“Sorry,” I answered. “I’m a zoology specialist. The best I can do is identify the species if something’s been nibbling your wires.”
He chuckled. “Maybe I should go back and play with the equipment while there’s still some light. Getting close to the big day, and we wouldn’t want to launch our ship into the teeth of a blizzard.”
“You have a ship ready for launch?”
“Depends who you ask,” Walton said. “Some’ll tell you it’s been ready for months. Others say it needs months more testing. Damned if I know—only aviation I understand is weather balloons.”
“Is it…” I paused to think of how to put my question. “Is it a big ship?”
“Don’t worry,” he replied. “There’s room for everyone. Won’t be long before you’re heading for home.”
Walton smiled. I’m sure he expected me to smile back, overjoyed at the prospect of getting off Melaquin. But I wasn’t leaving—a murderer couldn’t. I tried for a smile anyway, but it didn’t fool Walton. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I answered quickly. “Just…bothered that I’ve dropped in at the last moment when the work’s nearly all done.”
“No one will hold that against you,” he assured me. “You’re one of us, Ramos. You’re an Explorer.” He took my hand and gave it a friendly shake. His skin felt grizzled against my fingers. “Welcome to the family,” he said. “Whatever hard times you’ve had on Melaquin, you’re not alone anymore.”
I smiled…and felt alone anyway. Suddenly, I didn’t know why I’d come here. To see other Explorers? To see Jelca? Walton’s manner was sincerely warm, but I found I could not return it. Any day now, he’d be leaving. They’d all be leaving.
And what would I have then?
On the Ride Down
Walton gave directions to the city entrance, then headed back to his weather station. I couldn’t help feeling I’d disappointed him: I was too clenched to respond to his calm cheerfulness. Still, I was not so numb that I didn’t feel a stir of excitement as we left the lark and the river behind. We followed a short trail through pine forest, then came to an open area of rock and gravel, just as Walton described.
A concealed doorway lurked behind a rock outcrop. PRESS PALM HERE was scratched onto the stone. I pressed, and the door opened.
An elevator lay beyond the door. Someone had painted UP and DOWN beside two buttons embedded in the wall. I pressed DOWN.
The elevator began to descend.
“We’re here,” I said to Oar.
“And there are many fucking Explorers here?”
“I promise they’ll treat you kindly.”
“They will not whisper about me? They will not look at me as if I am stupid?”
“Walton didn’t, did he? And if any of the others do, I’ll punch them in the nose.”
I smiled, but Oar didn’t smile back. It occurred to me I’d barely paid attention to her since we boarded the plane. I had spoken more to the plane than to Oar.
Moving to her, I took her arm and patted her hand. “It’ll be all right…really.”
“I am scared,” she said in a small voice. “I feel strange in my stomach.”
“Don’t be afraid. Whatever happened between you and Jelca—”
She interrupted. “Will he want to give me his juices again?”
Ouch. “Do you want him to do that?” I asked.
“I am not such a one as needs Explorer juices!” she snapped. “I just do not want him to think I am stupid.”
“No one thinks you’re—”
“They left without telling me! All of them: Laminir Jelca, Ullis Naar, and my sister Eel. I woke one morning and they were gone. They took Eel with them, but not me.”
I studied her for a moment. “You’re angry at Eel?”
“She was my sister. She was my sister but she went with the fucking Explorers and left me alone.”
“Oar…” I wrapped my arms around her. “You aren’t alone now. You’re with me. We’re friends.”
She hugged me, crying, her head on my shoulder. That was how we were standing when the elevator opened…and damned if I didn’t try to pull away, for fear Jelca might see us like that.
Oar’s grip was too strong for me to escape. Anyway, there was no one waiting on the other side of the door.
Reflections on the City
Beyond the door lay a city.
A city.
Oar’s home had been a village; Tobit’s a town. Here, in a cavern hollowed out of a mountain, there was space for thousands of buildings, perhaps millions of people.
