The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  I was glad it was Chee being transported, not me. Though I had squirted through the tail more than a hundred times, I never enjoyed it. Some Explorers did. Yarrun said it felt like a ride at an amusement center: your feet swooped out from under you, your brain dimmed to black, the space-distorting forces in the tail twisted you through a few hyperdimensions, and then you slid out the other end like sound emerging from a trumpet. Dozens of people had done it without even wearing an impact suit (despite safety regs). The death rate was lower than any other form of transport used in the Outward Fleet.

  And yet….

  When I stood down there in my suit, waiting for the blue light that said the tail had been secured, I sometimes prayed something would save me from that five second ride. “Sorry, Festina, all a big mistake, you don’t have to go today.”

  I was a child who never believed in fairies, but still told herself fairy tales.

  Then the light went on, and I would look around one last time, at the rainbow jacarandas, at Yarrun counting the seconds until our ejaculation, and at the iris that waited, eyelike, ready to open.

  I always faced that iris full on. No tail-operator ever saw me flinch. Only Yarrun knew that I closed my eyes.

  The Arrival

  “Got it!” Harque cried with relief.

  “About time,” the captain growled. She twisted a knob on the console and spoke into a filament microphone. “Golden Cedar, this is Jacaranda. We have established connection.”

  There was a pause of several seconds as our computer coded the captain’s voice for transmission, squirted it to the Golden Cedar 20,000 klicks away, received an answer, and decoded it into sound. “Connection acknowledged. Prepare to receive.”

  As Yarrun and I moved to the observation window, the iris blinked open with the speed of a bubble popping. The plastic in front of us, thick as it was, jerked slightly as the air on the other side exploded into the tail, and one of the windows boomed like a drum. Harque and Prope ignored the sound, so Yarrun and I did too.

  “Mouth open and ready to receive,” Prope said into the mike. She said it with a straight face.

  Pause. “Acknowledged. Stand by.”

  Harque stifled a yawn as Prope looked at her watch. She pursed her lips in annoyance, then suddenly drew up into her most heroic stance, a calm smile taking possession of her face. “Let’s look alive, people,” she intoned, her voice half an octave lower than when she was kibitzing over Harque’s shoulder.

  Beyond the open Mouth, the milk white Sperm smeared itself over the black of space. Shimmering distortions rippled through the tail’s surface like heat waves. At the heart of the aperture, like a fly floating on cream, lay the black gap through which the admiral would arrive.

  A light flashed orange on the console and soft beeping filled the room. Harque murmured, “Five seconds.”

  The gap in the center of the hole suddenly expanded like a throat, vomiting out a figure in an impact suit that shone a burnished gold. The suit shot half the length of the room before landing chest first on the floor and skidding to a stop.

  Harque leapt back to the console and spun some dials. The iris blinked shut soundlessly. “Pressurizing now,” Harque said in a loud voice that clearly wanted someone to pay attention. But the captain was too busy posing: hands on her hips, and feet spread wider than I, for one, would find natural.

  The figure on the floor rolled onto his back and went into a convulsion. His legs shook with quick little kicks and his hands clapped together again and again. “Oh shit, he’s hurt,” Prope said, breaking her stance and pressing her nose against the window. “Harque, buzz the infirmary and tell them to get their asses here on the double. Fast and quiet—the rest of the crew isn’t supposed to know about this.” She closed her eyes and whispered, “Don’t die on my ship!”

  As air rushed into the transport bay, the sound of metal clapping on metal became audible over the speakers monitoring the area. Ringing above the clapping was a tinny cry. At first it sounded like screeching, but then it solidified into something like “Wheeeeeee!”

  I looked at Yarrun. He looked back, eyebrows slightly raised.

  Down in the transport bay, the admiral scrambled to his feet and tossed off the helmet of his impact suit. He turned to the four of us standing at the window and shouted, “See? Like Jonah and the whale.” He pointed to himself. “I’m Jonah.” He pointed to the Mouth. “That’s the whale. A sperm whale. Jonah comes out of the whale. See?” He hugged himself with a clang of metal gloves against the suit’s chestplate.

