Expendable

by James Alan Gardner

  “Why?” I asked. “Living well is the best revenge?”

  “No. The best revenge is getting back to New Earth and cramming the council’s misdeeds down its throat.”

  “I’m a murderer. I can’t leave Melaquin.”

  “God damn it, Ramos!” Chee roared. “You may feel guilty, but you are not a—”

  That was when he had his stroke.

  Suh

  We were almost to the top of the ravine. A few paces ahead, the trees gave way to the meadow where we had landed. Off to the west, I could see the last thin yellow of sunset fading into the purple of night.

  Chee slumped like deadweight, slopping off my shoulders and falling into the crackle of forest leaves. I was so busy looking at the sky, I didn’t react fast enough to catch him.

  “Suh,” he said, face down in the leaves. “Suh.”

  I knelt quickly and turned him over. Already, the left half of his face was dead. The Explorer paramedic course had talked about this, but it had just been words: Loss of control over one side of the body…a telltale symptom of stroke. But now it wasn’t a symptom, it was something that had happened to someone sprawled in my arms.

  The right half of the face still had Chee in it. The left half was empty—unoccupied flesh, controlled by nothing but gravity.

  “Suh,” he said urgently. His right hand grabbed my arm. “Suh!”

  Last Wishes

  “Admiral,” I told him, “try to be calm. I might have something in the first aid kit—”

  He slapped his palm over my mouth…a fumbling clumsy swipe that would have hurt if he’d had any strength left. “Suh!” he shouted. “Suuuuh!”

  I leaned back, just far enough to dislodge his hand. It fell limply across his chest. “Admiral Chee,” I said with choked self-control, “you have had a stroke. It has affected your left side, so it probably happened in the right lobe of your brain. Most people have their speech nodes predominantly in the other lobe, so there’s a good chance you can still speak if you relax.” I didn’t know if that was true, but I said it anyway. “Imagine you’re speaking with the right half of your mouth. Maybe that will help you focus.”

  “Suhhhh…suuuhhh….” He pursed his lips with great effort, then tried again. “Suhhhhh….”

  “Something about the sun?” I asked. “Sand? Soil? You’re sorry?”

  His hand flopped across my mouth again. If he hadn’t done it, I would have stopped myself in another word or two. This was not the time for guessing games. The man had suffered a stroke thirty light-years from the nearest med-center. That was bad enough; but this was the start of YouthBoost meltdown—it would only get worse. And what could I do about it? Grab my scalpel and see if I could make it two-for-two?

  “Suhhhh….”

  He lifted his hand to point. For a moment, it aimed toward the ravine—south. Was that it? But then his whole arm spasmed and pointed the other way: toward the lake. The lake? Or did his confused brain think it was the sea?

  “The sea?” I said. “Is that it? Do you want to be buried at sea?”

  His whole body sagged. I couldn’t tell if he was relaxing because he’d got his message across or collapsing because his strength had run out. His grip on my arm went slack, and he sank back into the leaves.

  One leaf drifted over his face, covering his nose and eyes. He didn’t even twitch.

  More Expendability

  It took Chee another hour to die.

  I sat with him, his head cradled in my lap as I stroked his hair with my hand. His eyes fluttered open now and then, but I don’t think he was really seeing anymore. Occasionally he would grimace and grunt; then his face would relax once more into apparent calm.

  From time to time, I used the Bumbler to check his vital signs. Eventually, the readings came up negative. No heartbeat. No EM activity in the brain.

  As planet-down deaths go, it was more gentle than any Explorer expected.

  More gentle than Yarrun.

  To take my mind off that, I asked myself why it had been so important for him to be buried at sea…if that really was what he wanted. I knew some religions believed strongly in the practice—the Last Baptism, they called it, a return to the mother of us all. Did Chee belong to one of those faiths? Or had he perhaps come from a waterworld, an oceandome, a sargasso habitat…some birthplace near the sea, that would now gather him home?

  I never found out.

  I never found out.

  I never learned why he had asked to be buried at sea…or if he had been trying to say something entirely different, and had died in frustration at not being understood.

