the first time in years nothing was dragging me into the future — I had no duties to keep my mind off what I'd done. I could almost feel things letting go inside me: not the pleasant easing of burdens, but a dismaying loss of cohesion, bits of myself slipping out of place.

Alone, alone, alone. Alone in a colorless village, all the inhabitants as good as dead except for one childlike woman who could never understand my ugliness, my pettiness, my pain…

Three days passed. I won't describe them. I could say I don't remember them, but that's dodging the truth. Even if I can't list what I did, I remember every hour deep in my bones: grieving, raging, raving. I can return to that darkness anytime I want; stand over the pit and look down, shivering with the same furies and regrets. Now and then I deliberately turn back to those days — lift the lid to reassure myself I have not forgotten. At other times the memory rises unbidden; I find myself blurting out, "I'm sorry!" in the silence of an empty room.

The taste is still bitter.

Oar took care of me in her way: alternating between earnest attempts to comfort me and annoyed impatience when I wouldn't "stop being foolish." Sometimes she would storm off, calling me a stupid fucking Explorer who was very, very boring. Later she would come back and hold me, rocking me in her arms as she searched for words to bring me back from wherever I was. She fed me; she told me when I had to wash; she slept beside me after I fell into bed from exhaustion.

When I awoke the fourth day… I won't say I was better or over my breakdown, because that makes me sound stronger than I was. I felt as fragile as an eggshell; but a tiny part of me was ready again for the future.

By the time Oar woke up, I was rewatching the broadcast from Chee and Seele. This time, I paid attention to the maps.

Geography

As I had seen from space, the lower half of this continent was a wide prairie basin, bounded to the south by an arc of mountains and to the north by the three-lake chain stretching well into the heartland. The more I thought about the layout, the more it reminded me of Old Earth's North America: the Great Lakes in the middle of the continent with forest-covered shield to the north and grassy plains to the south. The parallels weren't exact, but they were disturbing, as if someone had superimposed Earth's ecology onto another planet's plate tectonics.

In terrestrial terms, I was close to the south shore of the lowermost Great Lake — call it Lake Erie — and the city Chee and Seele described lay several hundred klicks to the south, somewhere in the mountains along the "Caribbean" coast.

The trip from here to there looked suspiciously simple. The region immediately below the lake had a good growth of forest (slightly thinned by Oar); but a few days travel would bring me to open grassland, and from there it was an easy walk all the way to my destination.

No doubt there would be difficulties — rivers to cross, wild animals to avoid — and winter could start snowing down in a few weeks. By then, however, I'd be substantially closer to the equator. If Melaquin's weather patterns were comparable to Earth's, I might miss the snow entirely.

As the broadcast ended, I finished scribbling in my notebook: Seele's description of how to find the entrance to the subterranean city. Between now and the next broadcast, I would check the best food synthesizer Jelca left behind and get the rest of my gear together. Then I'd listen to the loop one more time to make sure I had all the details correctly. Within an hour, I'd be ready to head south… except for one loose end.

"You are writing, Festina," Oar said. "Does that mean you are no longer crazed?"

Seeing the World

"When you are crazed," Oar continued, "you are a very boring person, Festina. You nearly drove me to lie down with my ancestors forever and ever."

"I'm glad you didn't," I told her. "I still feel three quarters crazed, but at least I've cried myself out. How are you?"

"I am not such a person as has difficulties," she answered, "except when you fucking Explorers make me bored or sad."

"Lucky you," I murmured.

She gave me a look of wounded dignity.

"All right," I sighed, "let's talk about important matters. Have you ever wanted to see the world?"

"I can see the world now, Festina. It is not invisible."

"See more of the world. How far have you traveled from your home here?"

"As far as far." She lowered her eyes. "When the other Explorers left with my sister — for some time I was… crazed like you. Later, I tried to follow them; perhaps I was crazed then too. I walked for many days in the direction they had gone, until finally I came to a river that was very wide and deep. It was not such a river as I could cross, but I tried anyway. That is how I know what drowning is like, Festina. It is very unpleasant. I was lucky the river had a strong current — it carried my body along till I washed up on shore. The same shore I left. I thought about trying to cross again, but I lacked the courage."

She glanced up quickly, as if to check whether I was sneering at her as a coward. "You made a wise decision," I assured her.

"I did not feel wise. I felt sad and lonely. I sat on the bank of that river for many days, wondering how my sister got across. We are not such creatures as swim. But perhaps Explorer Jelca pulled her through the water, just as you pulled me out of the lake. He might have wrapped his arms around her and helped her away."

For a moment or two, we both brooded silently over that mental image.

My Native Guide

"All right," I said at last, "you've traveled before. Would you like to do it again?"

"What do you mean, Festina?"

"I know where Jelca and Ullis went. I want to go there too, and I'd like you to come with me. My native guide."

"We would see Explorer Jelca?"

"And Ullis and your sister," I added, too sharply. "What's your sister's name anyway?"

"I call her Eel," Oar answered. "An eel is an unpleasant kind of fish."

"Is that her real name?" I asked suspiciously.

"Yes," Oar replied. In a lower voice she added, "At one time, I did not think eel-fish were so bad."

I hid a smile. "Would you like to go with me, Oar? I could use your help."

"Is that true? I would be helpful to an Explorer?"

"Absolutely. You've helped me the past few days, haven't you?"

"That is different, Festina — you were crazed. Now that you are an Explorer again, you are not such a person as needs help from me."

I looked at her closely. Her head was lowered, her posture crumpled. Hesitantly, I patted her shoulder; today, her skin felt cool under my fingers. "The other Explorers made you feel useless… is that it?"

"You do too, Festina." She didn't lift her head. "You know many clever things. Even when you are being stupid, you make me fear I am the one who does not understand. You can swim and make fires; you can use your seeing machine. And you know the names of plants and animals — you talked about them when you were crazed. I have lived here all my life and do not know such names. You know more about my world than I do." Suddenly, she raised her eyes and looked straight at me. "How do you think I will help you, Festina? Do you just need someone for bed games? That is the only thing Explorers do not like to do by themselves."

"Oar…" When I met Jelca, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. "Oar, I need you to help carry things. It's not glamorous, but it's important — you're much stronger than I am. And I'll teach you other things as we go along. Besides," I added, "I'll be lonely and sad if I go on my own. I need company, and I'd like it to be you."

"Festina," Oar said, "are you telling the truth? Maybe you just feel bad about going away, and you say, 'Come along, Oar,' because you are sorry for me. I do not want to burden you, Festina. It is sad being alone, but it is worse being with someone who hates you."

"I don't hate you now, and I won't hate you ever. Listen, Oar. If I went without you, I'd be alone with my thoughts for weeks on end. I couldn't stand that — not right now. With you along, I'll stay sane… probably moody as hell, but I'll cope. Besides, Explorers never set out alone if they can help it. Solo missions are a hundred times more dangerous than taking a partner."

Oar's face brightened. "I will be your partner? Your real partner?"

I closed my eyes against a stab of heartache. Oh God, Yarrun! I thought. But he would be the first to tell me, Let go, let go. "Yes," I said, "you'll be my new partner… if you want to be."

She leapt forward and seized me in a bear hug so fierce it had a serious potential for cracking my ribs. I might have been squeezed to a pulp if a sudden thought hadn't struck her. Releasing her grip, she stepped back a pace and asked, "Now that I am an Explorer, do I have to make myself ugly?"

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry.