Expendable

Part IV OBSERVATIONS

Alarm

I woke to the sound of applause and distant shouts of "Brava! Bravissima!" The less restrained members of the audience let loose a flurry of sharp whistles. The cheering went on and on, louder and louder, until I kicked away the sheets and stomped to my computer terminal to enter the de-ac code.

It has long been known that if your alarm clock makes the same buzz or ring every morning, you learn to sleep through it. For this reason, all wake-up systems in the Outward Fleet produced a different noise each day.

In the preceding week, I had wakened to the hum of a million bees, the drone of bagpipes, the love songs of whales, the demolition of an office tower, the screams of earthquake victims, and the national anthem of some obscure Fringe World nation as performed by a 200-voice chorus of five-year-olds. Even worse, they all started at low volume and gradually increased, so that you might sleep through as much as a minute before truly gaining consciousness.

It made for the damnedest dreams.

Dripping

I had just shoved myself into the shower when the message buzzer hummed. For a few moments, I pretended I couldn't hear it, but the buzz increased in volume. One day in my second year on the Jacaranda, I had plugged my ears and hoped the buzzer would burn out its damned speaker; but before that happened, the strength of the sound vibrations broke one of my eggs, a fragile filigreed shell from Tahawni. I had to stop the buzzer back then, and I had to stop the buzzer now. Cursing, I dripped my way out of the shower, wrapped a towel around the parts most likely to get goose pimples, and stomped off to answer the call.

Harque's smirking face appeared on the screen. "Good morning, Explorer. I hope I didn't disturb you."

There was no way he could miss that my hair was streaming wet and I was only wearing a towel, but Harque was Harque. "What is it?" I asked.

"Five minutes to Melaquin orbit," he announced. "Any special instructions as we go in?"

"I have a special instruction for you, Harque, but I don't think it's physically possible."

"Goodness, Explorer! Need I remind you that deliberate rudeness is Conduct Unbecoming an Officer. Especially when I'm merely doing my duty. I don't suppose this Landing has you frightened, has it?"

"One more word, Harque, and here's what I'll do. I'll show the admiral one of my pretty little eggs, and I'll tell him he can have that pretty little egg if he immediately transfers you to the Explorer Corps. I think he'll do it, Harque, and then you'll get to visit Melaquin with the rest of us."

The screen went blank and I laughed aloud. Vacuum personnel were so susceptible to cheap theatrics.

Leave-Taking

I spent too long drying my hair and trying to get it to fluff properly. It should have been cut weeks ago, but I refused to have it done on ship — the Jacaranda barber felt she had the right to comment on my appearance and make suggestions to improve it. ("All it would take is the right kind of makeup, not really heavy, just some pancake, and we could soften that color a lot. What if you wore your hair over to the side like this? Well really, Festina, I'm just trying to help. If you'd just make an effort, you could hide it so scarcely anyone would notice.")

Rushing, rushing, and I was nearly out the door when it occurred to me I might not see this room again. The thought chilled me. My collection. Two thousand, three hundred and sixty-four eggs, catalogued, mounted, polished.

And if I died? Perhaps the captain would let the crew traipse through my quarters and take whatever appealed to them, manhandling my treasures, breaking them, laughing at me for collecting useless dead things.

Or perhaps Harque would come with a garbage hopper and throw in all my eggs, smash, smash, smash, and they would be jettisoned into space, shot out through the Sperm tail like trash and Explorers.

No.

No.

Surprising what can give you the will to live.

My Will

But I was an Explorer, a good Explorer, and therefore a realist. I didn't have much time, but I keyed the computer for audio input and dictated the following. "Instructions: lock the room and do not open until you register my voice print or Yarrun's. Confirm?" It beeped once, then responded, "Confirmed."

"If anyone overrides my instructions by asserting that I am dead or Lost on Landing, you will immediately inform Captain Prope and Fleet Central Records that I bequeath my egg collection and all personal effects to…"

To whom? My parents were dead. Yarrun would be my second choice, but he was about to go Oh Shit with me. Perhaps I could leave everything to my old crush Jelca… but no, a classmate told me he had gone Lost three years ago; she hadn't known the details. No other friends came to mind. No one really…

"I bequeath my collection and personal effects to Admiral Seele. Confirm?"

