Expendable

by James Alan Gardner

  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 remember 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….

  “Damn, I’m stupid!” I said, hitting my head with my palm.

  “No, just confused,” Oar insisted generously.

  Duplication

  In all my time on Melaquin, my mind had been too lost in dismay and distraction to put the pieces together. The League of Peoples had already proved it could duplicate Earth—after the schism that divided humanity, the League had built New Earth as a refuge for those who agreed to respect the galactic peace. Humans who refused to give up armed violence were quarantined on their old planet, stuck with the legacy of pollution and war accumulated over the centuries; but those who abandoned their weapons were given a clean new planet: Earth without the garbage. New Earth was a “Welcome to the Universe” gift from the League of Peoples…along with star drives, YouthBoost, and other goodies no sentient race should do without.

  Why had it taken me so long to remember New Earth was artificially constructed? Stupid, Festina: very stupid. But now that my eyes were open, everything made sense.

  Some time far in the past—long enough ago that history didn’t record it—members of the League must have visited Old Earth. They made the same proposal then that they made to humanity in the twenty-first century: prove your sentience by renouncing violence, and we will give you the stars. As in the more recent contact, some prehistoric people must have said yes while others said no…and those who agreed not to kill were given a new home elsewhere in the galaxy.

  Here on Melaquin.

  This planet must have been built by the League to duplicate Earth at that long-ago time…including the presence of passenger pigeons. Somewhere Melaquin must also have dodos, moas, and other species that hadn’t survived recent times on our Earth; unless the humans who came to Melaquin had killed those animals all over again.

  No, I thought to myself. They didn’t kill the animals, they killed themselves. Either they developed bioengineering on their own, or they received it as a gift from the League; and they had turned themselves into glass creatures like Oar—tougher, stronger, smarter, and a complete evolutionary dead-end.

  “Festina,” Oar said, “are you becoming crazed again?”

  I must have been standing frozen, thinking it all through. “No,” I answered, “I’m not crazed…although you may think I am when I tell what I want to do.”

  “What?”

  “We’re going to find rocks and look for creatures that probably aren’t there.”

  Paleontology

  There is one simple difference between Old and New Earth: the original planet has fossils; the duplicate does not. When the League gave New Earth artificial deposits of sandstone, limestone or shale, they didn’t enliven the rock with simulated remnants of ancient life. For the sake of raw materials, they did create fields of petroleum, coal, and other fossil resources…but not the fossils themselves.

  I bet Melaquin didn’t have fossils either.

  The most promisi
ng excavation site within view was the shore of a creek half an hour ahead of us. Water cuts down into soil, exposing stones that would otherwise require digging to bring to the surface. The creek bank should have a good sample of easy-to-pry-out rocks; if I checked a few dozen without finding fossils, I could be fairly confident my hunch was right.

  “We’re going to that creek,” I told Oar.

  “Yes, Festina,” she answered patiently. “Going around it would take a long time.”

  Creeks were plentiful in that part of the prairies. Most were a few paces wide and barely thigh-deep, so crossing them was no challenge—just cold and wet. The one we approached now was larger than average, but still too small to deserve the name “river”: thirty meters across, sluggish and barely over our heads in depth. In spring, it might be deeper; but now the water level was low enough to leave a healthy sweep of gravel uncovered on the near shore.

  “Perfect,” I said. “As good as we’re going to find on short notice.”

  “Do you want me to clap in admiration of the creek?” Oar asked.

  “No need.” I climbed down the dirt bank to the gravel and stared around appraisingly. The top layer of stones were worn smooth by water action—whatever fossils they once contained could have eroded to invisibility. Still, I might find better samples underneath; and there were other places to look for exposed deposits.

  “Oar,” I said, “can you please walk along the bank and see if there are any rocks sticking out of the dirt? I’m looking for rocks with edges…not smooth like these pebbles.”

  “What shall I do if I find one?”

  “Bring it to me.”

  She looked at me dubiously. “You want me to touch dirty rocks, Festina? That is not very nice.”

  “You can wash your hands after—the creek’s right there.”

  “Is the creek water clean?”

  “Clean enough,” I said, stretching a point. It was actually a bit muddy, thanks to silt washed down by the previous day’s rain. No doubt, it also contained the usual disease-causing microbes one finds in untreated water: typhoid perhaps, and a cornucopia of viruses for intestinal flu. However, Oar had little to worry about—along with the other improvements in her body, she probably had a nigh-impregnable immune system. Why not? Her designers had built in everything else.

  I envied her for that. Since the start of our trip, I’d carefully purified the water we drank, boiling it on the campfire and filling enough canteens to last us through the next day. I also had water purification tablets if the canteens ran dry, but I preferred to use those sparingly, since I could never replenish my supply. Still, I worried about infection. If this planet really was a duplicate of Earth from millennia ago, it might have smallpox, diphtheria, pneumonic plague: famous diseases, extinct in the rest of the galaxy, but possibly still thriving here on Melaquin.

  Maybe Oar was right to worry about getting dirty.

  With the air of a woman who hopes she doesn’t find anything, Oar started walking slowly along the water’s edge. I turned my attention to the gravel flat and began to dig down. Sure enough, the stones were not so eroded a few centimeters below the top surface. I was just beginning to examine them for fossil evidence when the Bumbler’s alarm went off.

  EM Anomaly

  I did my programmed roll-and-tuck, having the good fortune to dive in the direction of the Bumbler rather than throwing myself into the nearby creek. With fists ready for trouble, I kicked the Bumbler’s SHUT-UP switch and scanned the area.

  I saw no threat, but standing on the creek-bed, I was three meters lower than the main level of the prairie. Anything could be up there, lurking just out of sight.

  Not far away, Oar opened her mouth to say something. I held up a hand and held my finger to my lips. She closed her mouth and looked around warily.