All glass. All sterile. All empty and sad.
Listen. When you think of a glass city, do you imagine a crystal wonderland, bright-lit and glittering? Or perhaps something more mysterious, a glass labyrinth dreaming in permanent twilight? Then you don’t understand the ponderous monotony of it all. No color. No life. No grass, no trees, no gardens. No friendly lizards basking in the plazas, or pigeons strutting across the squares. No smells of the marketplace. No playgrounds. No butterflies.
Nothing but a vast glass graveyard.
I don’t know what the League intended on Melaquin. To build a refuge? A zoo? How had those humans of four thousand years ago reacted when they saw this new home? They had food, they had water, they had medicine and artificial skin; they even had obedient AIs to help and teach them. With all those comforts, it would be hard to walk away…but it would also be hard to live here, eternally colorless and odorless.
Or perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps those ancient people filled these streets with music…held dances, played jokes, painted murals on every glass surface. They were finally free from fear and want; their beautiful glass children would never starve down to skeletons, or cough themselves bloody from TB. Those first people might have lived joyously and died in comfortable peace, convinced this was truly a paradise.
That was four thousand years ago: the early ages of what humans call civilization. If those first generations painted these walls, the paint had long since flaked away. If they sang and danced, the tunes were forgotten. Human roots ran shallow on this planet; when the people of flesh died, their works crumbled, leaving only immortal glass.
Glass buildings. Glass children. Children who seemed to make no artworks, no songs, no sloppy messy life.
Was the problem physical…some lack in their glands, something the League left out when making these new versions of humanity? Or was the problem social? When the fear of death was gone, when offspring were rare, did you lose the incentive to achieve something beyond yourself?
I still don’t know. Whatever went wrong on Melaquin happened in every settlement on the planet—an astounding thing in itself—and it happened so long ago that no evidence remained of the loss.
All I saw was glass. A glass city.
Oar no doubt thought it beautiful. She too was glass.
Signs
The elevator was set into the outermost wall of the city: a wall of rough-hewn stone, striated with geological layers slanted twenty degrees to the horizontal. I have never liked caves—I can feel the weight of all that rock pressing down on my head—but the cavern was so huge, my misgivings were small. Besides, there were veins of pink quartz, green feldspar, and other tinted minerals deposited through the stone, providing welcome variations in the bleak color scheme.
Another variation was a sign painted in loose black letters on the nearest building:
GREETINGS, SENTIENT BEINGS
WE’RE IN THE CENTRAL SQUARE
WE’LL SHOW THEM WHAT EXPENDABLE MEANS!
“What does that say?” Oar asked.
“It says hello,” I told her. “And that we’ve come to the right place.”
“It is a very big place,” Oar said, staring out on the forest of towers, domes, and blockhouses.
“Be brave.” I gave her a squeeze, telling myself not to feel awkward about touching her “Walton said we should walk to the center now.”
It was a long walk; it
was a big city. I wondered how many ancient humans had been brought here…certainly not enough to fill the place. After living in grass huts or wattle-and-daub, the people must have been intimidated to have so much space at their disposal. Then again, they were used to living outdoors; maybe with a roof over their heads, they actually felt confined.
Our route led straight down a broad boulevard, its surface smooth white cement. A few buildings had words painted on their walls: KEEP GOING…NO U TURN…BE PREPARED TO MERGE…the indulgent signs people write to amuse themselves in empty cities. SIGNAL YOUR TURNS…DEER CROSSING…ALL CARS MUST BE RUNNING ELECTRIC….
I didn’t translate them for Oar. Some jokes aren’t worth explaining.
Dirt
The closer we got to the center, the more dirt I saw. First it was just thin dust on nearby buildings; then bits of grit accumulated at the edge of the boulevard; then spills of grease or electrolyte darkening the pavement.
“This is a filthy place,” Oar said with self-satisfaction. “My home would never become so dirty.”