"Confirmed."

There. Everything to my first Admiral, the one who wept and tried to hold my hand. It was a bequest Prope and Harque wouldn't dare ignore. And Seele cared for me in her way. As good a way as any.

I wondered if she belonged to the High Council now. I wondered if she had been the one who picked me to take Chee to Melaquin. If so, receiving my collection would unsettle her.

It would seem like some kind of gesture.

In the Halls (Part 2)

While I was asleep, the day shift had come on duty. The corridors were now filled with crew members striding along, wearing self-important airs that told the world they had Things to Do. Most pretended to be so absorbed by their obligations that they didn't notice me; those who couldn't pull off such obliviousness doffed self-conscious salutes to me without meeting my eyes.

As I passed open hatchways, I heard snippets of conversation. The crew seemed bursting to tell each other that Admiral Chee was on board. ("A real admiral, but he's here incognito, so keep it secret.") Each of them had a theory why Chee was here: Prope was going to be court-martialled; Prope was going to be promoted; the League of Peoples had decided humanity was mature enough to receive another technological "gift," and the Jacaranda was taking the admiral to pick it up.

Once in a while, the gossipers noticed me and instantly went silent. Before I passed out of earshot, their babble began again with, "I'll bet she knows."

And yet no one spoke directly to me. No one asked if I had news. It was as if I were encased in glass walls that no one could break through — not them, and not me.

Even now, that's how I remember the Jacaranda.

First Sighting

On the bridge, Harque sat at the pilot's console and occasionally tapped a key to make course corrections. Chee frolicked behind him in the captain's command chair, swivelling left and right as far as it would go. Thunk, an arm of the chair would hit the engineering monitor panel; thunk, the other arm would hit the communications board.

Prope clenched her fists tighter with every collision… which was no doubt why Chee did it.

Yarrun had already taken his place at the Explorer station, and was programming probe drones for preliminary surveys of the planet surface. This was routine work; he nodded to me as I walked by, then went back to his gauges.

On the view screen, a purple speck had begun to differentiate itself from the background of bluish stars. We were not on a direct course at the moment, so the speck drifted slowly to the left. I grabbed one arm of the command chair and stopped Chee's gyrations long enough to push a button on the chair's control pad. The purple spot blossomed to the size of a baby prune.

"I thought Melaquin was supposed to be Earthlike," Chee said. "Why is it purple?"

"Blueshift from our speed of approach," Prope answered. "I can computer-correct the color if you let me work the controls…"

But Chee had already keyed in the correction, plus an extra level of magnification. He muttered, "She thinks I've never heard of blueshifting. I just forgot, is all. Too long since I've been on a real bridge…"

"Anything special for the probes?" Yarrun asked me for the sake of formality. The rules of rank said he should defer to me, but his programming skills were at least as good as mine, and his planetography intuition was superb. I waved for him to proceed and he turned a knob. "Probes away."

Four projectiles appeared on the screen and sped toward the planet. They looked like ejaculated Sperm, wearing a milky film dragged off the Jacaranda's own envelope. The wispy white coating hung loosely about the probes, held by the faint magnetic fields generated as a side effect of internal electronics; but within a few minutes, those Sperm coverings would lose their grip and fall away into hot little eddies of nonrelativistic spacetime that would take years to normalize. I watched as the Sperm cover slipped off one of the probes, curled, and rolled in on itself; but before the other covers did the same, the computer running the monitor lost its battle to keep the probes visible, and they vanished into darkness.

"Shot our wad, did we?" Chee asked.

Prope winced at the expression.

"Yes, sir," I told Chee. "Now Melaquin knows we're coming."

Sitting on the Edge of Immortality

Time crawled by. The probes would take five or six minutes to reach the planet and assume their initial scan configuration, then there'd be another two minutes before we started receiving data.

