Expendable

by James Alan Gardner

  That assumed the skin didn’t turn magenta to duplicate my birthmark.

  “How fast does it change color?” I asked, not looking at Tobit.

  “About an hour.”

  “I’ll see you in an hour,” I said, and left the room.

  Punch Gently

  Oar trotted at my heels. I didn’t really want company, but it was safer this way—if the Morlocks turned belligerent with liquor, she’d be in trouble on her own.

  Once we had left the building, I set a fast pace across the plaza toward the outskirts of the town. “Where are we going?” Oar asked.

  “To find a mirror.” As if I needed one, surrounded by so much glass; if necessary, I could put on the patch using my slight reflection in Oar’s own body. But I wanted to put distance between me and Tobit, to leave his leers behind. If this worked, his smugness would be obnoxious; but if I didn’t even try, he’d be utterly unbearable.

  If I didn’t even try….

  Listen. My stomach had the same nervous flutters as the night I decided to lose my virginity: balancing on a razor’s edge of desire and fear. I wanted to see myself whole. I yearned for that. Yet I was afraid of being disappointed, and even worse, of being changed. My life sometimes felt like a war to hold on to what I was; to remain me. I was terrified of turning into something different—of losing my definition.

  It sounds childish. It sounds glib. I only have words to describe the superficial issues. Even to myself, I can’t express the depths of my fear. Nor can I express the depths of my longing. You’d think it would be easy to explain why I wanted to cure my disfigurement; that’s obvious, yes? Obvious why I’d want to look like Prope and Harque and everyone else whose glances of fascinated revulsion had humiliated me all my life. Why should I feel ashamed of wanting to look like them?

  And Jelca…pathetic to think of him at a time like this, but how would he react? Would he be delighted to find a real, unblemished woman on Melaquin? Or would he regard me the way Explorers always regarded the unflawed: as shallow and vain, pretty objects but unworthy of deep attention.

  “You look sad,” Oar said. “Why are you sad, Festina?”

  “Because I’m foolish,” I replied. “Very foolish. I want to be me, but I also want to be some other woman I’m afraid I won’t like.”

  “That is foolish,” Oar agreed. “If you turn into an unlikable woman, I will punch you in the nose; then you will know you have to turn back into my friend.”

  Laughing, I kissed her on the cheek. “Thanks. But punch gently, okay? My face has enough trouble without a broken nose.”

  In Front of the Mirror

  We found a blockhouse, much like the one where Jelca had made his home in Oar’s village—the same layout anyway, but without the clutter of cannibalized electronics. The bathroom had a mirror. After asking Oar to wait outside, I stared at my reflection.

  Memorizing a face I’d often wanted to forget.

  “This may not work,” I said.

  “I can always take it off,” I said.

  “This patch may be too small,” I said.

  It was big enough. In fact, it needed some trimming. I used the scalpel from the medical kit, but I spent a long time washing the blade first.

  My Appearance Revisited

  The skin eased down onto my cheek. I patted it into place. For a moment I could feel its light touch, but the sensation slowly vanished—like the residue of water after washing your face, disappearing as it dries into thin air.

  When I first laid out the patch, its edges were visible. I spent a minute trying to smooth them down; but as I watched, I could see the outer fringe knit itself into my own skin, bonding, becoming part of me. I brushed the intersection with my finger: it was barely discernible. It was still possible to see where the patch ended and my own cheek began—the patch was darker—but within minutes all trace of a join was gone.

  Like a parasite affixing itself to a newfound host.

  Yet I did not feel any revulsion. My cheek had the texture of smooth, perfect skin. When I looked closely, I could see fine hairs peeking out of it. Were they my own hairs, protruding through the mesh? Or did the material have hairs of its own, mimicking real tissue?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember if hairs had grown up through my birthmark. After only three minutes, I was forgetting what my birthmark looked like.

  I shivered.

  With sudden energy, I snapped myself away from the mirror and strode into the next room. “Let’s go for a walk,” I told Oar.