  For a while, I continued stroking his hair. “That’s what ‘expendable’ means,” I whispered, over and over again.

  Then I began dragging his body toward the lake.

  Part VII

  MOONRISE

  Moons

  I stood at the edge of the bluffs and looked down at the water. The sky was clear and perforated with stars; to the southeast, a large white moon hung a hand’s breadth above the horizon.

  The moon was the color of Old Earth’s moon. Ancient and melancholy.

  I liked white moons—they had a subduing effect on their planets. When a world has a red moon in the sky, nights tend to be desperate…you’re fighting angry, or you scramble for someone, anyone, to lie sweat-slick entangled with you, till the morning comes and you’re exhausted enough to sleep. Greenish moons can make you happy on the right day in spring, but any other time they look fetid and sickly; when a planet’s dominant moon is green, the people are whiners, filled with petty resentments. As for blue moons….

  Blue moons are rare for populated worlds. The only one I’d ever seen loomed in the skies over Sitz, the planet where all cadet Explorers got sent for inoculations that everyone knew were pointless. To avoid reactions with the shots, you had to abstain from all other medications…which meant that my memories of Sitz were centered on fierce menstrual cramps, unaided by the usual swatch. I passed my single night on Sitz huddled on the floor of the cadet hostel, staring at the bluish glow in the sky and outraged that something so mundane could hurt so much.

  In the back of my mind, I wondered how many swatches I’d find in the first aid kit. Not enough to last a lifetime on Melaquin. How long until my next period? Twelve days, unless the stress of the last few hours threw my chemistry off…which it probably would.

  Suddenly, the moon rising before me was more ominous than it had been.

  Still, it was a white moon, and that was a point in its favor. White moons are aloof and formal—like a bachelor uncle who will leave you alone when you need to cry. People born under white moons know how to be silent; they don’t feel the need to fill every quiet moment with conversation.

  Then again, most people aren’t born under moons at all. Most people are born under roofs—at least their souls are. And they sluggishly live their lives under roofs. At night they pull the curtains for fear some moon will shine in and infect them.

  I liked moonlight. Even colored moonlight.

  Moonlight was forgiving when I looked in the mirror.

  Down the Bluffs

  Chee’s body was at my feet. I had clamped his helmet back in place on his suit so that crickets and grass wouldn’t go down his collar as I dragged him across the meadow. It wasn’t clear whether I should take the helmet off again when I finally got him to the lake. If this burial at sea was a matter of religion, maybe it was important for him to be in actual contact with the water. (And in contact with the fish who would chew his flesh…who would eventually float in the darkness of his picked-clean ribcage, as if he were a skeleton of coral.)

  Stupid, Festina, I chided myself, keep it together a bit longer. Be hard, be hard, until you’ve done what needs doing.

  So I pulled my gaze away from the moon and started hauling the admiral down the bluffs.

  The slope was steep but not forbiddingly so. I could dig my feet into the sandy soil and keep my balance by hanging onto the weeds that
grew on the slanting face.

  Burdock. Nettles. Thistles.

  Stumbling down in the dark, I didn’t like so many thorns clustered around me…but the tightsuit was as tough as plate mail, proof against anything a milquetoast terrestrial weed could dish out. Chee was protected, I was protected, and gravity was in our favor; so we proceeded down the bluffs in a controlled slide, me on my feet tugging Chee on his back, headfirst so he didn’t get caught in bushes.

  I was also lugging the Bumbler, which I refused to leave back at the Landing site: a slow-witted proximity alarm was better than no alarm at all. I had no partner now to watch my back.

  At the bottom of my climb, the weeds ended abruptly at the beach: a wet, narrow beach, littered with driftwood, clam shells, and half-rotted fish. I could see the place clearly, thanks to the moon…and I could smell it clearly too, with the air moldering breezeless in the shelter of the bluffs. Ocean shores smell of salt; fresh water smells of the day’s decay.

