Expendable

Part VIII ACQUAINTANCE

Shocked and Hurt

Without a millisecond's pause, I spun away from her, rolling across the sand and tucking up to my feet in a fighting stance. My mind was scarcely aware what I was doing; the reaction had been programmed into me along with so much else.

It was an ongoing experiment by the Admiralty. In situations of total shock, when the conscious brain was too surprised to make a rational decision, some Explorers were trained to assume an aggressive posture, some to become passive, and some to freeze in whatever position they happened to be. The Fleet wanted to determine if any of the three approaches offered better survival prospects than the others.

If the study had drawn any conclusions, no one bothered to tell us Explorers.

With an effort, I forced myself to lower my fists. The woman's hand was over her eyes — maybe she hadn't noticed my reaction… although if I could see through her hand, why couldn't she? I looked carefully through her glass fingers and saw that her eyelids were an opaque silver, shut tight and trembling.

"You've met Explorers before," I said after a moment. "How else would you know my language? And since dozens of Explorers have come here over the past forty years, it's not completely improbable that an earlier party landed in this neighborhood. They may have followed the same chain of reasoning as we did." I was talking to myself, not her. "But what did they do to you? Why are… how did they upset you?"

She opened her eyes and raised herself on one elbow so she could look at me; she didn't lift her gaze high enough to meet my eyes. "They made me sad," she said. "Fucking Explorers."

"Did they hurt you?" I knelt in the sand so I wouldn't loom over her. "If they hurt you, it must have been an accident. Explorers are programmed… Explorers are taught very strictly never to hurt the people they meet."

"Yes," the woman said, "they are taught many things." This time her gaze met mine for an angry second before dropping away. "Explorers know so much, and it is all stupid!"

I stared at her, trying to decide how to read her. She looked like a grown woman, perhaps in her early twenties; but she talked with the words of a child. Did she only have a primitive grasp of English? Perhaps she learned the language as a child and hadn't used it since. A team of Explorers might have passed through this area when the woman was young, spent a few months, then moved on. Children learn languages quickly… and they form crushes quickly too. Maybe the Explorers had done nothing worse than leaving an overfond child who wanted them to stay.

"I'm sorry," I said, "that the other Explorers made you sad. I'll try not to do the same thing. If I ever make you sad, you tell me and I'll try to fix it."

"Fucking Explorers." She turned away and tucked up her knees, hugging them to her chest. "Your face is very ugly," she said.

"I know." I told myself I was speaking to a sulky five-year-old. "And I look even worse in daylight."

"Why do fucking Explorers go places when they are so ugly? Other people do not like seeing ugly things." She took a deep breath that was bordering on a sob. "Fucking Explorers should just stay home."

"No argument from me," I murmured. In a louder voice I said, "If you want, I'll go away."

She ignored my offer. "Why is the other Explorer so stupid?"

"What?"

"He just lies there. He doesn't talk. Does he think he is smarter than me? Does he think I'm dirty?"

I had forgotten about Chee. His body lay a short distance up the beach, his tightsuit glistening in the moonlight.

"The other Explorer is dead," I answered softly. "He was very old, and he just—"

"He is not dead!" The woman was suddenly on her feet, glass fists clenched in fury. "Do you think you are sacred? Do you think you are holy? Fucking Explorers are not such things as can die!"

And she stormed over to Chee's corpse and kicked it hard in the side.

Sad

My kung fu master would say the kick showed incorrect foot formation — if I kicked a tightsuit like that, I'd have broken my toe. The glass woman showed no sign of injury; and when she pulled her foot away, I saw a shadowy dent in the suit's fabric, as if someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer. The force of the kick had been enough to scuff the body back several centimeters over the sand.

"Are you asleep?" the woman shouted at Chee. "Wake up! Wake up!"

She kicked him again.

I stepped forward to stop her, then held myself back. She couldn't hurt Chee now; and if there was an afterlife, the admiral would be amused to watch a beautiful nude alien try to wake up his corpse.

After three more kicks that didn't quite breach the suit, the woman dropped to her knees right on the admiral's chest and screamed in his face, "Wake up! Wake up!" She shook his shoulders, then clapped her hands on both sides of the helmet with a thud.

Panting and puzzled, she turned back to me. "He cannot hear me inside of his shell."

"He can't hear you," I agreed, "but it's not because of the suit."

"Do not say he is dead!" She buffeted the helmet with more smacks of her hand.

"Wait," I said at last. "Wait."

Kneeling by Chee's head, I fumbled with the clasps on his helmet. My fingers were clumsy after the dunk in cold water; wearing clammy wet underwear didn't help my condition either. I'd have to build a fire soon, before hypothermia set in.

The glass woman's face was close to mine as I removed Chee's helmet — I could feel her body heat on my skin. As soon as the helmet was off, she reached down and pinched his cheek. When she got no response, she shook him by the chin, then pulled on his ear. I placed my hand over hers and pulled her gently away from the corpse.

