I hid a smile. “Would you like to go with me, Oar? I could use your help.”
“Is that true? I would be helpful to an Explorer?”
“Absolutely. You’ve helped me the past few days, haven’t you?”
“That is different, Festina—you were crazed. Now that you are an Explorer again, you are not such a person as needs help from me.”
I looked at her closely. Her head was lowered, her posture crumpled. Hesitantly, I patted her shoulder; today, her skin felt cool under my fingers. “The other Explorers made you feel useless…is that it?”
“You do too, Festina.” She didn’t lift her head. “You know many clever things. Even when you are being stupid, you make me fear I am the one who does not understand. You can swim and make fires; you can use your seeing machine. And you know the names of plants and animals—you talked about them when you were crazed. I have lived here all my life and do not know such names. You know more about my world than I do.” Suddenly, she raised her eyes and looked straight at me. “How do you think I will help you, Festina? Do you just need someone for bed games? That is the only thing Explorers do not like to do by themselves.”
“Oar…” When I met Jelca, he was going to have a lot of explaining to do. “Oar, I need you to help carry things. It’s not glamorous, but it’s important—you’re much stronger than I am. And I’ll teach you other things as we go along. Besides,” I added, “I’ll be lonely and sad if I go on my own. I need company, and I’d like it to be you.”
“Festina,” Oar said, “are you telling the truth? Maybe you just feel bad about going away, and you say, ‘Come along, Oar,’ because you are sorry for me. I do not want to burden you, Festina. It is sad being alone, but it is worse being with someone who hates you.”
“I don’t hate you now, and I won’t hate you ever. Listen, Oar. If I went without you, I’d be alone with my thoughts for weeks on end. I couldn’t stand that—not right now. With you along, I’ll stay sane…probably moody as hell, but I’ll cope. Besides, Explorers never set out alone if they can help it. Solo missions are a hundred times more dangerous than taking a partner.”
Oar’s face brightened. “I will be your partner? Your real partner?”
I closed my eyes against a stab of heartache. Oh God, Yarrun! I thought. But he would be the first to tell me, Let go, let go. “Yes,” I said, “you’ll be my new partner…if you want to be.”
She leapt forward and seized me in a bear hug so fierce it had a serious potential for cracking my ribs. I might have been squeezed to a pulp if a sudden thought hadn’t struck her. Releasing her grip, she stepped back a pace and asked, “Now that I am an Explorer, do I have to make myself ugly?”
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Part XI
TRAVEL
Weeds Transformed
Riding back to the beach in Oar’s glass coffin was more pleasant than my previous trip. This time there was a hint of brownish green light, dimmed by fathoms of water but enough to show where the boat was going. I lay on my stomach and looked through the forward wall, watching for fish crossing the bow. There were several collisions on the trip—smallmouth bass who glanced off and scuttled away in terror—but the thumps of impact weren’t so loud when I knew they were coming.
The boat opened up as soon as it landed, and I hurried to unload the equipment I’d been lying on: my pack, the Bumbler, and Jelca’s food synthesizer. The last was a heavy brute—it took all my strength to wrestle it out of the boat, even using the carrying straps that I’d attached to it. If I carried the machine myself, I’d only manage a few klicks a day before dropping from exhaustion. Oar, however, claimed to have no trouble hauling such a weight. When her ancestors engineered themselves transparent and immortal, they’d obviously thrown in the strength of gorillas as a bonus.
And Oar felt inferior to me?
After two minutes, the boat closed itself and slipped back into the lake, returning underwater to pick up Oar. In the meantime, I busied myself testing the food synthesizer. If it didn’t work, we’d still press on with our trip—I could shoot game with my stunner, or forage for nuts and berries—but spending time as hunter-gatherers would reduce the distance we could travel in a day, and increase our chance of being caught by winter. Added to that, I preferred not to eat local flora and fauna. Everything might look like Earth species, but they still could turn out poisonous. Even if they were fully terrestrial, that was no guarantee of safety. What if I cooked a rabbit for supper and later found it had rabies?
Since the synthesizer was solar-powered, I set it in the sun and loaded the hopper with weeds from the face of the bluffs. Grinders whirred immediately, turning the plants to puree: a good sign. There was no way to guess how long the machine needed to do its job, breaking the weeds into basic aminos, then reassembling the components into edible blobs: maybe five minutes, maybe several hours. In the meantime, the day was fresh, and placidly warm outside the shadow of the bluffs. I took off my top to air after wearing it four days straight…or perhaps just to feel the autumn sun on my skin.
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 b
lade 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 genetically 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 suspicion 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 ye
ars 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 best animals who his their plateau at two months.
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