  Prope stared blankly at the wild old man. Harque, at her side, whispered, “Should I cancel the call for the medical team?”

  “Not on your life,” she answered.

  My Second Admiral

  Harque turned a dial and the observation deck began to descend, lowering itself to match levels with the transport bay. As we sank, doors within doors were revealed in the plastic separating us from the bay: a large door that could be opened to receive huge, heavy equipment; a medium door, just the lower half of the largest one, but still big enough to let robot cargo-haulers pass through; and a baby door, set into the medium one, just right for humans.

  Prope was obviously reluctant to open any of those doors until the medical team arrived. With her heroic stance abandoned, she shifted her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, probably wondering how to preserve her dignity while dealing with a madman. On the other side of the door, Admiral Chee had begun clinking the metal of his pressure suit with his finger, idly checking which surfaces made which tones. He may have been trying to tink out a song, but I didn’t recognize the tune.

  Yarrun cleared his throat. “Captain…hadn’t we better let him in?”

  “How do we know it’s safe?” she asked. “He might have a disease.”

  Yarrun glanced at me, then turned back to Prope. “Captain, the admiral’s behavior may be peculiar by the standards of mainstream Technocracy culture, but we could be mistaken in applying those standards to him. If the admiral comes from a Fringe World, his apparent childishness may simply be cultural idiosyncrasy.”

  “Trust an Explorer to talk about cultural idiosyncrasy,” the captain muttered. And trust a Fleet captain to ignore it, I thought to myself. Officers of the Vacuum Corps invariably came from the great homogenized paunch of the Technocracy, with no representation from the more eclectic Fringes. But the captain admitted, “I suppose we have to let him in sooner or later. Go ahead, Harque: open the door.”

  The human-sized door slid into the floor with a hydraulic hiss. Harque snapped the admiral an ostentatious salute. Prope did the same a guilty second later, and Yarrun and I fluttered our hands somewhere near our foreheads. Chee blinked at all of us for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively. “Piss on saluting. I’m here incognito. I don’t have to salute if I don’t want.”

  “Of course not, sir,” Yarrun said, smoothly changing his salute to a hand extended for shaking. “Welcome to the Jacaranda. I hope the ride over was pleasant?”

  “The only fun I’ve had in thirty years. Can I do it again?”

  “I’m afraid not, sir,” I said after a glance at the tracking holo that glowed above the control console. “The Golden Cedar has already broken the tail-link, and it’s heading out of range.”

  “I can call them back. I’m an admiral.”

  Captain Prope looked down the hall, apparently praying for the med team to arrive. In the meantime, I reminded Chee, “You’re here incognito, sir. If you were to begin transmitting orders….”

  “Oh.” His face fell. “This secrecy stuff was a piss-poor decision on my part. Or was it my decision? I forget. Let me read my papers.”

  He reached into the front pouch of his impact suit and pulled out four sealed packets. One of them had my name on it, but he shoved that one and another back into the pouch. He took one of the remaining packets himself and handed the other to Prope. While he fiddled with his packet’s lock mechanism, Prope pressed a thumb to her
own packet’s registry plate and flicked the top open. She withdrew a slim viewpad and retired to a corner to read.

  The admiral finally got his own package open and pulled out a sheet of paper…paper made from trees. I supposed that admirals were too exalted to receive orders by viewpad like the rest of us.

  Chee shouted, “Aha!” as he looked at the paper sheet. “I didn’t decide this. Orders direct from the Admiralty High Council. Can I countermand those?”

  Yarrun and I busied ourselves examining the deck at our feet. Harque swallowed hard and answered, “No sir, you can’t.”

  “Oh well,” Chee shrugged. “Maybe some other time.” He folded his orders into a paper airplane and threw it wobbling across the room.

  Yarrun whispered to me, “I have a nasty suspicion. Ever been to Melaquin?”

