Expendable lop-1

by James Alan Gardner

  Signs

  The elevator was set into the outermost wall of the city: a wall of rough-hewn stone, striated with geological layers slanted twenty degrees to the horizontal. I have never liked caves — I can feel the weight of all that rock pressing down on my head — but the cavern was so huge, my misgivings were small. Besides, there were veins of pink quartz, green feldspar, and other tinted minerals deposited through the stone, providing welcome variations in the bleak color scheme.

  Another variation was a sign painted in loose black letters on the nearest building:

  GREETINGS, SENTIENT BEINGS

  WE'RE IN THE CENTRAL SQUARE

  WE'LL SHOW THEM WHAT EXPENDABLE MEANS!

  "What does that say?" Oar asked.

  "It says hello," I told her. "And that we've come to the right place."

  "It is a very big place," Oar said, staring out on the forest of towers, domes, and blockhouses.

  "Be brave." I gave her a squeeze, telling myself not to feel awkward about touching her "Walton said we should walk to the center now."

  It was a long walk; it was a big city. I wondered how many ancient humans had been brought here… certainly not enough to fill the place. After living in grass huts or wattle-and-daub, the people must have been intimidated to have so much space at their disposal. Then again, they were used to living outdoors; maybe with a roof over their heads, they actually felt confined.

  Our route led straight down a broad boulevard, its surface smooth white cement. A few buildings had words painted on their walls: KEEP GOING… NO U-TURN… BE PREPARED TO MERGE… the indulgent signs people write to amuse themselves in empty cities. SIGNAL YOUR TURNS… DEER CROSSING… ALL CARS MUST BE RUNNING ELECTRIC…

  I didn't translate them for Oar. Some jokes aren't worth explaining.

  Dirt

  The closer we got to the center, the more dirt I saw. First it was just thin dust on nearby buildings; then bits of grit accumulated at the edge of the boulevard; then spills of grease or electrolyte darkening the pavement.

  "This is a filthy place," Oar said with self-satisfaction. "My home would never become so dirty."

  "Do you clean your home?" I asked.

  "No." Her voice was offended. "Machines attend to such matters."

  "This city has the same kind of machines. Otherwise the place would be buried in grime. The Explorers must have kicked up more mess than the systems could handle; either that or my friends have commandeered the cleaning machines for other things." Most likely for spare parts, I thought. Someone like Jelca wouldn't hesitate to sacrifice a janitor-bot in his drive to restore a spaceship.

  "So the Explorers make this place dirty?" Oar asked. "Hah! Fucking Explorers."

  "Maybe you shouldn't use that phrase," I told her. "You want to get along with the others, don't you?"

  "I do not know them yet," she replied. "If they are very stupid, I may want to kick them."

  "Please, Oar; you're my friend, and they're my friends. It will make me sad if you pick fights."

  "I will not pick fights unless they deserve it." Her tone of voice suggested they would deserve it.

  "Oar, if you get jealous that I have other friends—"

  "Festina!" shouted a voice behind me.

  Jelca.

  Changed

  He had no hair. Wasn't that strange? Just the bald skull I remembered, covered with the scabby patches that would grow inflamed and bleed if he tried to wear a wig.

  For some reason, I had thought he'd have hair. I don't know why — I hadn't said, "Melaquin tech helped me so it must have helped him too." I hadn't thought about it logically at all; I had just assumed Jelca would have hair… that he would be dashing and handsome and muscular.

  I had assumed he would be perfect.

  He was not perfect; he looked gaunt and twitchy. Jelca had always been thin, but now he looked positively ravaged, as if he hadn't eaten or slept for days. It didn't help that he was wearing a badly-fitted long-sleeved shirt… a shimmery thing of silver fabric that probably came from the local synthesizers: something like spun glass, but a fine enough mesh that it was opaque. I doubted Jelca wore it for the sparkle — more likely it was the only cloth the synthesizers would produce — but the shirt was so glitzily out of place, it looked like voluminous silver lame hung around the bones of an anorexic.

  "Festina?" Jelca said.

  "Yes."

  "You're here too?"

  "Yes."

  "You've changed."

  "Have I?"

  "Yes."

