Expendable lop-1

by James Alan Gardner

  For a few minutes, I had the planet to myself.

  Alone

  I had never been alone before… not in this specific way. Often I had been one of only two sentient creatures on a planet — the other being Yarrun, of course. But a planet-down mission was different, with goals to accomplish, checklists to work through, and a shipload of Vac personnel listening to your transmissions. Even as a little girl, I never felt truly alone. I was constantly accompanied by responsibility: the schoolwork heaped upon potential Explorers from the age of three, plus the chores I had to do on the farm. Now and then, our family took vacations; now and then, I played hooky or ran off to sulk in "secret hiding places" my parents likely knew from their own childhoods. But wherever I went, I was shadowed by what was expected of me. You don't free yourself from duty by running away. That only increases the weight on your shoulders.

  Now, I was free — forcibly cut loose. If I stayed on this beach forever, what difference would it make? How would anything change? Jelca wasn't expecting me. He might not even be glad to see me: just some kid who made a spectacle of herself, mooning after him at the Academy.

  Ullis would be happy if I showed up — we got along well as roommates. Even so, I remembered one night in the dorm, when she complained after hours of study, "Who cares about zoology, Festina? Cataloguing animals is as pointless as stamp collecting. There's only one classification system that interests me: things that can kill and things that can't." Even as Ullis hugged and welcomed me, she might be thinking, A zoology specialist… why couldn't it be someone with useful skills?

  Why force myself on them? It might be better just to lie in the sun. I could keep Oar company, and give her English lessons till she felt brave enough to use a contraction.

  And then what, Festina? Help clear fields to prove you're both civilized? Play "bed games" with her out of sheer boredom? Endure it as long as you can, then go lie down with her ancestors? That would be a vicious way to die: withering up with radiation sickness, while the glass folk around you fed on the rays.

  "I'm an Explorer," I said aloud. The words had no portentous echo — they were just words, spoken as waves lapped the shore and bushes rustled in the breeze.

  I touched my cheek. "I'm an Explorer," I repeated.

  As a duty, it was stupid; but as an open opportunity…

  Some maudlin urge made me want to address a speech to Yarrun — an apology and a promise. But the only phrases in my mind were too banal to voice.

  The sun continued to beam warmly on my skin. A gull launched itself from the top of the bluffs and I watched it soar into the cloudless sky.

  Oar's Axe

  Ten minutes later, Oar's boat slid onto the sand. She stepped out, and with rehearsed casualness, swung a gloss-silver axe onto her shoulder. It looked deadly heavy, but not metallic — perhaps plastic, perhaps ceramic. Whatever it was, I'd bet my favorite egg the blade was sharp enough to shave a balloon; a culture that could make a see-through woman could certainly produce a monofoil cutting edge.

  "On our trip," Oar announced, "we should clear trees now and then. Then we can tell the Explorers we traveled in a civilized way."

  "Let me guess," I said. "When Jelca taught you our language, he never explained the word 'ecology.' "

  Oar Food

  Before I could lecture Oar on environmentalism, the food synthesizer gave a subdued chirp. I looked at my watch: eighteen minutes since I pressed the machine's ON button. Jelca might be lax on conservation, but he made admirably efficient gadgets.

  When I opened the drawer at the bottom of the synthesizer, it contained two dozen blobs of jelly, each the size of my thumb. They came in several shades: light pink, frost green, and dull brown, with a few clear colorless ones too. I lifted a pink blob and smelled it; the fragrance was generically fruity, like cheap candy that simply tastes red.

  "What are those, Festina?" Oar asked.

  "Food."

  Her nose wrinkled skeptically. "Explorer food?"

  "And Oar food."

  During my three days of breakdown, Oar had fetched us both food from the big village synthesizer, so I knew what she usually ate. Most dishes had the shape of common terrestrial foods — noodles, wafers, soups — but of course, each morsel looked like glass. The jellylike output from Jelca's synthesizer was at least translucent; but I had to admit it didn't resemble Oar's normal cuisine.

  "Try that clear one there," I pointed. "I'll bet it tastes good."

  "I cannot put that in my mouth," she objected. "It has touched the green one. It is dirty!"

  "This is special food," I said. "It doesn't get dirty." I took the clear blob myself, making sure it hadn't picked up any color from adjacent blobs. "See? It's pretty."

  "Now you're touching it."

  "My hands are clean… and my skin color doesn't rub off, you know that. Otherwise, you'd be smeared and smudged yourself."

  She didn't look convinced.

  "Oar," I said, "if you don't like food from the synthesizer, what are you going to eat? Do you want me to kill animals for you? Or rip up plants I think might be edible? Do you want to eat raw fish? Or bright red raspberries?"

  Her eyes widened in horror. "I will try machine food," she said quickly, and plucked the clear jelly from my hand. With the get-it-over-quick air of a woman taking medicine, she plopped the blob in her mouth, and swallowed without chewing… as if she was hurrying to get it down before the taste made her gag.

  Seconds ticked by silently. "How was it?" I asked.

  "I do not know," she answered. "I shall wait to see if I become sick."

  Good enough, I told myself. If I could eat her food, she could probably eat mine; but let her work up to it gradually. In the meantime, the sun was bright — she could photosynthesize, like her ancestors back in the village.

  "We're ready," I said. "Let's head south."

  We Begin

  Our climb up the bluffs proved Oar had ample strength to carry the synthesizer — with it strapped to her back, she walked as if its weight were barely there. I worried the straps might chafe her bare shoulders; but as time passed without a peep of complaint, I concluded her skin really was as tough as glass… and hardened safety glass at that.

  From the top of the bluffs, our way south ran into the wooded ravine. I veered off the most direct route to avoid passing the log that held Yarrun's corpse; instead, I led Oar along the ravine's spindly stream, traveling southeast according to my compass. Walking wasn't easy — undergrowth tangled thickly along the stream bank — but I stuck with it for ten minutes, till we were far past my partner's shabby burial site. Then we turned due south again, climbing out of the ravine and into more level woodland.

  For a long time after that, I still made wide detours around any logs that lay in our path.

  Walking (Part 1)

  Here is what I remember from that first day.

  The peaceful stillness of the forest… and sudden compulsions to break that silence, babbling trivialities to cover the noise of guilt in my brain.

  The quality of Oar's voice as she replied to me — the way the surrounding trees absorbed the sound and muted it.

  The slash, slash, slash of our feet through fallen leaves.

  A covey of quail which suddenly flushed from cover as we approached.

  A flock of geese flying south in a lopsided V, their honking distant and piercingly autumnal.

  Topping a rise and seeing a great open marsh in front of us, sparkling in the clear sunlight.

  The small nose of a muskrat weaving along the edge of the creek in the marsh's center.

  Oar fastidiously cleaning her feet after picking her way across mud. ("It is brown and ugly, Festina; people will think I am stupid if my feet are brown and ugly.")

  Watching a great blue heron balance on one leg as it scanned the water for prey.

  Borrowing Oar's axe so I could cut down a cattail, then pulling the plant's fuzzy head apart as we continued through the swamp.

  The maddening suspi
cion that there were eggs all around me: heron eggs hidden by bulrushes, turtle eggs buried in the mud, frog eggs globbed just beneath the creek's surface. I knew better — on Earth, few species laid eggs so soon before winter — but still I was seized by impulses to look behind patches of reeds or kick the dirt with my toe… as if I had acquired some mystic intuition of eggs calling to me.

  I hadn't. I found nothing. And in time, twilight closed around us as we reached the far edge of the marsh.

  My Sleeping Bag

  Beyond the marsh was forest; we built camp just inside the trees. More precisely, Oar went to gather firewood, while I pulled handfuls of marsh greenery as input for the food synthesizer. Once the machine had begun digesting the plants, I went to my backpack and debated opening my sleeping bag.