  “What do you mean?” I whispered back. Before he could answer, Prope shut her viewpad with a crisp click. She had a far too satisfied smile on her face. “We’re going to Melaquin,” she said.

  Under my breath I muttered, “Oh shit.” But Yarrun only nodded to himself.

  Melaquin—The Official Story

  Melaquin (AOR No. 72061721)

  Third planet in the Uffree system.

  Orbital survey data: CLASSIFIED.

  Explorational data: CLASSIFIED.

  Historical data: CLASSIFIED.

  Official status: INAPPLICABLE.

  —Excerpt from the Admiralty Object Registration Catalogue,

  distributed by the Admiralty to all sciento-military personnel

  Melaquin—The Unofficial Story (Part 1)

  I first heard of Melaquin from a dying prostitute on the Fringe World He’Barr. She had taken a knife under the ribs in an alley fight and happened to collapse against the door of my dormitory room while wandering in a daze. I watched her bleed to death on my bed over the course of an hour and a half.

  “Guess I’m on my way to Melaquin,” she had said. I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly—she was slipping in and out of coherency with no discernible transition between lucid speech and babble—so I asked her to repeat her words. “I’m on my way to Melaquin,” she said. “That’s the planet of no return. You know?”

  I shook my head.

  “Hell of an Explorer you are,” she wheezed. “It was an Explorer who told me. They send you there when they want you gone forever and never coming back home to the blue blue sky pulling black curtains over the little baby boy. He saw me watching and smiled, a great big smile with all his teeth out, like black black curtains…”

  While she rambled, I keyed up the registration catalogue and requested details on Melaquin. There was no information to be had.

  In time, the woman fell silent with her eyes closed; I wondered if she had finally died. I got up to check her pulse, but she heard me coming toward the bed and shrank away. “You sure you didn’t call the cops?”

  “The who?”

  “The police. The Civilian Protection Office.”

  “You asked me not to call them.”

  “I know. That doesn’t answer my question.”

  “I didn’t call them.”

  “Good.” She coughed, and a trickle of blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She licked her lips as if she couldn’t identify the taste. “I’m an Opter.”

  “I guessed.”

  “I’m opting to die.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me with a sly smile. Her eyes kept losing focus. “You don’t understand this, do you?”

  “I’ve read about Opters,” I said. “Your religion claims that any attempt to prevent death is an affront to your god’s will.”

  “You don’t understand.” She let her head flop back onto the plastic sheet I had put over the pillow. Her breath slid softly in and out, gradually slowing.

  For a while, I watched her stare blindly at the ceiling. Those blind eyes gave her face an ecstatic radiance that annoyed me. Radiance always did.

  “Can’t you close your eyes?” I asked. “Why?”

  “I don’t like the way you look.” “You don’t want to have to close them for me,” she said with scorn. But she did close her eyes. After a while she said in a quavery voice, “It doesn’t hurt, you know.” “Of course not. I gave you 20 cc’s of picollin.” She didn’t hear me. “It doesn’t hurt because God is kind to those who come when She calls. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, if you say yes, She’ll just sing you to sleep. La, la-lah, la, la-lah…”

  The tune she sang in a broken whisper was a lullaby my own mother sang to me, years ago on my home planet of Agua—a lullaby sung over the thunderstorms that rattled our environment dome each night.

  Day is done

  Night is nigh

  Farewell the sun

  Sleep deep, don’t cry.

  I couldn’t bear to look at her as she sang her own lullaby. Her face was purple with bruises from the fight that had gotten her stabbed. I took out my textbooks and read survival manuals till dawn, long after the singing had stopped.

  Melaquin—The Unofficial Story (Part 2)

  Phylar Tobit was once an Explorer. He was an Explorer by virtue of being born with a flipperlike left arm that ended in a half-hand where the elbow should have been. The three fingers on the hand looked like tiny boneless sausages.