One of our instructors at the Academy (Explorer Commander Dendron, afflicted with a progressive muscle disorder that pulled his face taut over his bones like a rubber mask stretched on a cannonball) encouraged us to smoke a pipe of tobacco during this waiting interval. "Nothing like a comfortable pipe," he would say whenever he could manipulate a lecture in that direction. "Calms you, gives you something to do with your hands, and irritates hell out of the Regular Vacuum types. Imbues the upholstery with your presence too — you may go Oh Shit within the hour, but the smell of pipe smoke will stink up everything till the ship gets decommissioned. What other immortality do we have?"

In fact, ECMs were granted another form of immortality besides tobacco fumes: the Memory Wall at the Explorer Academy. The wall recorded the names of all Explorers who went Oh Shit in the course of duty. Perhaps it was significant that Commander Dendron didn't consider our Memory Wall as a true memorial for the Lost. You had to be remembered by "real people" — other Explorers didn't count.

Chee's Pipe

Neither Yarrun nor I had been swayed by Dendron's suggestion; we did not smoke as the probes sped toward Melaquin. Chee, however, chose that moment to pull a briar pipe and leather pouch from an inner pocket of his jacket. As he opened the pouch and pulled out a pinch of dark-brown shreds, the rich brandied aroma of tobacco took command of the bridge. I had smelled pipe tobacco before (Dendron's brand if nothing else), and the odor usually had a metallic tang to it… like the taste of water that has been stored too long in a steel canteen. Chee's tobacco, however, had a thicker, purer scent; somehow nostalgic, though I couldn't imagine why.

Chee must have noticed me eyeing his tobacco, for he offered the pouch for me to inspect. "It's the real thing, Ramos. Rank hath its privileges."

I took the pouch and inhaled deeply in spite of myself. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"This tobacco was stolen under cover of darkness from Old Earth itself. I organized the raid personally. Five Explorers landed on the island that used to be known as Cuba, primed as much ripe leaf as they could get in fifteen minutes, then scampered back to the ship just before the Spark Lords arrived with weapons blazing."

"You risked Explorer lives for tobacco?"

"Don't squawk," Chee growled. "The High Council reamed me out enough, without you bitching too. Of course, all the council cared about was violating our treaty with the Sparks; they didn't give a flying fart for the Explorers… who all got back without a scratch, I might add. The council cursed and screamed, and next thing I knew, they were sending me to Melaquin. I suppose you agree with them."

"Your actions are difficult to understand," Yarrun replied. "Tobacco is grown on many Technocracy planets, not to mention the Fringes. It seems rather… extravagant to endanger Explorers and the treaty for something so easily available."

"Shows how little you know about tobacco," Chee answered. "The stuff our Technocracy grows is castrated and harmless — no tar, no nicotine, not a single carcinogen or addictive substance in the damned vegetable from flower to root. Sissy weed! On Old Earth, tobacco still has balls. It can kill you… will kill you if something else doesn't get you first. I like that in a plant."

He produced a match and swept it across the rough metal control pad set into the captain's chair. Prope and Harque drew in their breaths sharply. Ignoring them, Chee sucked on the pipe to pull the match flame onto the tobacco, then took a few experimental puffs. "I hate safe vices," he continued, shaking out the match. "Live your life on a limb, that's what I say."

"Begging the Admiral's pardon," I said, "but from an Explorer's point of view, inhaling weak carcinogens is a pretty candy-assed risk. Ultimately, you die in bed. Sir."

The bridge fell silent except for the soft hum of machinery. Prope's mouth dropped open in shock. Harque had his back to me so I couldn't see the expression on his face, but his hand stopped moving and hovered stunned over the instrument panel. Even Yarrun stared at me in surprise, his hideous face lit from below by the greenish glow of his data screen.

Chee met my gaze without rancor. "The wolf knows something the sheep will never understand. Is that what you're saying, Ramos?"

"The wolf pays for it," I answered.

"A big ante buys into a bigger pot," he said.

"The pot only grows big when there are many losers."

With a small laugh, he patted me on the arm. "Don't you just love arguing in metaphors? Makes you feel profound as a polecat. Even when you don't know what the hell you're talking about." He smiled. "Maybe we'll have this argument again someday."

"Maybe." If he could pretend we'd survive, I could pretend with him.

"Data on Melaquin coming in," Yarrun quietly announced.