  “May I touch it?” she asked.

  “No. Walk.”

  Hard

  We began to stroll the circumference of the habitat dome—keeping to the edge of town let me avoid being surrounded by glass buildings. In an hour, I would look at my face; before then, I didn’t want to catch any chance reflection. Therefore, my gaze was turned toward the black dome wall as we walked. There was nothing to see, and that was good.

  From time to time, I could feel Oar glancing at me. I was deliberately walking on her right, so she could only see my good cheek; her furtive peeks were attempts to watch the new skin change. Or perhaps she was only trying to gauge my mood. After minutes of tentative silence, she finally asked, “How are you feeling, Festina?”

  “I’m fine.” The words came out automatically. “I’m always fine,” I said.

  “You are not fine, you are troubled. Must I punch you in the nose so soon?”

  I gave her a rueful grin. “No.” It was tempting to face her, but I didn’t. I could feel nothing special in my cheek, yet it seemed to be the center of all my consciousness. “This is just hard,” I said.

  “Why is it hard? Either you will stay the same, or you will look less ugly. You cannot lose.”

  “I might have an allergic reaction.”

  “What is an allergic reaction?”

  “It’s…” I shook my head. “Never mind, I was just being difficult.” I turned my gaze to the crisp white cement beneath our feet. “This is hard,” I said again.

  We walked another minute in silence. Then Oar said, “I know how to stop you being sad. We can find the Tower of Ancestors in this place.”

  She looked at me expectantly.

  “And that would cheer me up?” I asked.

  “It feels good inside the Hall of Ancestors.”

  “Only if you feed off UV and X-rays,” I told her. “I’ll pass.”

  “But if we go to the Tower of Ancestors,” Oar insisted, “we can find the foolish Prophet those Morlocks follow. Then we will walk up to him and say, ‘Pooh!’ Just like that: ‘Pooh!’ Someone should have spoken to him a long time ago. ‘Pooh!’”

  I smiled. “You have a knack for theological argument. Good thing you didn’t try it with the Morlocks themselves.”

  “The Morlocks are all very foolish,” she replied. “It does not make sense to wear skin when it only looks ugly. Ugliness is bad. You know that, Festina. You will never be beautiful, but you are trying to look better. That is wise. That is correct.”

  “Thank you,” I answered drily. “But even if the new skin works, I may not wear it forever. I just put it on for curiosity’s sake. An experiment, that’s all. No self-respecting woman places much value on mere appearance…”

  Such babble. Even Oar knew I was talking for my own benefit. She gazed at me with gentle pity…and perhaps I would have prattled on to greater depths of humiliation if a naked man hadn’t materialized two paces in front of us.

  The Naked Man

  He didn’t step from behind a building. He didn’t rise out of the ground or appear in a puff of smoke. One moment the space in front of us was empty, and the next it was occupied. As instant as a scream.

  The man was short and brown and hairy. His head was thatched with crinkly salt-and-pepper hair, and his mouth surrounded with a bushy silver beard. Graying curls dappled his chest, arms, and genitals. Beneath all that hair was a wiry body marked liberally with scars—wide slashes of whitened tissue, the kind you see
on Opters fanatical enough to refuse stitches, no matter how serious the wound. His eyes had a yellow tint to them, but were still bright and alert. He looked straight at me for a moment, then slammed his fists on his stomach and spoke in a melodious language I didn’t recognize.

  I looked at Oar to see if she knew what he was saying. She returned my gaze in bewilderment.

  “Okay,” I sighed to the little man. “Greetings, I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg your Hospitality.”

  “Why do Explorers always say that?” Oar muttered. “It is very annoying.”

  “Blame it on boundless optimism,” I told her. “Someday I’ll say it to someone who doesn’t run screaming or try to kill me.”