  Like most Explorer equipment, standard-issue sleeping bags were compact. They had no bulky padding; an open bag looked like a sheath of tin foil, shiny side in. The foil didn't have the weight of a nice down comforter, but it was a good insulator for all its thinness — the glossy interior reflected back most escaping body heat. Surprisingly, the entire bag could be folded into a package no bigger than the flat of your hand.

  It could be folded that way exactly once: at the factory where the bag was manufactured. Once you broke the shrink-wrap containing the bag, you would never fold the damned thing neatly again. It turned into a crinkly cranky mess of foil, billowing unmanageably in the slightest breeze and smooth enough to slip from your hands unless you held it in a death grip. The best refolding job I ever managed produced a lumpy wad as big as a pillow. Try jamming that into your rucksack when the original package was the size of an envelope.

  So: to open or not to open the bag, that was the question — whether it was worse to spend the night unprotected, huddled against Oar for warmth, or to open the bag now and spend the rest of my life on this planet, fighting with a misshapen clump of surly tin.

  To hell with it. I'd sooner shiver.

  Around the Campfire

  We ate around the campfire, Oar picking out the clear jelly blobs and me eating the rest. It took several courses to fill our stomachs. We would stuff the synthesizer with biomass, wait eighteen minutes, then eat the results while the machine whirred away on another batch.

  While we ate, we talked… which is to say, Oar talked and I asked enough questions to keep her going. I wanted to learn all I could about her background, especially what she knew about the history of her planet.

  She knew almost nothing. The far past was a blank; even the recent past was vague. Oar couldn't remember her father — her mother had pointed him out in the Tower of Ancestors, but he had been dormant Oar's whole life. Sometime during the pregnancy, he had simply decided enough was enough.

  That was forty-five years ago.

  It unsettled me that Oar was forty-five: she was almost twice as old as me. On the other hand, I had seen that her people didn't show their age… and why should I think of her as childlike, just because her English was simplistic? How's your grasp of her language? I asked myself.

  It brought up an interesting question.

  "Oar," I said, "how did you learn to talk like Explorers? Did Jelca and Ullis teach you?"

  "Yes."

  "They taught you to speak this well… and how long were they here?"

  "A spring and a summer, three years ago."

  "You learned this much English in six months? That's fast, Oar."

  "I am very smart, Festina," she answered. "Not stupid, like Explorers."

  It struck me she might be right. Bioengineering made her stronger and tougher than me; why not smarter too? Admittedly, Earth's attempts at building smarter people had seldom met with success: tinkering with the brain was so complex, most intelligence enhancement experiments ended in tragic failure. Even "successful" research projects had a ratio of ten thousand dead or near-vegetable infants for every child who turned out a cut above normal. Still, Melaquin had succeeded in so many other DNA modifications, why not heightened learning ability? It could work with the right approach — nothing crude like a mere increase in skull capacity, but exploring how humans truly differed from other animals…

  Neotony. Maybe that was it.

  "Neotony" was a biological term related to a prolonged period of childhood. Humans were the winners in that category, at least on Earth; some species took longer to reach sexual maturity, but nothing required parental care as long as Homo sapiens. From time to time, zoologists hypothesized that neotony was a prime factor in human intelligence. After all, children learn enormous quantities of knowledge in a short span of time — much more than the greatest genius manages later in life. Some experts thought that the length of human childhood kept our brains in a state of accelerated learning for years longer than anything else in the animal kingdom… precisely what put us ahead of other species in terms of thinking capacity. If you keep acquiring knowledge at high speed for ten to fifteen years, you're just naturally going to beat animals who hit their plateau at two months.

  Suppose the Melaquin engineers extended the childlike learning phase even longer — decades past us normal-flesh humans. Suppose a forty-year-old could learn languages with the wide-open ease of a toddler. And keeping these glass people childlike wasn't a safety hazard: they were practically invulnerable and had all their needs supplied by machines like the food synthesizer.