Melaquin — The Story from Initial Probes

Melaquin (AOR No. 72061721)

Third planet in the Uffree system; one moon

Average distance from primary: 1.0 A.U.

Gravity: 1.0000 G.

Thermal Index: 1.0000 S.

Atmosphere: 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen, .9% argon, .03% carbon dioxide. Other trace gases, e.g. methane, ozone, water vapor

Day: 24.0000 standard hours

Orbital period: 365.25 days

Axial tilt: 23.5 degrees

Surface: 78% water; four continental land masses; many islands, some approaching continent size; poles ice-capped

Life: Abundant green vegetation in 80% of land areas; abundant carbon-based microorganisms in atmosphere; quantity of methane in atmosphere consistent with large carbon-based animal life; sightings of motion in open plains suggest movement of large animal herds

Sentients: No illuminated cities visible on night side; no industrial pollutants in atmosphere; no unnatural EM transmissions; no visible roads or constructions; no visible dams or canals

Initial Response

A summary of the initial probe data replaced the star-scape on the main monitor. "It's rather like Earth, isn't it?" Prope observed. "Isn't that, uhhh, surprising?"

"There are two ways to look at it," Yarrun answered. "Given the vastness of the universe, it is highly probable that a close twin of Earth would exist somewhere; therefore, the mere existence of such a planet should not take us aback. On the other hand, the odds of such a twin turning up only a few thousand parsecs from the original planet… that is frankly unbelievable."

"Which means?" Chee asked.

"What else?" Yarrun shrugged. "There's something fishy going on."

"I just hope the continents don't look familiar," I muttered.

Conjectures

A. Prope: Perhaps we're really looking at Old Earth. Through some unknown phenomenon, we aren't where we think we are in space; or at least we're seeing into a completely different part of space.

Yarrun: The stars aren't in the right places for the Sol system. And the other planets are all wrong.

Me: Besides, Earth would show plenty of signs of sentient habitation. Cities, highways, all those nuclear waste dumps…

B. Harque: Maybe the computer is malfunctioning.

Chee: [After banging three times on the console with his fist.] Has anything changed?

C. Prope: Perhaps this is just an illusion, and some unknown agency is tampering with our very minds.

Me: So what do we do about it?

Chee: [Closing eyes and holding fingers to temples.] I disbelieve, I disbelieve, I disbelieve. [Opening eyes again and looking at Harque] Shit.

The Globe

"I think we have enough to construct a map of the day side," Yarrun said. He tapped a few keys and a globe appeared on the screen in front of us: north pole at the top of the view, south pole at the bottom. (By convention, all planets are assumed to rotate west to east; once you determine west and east, north and south fall out automatically.)

On the left of the display, two land masses were emerging from shadow at the terminator. One lay roughly in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The positions of the continents reminded me of North and South America on Old Earth, but the coastlines were very different. For that, I was grateful.

The daylit part of the north continent formed a breast-shaped bulge jutting eastward into a crystal blue ocean. That sparkling blueness on the view screen was deceptive — the computer used color to represent water depth, not tranquility. On land, various colors represented types of terrain, splitting continents into patchworks of yellow desert, gray mountains, green forests. Every few seconds, a region of the map shimmered for a moment, as the colors were updated on the basis of more specific data. The effect always made planets look more cheerful than they actually were.

A narrow spine of mountains cupped the lower coast of the northern bulge, extending east into the water to form a tail of rocky islands and rounding northwest into the darkness of the night side. Inside that cup of mountains, the rest of the bulge appeared to be a grassy basin, broken by three linked lakes that emptied into a river flowing northeast.

The south continent had a concave coastline, gouged by a large bay slightly south of center. North of the bay, the land supported a tropical forest; south was a strip of hilly woodland along the ocean, but thinning to desert farther in. The lowest part of the coast offered jagged fjords, zigzagging down to the whiteness of polar snow.

"Designating those continents the western hemisphere," Yarrun announced formally.

The eastern hemisphere had two continents too. Most of the northern continent had disappeared into the night side. The remainder was an egg-shaped protrusion narrowing to a long peninsular arm that reached almost all the way down to the southern continent. The peninsula had once been mountainous, but the mountains were old and worn with erosion. The range continued back into the mainland of the continent, dividing it into plains to the south and forest to the north.