"He is dead," I told her. "Really."

I laid the back of my hand against the admiral's forehead. He was beginning to cool.

Hesitantly, the glass woman peeled open Chee's eyelid. The pupil did not react. She suddenly snatched back her hand and pressed it to her chest, as if she could hardly breathe.

"He is truly dead?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Explorers can die?"

"They're famous for it," I said.

She stared at me; her expression was so intense, I came close to flinching. "You can die?" she asked at last.

"As far as I know. It's not something I want to test anytime soon."

The woman peered at my face a moment longer, as if searching for some sign I was lying; then she turned away, her troubled gaze moving toward the lake's dark water. After a moment, she said, "Now I feel very sad."

"I feel sad too." My hand still lay on Chee's forehead.

Oar

I told her, "Before my friend died, he asked me to put his body into the lake."

"Yes," the woman agreed. "We will hide him in the lake. We will use rocks to make him heavy so he will go to the very bottom; and he will be safe forever and ever."

I wondered what was going through her mind: why she used the phrase "hide him in the lake," what she meant by "safe," why the ability to die meant so much to her. Possibilities leapt to mind, but I shoved them away; Explorers shouldn't jump to conclusions.

We both began collecting rocks — mostly just pebbles, since neither the beach nor bluffs offered stones of any great size. I stuffed what I gathered into Chee's belt pouches, but the woman deposited hers directly inside his suit. She placed them there one at a time, working with care and delicacy. Once, I thought I saw her lips speaking silent words as she pushed one pebble after another through the suit's open collar. I wondered what she was saying… but her face had such a look of concentration, I didn't interrupt.

There came a time when we were both kneeling beside Chee's body: the woman inserting pebbles through his collar and me filling his pockets. After a full minute of silence, the woman said, "My name is Oar. An oar is an implement used to propel boats."

"I'm pleased to meet you, Oar," I answered solemnly. "My name is Festina Ramos and I take… my name is Festina. According to my mother, that means 'the Happy One.' " I didn't mention how Mother held that against me. You're supposed to be happy, Festina; you have everything a little girl could want. Why must you be so deliberately miserable?

"Your mother," Oar said. "That is the woman who gave you birth?"

"Yes."

"Have you given birth to a child, Festina?"

"No. Not me."

"Do you think you will some day?"

"No."

"Why not? Would it not be interesting to have a child come out of you?"

"I suppose so."

"And since this man here has… died," Oar continued, "should you not produce a new Explorer to replace him?"

"It's not that easy."

She looked at me, waiting for me to explain. I shook my head, too tired to belabor the details. Would she understand if I explained that women received tubal ligations upon joining the Fleet? The operation could be reversed on request after ten years' active service; but I doubted I would find a surgeon to do the job here on Melaquin. Children were impossible for me. Someday, when I was past the numbness of Yarrun and Chee dying, I wondered how I'd feel about being permanently barren.

After waiting for me to answer, Oar came up with an explanation of her own. "Oh yes," she said, "you cannot have a child here and now. You need a man to supply his juices."

"That's certainly a consideration," I agreed.

Oar fell silent. I fastened the snap on one of Chee's belt pouches, then looked up. Her silvery eyelids were closed.

"I know a man," Oar whispered.

"Yes?"

"I know an Explorer man." Her eyes opened. "I have not seen him in three years, but I am sure he is still such a man as would give his juices to any woman."

There was bitterness in her voice.

"Oh," I said. "Oh, Oar."

And I understood why she said, Explorers only make people sad.

Fucking Explorers.

"Who was this man?" I asked.

She closed her eyes again. "Explorer First Class Laminir Jelca."

My Heart

Jelca.

Jelca.

I'd heard he'd gone Oh Shit a few years ago — nothing in the official records, just a rumor. I should have realized there was only one place you could disappear without leaving records in the Fleet archives.

Jelca was here on Melaquin. And not just on the planet — he was somewhere close by. He had not landed on a different continent; he had not landed on some isolated island; he was here. At least, he had been here three years ago. How far could he have traveled since then?

My heart beat faster, though I knew it was foolishness. I scarcely knew Jelca — after that night we carried Tobit to his quarters, we had gone on two dates, no more. There was every chance Jelca had treated Oar badly… and yet, I was already making excuses for him in my mind. She had misunderstood mere friendliness; and perhaps Duty had forced him to leave.

Never mind that my excuses didn't make sense. In the heat of the moment, "making sense" was my enemy.

I had killed Yarrun. Chee had died. But if Jelca was here, I was not alone.

In that moment of weakness, I thought Jelca would save me.

Jelca's Partner

"Where is Jelca now?" I asked as calmly as I could.

