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 slipped 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.
The slipperiness of her skin was a mixed blessing. It made things easier for me to wriggle away when she grabbed me, but she could also slip from my grip whenever I tried a rescue hold. My only edge was that she had been underwater longer than I had; and once, I even got away from her for a moment, long enough to surface for breath. I didn’t worry about losing her in my brief moment of departure—she might be hard to see, but I wasn’t. She grabbed me the second I came back within reach.
Little by little, she weakened. After a long confusion of thrashing limbs, I managed to loop an arm around her neck and drag her to the top. We both gasped, spitting and sputtering; then she lapsed into uncontrolled gagging which gave me time to haul her to shallow water. At the edge of the beach, I let her go and we both collapsed, side by side—half in, half out of the lake, propped up on our elbows and sucking at the air.
Out of the corner of my eye, I studied her: sleek and elegant, even when coughing up lake water. I could see right through her to a gnarl of driftwood on the beach beyond her; everything about her was transparent except for her eyes. As she turned toward me, I saw they were silvered like mirrors.
“You can’t understand me,” I told her, “but you have nothing to worry about. I saved you, didn’t I? I mean you no harm.”
The woman gazed at me for a moment, then let her head slump back onto the sand. “Fucking Explorers,” she said. “Always Greetings, greetings, I mean you no harm. But you only make people sad. Go away, fucking Explorer. Go away now.”
And she covered her eyes with her hand.
Part VIII
ACQUAINTANCE
Shocked and Hurt
Without a millisecond’s pause, I spun away from her, rolling across the sand and tucking up to my feet in a fighting stance. My mind was scarcely aware what I was doing; the reaction had been programmed into me along with so much else.
It was an ongoing experiment by the Admiralty. In situations of total shock, when the conscious brain was too surprised to make a rational decision, some Explorers were trained to assume an aggressive posture, some to become passive, and some to freeze in whatever position they happened to be. The Fleet wanted to determine if any of the three approaches offered better survival prospects than the others.
If the study had drawn any conclusions, no one bothered to tell us Explorers.
With an effort, I forced myself to lower my fists. The woman’s hand was over her eyes—maybe she hadn’t noticed my reaction…although if I could see through her hand, why couldn’t she? I looked carefully through her glass fingers and saw that her eyelids were an opaque silver, shut tight and trembling.
“You’ve met Explorers before,” I said after a moment. “How else would you know my language? And since dozens of Explorers have come here over the past forty years, it’s not completely improbable that an earlier party landed in this neighborhood. They may have followed the same chain of reasoning as we did.” I was talking to myself, not her. “But what did they do to you? Why are…how did they upset you?”
She opened her eyes and raised herself on one elbow so she could look at me; she didn’t lift her gaze high enough to meet my eyes. “They made me sad,” she said. “Fucking Explorers.”
“Did they hurt you?” I knelt in the sand so I wouldn’t loom over her. “If they hurt you, it must have been an accident. Explorers are programmed…Explorers are taught very strictly never to hurt the people they meet.”
“Yes,” the woman said, “they are taught many things
.” This time her gaze met mine for an angry second before dropping away. “Explorers know so much, and it is all stupid!”
I stared at her, trying to decide how to read her. She looked like a grown woman, perhaps in her early twenties; but she talked with the words of a child. Did she only have a primitive grasp of English? Perhaps she learned the language as a child and hadn’t used it since. A team of Explorers might have passed through this area when the woman was young, spent a few months, then moved on. Children learn languages quickly…and they form crushes quickly too. Maybe the Explorers had done nothing worse than leaving an overfond child who wanted them to stay.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “that the other Explorers made you sad. I’ll try not to do the same thing. If I ever make you sad, you tell me and I’ll try to fix it.”
“Fucking Explorers.” She turned away and tucked up her knees, hugging them to her chest. “Your face is very ugly,” she said.
“I know.” I told myself I was speaking to a sulky five-year-old. “And I look even worse in daylight.”
“Why do fucking Explorers go places when they are so ugly? Other people do not like seeing ugly things.” She took a deep breath that was bordering on a sob. “Fucking Explorers should just stay home.”
“No argument from me,” I murmured. In a louder voice I said, “If you want, I’ll go away.”
She ignored my offer. “Why is the other Explorer so stupid?”
“What?”
“He just lies there. He doesn’t talk. Does he think he is smarter than me? Does he think I’m dirty?”
I had forgotten about Chee. His body lay a short distance up the beach, his tightsuit glistening in the moonlight.
“The other Explorer is dead,” I answered softly. “He was very old, and he just—”
“He is not dead!” The woman was suddenly on her feet, glass fists clenched in fury. “Do you think you are sacred? Do you think you are holy? Fucking Explorers are not such things as can die!”
And she stormed over to Chee’s corpse and kicked it hard in the side.
Sad
My kung fu master would say the kick showed incorrect foot formation—if I kicked a tightsuit like that, I’d have broken my toe. The glass woman showed no sign of injury; and when she pulled her foot away, I saw a shadowy dent in the suit’s fabric, as if someone had smashed it with a sledgehammer. The force of the kick had been enough to scuff the body back several centimeters over the sand.
“Are you asleep?” the woman shouted at Chee. “Wake up! Wake up!”
She kicked him again.
I stepped forward to stop her, then held myself back. She couldn’t hurt Chee now; and if there was an afterlife, the admiral would be amused to watch a beautiful nude alien try to wake up his corpse.