The southern continent lay more to the west, and most was still in daylight. The land was shaped like a Y lying on its side, two arms pointing west and the tail pointing east. Between the arms clustered an archipelago of hundreds of hilly islands, no more than a few square klicks each. The northwest arm of the Y held a broad patch of desert, but the rest of the continent was a combination of forest and meadow.

"What do you think?" Chee asked.

I pointed to the lakes on the northern continent, western hemisphere. "What's the weather like here?"

Yarrun turned a dial. Cloud patterns became visible over various regions of land and sea, but the sky over the lakes was clear. "Temperate mid-autumn," Yarrun said. "The temperature is only about ten degrees Celsius at the moment, but it's just an hour after sunrise. It could go up to twenty degrees by the middle of the afternoon."

"Shirtsleeve weather," Chee grinned and Yarrun nodded.

"Okay," I decided. "Concentrate the probes there. We'll see what looks good."

"Keep the probes in high atmosphere?" Yarrun asked.

"No," I answered, "send them in as low as you want. If the place has natives, we'll give them a thrill."

Fields and Forests

In a few minutes, the lake district bloomed on the screen, marked with fifteen-meter contour lines. Moderately tall bluffs rose at several points around the lakes, but most of the shore was sandy beach. Inland, the countryside consisted of rolling hills with plenty of streams, a few marshes, clots of forest here and there, and wide stretches of grassy meadow.

"Looks pleasant enough," Prope said.

"That's what you think," I told her.

"What's wrong?"

"There are too few trees," Yarrun answered for me, scanning some figures thrown up by the computer. "All those open fields… with that kind of soil and climate, you expect forests to encroach on fields and eventually cover them. On a truly Earthlike planet, there'd be trees everywhere unless…" He turned a few dials and checked a readout. "Well, the computer gives seventy percent chance there was a forest fire south of the eastern lake, between ten and thirty years ago… but the fire only took out a few dozen hectares. Not nearly enough to explain the discrepancy. I suppose Melaquin might have evolved a particularly aggressive form of grass that doesn't need much light — one that encroaches on trees, starving out their roots…"

"Yarrun is grasping at straws," I told Chee. "The truth is, this terrain profile looks more like farmland than virgin wilderness. Not meadows, but cleared fields."

"Any sign of actual cultivation?" Chee asked.

"No," Yarrun replied, "but the probes are spreading their attention over a large area. They could easily miss cultivation on the scale of garden plots. Or larger fields that have lain fallow longer than five or ten years."

"Sentients!" Prope said in a hushed tone intended to be dramatic. She had assumed yet another pose, staring at the monitor through narrowed eyes, her head lifted to show the clean white edge of her jaw. "Do you suppose this could be a world of sentients, once great, now fallen? Yet even though the planet lies barren, something has been left behind. Something that has killed before and will kill again…"

"Shit," muttered Chee. "I told the council we shouldn't let Vacuum officers take Pulp Literature as an elective."

The Lake

"Let's do a full workup on this lake," I said, tapping the one lowest on the view screen.

"Why?" Chee asked.

"It's closest to the equator. Winter's coming to the whole lake district, and I'd prefer not to freeze my tail off if we get stranded down there."

"Explorer Ramos grew up in an unduly warm climate," Yarrun explained to the admiral. "She is rather delicate when it comes to chills."

I did not rise to the bait. Yarrun's own home colony was snowed in more than half of each year, and his people had developed an unhealthy reverence for subzero temperatures. They ascribed all manner of beneficial properties to freezing cold: it built stamina, it built strength, it built moral fiber. As far as I could tell, all it built was an irrational disdain for those of us who had the sense to be born in environments free of frostbite.

"Yarrun," I said, "check out the south lake. The southern shore."

He rubbed a dial. Far below us, one of the four probes sacrificed almost all its airspeed as it arrowed into the water. The splash was big enough for the other three probes to register: a pimple of red marked the splash point on the viewmap, until the computer factored it out.

"The water is fresh," Yarrun reported as the sunken probe began to return data. "The usual natural trace elements; no signs of industrial pollution. Microorganism count measures a bit low."