  Tobit lost his malformed arm on a planet whose name was a number and whose dominant lifeform resembled a blotchy cluster of rocks. One of those rocks bit off Tobit’s arm before he even knew the rocks could move…bit clean through his tightsuit, flesh, and bone in the blink of an eye.

  The creature died with the first swallow halfway down its throat. Human meat was virulently poisonous to the beast. Statistics show that human flesh is toxic to eighty-seven percent of alien lifeforms who try eating it. Explorers take some comfort from this, like dying bees who know their stings have found a target.

  But Tobit didn’t die. His partner stopped the bleeding in time—Explorers are taught every possible emergency surgical procedure. Phylar Tobit returned to a medical base and recovered.

  The new Tobit presented the Admiralty with a problem. He was no longer a repulsive flippered thing; he was merely a man who was missing an arm. Further, the arm could be replaced by a myoelectric one—not quite as good as a true arm, but a thousand times more effective than the one he had lost. Perhaps someone in the Admiralty contemplated giving Tobit a prosthetic duplicate of his flipper instead of a real arm…but that would have outraged the entire Explorer Corps, maybe even the regular Vacuum service. Anyway, an off-the-rack arm doesn’t cost as much as a custom-built one, and the Fleet likes to be frugal.

  The Admiralty had to accept that Phylar Tobit now looked too much like a real person to serve as an active Explorer. So Tobit and his new plastic arm were assigned teaching duty at the Academy.

  He did not get along with his students, and we did not get along with him. This was normal. Our teachers were all former Explorers who had won safe desk jobs, by accident or by gutless sucking up. They were the dregs of the Corps, and we students knew it. The teachers hated us in turn because of the guilt they felt, blithely preparing us for short lives as planet fodder. Perhaps this was planned by the Admiralty, to show us how small-spirited Explorers could become.

  What set Tobit apart from the rest was his drinking. The other teachers, still blessed with the repugnance that originally marked them as Explorers, stood under threat of transfer to active duty if they failed to toe the line. Tobit had nothing to fear but absolute discharge, and no Explorer feared that. While he put in his time, he soaked up the oldest drug in the world and was seldom sober.

  Every morning he would stumble to class, surrounded by an alcoholic cloud we could smell at the back of the room. Every evening he would sit alone in the Academy lounge, his artificial hand wrapped around a whisky glass with THE BLIND PIG inscribed on it in gold letters. Eventually he would pass out and slide off his chair to the floor. We students would draw lots to see who would have to carry him to his qu
arters.

  One such night, I happened to pull the short straw with another cadet named Laminir Jelca. I had a crush on Jelca at the time. He was a senior and I a freshman; I suppose that’s all that was necessary. He had some kind of genetic scalp condition that left his skull bald and covered with lesions, but in low light, if you half-closed your eyes, the scabby patches almost looked like hair.

  Jelca and I slung Tobit’s arms around our shoulders and dragged him up two flights of stairs to the instructor dormitories. The man smelled of sweat and saliva and scotch. I happened to have the artificial arm around my neck and was afraid it might come off. It would make me look foolish in Jelca’s eyes; I could picture myself staring slack-jawed at the detached arm, blood rushing to my cheeks (my cheek), so I carried the load as gingerly as I could and fretted Jelca would think I was making him take all the weight.

  When we reached Tobit’s door, we had to spit-wash some dirt off his hand before the security plate would recognize his palm-print.

  Tobit’s futon was unrolled just inside the door. Jelca was all for throwing the man on it (face down so he wouldn’t drown in his vomit), then leaving immediately. Like a lovesick schoolgirl, I preferred to bask in Jelca’s company as long as possible, so I persuaded him we should at least take Tobit’s boots off and arrange the body comfortably.

  It had been many days since Tobit had changed his socks. The musty smell of overwear rose up from them and our noses wrinkled as we untied his bootlaces. The smell was painful to us; I couldn’t understand how Tobit could bear it. As an Explorer, he must have been programmed for obsessive grooming like the rest of us, but somehow he had sloughed it off.