"He went away with her," Oar replied. She made the word "her" sound like excrement.

"Her?" I repeated.

"The ugly woman who blinks."

"Ullis? Ullis Naar?" My old roommate with the permanent twitch in her eyes.

"Yes, Explorer Ullis Naar. She blinks and blinks until you scream at her to stop. She is so stupid!"

I said nothing. Ullis was not stupid; she had a good brain and a better heart. In our years rooming together at the Academy, I had never heard Ullis say an unkind word about anyone. Sometimes… sometimes we avoided her, when the stress of our studies exhausted us so much, we didn't have the strength to put up with her blinking; but she never made us feel guilty afterward. If she had become Jelca's partner after graduation, he was lucky.

So was she.

I tried not to think of her alone with Jelca on this planet. It gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Away

I asked, "Where did they go, Oar?"

"Away." She pointed in the direction of the bluffs-south. "They said they had to join with other fucking Explorers, but that was just an excuse. Jelca left because he wanted to go."

Other Explorers… Jelca must have contacted some of the others marooned here. He could have cobbled together a radio, possibly by cannibalizing his Bumbler — he came from a Fringe World where children learned electronics from the age of three — and he'd managed to contact other Explorers on the planet.

"Oar," I said, "you have to believe Jelca wasn't making up excuses. If he found out about other Explorers, he'd have to…"

I didn't finish my sentence. Oar's fierce expression told me she wouldn't believe a word in Jelca's defense. "Okay," I conceded. "Okay." There was no point in angering her. She sniffed a bit, then went for another handful of pebbles.

Visible Light

In time, Chee's pockets bulged with rocks. The interior of his suit was less full, but it would do — when I gave his body an experimental shove, I could barely move him. No amount of ballast would weigh him down forever, but we'd done enough to keep him submerged for a good long time, provided we started him out deep enough.

Getting him away from shore was the trick. I could drag the body as far as I could wade, but it was too heavy to swim with — smart Explorers don't dogpaddle while carrying an anchor. Oar had shown she couldn't swim at all, and the wrinkled curls of driftwood on the beach were too small for building a raft. For a moment, I considered giving up on the burial at sea and just digging a grave in the sand; but then I thought about Chee's last desperate attempt at speaking. "Suh… suh…" Although I had no confidence he really wanted to be committed to the water, I wanted to do something that felt like granting his final request.

"Oar," I said, "do you have any ideas how to take my friend out into the lake?"

She answered immediately, "We will carry him on my boat."

"You have a boat?"

"It will come when I call. Stay here."

She walked away down the beach, giving me the chance for something I'd been longing to do since she appeared. Casually activating the Bumbler, I aimed the scanner at her smoothly sculpted back and did a quick run through the EM band.

In the visible spectrum, she was transparent; but at every other wavelength, she gauged very close to Homo sapiens. IR readings showed her body temperature was less than a degree warmer than mine — or what mine would have been if I weren't shivering on an open beach in a wet cotton chemise. On UV, she looked just as opaque as I did; and on X-ray, she actually showed a skeleton and the ghosts of internal organs. To my untrained eye, the images of bone and tissue looked entirely human… except that none of it showed up with visible light.

An invisible heart, beating in her chest.

Invisible lungs, processing air.

Invisible brain, glands, liver, gall bladder… all wrapped up in a glassy epidermis that let light through unimpeded.

Could she possibly be a machine? Unlikely. Machines tend to have IR hot spots: power packs, transformers, things like that. Oar's body temperature was more evenly distributed — like mine, to be honest, with head and thorax warmer than the extremities but none of the sharp gradients you see in androids. Organisms also emit waves in the radio band with a completely different pattern from machines; nervous systems transmit their signals in ways wires can't imitate… not even biosynthetic wires made from organic molecules.

No — Oar was not built on an assembly line. That still didn't make her "natural"… most likely, she was the result of DNA tinkering. She or her ancestors had been purposely altered. More important, she'd been altered for the benefit of eyes like mine. No other species in the League of Peoples perceived exactly the same set of wavelengths as humans. If other sentient beings looked at Oar, they'd see her IR glow, or perhaps a full X-ray layout. They certainly wouldn't see the perfect transparence that greeted my human eyes.

The only plausible explanation was that humans had lived on Melaquin, either now or in the past. The planet had worms, killdeer, and monarch butterflies; why not Homo sapiens too? And for some reason, those humans had fabricated this new transparent race… transparent to human eyes, if not to the eyes of extraterrestrial species.

Of course, I had no idea why they'd do such a thing. Why make yourself hard for your fellow creatures to see? Were they trying to hide from each other? But Oar still showed up on IR, UV, and other wavelengths. She couldn't conceal herself from high-tech sensors… and surely her culture had such gadgets. They were sophisticated enough to engineer themselves into glass; they must understand basics like the EM spectrum.