  On the other hand, childlike brains might have their drawbacks in the end; after decades of operating at top speed, burnout might easily set in. Was there a neural chemical responsible for feelings of interest, curiosity, wonder? To construct childlike minds, the engineers may have pumped that chemical up to intense levels — levels that just couldn't be sustained forever. After years of high-capacity effort, the gland that produced the chemical might simply succumb to overwork. Result? Motivational shutdown. A deep metabolic lethargy.

  It was all guesswork, but the logic held together. I gazed at Oar, seated across from me with the campfire's reflection flickering on her face. A sting of tears burned in my eyes. Pity is stupid, I told myself. Every organism breaks down eventually. My father's heart broke down… my mother's liver. Why feel unbearably poignant that Oar's weak spot is her brain?

  But the tears did not stop stinging.

  Walking (Part 2)

  We slept the night in spoon position, with the Bumbler keeping watch for prowling bears. Only my legs got cold — the rest of my body was protected by the insulated remains of my tightsuit. An hour before dawn, I heaped fallen leaves over me from thigh to ankle, so I wasn't directly exposed to the breeze. The improvement was immediate; I kicked myself mentally for not doing it when I first lay down. Something had frazzled my survival instincts, and I couldn't allow that to continue.

  The day dawned cloudy, and by noon it was raining. The good news was that we were walking through forest; the bad news was that the trees had shed enough leaves for rain to get through anyway. Little dribbles trickling down Oar's body looked like drops on a windowpane.

  The drizzle continued intermittently for a day and a half. It started warm but turned colder on the second morning: a drop of five degrees according to the Bumbler. I hoped this wasn't the tip of the icestorm… but the temperature stabilized during the afternoon of our third day of travel, and the clouds thinned enough to let the sun glimmer through whitely. By then, we had reached the end of full forest and were picking our way through patchier groves down into the great prairie basin.

  The next day we had to detour around an enormous herd of buffalo grazing directly in our path. Oar was surprised we didn't walk straight through them; but large bull ruminants are notorious for nasty tempers, and I had no intention of getting trampled. It took four hours to circle to a point where we could turn south again, which tells you how big the herd was… several thousand animals in total, all of them shaggy with winter fur.

  In midafternoon, with the herd still visible behind us, we came upon a dozen wolves. No doubt, the pack was shadowing the buffalo; I couldn't reme
mber whether wolves were day or night predators, but they would attack when they were ready, running in to pull down a calf or an elderly animal too weak to defend itself. In the meantime, they eyed us from a judicious distance of a hundred meters, sizing up our food potential.

  "Clap your hands," I murmured to Oar.

  "Are we expressing admiration for those dogs?"

  "Just do it!"

  Oar slapped her hands together several times: glass on glass, each impact as loud as a hammer blow. The noise hurt my ears; and the wolf pack vanished like mist at dawn, slipping silently away through the tall grass.

  We had no more trouble with animals that day. Most wildlife stayed away from us through the entire journey. As the terrain flattened out, it became easy to spot ground mammals a long way off — prairie dogs, rabbits, coyotes — but they always disappeared before we came near. Birds let us get closer; they stared at us suspiciously from trees or bushes, or flew overhead in vast migratory flocks. It was late the same day we passed the buffalo that I looked up at one flock and said, "Holy shit!"

  "Do Explorers revere shit?" Oar asked with interest.

  "It's an expression," I said, still staring at the sky. "Do you know what those birds are?"

  "No, Festina."

  "I can't be sure… but I think they're passenger pigeons."

  The Pigeons

  "Do those pigeons carry passengers?" Oar asked. "I should enjoy flying on a bird."

  "I don't know why they're called passenger pigeons," I told her. "They've been extinct for five hundred years."

  "Extinct means dead?"

  "Yes."

  Oar burst into giggles. "Dead things do not move, Festina. You are very, very stu— confused."

  I didn't answer. Over the past few days, I had grudgingly accepted Melaquin as Earth's near-twin; but the sight of an extinct species jolted me. There weren't even passenger pigeons on New Earth — when the League of Peoples built humanity its new home, they could only duplicate what was still alive on…