"Does that mean anything?" Prope asked.

"Probably not," I told the captain. "Lots of simple factors could decrease the micro count in a given area — anything from a strong current, to a recent rain, to a nearby school of filter-feeders."

"Still… it seems a little sinister, don't you think?"

I ignored her.

The Bluffs

"Let's concentrate on these bluffs," I said, pointing to a line of elevation on the south side of our chosen lake.

"Why there?" asked Chee as Yarrun twisted dials to send the three remaining probes on a close flyby.

I thumbed a dial myself to magnify that area of the map. "Along the top, we have open fields… good visibility. If we're in for a long stay, we can get fresh water from the lake, but in the short term, we'll be far enough away that we don't have to deal with the complexities of shoreline ecologies."

"What if something unspeakable charges the party and knocks you off the cliff?" Prope asked.

"If we see something unspeakable, I for one will jump off the cliff," I answered. "Our tightsuits will protect us from the brunt of the impact, and the long leap is a nice fast escape route."

Prope's expression showed what she thought of people who would jump off a cliff rather than face something unspeakable; but she held her tongue.

Pictures

"Pictures," Yarrun said; and the map on the screen shimmered to show a sunny meadow dotted with yellow wildflowers. Off to one side stood a deciduous tree, something like a maple; a bird flitted into the leaves, too fast to see clearly, but it had two wings, a small head, and a black or dark brown body. A few dozen meters behind the tree, the land dropped off at the edge of the bluffs, down to the sparkling blue lake.

The view slowly shifted as the transmitting probe moved along. We saw a gray rock outcrop, more deciduous trees, a thicket of brambles. Something darted into the brambles, and my mind said "rabbit" …but an Explorer had to ignore such snap judgments. The human brain is still hopelessly tied to Old Earth; it always interprets a fleeting image as something terrestrial, no matter how alien the creature might really look.

"Try it ten kilometers to the east," I said. Yarrun played with dials.

Prope sneered. "You think the meadow looks too dangerous?" she asked.

I tapped the screen. "Didn't you see that animal run into the briar patch?"

"You're afraid of a little beast like that?"

"I'm wary of a little beast like that," I told her. "I'm afraid of whatever the little beast was running from."

Our Choice

The picture dissolved into a view from another probe, this one hovering over the lake and looking shoreward to the bluffs. The cliffside was tangled with weeds and scrubby bushes. Here and there, swaths of bare sandy soil interrupted the undergrowth — gullies probably washed out by spring runoff. Erosion was slowly undercutting the top edge of the ridge; at one point, the rim had collapsed in an earth slide that dragged down a great strip of brush.

The probe moved toward the land, and slowly rose to give us a view of the heights: another flowered meadow, with a few lichen-covered outcrops of rock. A short distance inland, a deep ravine ran parallel to the bluffs — probably the bed of a stream on its way to the lake. Trees grew up the sides of the ravine, but none were visible on the flat land.

"This an example of what we were talking about," I said, pointing at the screen. "If you have trees growing in the ravine, you should have trees growing in the field — it has to be easier for them to root on level ground than on a slope. But it looks like the flat has been cleared."

"Is that enough to scare you off again?" Prope asked.

"Not in the least," I answered, working to keep my temper. "Cleared terrain is good for a Landing. You're less likely to hit something on the Drop, and you have an unobstructed view of things coming to eat you." I turned to Yarrun. "What about it?"

Instead of answering, he fiddled with dials, rotating the screen's view through a slow 360 degrees. The meadow seemed very peaceful… no motion but the gentle waving of grass in the wind. "The motion sensors are picking up a lot of animal life," he reported, "but nothing big. Mostly on the order of insects, with the occasional field mouse. Which is to say, something warm-blooded the size of a field mouse."

It was easy to forget this wasn't some tame terraformed world, stocked with all the species we knew, and loved, and could kill if necessary.

"Any thoughts?" I asked the room at large. Prope looked as if she wanted to say something scathing, but knew it would only delay things. "Okay," I told Yarrun. "Have the probe drop a Sperm anchor. Immortality awaits."