  With the admiral safely down from the bluffs, I rewarded myself with a rest, sitting on a driftwood log: a time to catch my breath, to listen to the waves, to debate whether I should leave Chee’s suit open or closed. If he stayed helmet on, he would float—the air in his suit would buoy him up like a life preserver. Floating, he would soon drift to shore; so perhaps I had to take off his helmet and fill his tightsuit with rocks…enough to weigh him down until the water had its way with him.

  Was that what he would have wanted? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to make the decision.

  I might have sat on that driftwood a long time, if a glass coffin hadn’t risen out of the lake.

  Glass

  The coffin surfaced silently, sending out ripples under the moonlight. Its glass had a mirror polish, dappled with drops and trickles of water; the sheen reflected the shadowed bluffs, making it impossible to see inside. As smooth as a swan the coffin slid across the waters, until it nudged the beach only twenty meters away from me.

  I held my breath as the coffin lid opened. A woman lying face down inside pushed herself up and stepped onto the sand.

  A nude woman made of glass.

  The glass was clear and colorless. I could see right through her, the beach beyond distorted by a woman-shaped lens.

  She was my height, but she looked like an Art Deco figurine. Everything about her seemed sleek and stylized—the long sweep of her legs, the slim torso, the high-cheekboned face. Her hair was not hair but the suggestion of hair: smooth glass swaths which were not differentiated into separate strands. That went for both the hair on her head and the tasteful implications of hair on her pubis…nothing so earthy as real genitalia, but an artistic rendering which hinted at some platonic ideal.

  What was she doing here? On a planet with real worms, real butterflies and real killdeer, how could there be such a patently unreal woman? She was out of place, disturbing. Alien.

  And so beautiful, she filled me with shame at my own flaws.

  The woman walked onto the beach the way glass would walk if it could—smoothly, strongly, boldly. The muscles of her legs and arms slid silkily with the movement; whatever she was made of might resemble glass, but it was not brittle. After a glance that didn’t come around far enough to see me, she faced back to the coffin and called out something in a resonant alto voice. The words were no language I had ever heard, but they were obviously commands to her vessel. Its lid closed silently…

  …and in that moment of quiet, the Bumbler finally noticed her. Its alarm chittered Beep, beep, beep! in the still night air.

  The woman’s head whipped around. She couldn’t help but see me. Lit by the full moon, her mouth and eyes flew open in horror.

  “Greetings,” I said as I kicked the Bumbler’s SHUT-UP switch. “I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality.”

  With an agonized howl, the woman spun away from me and sprinted for the coffin.

  Submergence

  By the time she reached her vessel, the coffin lid was fully shut. That didn’t stop her—she threw herself onto the top and hammered at the mirrored surface. Glass fists clacked sharply against the glass lid; but the coffin showed no sign of opening, no matter how hard she pounded.

  Slowly, the craft slipped back into the water…and the woman hung on, shouting words I didn’t understand but could easily guess: “Help, help, a monster!” How else would she react to a purple-faced stranger, dressed in bulky white? The coffin paid no attention to her screams. With increasing speed it withdrew from the shore, fast enough to throw spray in its wake.

  Wet glass fingers clung to the wet glass lid—and as water sprayed in the woman’s face, her grip slipped with the squeal of glass on glass. The coffin’s surface was too slick to offer purchase; and when the sarcophagus started to submerge, a thickening onrush of water pushed the woman clean off, coughing, spluttering…and sinking.

  “Bloody hell,” I muttered. Could she swim? Could she breathe under water? Did she need to breathe at all?

  If she really was glass, she’d be heavy as an anchor.

  “God damn it,” I said. But I knew I would have to play lifeguard.

  Emergency Evac

  I couldn’t rescue her in my tightsuit: with the helmet off, it would fill with water and drag me down as soon as I started swimming. Growling profanities, I dug my thumbs under the twin flaps protecting the emergency release buttons, then pressed down hard. It was something I’d never done before, not with an active outfit—all our escape drills were performed with deactivated gear to avoid destroying valuable equipment. This time, however, the suit was live…and it stayed that way for precisely two seconds, just long enough for me to splay out my legs and throw my arms wide over my head.