“Do you clean your home?” I asked.
“No.” Her voice was offended. “Machines attend to such matters.”
“This city has the same kind of machines. Otherwise the place would be buried in grime. The Explorers must have kicked up more mess than the systems could handle; either that or my friends have commandeered the cleaning machines for other things.” Most likely for spare parts, I thought. Someone like Jelca wouldn’t hesitate to sacrifice a janitor-bot in his drive to restore a spaceship.
“So the Explorers make this place dirty?” Oar asked. “Hah! Fucking Explorers.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t use that phrase,” I told her. “You want to get along with the others, don’t you?”
“I do not know them yet,” she replied. “If they are very stupid, I may want to kick them.”
“Please, Oar; you’re my friend, and they’re my friends. It will make me sad if you pick fights.”
“I will not pick fights unless they deserve it.” Her tone of voice suggested they would deserve it.
“Oar, if you get jealous that I have other friends—”
“Festina!” shouted a voice behind me.
Jelca.
Changed
He had no hair. Wasn’t that strange? Just the bald skull I remembered, covered with the scabby patches that would grow inflamed and bleed if he tried to wear a wig.
For some reason, I had thought he’d have hair. I don’t know why—I hadn’t said, “Melaquin tech helped me so it must have helped him too.” I hadn’t thought about it logically at all; I had just assumed Jelca would have hair…that he would be dashing and handsome and muscular.
I had assumed he would be perfect.
He was not perfect; he looked gaunt and twitchy. Jelca had always been thin, but now he looked positively ravaged, as if he hadn’t eaten or slept for days. It didn’t help that he was wearing a badly-fitted long-sleeved shirt…a shimmery thing of silver fabric that probably came from the local synthesizers: something like spun glass, but a fine enough mesh that it was opaque. I doubted Jelca wore it for the sparkle—more likely it was the only cloth the synthesizers would produce—but the shirt was so glitzily out of place, it looked like voluminous silver lamé hung around the bones of an anorexic.
“Festina?” Jelca said.
“Yes.”
“You’re here too?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve changed.”
“Have I?”
“Yes.”
He spoke flatly—no grin of welcome for an old friend, or even a courteous smile for a fellow Explorer. Walton had been happier to see me, and Walton was a complete stranger.
Jelca’s eyes stared fixedly at my cheek. God knows, I was used to stares, but this one unsettled me. I couldn’t read his face. Was he simply surprised? Or was he disappointed with me, maybe even repelled?
I noticed that his hand had dropped onto the stun-pistol holstered at his hip—not a purposeful gesture, I thought, just a reflex, just something he was in the habit of doing. Everything about him seemed as tight as wire.
“You look good,” he said at last. It did not sound like a compliment.
“You look good too,” I responded immediately.
“You both look very ugly,” Oar announced in a loud voice. “And you are so stupid I want to scream.”
“So scream,” Jelca said. “Who’s stopping you?”
“I am too civilized to scream,” she answered. “I am very cultured, I have cleared many fields, and I do not—”
“You’re Oar,” Jelca interrupted, obviously making the connection for the first time.
Oar shrieked. “You recognized ugly Festina but did not recognize me?”
“You all look alike,” Jelca shrugged. There was no apology in his voice. “Why are you here?”
“My friend Festina needed my help to come to this place! That is the only reason. She wanted me with her so I came, because she is my friend.”
“Friend,” Jelca repeated with pointed intonation. “Oh.”
My face burned. I wanted to blurt, It isn’t what you think…and I hated myself for feeling that way. I hated Jelca too. Why didn’t he smile? Why didn’t he run forward and sweep me into his arms?
Why didn’t he think I was beautiful?
“How’s Ullis?” I asked, just for something to say.
“Fine,” he said. “Busy. You haven’t seen her yet?”
“We just got here. We saw Walton outside.”
“Oh. Well.” He took his eyes off my face long enough to look at his watch. “It’s almost suppertime. I’ll show you where the others are.”