After three more kicks that didn’t quite breach the suit, the woman dropped to her knees right on the admiral’s chest and screamed in his face, “Wake up! Wake up!” She shook his shoulders, then clapped her hands on both sides of the helmet with a thud.
Panting and puzzled, she turned back to me. “He cannot hear me inside of his shell.”
“He can’t hear you,” I agreed, “but it’s not because of the suit.”
“Do not say he is dead!” She buffeted the helmet with more smacks of her hand.
“Wait,” I said at last. “Wait.”
Kneeling by Chee’s head, I fumbled with the clasps on his helmet. My fingers were clumsy after the dunk in cold water; wearing clammy wet underwear didn’t help my condition either. I’d have to build a fire soon, before hypothermia set in.
The glass woman’s face was close to mine as I removed Chee’s helmet—I could feel her body heat on my skin. As soon as the helmet was off, she reached down and pinched his cheek. When she got no response, she shook him by the chin, then pulled on his ear. I placed my hand over hers and pulled her gently away from the corpse.
“He is dead,” I told her. “Really.”
I laid the back of my hand against the admiral’s forehead. He was beginning to cool.
Hesitantly, the glass woman peeled open Chee’s eyelid. The pupil did not react. She suddenly snatched back her hand and pressed it to her chest, as if she could hardly breathe.
“He is truly dead?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Explorers can die?”
“They’re famous for it,” I said.
She stared at me; her expression was so intense, I came close to flinching. “You can die?” she asked at last.
“As far as I know. It’s not something I want to test anytime soon.”
The woman peered at my face a moment longer, as if searching for some sign I was lying; then she turned away, her troubled gaze moving toward the lake’s dark water. After a moment, she said, “Now I feel very sad.”
“I feel sad too.” My hand still lay on Chee’s forehead.
Oar
I told her, “Before my friend died, he asked me to put his body into the lake.”
“Yes,” the woman agreed. “We will hide him in the lake. We will use rocks to make him heavy so he will go to the very bottom; and he will be safe forever and ever.”
I wondered what was going through her mind: why she used the phrase “hide him in the lake,” what she meant by “safe,” why the ability to die meant so much to her. Possibilities leapt to mind, but I shoved them away; Explorers shouldn’t jump to conclusions.
We both began collecting rocks—mostly just pebbles, since neither the beach nor bluffs offered stones of any great size. I stuffed what I gathered into Chee’s belt pouches, but the woman deposited hers directly inside his suit. She placed them there one at a time, working with care and delicacy. Once, I thought I saw her lips speaking silent words as she pushed one pebble after another through the suit’s open collar. I wondered what she was saying…but her face had such a look of concentration, I didn’t interrupt.
There came a time when we were both kneeling beside Chee’s body: the woman inserting pebbles through his collar and me filling his pockets. After a full minute of silence, the woman said, “My name is Oar. An oar is an implement used to propel boats.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Oar,” I answered solemnly. “My name is Festina Ramos and I take…my name is Festina. According to my mother, that means ‘the Happy One.’” I didn’t mention how Mother held that against me. You’re supposed to be happy, Festina; you have everything a little girl could want. Why must you be so deliberately miserable?
“Your mother,” Oar said. “That is the woman who gave you birth?”
“Yes.”
“Have you given birth to a child, Festina?”
“No. Not me.”
“Do you think you will some day?”
“No.”
“Why not? Would it not be interesting to have a child come out of you?”
“I suppose so.”
“And since this man here has…died,” Oar continued, “should you not produce a new Explorer to replace him?”
“It’s not that easy.”
She looked at me, waiting for me to explain. I shook my head, too tired to belabor the details. Would she understand if I explained that women received tubal ligations upon joining the Fleet? The operation could be reversed on request after ten years’ active service; but I doubted I would find a surgeon to do the job here on Melaquin. Children were impossible for me. Someday, when I was past the numbness of Yarrun and Chee dying, I wondered how I’d feel about being permanently barren.
After waiting for me to answer, Oar came up with an explanation of her own. “Oh yes,” she said, “you cannot have a child here and now. You need a man to supply his juices.”
“That’s certainly a consideration,” I agreed.
Oar fell silent. I fastened the snap on one of Chee’s belt pouches, then looked up. Her silvery eyelids were closed.
“I know a man,” Oar whispered.
“Yes?”
“I know an Explorer man.” Her eyes opened. “I have not
seen him in three years, but I am sure he is still such a man as would give his juices to any woman.”
There was bitterness in her voice.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, Oar.”
And I understood why she said, Explorers only make people sad.
Fucking Explorers.
“Who was this man?” I asked.
She closed her eyes again. “Explorer First Class Laminir Jelca.”
My Heart
Jelca.
Jelca.
I’d heard he’d gone Oh Shit a few years ago—nothing in the official records, just a rumor. I should have realized there was only one place you could disappear without leaving records in the Fleet archives.
Jelca was here on Melaquin. And not just on the planet— he was somewhere close by. He had not landed on a different continent; he had not landed on some isolated island; he was here. At least, he had been here three years ago. How far could he have traveled since then?
My heart beat faster, though I knew it was foolishness. I scarcely knew Jelca—after that night we carried Tobit to his quarters, we had gone on two dates, no more. There was every chance Jelca had treated Oar badly…and yet, I was already making excuses for him in my mind. She had misunderstood mere friendliness; and perhaps Duty had forced him to leave.
Never mind that my excuses didn’t make sense. In the heat of the moment, “making sense” was my enemy.
I had killed Yarrun. Chee had died. But if Jelca was here, I was not alone.
The League of Peoples Page 12