  He spoke flatly — no grin of welcome for an old friend, or even a courteous smile for a fellow Explorer. Walton had been happier to see me, and Walton was a complete stranger.

  Jelca's eyes stared fixedly at my cheek. God knows, I was used to stares, but this one unsettled me. I couldn't read his face. Was he simply surprised? Or was he disappointed with me, maybe even repelled?

  I noticed that his hand had dropped onto the stun-pistol holstered at his hip — not a purposeful gesture, I thought, just a reflex, just something he was in the habit of doing. Everything about him seemed as tight as wire.

  "You look good," he said at last. It did not sound like a compliment.

  "You look good too," I responded immediately.

  "You both look very ugly," Oar announced in a loud voice. "And you are so stupid I want to scream."

  "So scream," Jelca said. "Who's stopping you?"

  "I am too civilized to scream," she answered. "I am very cultured, I have cleared many fields, and I do not—"

  "You're Oar," Jelca interrupted, obviously making the connection for the first time.

  Oar shrieked. "You recognized ugly Festina but did not recognize me?"

  "You all look alike," Jelca shrugged. There was no apology in his voice. "Why are you here?"

  "My friend Festina needed my help to come to this place! That is the only reason. She wanted me with her so I came, because she is my friend."

  "Friend," Jelca repeated with pointed intonation. "Oh."

  My face burned. I wanted to blurt, It isn't what you think… and I hated myself for feeling that way. I hated Jelca too. Why didn't he smile? Why didn't he run forward and sweep me into his arms?

  Why didn't he think I was beautiful?

  "How's Ullis?" I asked, just for something to say.

  "Fine," he said. "Busy. You haven't seen her yet?"

  "We just got here. We saw Walton outside."

  "Oh. Well." He took his eyes off my face long enough to look at his watch. "It's almost suppertime. I'll show you where the others are."

  He still didn't smile; but suddenly he held out a hand to me as if I remained a silly little freshman who'd leap forward at the first opportunity. Maybe I would have. I didn't run to him immediately, but maybe I would have given in after a few seconds, telling myself that this was the start of whatever I wanted.

  Who knows?

  Before I made up my mind, Oar darted forward and took the offered hand, lacing her fingers with his. Jelca stared at me a moment longer, then shrugged. "This way," he said.

  Monstrosity

  We walked to the central square. It was a huge space, several hundred meters on each side… and almost completely filled with a giant glass whale.

  "The spaceship," Jelca said.

  I winced. A spaceship that looked like a whale? And a killer whale at that, an orca, with lines etched into its exterior skin to suggest the usual pattern of black and white coloration. It stood on its tail at the very center of the city, as tall as any nearby skyscraper. Its bulbous body no doubt contained living quarters, engines, and so on, but all of it was glass, glittering with prismatic refractions.

  Could it fly? Like any whale, it looked streamlined enough. Still, it was a far cry from Technocracy starships. They were simply long cylinders with a "Sperm head" at the front — an oversized gray sphere that generated the Sperm-field back along the hull. The orca had no such sphere: nothing more than a huge glass parasol sticking out of its sno
ut… as if the whale had a beach umbrella clenched in its teeth.

  "So that's our way home," Jelca said.

  "You're going into space in a whale?" I asked.

  "It's a ship, Festina." His voice flared with hostility. "Why should appearance matter?"

  "It doesn't," I answered. "How are you going to get it out of here?"

  "There are roof doors." He looked up briefly, then shook his head. "You can't see them from here. Can't see them from outside either. A whole section of the mountain just opens up."

  "And off you go in an orca."

  I meant to sound lighthearted and teasing, but Jelca didn't take it that way. "The whale was all we had to work with," he snapped. "A remnant of the Melaquin space program, whenever that was. This city has all kinds of ships, each stupider than the last. Birds, bats, insects… even a rabbit, for Christ's sake. The people here didn't care. They scarcely worried about trivialities like aerodynamics, or tradeoffs between weight and strength of materials. Ninety-nine per cent of each ship was built by the city's AI, using League of Peoples technology. Oh no, the AI wouldn't actually build a working starship; but if you ask for a hull as strong as steel and a thousand times lighter, there's no problem with that! So the locals built a whale, probably because it was romantic."