He still didn’t smile; but suddenly he held out a hand to me as if I remained a silly little freshman who’d leap forward at the first opportunity. Maybe I would have. I didn’t run to him immediately, but maybe I would have given in after a few seconds, telling myself that this was the start of whatever I wanted.
Who knows?
Before I made up my mind, Oar darted forward and took the offered hand, lacing her fingers with his. Jelca stared at me a moment longer, then shrugged. “This way,” he said.
Monstrosity
We walked to the central square. It was a huge space, several hundred meters on each side…and almost completely filled with a giant glass whale.
“The spaceship,” Jelca said.
I winced. A spaceship that looked like a whale? And a killer whale at that, an orca, with lines etched into its exterior skin to suggest the usual pattern of black and white coloration. It stood on its tail at the very center of the city, as tall as any nearby skyscraper. Its bulbous body no doubt contained living quarters, engines, and so on, but all of it was glass, glittering with prismatic refractions.
Could it fly? Like any whale, it looked streamlined enough. Still, it was a far cry from Technocracy starships. They were simply long cylinders with a “Sperm head” at the front—an oversized gray sphere that generated the Sperm-field back along the hull. The orca had no such sphere: nothing more than a huge glass parasol sticking out of its snout…as if the whale had a beach umbrella clenched in its teeth.
“So that’s our way home,” Jelca said.
“You’re going into space in a whale?” I asked.
“It’s a ship, Festina.” His voice flared with hostility. “Why should appearance matter?”
“It doesn’t,” I answered. “How are you going to get it out of here?”
“There are roof doors.” He looked up briefly, then shook his head. “You can’t see them from here. Can’t see them from outside either. A whole section of the mountain just opens up.”
“And off you go in an orca.”
I meant to sound lighthearted and teasing, but Jelca didn’t take it that way. “The whale was all we had to work with,” he snapped. “A remnant of the Melaquin space program, whenever that was. This city has all kinds of ships, each stupider than the last. Birds, bats, insects…even a rabbit,
for Christ’s sake. The people here didn’t care. They scarcely worried about trivialities like aerodynamics, or tradeoffs between weight and strength of materials. Ninety-nine per cent of each ship was built by the city’s AI, using League of Peoples technology. Oh no, the AI wouldn’t actually build a working starship; but if you ask for a hull as strong as steel and a thousand times lighter, there’s no problem with that! So the locals built a whale, probably because it was romantic.”
“It is an excellent whale,” Oar said approvingly. “I have seen pictures of such animals, but I did not know they were so large.”
“It’s a ship, that’s all,” Jelca replied. “And it happens to be the biggest in the city—the only one with enough room to house all the Explorers here.” He turned to me. “Sixty-two Explorers now, counting you.”
“Sixty-two?”
“And five non-Explorers,” he went on, “who haven’t got around to dying yet. Admiralty officials who got ‘escorted’ here—two embezzlers, two addicts, and a pedophile, all of whom the High Council preferred to have disappear rather than go through the messy embarrassment of a trial.” He gave me an angry look. “Isn’t that great? Getting banished here with the likes of them? The admiral Ullis and I came down with was a total piece of shit…took bribes from a contractor so the guy could keep selling shoddy equipment to the Fleet. God knows if anyone was hurt because of it; the admiral never asked. Never tried to learn what damage he’d done. And the council condemned Ullis and me to the same fate as a man like that!”
I said nothing. Jelca’s words sounded like a rehearsed speech: a sore that had festered inside him so long, he was happy to have a new listener to hear. I knew the feeling. On the other hand, it had never occurred to me that most Explorers came to Melaquin in the company of criminals and other genuine undesirables. Somehow, I’d thought the exiles would all be people like Chee—out of control but not vicious. Naïve, Ramos, I thought; too quick to romanticize the High Council as tyrants and their victims as heroic political prisoners. No one was as good or as bad as I might like to believe.
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