  Then the suit exploded off my body.

  It went in pieces, splitting along seams invisible to anything less than an electron microscope. The gloves rocketed into the sky while the sleeves peeled themselves back like bananas, then ripped free from my shoulders as tiny charges of plastique blew them away. The breastplate had plastique of its own: enough to blast the front half five paces down the beach and the back half ten centimeters deep into the sand of the bluffs. The crotch slumped away without force—the males on the tightsuit design team must have been squeamish about high-powered explosives near that part of their anatomy—but the leg releases had enough plastique to compensate, spraying a confetti of fabric over a radius of ten meters and leaving me with nothing but shin-high white boots…that and the sweaty cotton chemise I wore to protect against the tightsuit chafing.

  “Mmmm,” I said, in spite of myself. No matter what other things I had on my mind, it’s hard to stay focused when all your clothing is blown off in a single zipless whirlwind.

  “Mmm. Mmm-hmm.”

  And you are left standing on a moonlit beach, exposed to the soft night air.

  “My oh my,” I said.

  Then I saw that some of the fabric tatters had slapped like useless bandages onto Admiral Chee’s corpse. And I thought of the woman, maybe with the ponderous density of glass, sinking over her head in lake water.

  There’d been too many deaths already. I refused to permit another.

  Lifeguard

  Clasping the Bumbler’s strap to my shoulder, I hit the lake running, took one bounce, then knifed out in a shallow dive while I still had momentum. For a woman brought up in the steamy tropics of Agua, the water temperature here was an education. No doubt, an ice-colony boy like Yarrun would have claimed the lake was balmy, but this was still mid-autumn at forty-one degrees north latitude. My muscles did not seize up with the cold; my lungs continued to gasp up air whenever I lifted my head from the water; but I could feel my skin pebble into gooseflesh, and had to grit my teeth to keep them from chattering.

  Ahead of me, the glass coffin was nothing more than a V-shaped disturbance under the water. Before it vanished completely I took a sighting on it, trying to estimate the difference between its position now and where it was when the glass woman slipp
ed off. Was I getting close to her? The water was certainly over my head. Trying not to think about undertows, sharks, or water-borne parasites, I swung the Bumbler around and pushed its scanner under the surface.

  A visual scan would only waste time; the water was black, the target transparent. I set the sensors to look for heat and cranked up the gain. There was no guarantee the woman would be warm-blooded—who knew if glass had blood at all?—but even if her metabolism just matched air temperature, she had to be warmer than the frigid water around me. The Bumbler would pick her up if she was within ten meters.

  The screen flickered then bloomed with something hot right beneath me—something alive, close and moving. My heart choked tight with fear before I realized I was seeing my own legs, treading water. Oh. Tilting the scanner outward, I swung myself in a slow circle…and tried to force from my mind the memory of doing the same when I was searching for Yarrun.

  “Where are you?” I muttered. “Come on, come on….”

  A bright blob flared on the bottom, only a few meters from me. Steady, steady; and in another few seconds, the Bumbler had sufficient data to resolve the image into a human shape, its arms and legs struggling futilely.

  Okay. Okay.

  Sling the Bumbler over my shoulder.

  Take a deep breath.

  Dive.

  Even with the heat trace sighting, it wasn’t easy to find a transparent woman in night-black water. I swept my hands blindly for at least ten seconds before I made contact: smooth slick skin, warm but diamond-hard. Before I could decide what part of her I was touching, an arm lashed out and grabbed me, catching hold of my hair. She nearly yanked out a handful. Then we were wrestling, unable to see in the dark—the woman wild with the fear of drowning and me trying to get her in a good rescue hold.

  It was a match too evenly balanced for comfort. Explorers are trained in every conceivable rescue technique, and I had the added advantage of my martial-arts work, breaking free from people who wanted to grapple. On the other hand, the glass woman was strong and desperate, with a hide like blastproof plastic. When a flailing hand caught me in the stomach, it felt like a hammer—if the water hadn’t slowed it down, the blow might have knocked the air out of me.