The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  The answer was a Sperm-field generator. We found it on the top floor, pushed tight against the wall of the building. I recognized it from a distance, even with my blurred vision: a black box the size and shape of a coffin.

  “Holy shit,” I whispered.

  “Amen,” Oar answered dutifully.

  This had to be a second generator. The first was still installed in the orca starship—I had seen it mere hours before. Callisto had been running diagnostics on the device; it had actually spun a short thread of Sperm for her tests.

  What was Jelca doing with another generator?

  I had no doubts where the machine had come from—it was the second spare from Jelca’s former starship. He must have stolen both generators from the engineering hold, then installed them into separate probes and sent both down to Melaquin. Ullis told me Jelca had flown one probe south by remote control. He must have done the same with the other probe, picking a time when Ullis was busy or asleep. Later, he had retrieved the first generator and turned it over to the Explorers…but he’d kept the other for himself, smuggling it here when the others weren’t watching. (Jelca had been the one to instigate the day/night cycle in lighting. Clever. It ensured the Explorers would all sleep at the same time, thereby giving him a chance to fetch the generator under cover of darkness.)

  But why did he need a second generator? Why did he want it badly enough to steal it, leaving his ship with no backup in case of breakdown? Of course, angry people do strange things; maybe Jelca liked the idea of the Vac crew drifting in space until someone answered their may day. He might have thought it would give them something to think about after abandoning him on Melaquin—a few weeks of being stranded themselves.

  But if that was his rationale, why hide this generator here? Why not load it onto the whale, as a replacement in case the first generator malfunctioned?

  No. Jelca had plans for this second generator. I just couldn’t guess what those plans were.

  Hampered by my obstructed vision, I examined the black coffin. It was wired into another piece of equipment: a waist-high glass box with wing panels attached to the top. “Photo-collectors,” I murmured. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “What is a photo-collector?” Oar asked.

  “These panels,” I told her, “soak up light and other radiation that hits them…which must be a hefty dose of energy, considering the output of this building. The panels obviously transfer power to a battery inside this case, and the battery supplies the Sperm generator; but damned if I know why. What’s the point of generating a Sperm field on a planet?”

  “Jelca is very very stupid about sperm,” Oar answered.

  I gave her a look she couldn’t see through my suit.

  Cursed with Hope

  Minutes later, we were back on the street. Oar had replaced the suit where she found it, and my skin was rediscovering the joy of breathing; wearing the suit had been like being wrapped in plastic, close and sweaty.

  I had decided not to move the ancestors away from the walls just yet. Oar assured me they were all getting enough light and air, and would scarcely notice a few more hours of overlapping each other. Putting the people back would tip off Jelca that he’d been discovered…and I didn’t want that until I was ready to confront him. At the very least, I had to talk with Ullis first. Maybe the other Explorers needed to know too; but maybe not.

  Maybe Jelca had a sensible explanation for everything.

  I know. I was being foolish. How much more evidence did I need that Jelca had degenerated into a self-centered bastard? Toying with Eel and Oar, then callously discarding them…hiding the generator from his fellow Explorers…giving me the cold shoulder as if I were a Vac-head….

  And yet….

  Since Oar had first told me he was here, I had dreamt about him. Thought about him. Imagined us together. Even earlier, during my years on the Jacaranda, he had crossed my mind now and then…especially when I lay beside some snoring substitute I had taken to bed because desperation got the better of me. Alone with my eggs, I invented fantasies about Jelca: a fellow Explorer I could make love with, not just a convenient Vacuum crew member to slick myself down.

  I had such hopes. Stupid hopes—I knew that. But I had hoped that maybe, losing myself to Jelca would sear off my guilt, burn it away with white heat for just a few seconds. Whom else could I turn to? If I threw myself on another Explorer, or Ullis, or Oar, it would be so hollow, nothing more than drugging myself with sex. But with Jelca it could be different…couldn’t it? He was not just someone within arm’s reach, he was someone I’d thought about, dreamed about….