Maybe turning to glass was simply a fashion statement. Or a religious practice — implementing some teaching that glassiness was next to godliness. No, I told myself, that was too easy: too many sociologists threw up their hands and said, "It's just religion," when they found a custom they didn't understand at first sight. An Explorer doesn't have the luxury to dismiss anything.

I had to be scrupulously honest: I didn't understand why people would make themselves glass… and perhaps this whole train of thought was merely jumping to conclusions. Melaquin showed no roads, no cities, no signs of technology — scarcely consistent with a culture that could engineer people into near-invisibility.

Unless…

…at the same time they made a race so hard to see, they also removed all signs of their presence on the planet.

Unless these see-through bodies and the dearth of development were all attempts to hide that this planet was inhabited. Even if they showed up on IR, glass bodies were still harder to see than normal flesh and blood.

And if that was true, what were they hiding from?

I shivered; and this time it had nothing to do with air temperature or damp clothes.

Radio, Boat

Oar walked twenty paces, then crouched beside a shadowed tangle of thornbush washed up on the sand. She glanced back and gestured that I should turn my head away. I complied, but tucked the Bumbler's scanner behind me so I could watch while my back was turned.

A few moments passed while she checked I wasn't looking. Then she stretched her arm into the tangle, methodically pushing away one branch after another as she moved her hand inside. I played with the Bumbler's dials, trying to see what Oar was reaching for; and suddenly, the image glowed with a flare of bright violet.

Hmmm.

On the Bumbler's current setting, violet corresponded to radio waves. Somewhere in the bushes, a concealed radio transmitter had sent out a signal.

Oar stood and began walking back to me. I clicked off the Bumbler's display and pondered how long I should pretend to be unaware of her approach. Before I was forced to decide, I was saved by the lapping of waves offshore — the glass coffin had reappeared, and was slipping in toward the beach. I watched it a moment, then turned to Oar. "Your boat?"

"Yes. It comes when it is wanted." Her voice had a self-satisfied tone, as if I should be impressed by the boat's "magical" response to her whim. The magic was surely the radio signal she'd just sent… but perhaps Oar didn't know that herself.

"It must be good to have a boat like that," I said. "Where did you get it?"

"I have always had it," she replied, as if my question was nonsense. "Would you like to ride in it with me?"

"Both of us?" The boat's size was generous for a coffin, but getting two people inside would be a squeeze. "It's a bit small," I said.

"Two can fit," she started to say… then she stopped, suddenly stiff and distant. "You are right, Festina," she said in a voice that was meant to sound casual. "The boat is very small."

Ouch, I thought; and I imagined Jelca and Oar enclosed there together, arms and legs entwined, sailing impassioned through the lake's silent dark.

Half of me was sick with jealousy. The other half pictured myself in the same position with Jelca; and that half was not sick at all.

The Last of Chee

Oar began to tell me her plan, and in a moment, I collected myself enough to listen. She would board the boat and I would drape Chee's body over it. At Oar's command, the boat would sail slowly out into the lake. When they were far enough out, she would tell the boat to submerge and let the admiral slump off into the water. I had a hunch the boat's glass was so slippery, Chee might slide off sooner than expected. Still, if they only got a stone's throw from shore, it would be better than I could do wading; so I nodded and complimented Oar on the cleverness of her plan.

She smiled like a queen acknowledging the adoration of her subjects.

After Oar got into the coffin, I was left alone to heave Chee onto the lid. The rocks made him damnably heavy… and he was beginning to stiffen as well. Getting him into position took all my strength, plus leverage from sticks of driftwood; but at last I spreadeagled him face down on the glass, his arms dangling on either side of the coffin and his toes hooked over the forward edge. I wanted to send him out feetfirst, hoping he would stay in place longer — headfirst, there would be nothing to stop him from sliding backward, and the open collar of his suit would catch spray as the boat glided forward.

Oar could never be described as a patient woman. I had scarcely arranged Chee's limbs when the boat pulled away, backing into the lake. This was the first close view I'd had of the coffin while it was moving; I saw nothing that looked like a propulsion system, nothing that told me how it pushed itself through the water. Whatever engines it had were completely silent. With no exhaust, no bubbling of hidden propellers, the boat quietly withdrew and glided off along the surface.

Soon I could see nothing but Chee's tightsuit glistening in the moonlight. He lay quite still, his head toward me as he moved away. His thin white hair was slick with lightly splashed water; and I thought of Oar inside the boat, looking up through the glass at Chee's lifeless face. He was just a stranger to her… And yet, his death seemed to mean something profound to her.

The moon went behind a cloud and I lost sight of the body. Was that it? Was Chee gone forever? But the cloud passed and the moonlight sparkled again on white fabric far out on the water.

I raised my hand in the only heartfelt salute I ever gave an admiral, and held it there till he was out of sight.