  "It is an excellent whale," Oar said approvingly. "I have seen pictures of such animals, but I did not know they were so large."

  "It's a ship, that's all," Jelca replied. "And it happens to be the biggest in the city — the only one with enough room to house all the Explorers here." He turned to me. "Sixty-two Explorers now, counting you."

  "Sixty-two?"

  "And five non-Explorers," he went on, "who haven't got around to dying yet. Admiralty officials who got 'escorted' here — two embezzlers, two addicts, and a pedophile, all of whom the High Council preferred to have disappear rather than go through the messy embarrassment of a trial." He gave me an angry look. "Isn't that great? Getting banished here with the likes of them? The admiral Ullis and I came down with was a total piece of shit… took bribes from a contractor so the guy could keep selling shoddy equipment to the Fleet. God knows if anyone was hurt because of it; the admiral never asked. Never tried to learn what damage he'd done. And the council condemned Ullis and me to the same fate as a man like that!"

  I said nothing. Jelca's words sounded like a rehearsed speech: a sore that had festered inside him so long, he was happy to have a new listener to hear. I knew the feeling. On the other hand, it had never occurred to me that most Explorers came to Melaquin in the company of criminals and other genuine undesirables. Somehow, I'd thought the exiles would all be people like Chee — out of control but not vicious. Naive, Ramos, I thought; too quick to romanticize the High Council as tyrants and their victims as heroic political prisoners. No one was as good or as bad as I might like to believe.

  "What happened to your admiral?" I asked.

  "YouthBoost meltdown," Jelca answered with a shrug. "The usual fate of the scum who are sent here — they're old and fat and ready to fall apart as soon as they're cut off the teat. They keel over and problem solved… except for us Explorers, stuck in this hellhole."

  "It is not a hellhole," Oar growled. "Melaquin is an excellent planet!"

  "Sure," Jelca said. "Everything a man could want." He gave me a sideways glance. "That's why the council gets away with it, you know… why the League lets them get away with it. To an alien, there's nothing wrong with dropping Explorers on Melaquin; what other planet in the galaxy is better suited for human life? Depositing us here is damned safer than assigning us to explore a subzero ice-world or thousand degree inferno. Melaquin is a paradise for our species. When the council maroons us here, the League probably thinks it's a favor. Forget that we're cut off from civilization, forget that we'll never see our friends and family—"

  "Your friends and family are probably very stupid," Oar interrupted. "Festina is very bored with the way you complain and wishes you would talk about something else."

  Jelca gave a humorless laugh. "Sorry to bore you, Festina." He turned to Oar. "What do you think Festina would rather talk about?"

  "She would rather talk about my stupid sister, Eel."

  "What about her?" Jelca asked.

  "Where is she?"

  "She's your sister," Jelca said. "If you don't know where she is, why should I?" Before Oar could react, he gave her hand an ungentle tug. "Enough talk. I can smell supper and it's making me hungry."

  The First Supper

  The next few hours were an exhausting jumble.

  I met the other Explorers — some familiar to me, but many stranded on Melaquin long before I was drafted into the Fleet.

  I let people go through my pack: the candy rations I hadn't yet touched, the entertainment bubbles I'd brought because I had room, the odds and ends of equipment that might be used in the spaceship. There are no words to describe the joy of the female Explorers when they found my first aid kit contained two dozen menstruation swatches.

  I told my story: the parts I wanted to tell anyway. I did not describe how Yarrun died; besides, the others were more interested in the lark-plane we'd left outside. One of the older men, a gray-haired Divian named Athelrod, headed out immediately to inspect the craft… on the hunt for spare parts he could cannibalize.

  I vacillated between the urge to distance myself from Oar and the desire to keep her in close check. She was the only Melaquin native now in the city, apart from numerous towers of dormant ancestors. All other natives had left years earlier, peeved at some unspecified quarrel with the Explorers. ("You don't want to hear about that," scoffed a woman called Callisto.)

  I asked about Chee and Seele. None of the other Explorers had been in the city that long ago, but they'd learned from the glass populace that two "uglies" had flown away in a glass bumblebee.