  I’d even dated him. Twice.

  This sounds so banal now. It embarrasses me. I’d say I was lying to myself, but the lies were so obvious I didn’t believe them, even at the time. Yet I wanted to believe. I wanted to have something with someone somewhere. Who else did I have but Jelca?

  I wondered if Oar was thinking the same thing as we walked down the street in silence: patently false hopes, because the alternative was despair.

  Transport Tunnels

  We found Ullis in her cabin on the whale. She had jacked in to the ship’s system and was programming with fervid intensity.

  “Jelca’s got a second Sperm-field generator,” I said. “Did you know?”

  She blinked without speaking for several long seconds. Then she shook her head.

  It took some time to give her the full story. When I was finished, she could offer no explanation of what he might be doing. “There’s no reason to generate Sperm tails on Melaquin,” she said. “Even if he wanted to set up a transport tunnel…no. What would be the point?”

  “What is a transport tunnel?” Oar asked.

  “A way of sending things very quickly from one place to another,” I answered. “A Sperm tail is a long tube of hyperspace…which means it’s really outside our normal universe. Physical laws are very different there. If you stuck your arm in one end of the tube, it would immediately emerge at the other end, even if the ends were thousands of kilometers apart. If you anchored one end here on Melaquin and another on the moon, say, you could reach through, pick up a handful of moon dust, and bring it back just like reaching through an open window.”

  “I wouldn’t reach through that window if I were you,” Ullis said. “If you’re standing with normal Earth air pressure behind you, and the moon’s vacuum in front, you’d go shooting straight through mighty fast.”

  “Which is how we usually transport things along Sperm tails,” I told Oar. “When we go from one ship to another, we drop the pressure at the receiving end so things shoot through from the sender. When we go from the ship to a planet, we increase the pressure in the Transport Bay so that it blows us down…”

  “This is very boring,” Oar interrupted.

  “Also irrelevant,” Ullis said. “If Jelca wants to use a Sperm tail at all, he has to anchor down the far end. Otherwise the tail whips around at random.”

  “We all carry anchors,” I reminded her. Landing parties needed anchors to attract the tail when they wanted to leave the planet. Anchors were small enough to fit in the palm of your hand; I had one in my belt pouch, and no doubt Ullis did too.

  “So Jelca has an anchor,” Ullis conceded. “What’s he going to do with it?”

  “He brought the Sperm generator to this city with a remote-controlled probe drone. If the probe still has fuel, he could load an anchor on board, and fly the probe anywhere on Melaquin.”

  “So what?” Ullis asked. “Yes, he can set up a transport tunnel anywhere on planet, but what’s the point? Why would he want to go somewhere else when he’ll be going home anytime now?”

  “Unless he’s not going home.” The words were out of my mouth before I gave them a second thought.

  “Don’t be crazy, Festina. We all want off this rock. Jelca may be a turd but there’s no reason he wouldn’t—”

  “Shit,” I blurted out. The light had dawned at last. “Shit, shit, shit!”

  �
�What?” Ullis asked.

  “She is worshiping,” Oar told Ullis in a low voice.

  “Oar,” I said, “stay here with Ullis. Ullis, I have to find Jelca for a chat. If I don’t come back in a reasonable time, tell the others everything I’ve told you. And whatever you do, don’t let Jelca onto the spaceship!”

  “What’s wrong?” Ullis asked bewildered.

  I threw a tense glance at Oar, then grabbed a scrap of paper from Ullis’s work area and scribbled a message.

  Ullis gaped when she read it. “What does it say?” Oar demanded.

  I didn’t answer; I was already running out the door.

  Out of the City

  No one working on the starship knew where Jelca was. Someone suggested he might have gone to help with the lark-plane.