  Think, I told myself. What could the Bumbler detect from here? It might be a false alarm—Bumblers did make mistakes—but Explorers who dismissed such warnings soon had their names entered on the Academy’s Memory Wall.

  Maybe the Bumbler had suddenly decided to complain about Oar again: unknown organism, help, help. Still, I had programmed the machine’s tiny brain to accept her as a friend; her presence hadn’t bothered it for days. Best to assume the problem was something else…something I couldn’t see.

  What could the Bumbler detect that I couldn’t? It had a small capacity for peering through the creek banks, but not well—its passive X-ray scans could only penetrate ten to fifteen centimeters of dirt. Naturally, it could see farther if something was emitting large quantities of X-rays…or radio waves….

  Radio. Someone nearby might have transmitted a radio message. Quickly, I backtracked the Bumbler’s short term memory and looked at the radio bands. Yes: it had picked up a coherent short-wave signal lasting only fifteen seconds. Did that mean an Explorer in the neighborhood? Or someone else?

  Silently, I turned to Oar and pointed to the creek. Without waiting to see if she understood, I hefted up the Bumbler and headed for the water. We could hide there, just to be on the safe side—the middle of the creek was deep enough to be over our heads. My pack had a tiny scuba rebreather, only two minutes of air, but enough to stay submerged in an emergency. I’d give that to Oar; for myself, I’d have to make do with….

  Shit. I’d have to snorkel with the same esophageal airway I’d used on Yarrun.

  The Peeper

  After whispered instructions to Oar, I lowered myself into the water. It was cold; it was also murky, but that was good. The slight cloudiness would make it hard for someone to see me poised just under the surface. Oar, of course, was invisible as soon as she submerged.

  I found a depth where I could stand on the bottom and keep the tip of the airway just above the surface. The taste of it was sour in my mouth. I had washed it since the Landing, washed it over and over again; but I still imagined I could taste the rusty flavor of blood on the plastic.

  Trying to refocus my thoughts, I aimed the Bumbler’s scanner straight up at the outside world. In the muddy water, I had to amplify the Bumbler’s brightness before I could make out the screen; but my eyes adjusted soon enough to give me an adequate view above the surface.

  The sky. The creek banks.

  Thirty seconds after we had hidden ourselves, a head peeked over the south bank.

  At first, it looked like a fully human head: smooth brown skin; darker lips. But as I stared more closely, bile rose in my mouth. The head had no hair—or rather it had an abstracted glass simulation of hair, like Oar’s but a slightly different style…and the eyes were also like Oar’s, silvery globes with mirror surfaces.

  The lips drew back in smile…or maybe a grimace. Inside the mouth, the teeth were clear as glass.

  Sickened, I realized what I was seeing. This was a glass person just like Oar; but he or she had glued strips of skin onto cheeks, forehead, and throat.

  Strips of human skin.

  Part XII

  SKIN

  Hiding

  The skin-covered face peered down a few seconds more, then withdrew. I stayed put, hoping Oar would do the same—she was under orders not to come out until I gave the okay. Still, she had only a brief supply of air, and was inexperienced using a scuba breather; I gave the signal to surface at the two minute mark, even though I would have preferred to stay under much longer.

  Oar emerged silently and kept her mouth shut. Good; no matter how she might be given to outbursts, her cultural heritage placed priority on not being noticed. They built their villages underwater, they made themselves transparent, they cleaned all trace of their presence from the environment…no wonder Oar had the instinct to stay quiet when strangers were near.

  I wondered if Skin-Face was the reason Oar’s people were so good at hiding.

  For five minutes we remained in the water with only our heads showing. All that time, some devil’s advocate in my mind kept asking why we should cower. The skin on that glass face was probably just animal hide—perhaps leather from a buf
falo carcass, scraped clean of fur and worn for harmless adornment. Believing it was human skin was morbid imagination…that and the blurriness of looking at the Bumbler screen through muddy water.

  But if it had been human skin, it came from an Explorer, not someone with a glass body. And perhaps the accompanying radio transmissions had come from Explorer equipment: equipment stolen from my fellow ECMs along with their skins.

  I made myself get out of the water when I could no longer control the chattering of my teeth—not fear, but the physical chill of a creek in waning autumn. For a while I shivered on shore, until the sun warmed me back to a tolerable temperature. Thank heavens R&D made the tightsuit from quick-dry fabric; I would only stay soggy for half an hour, after which the material’s natural insulation would be as good as a dry parka. In the meantime, I had to hug myself for warmth and wonder if Skin-Face would reappear.

  He didn’t…or possibly she didn’t, although I was inclined to think of the stranger as male. Some atavistic prejudice in my subconscious still believed men were scarier than women.

  Say it was a man, a glass man of Oar’s species: he must have heard the Bumbler’s alarm beeping and came to investigate. It had taken him more than a minute to arrive, so he hadn’t been nearby…close enough to hear it, but far enough away that he hadn’t recognized the sound as unnatural. When he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he must have decided the noise was just bird cry. One quick look, then he went back about his business.

  What was his business? It was time to find out.

  It was also time to get the stunner out of my pack.

  Three Spears

  Motioning Oar to stay put, I swam the creek with the stunner in my mouth, in case I might need it quickly. The afternoon continued quiet and undisturbed—the chirp of birds, the light hiss of breeze ruffling the prairie grass. On the far side of the water, I climbed the dirt bank: steep, but only three meters high, the damp earth providing plenty of purchase. When I was almost at the top, I dug my feet firmly into the soil and did a quick scan with the Bumbler, X-raying through the last few centimeters of bank to make sure Skin-Face wasn’t lurking above. The screen was clear except for pebbles and roots; so with straining caution, I lifted my head over the edge for a look.