  Lastly, I toured the orca ship. As Walton said, it was close to completion, especially if my lark-plane contained the parts they were looking for. "Then again," said Callisto, "it's been close to completion for the past twenty-eight years."

  Or for the past four thousand years — the sticking point was what you required as an acceptable level of safety. No one doubted the ship could successfully take off; the only question was how far it would get. Out of the atmosphere? Certainly. But far enough into space to be rescued by a League vessel? That was the crucial point of debate.

  How much food and air would you need to get to the nearest trade lanes? How much fuel would it take? No one knew. So the Explorers had passed their time tinkering: an enhancement here, an increased efficiency there, but no breakthrough so overwhelming that they could state with confidence, "Now we stand a good chance of making it."

  Then came Jelca: resourceful, angry Jelca. Like other Explorers, he had received what Tobit called "the tip" — a hint he would soon be marooned on Melaquin and a suggestion of which continent he should choose for a Landing. Jelca hadn't wasted time in brooding or futile attempts at mutiny. Instead, he had taken direct action. While other Explorers reacted to the tip by packing more supplies or personal keepsakes, Jelca had stolen a Sperm-field generator.

  Every ship carries two extra generators, in case of malfunction. They are not large as ship equipment goes — black boxes the size of coffins, each weighing two hundred kilos. With the aid of a robot hauler, Jelca smuggled a spare generator out of the engineering hold and into a planetary probe drone. Of course, he had to remove most of the drone's sensing equipment to make room for the generator; but he considered that an unimportant tradeoff. He barely finished the work in time; almost immediately, he and Ullis received orders to escort the bribe-taking admiral on an "investigative mission" to Melaquin.

  From that point on, Jelca's theft was easy: he sent out the rigged probe as part of the preliminary survey; and he arranged that the probe landed softly in a spot he could find later. Some time after the Landing, when he had reached Oar's village and heard the looped message about the city in the mountains, Jelca reactivate
d the probe and flew it south by remote control. He and Ullis still had to travel to the city by foot, but when they got there, the stolen generator was waiting for them.

  As easy as that. A Sperm-field generator meant FTL flight — it meant the difference between limping out of the system after five to ten years of relativistic travel, or getting home in two weeks. It was still an engineering challenge to mount the generator on the whale; but with so many Explorers in the city, they had ample brainpower to focus on the problem. They also had an AI here like the one I'd met in Tobit's town: a source of tools and components, even if the AI occasionally decided the Explorers had to manufacture particular pieces of equipment themselves.

  Three years had passed since Jelca arrived with the generator; now the ship was ready. Some people talked as if it might take off tomorrow. Others contended the ship needed months of shakedown before departure. Within a few minutes, both camps were appealing to me as a disinterested party: someone who hadn't talked herself hoarse in the go-now-or-wait debates that had dominated every mealtime for a dozen weeks. Before I could say stop, I was barraged with measurements and test results, pages of figures and diagrams which both sides claimed would prove their point…

  Then Ullis said, "She's a zoology specialist," and the debaters lost interest in me.

  Ullis

  Unlike Jelca, Ullis Naar had greeted me warmly when I arrived at the Explorers' mess. She hugged me; she recognized Oar immediately and hugged her too. Since Jelca looked like he wanted to run off and eat by himself, Ullis took me around to meet everyone. "This is Festina Ramos and yes, she's one of us even if she looks gorgeous."

  (I had explained about the artificial skin. She said she was happy for me, and she meant it. Her own problem was still much in evidence: blink, blink, blink every second or so, some blinks so heavy they twitched all the way to her shoulders. I found myself feeling sorry for her… feeling pity. It was a patronizing, "Oh the poor dear" kind of pity, and it scared me. I'd never before felt condescension for another Explorer.)

  Ullis was the one who described how Jelca had obtained the Sperm-field generator; Jelca stood by silently as she spoke, as if the story were about someone else. Later, when lights throughout the city dimmed to dusk, Ullis explained that the dimming was Jelca's work too. He wanted a true day/night cycle rather than the city's eternal glimmer, so he had tracked down the control center and rewired some circuits. Perhaps, I thought, that change had been the impetus which spurred the glass populace into leaving. People who photosynthesize may not take kindly to strangers turning the lights off.