  I jogged down the boulevard toward the elevator, each footfall echoing off nearby buildings. As I passed Jelca’s quarters—the place where Oar had been crying—I stopped to see if he was there. He wasn’t…but his room contained more clothes of the silvery fabric used in his radiation suit: shirts, pants, even socks and gloves. I wondered if he’d tried piece-by-piece radiation clothing before he made the full suit; or perhaps he wore these as a second layer of protection under the main suit. If nothing else, having “street clothes” made of the same material would help reduce the radiation he soaked up while putting on the full suit inside the tower.

  The temptation to search Jelca’s quarters was strong—a thorough search, ripping the place apart if necessary—but I doubted I’d find anything. Besides, I felt an urgent need to confront him. And give him one last chance, said a voice in my head…as if there was still hope he could explain away all his actions. I hadn’t figured out everything yet; the purpose of the second Sperm generator was still a mystery to me. However, I thought I had many of the answers I needed. I just hoped I was wrong.

  Athelrod and Walton met me as I approached the elevator to the outside world. They carried glass holdalls containing parts they must have removed from the lark-plane. “Too late!” Walton called cheerfully as he approached. “We’re all done.”

  “Not much there that we needed,” Athelrod said. “Still, we got a few design ideas….”

  “Have you seen Jelca?” I asked.

  “He came by the plane outside, maybe two hours ago,” Athelrod answered. “Didn’t stay long.”

  “So he came back down here?”

  “No,” Walton said. “I asked him to see if he could fix the glitches in my weather equipment. He’s very good at that sort of thing.”

  “So he’s up at your weather station now?” I asked.

  Walton nodded.

  “How do I get there?” After getting directions, I headed out at a run.

  Walton and Athelrod stared after me with bewildered expressions.

  The Coming Cold

  The air outside was cooler than the day before—enough to prick up goose pimples on my bare legs. At the west end of the valley, the sun had already dipped below the far peak, though the sky was still coldly bright. Trying not to shiver, I hurried up the forest trail that led to the weather station. The world smelled of damp pine and winter.

  I found Jelca sitting on a high rock looking down on the river that wound along the base of the mountain. The water ran fast and shallow; even though it was dozens of meters below us, I could hear the rattle of it running over its gravel bed. The sound was cold. The world was cold. In the forest behind us, each tree felt closed in on itself, withdrawing into its own thoughts as winter approached. The stone everywhere—under Jelca, under my feet, under the snow caps of the mountains—looked like it had been dark gray once but was now bleached pale with disappointment.

  Jelca turned to look my way. He said nothing. Behind him, a small anemometer rotated listlessly as its cups accepted the wind.

  I waited for him to speak.

  “Ullis told me it was artificial skin,” he said at last.

  “Yes.”

  “Really just a bandage.”

  “That’s right.”

  He stared at my cheek a few more seconds. “So that’s it then. You’ve made it.”

  “Made what?”

  “Full human status.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  He said nothing for a moment. He wasn’t even looking at me. Then: “You know what the strange thing is? When I thought of you, I pictured you this way. Without the birthmark. I would have said it wasn’t part of my mental image of you; the birthmark made no impression on my mind. But I was wrong. When I saw you yesterday, you looked like one of them. The bastards who banished us here. It was like they’d stolen one more thing from me.”

  He thought of me, I told myself. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions about what he’d thought, when it happened, everything that had passed through his mind.

  No. I refused to let down my guard with him. Not now.

  Probably never.

  “I’m being ridiculous,” he said. “Why should I mind that you look so beautiful?”

  Beautiful. He found me beautiful.

  “Jelca,” I said. “Did you kill Eel?”

  He was silent a moment, then nodded.

  Accidents and Reality

  “It was an accident,” he said.

  I sat down on the rock, separated from him by only an arm’s length. The stone was cold beneath me…very cold, despite its exposure to the long day’s sun.

  “An accident,” he repeated. “A mistake right from the beginning.” He glanced at me. “You probably think I’m shit.”

  I didn’t trust myself to say yes or no.