  The man did neither. Instead he spoke again, this time guttural words with phlegmy rasps in the throat. It sounded so different from his first speech, I guessed he had changed languages in an attempt to find one I understood. Good luck, I thought to myself. No Explorer bothers with linguistic training; it’s taken for granted we’ll never understand the native tongues of the beings we meet. If they don’t understand our “Greetings” speech, our only recourse is to play charades…very careful charades, trying to avoid gestures that would be misunderstood as hostile.

  Accordingly, I lifted my hands, palms out, facing the man. “Hello,” I said, more for Oar’s benefit than his. “I am unarmed and friendly.” To back my words, I smiled, making sure to keep my mouth closed: for many species, baring the teeth means aggression. The man in front of me appeared to be one hundred percent Homo sapiens—the kind with real skin, not glass—but it would still be a mistake to assume too much cultural common ground.

  Before the man could respond to my gesture, Oar took her own stab at communicating: a gush of words in her own native language, a flood of syllables that went on for more than half a minute before she paused for breath.

  The man blinked once, then turned back to me. His attitude said he didn’t understand Oar, and had no interest in trying. He ventured another smattering of syllables, this one a type of singing that reminded me of Gregorian chant. The words, however, weren’t Latin—I don’t speak the language, but a zoologist knows enough scientific names for animals to recognize Latin when she hears it.

  “Listen,” I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly, “we aren’t going to understand each other this way. Maybe if we…”

  I didn’t finish my sentence. At that moment, the man flickered in and out of existence like heat lightning.

  Flicker

  The effect only lasted a second: his image breaking into a moiré pattern of optical interference, then righting itself again into a seemingly solid man. It didn’t matter how brief the disruption was—it told me two things.

  First, the man was a hologram: a good hologram, since it’s extremely difficult for projections to fool the eye at a range of three paces. Nevertheless, I knew he was just a constructed image…something I half-expected already, since corporeal men don’t appear out of nowhere. (Some members of the League are rumored to have perfected teleportation, but no one with that technology has ever contacted humans.)

  The second thing I knew was that Melaquin had started to live on borrowed time. The flicker in this image could only mean some machine somewhere had acquired a fault. It might only be a small malfunction in a nonessential system—the hardware for projecting pictures of naked men was unlikely to be crucial for survival—but even a tiny glitch meant things had begun to break down. No one, not even the League of Peoples, could build equipment that lasts forever; all the automated repair systems in the universe can’t hold back the patient creep of entropy. If four thousand years was the lifetime for the systems here on Melaquin…

  …the lifetime of the people wouldn’t last significantly longer.

  Fluent Osco-Umbrian

  The man in front of me behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. He launched into another speech in another language—no language I knew, no language I cared about. I bided my time till he finished, then held up my hand to stop him from trying again.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “Whatever message you want to convey, it’s four thousand years too late. You’re a simulation, right? Probably the interface projection for an artificial intelligence that oversees this town. Computer-controlled and designed to relate to the first people who came here. To them, you must have looked like a wise old man…someone they’d naturally respect. But to me, you’re evidence of the AI’s imminent breakdown. Trying to reach me with languages four millennia old; you can’t understand Oar, so you haven’t kept up as the people here changed. Anyway, I’ve never liked talking to AIs—they’re always smarmy and unctuous.”

  The man said nothing. He stared intently, as if sheer force of will could make my words intelligible.

  “Oar,” I said, “you’d better fetch Tobit. He might know how to deal with our friend. If Tobit has lived long enough in this town, maybe he’s learned Osco-Umbrian.”

  “Tobit…” the naked man whispered.

  “Ah,” I said, “a name he recognizes.”

  “Tobit,” the man repeated.

  “You’re friends with Tobit, right?” I said. “Maybe you two get lit up together.”

  “Tobit,” the man answered. “Tobit. Toe…bit…toe…bee…or not to be, that is the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—”

  “Shit,” I said. “Or rather, Zounds.”

  Speaking Trippingly From the Tongue

  “Hail and well-met!” the man said with a flourish of his hand. “I have in timely manner found your tongue within my mind.”

  An ugly anatomical image, I thought. Aloud, I replied, “You’ve finally identified my language in your data banks.”

  The man nodded. “This blessed talk, these words, this speech, this English.”

  “What is wrong with him?” Oar asked in a whisper. “Is he simply foolish, or is there something chemically wrong with his brain?”

  I shook my head. “The League of Peoples obviously drops in now and then to update the local language databases. The good news is that the records are recent enough to include English; the bad news is—”

  “It is a foolish kind of English,” Oar finished.

  “Let me not to the intercourse of true minds admit impediments,” the man replied. “My tongue may be rough and my condition not smooth—”

  “Enough,” I interrupted. It annoyed me he understood my contemporary English but continued speaking his Elizabethan version. That’s an AI for you: probably trying to “uplift” me by setting an example of “correct” speech. “Let’s keep this to yes-or-no questions,” I said. “Are you a machine-created projection?”

  “Yea, verily.”

  “So I’m essentially talking to an artificial intelligence?”

  “Aye, milady.” The little man displayed a smile of delight—the indulgent smile a pet-owner wears when the family dog rolls over. As I said, AIs are all smarmy.

  “And there’s some good reason you’ve approached me?” I asked.

  “E’en so.”

  “What reason?”

  “To lay this thy kingdom at thy feet. To bid you take up the scepter. To hail you as lord, and queen hereafter.”

  And he knelt before me, lowering his head to the pavement in respectful submission.

  The First of My Kind

  I had never been offered the title of queen. I did not want it now.

  “Do you say this to everyone who comes by?” I asked.

  “Only you,” the man replied. “You are the first of your kind to walk here since the dawn of this era.”

  “He means you have occluded skin,” Oar said helpfully.

  “A diplomatic turn of phrase,” I told her. Turning back to the man, I said, “I’m not the first of my kind to come. What about Tobit? Or the other Explorers who’ve visited this town?”

  “Pretenders have been legion,” the man admitted. “Many a child,” he gestured
toward Oar, “has tried to usurp the throne, clad in borrowed rags.” I realized he meant glass people wearing artificial skin. “Another who dwells in this place appears to have the proper bloodline, yet has knitted himself to unliving metal and is therefore discounted.” That had to be Tobit, “knitted” to his prosthetic arm; the League disapproved of cyborging, and had obviously programmed the AI to disqualify anyone equipped with any augmentation.

  “Some too,” the man continued, “have arrived with unverifiable claims, hidden as they were behind impenetrable armors.”

  “Ahh!” The other Explorers to pass this way had all been wearing tightsuits. The suits must be sufficiently shielded that the AI couldn’t tell whether the wearers were fully human. I, on the other hand, in my knee-high skirt….

  “Why are you laughing, Festina?” Oar asked.

  I answered, “How many women ever became queen because of their legs?”

  Probably a lot, I reflected. Especially if kings had anything to do with it.

  The Powers of the Queen

  “What does being queen entail?” I asked the little man.

  “All this realm’s resources lie at your command,” he replied.

  “Which realm? This dome? Or the entire planet?”

  “All that lies beneath this most excellent canopy, look you, this brave o’erhanging firmament, this majestical roof—”

  “The dome,” Oar explained.

  “I got that,” I nodded. “Not much of a kingdom,” I told the man-image. “And not much of a distinction either. What can a queen do that a commoner can’t? Anyone can work the synthesizers to get food, artificial skin, you name it. What else is there?”

  “Only one thing more. Follow me, your majesty.”

  I shrugged. “Lay on, Macduff.”

  The man rose gracefully from his knees and after a courtly bow, led us forward, keeping to the circumference of the dome. Although his legs were half the length of mine, he had no trouble walking at our pace, since his image could skim over ground as quickly as necessary.

  As we walked, I passed the time scanning the area for the projectors creating the man’s image; but I soon realized my search was pointless. Whether the machines were mounted on the dome, on a tower, or shining straight through the walls of nearby buildings, it didn’t make a real difference. He was here. He was projected. Everything else was a technicality.