  “There’s no point trying to justify myself,” he said. “When I met Eel and Oar, I was just looking to vent myself. Vent everything I felt about being heaved into exile with a piss-hole like Kalovski…and there were Eel and Oar. Looking so perfect it made me furious. Artificial people—like all the artificial people in the Fleet and everywhere. So I….”

  When he didn’t finish his sentence, I said, “You either raped or seduced them.”

  He shrugged. “I either raped or seduced them. Couldn’t tell you which. They didn’t put up a fight, but they didn’t understand what was going on either. It happened, the two of them together that first time, because I couldn’t stop myself. Well, no—because I couldn’t bother to stop myself. I couldn’t think of any reason that made it worth the trouble.”

  “Eel and Oar themselves should have been enough reason.”

  “You’d think so,” he admitted. “But the truth is, they weren’t real women. None of them are real human beings. They’re glass models of human beings…or what the League of Peoples believes humans should be. Beautiful dead ends, just as most people in the Technocracy are beautiful dead ends.

  “You know what I once thought?” he went on. “I thought the whole Explorer Corps was a training program for real people. Everyone else was pampered and spoiled, but we were real. The Admiralty wouldn’t let doctors cure our problems because they wanted us to develop strength of character; they needed a small band of individuals who had to fight for respect so that we’d gain depth. Then one day someone would tap us on the shoulder and say, ‘Congratulations. You’ve made it. Everyone else is useless, but you’ve learned all the painful lessons of life. You’ve won. Now we’ll cure your trivial little scalp condition and make you someone important, because you’ve earned it.’ You see? I had this daydream that everything was planned. That all the crap we’ve suffered had a point, and we’d be properly compensated in the end. Not dumped on a planet populated by empty people with nothing to contribute.”

  “You’re underestimating the people of Melaquin,” I said. “They may be different from humans, but—”

  “Save it,” he interrupted. “I know all the arguments. And you’re right, I shouldn’t dismiss them. Eel and Oar deserved better than I gave them. But I didn’t have it in me. They kept reminding me of all the shallow ‘beautiful people’ who make the Fleet a hell. So I used them and used them and used them un
til I couldn’t stand the sight of them anymore.”

  “Then you killed Eel,” I said.

  “That was Ullis’s fault,” he replied. “If she’d just let me leave quietly…but she grabbed Eel and forced me to explain things. I tried rational discussion, I really did. I told Eel that Ullis and I had a duty to join the other Explorers; I told her that she and Oar would feel out of place if they came with us. Eel wouldn’t listen. She had the mind of a child. She didn’t want to be left out. Finally, I had no option but to….”

  He lapsed into silence, so I finished the sentence for him. “You shot her,” I said. “And even though the regs made you carry a standard-issue stunner when you landed, you must have amplified the pistol as soon as you knew you were stuck on Melaquin.”

  “True,” he admitted. “Everyone knows the guns are underpowered….”

  “They’re underpowered because anything more could be deadly,” I snapped. “I can imagine what high intensity sonics did to a woman made of glass.”

  “You think she shattered like crystal?” He shook his head. “Nothing so dramatic. These people aren’t real glass; you know that. Eel stayed on her feet a long time. I kept shooting and shooting and she wouldn’t fall down. And I swear I didn’t believe the gun would really damage her; she was so tough, you could pound her with a sledgehammer without making a dent. But something inside her body was vulnerable to sonics. Something must have…cracked. Maybe her brain, maybe her heart, I don’t know. But the instant she fell, she was dead.” He shook his head as if this was an incomprehensible mystery. “So I dragged her into the woods and stuffed her under a pile of brush.”

  “And now you’re a murderer,” I said. “A dangerous non-sentient being.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced. “But it was just an accident. Sometimes I think it’ll be all right if I get on the starship with everyone else. I didn’t mean to kill her. And if I don’t go on the ship, I’ll be stuck on Melaquin, won’t I? No better than the criminals and other scum the council banished here….”