The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  Two paces away, I found the nest the killdeer was protecting. There were three eggs in the nest, their shells dirty white with brown speckles.

  Three beautiful eggs.

  Eggs

  I took the Bumbler from Yarrun and crouched beside the nest. Melaquin’s atmosphere blocked most of the X-rays emitted by the local sun, Uffree; but the Bumbler was extremely good at amplifying what little there was.

  Inside each egg was a tiny bird. (Their mother squawked frantically at me from a distance.) The Bumbler showed only their skeletons, curled into positions that seemed impossibly cramped. The little birds filled the eggs completely; within hours, they would hatch.

  “Greetings,” I whispered softly to them. “I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality.”

  The mother squawked in anguish, dashing back and forth with her feigned broken wing.

  Gone

  “Where’s Chee?” Yarrun asked suddenly.

  My head snapped up. Yarrun and I were alone in the meadow.

  “Admiral Chee, come in, admiral,” I called over the radio, keeping my voice calm.

  No response.

  “Maybe he fell off the bluffs,” Yarrun suggested.

  “You check.” And while Yarrun hurried toward the edge of the bluffs, I switched the Bumbler to IR, and did a fast circle. Nothing showed up anywhere near Chee’s size. He wasn’t hiding in the grass. “Admiral Chee, please respond. Admiral Ch—”

  A force closed on my windpipe like a strangling hand. I stopped talking mid-syllable. I could not breathe, I could not speak.

  Oh shit.

  Oh Shit

  My throat transceiver. Was that it? Was that all?

  Oh shit.

  It was something in my throat implant. It was killing me. How stupid. How mindlessly stupid. Shit.

  No monsters. No sentients. No deadly physical phenomena. Just crude treachery.

  And I was fool enough to feel disappointed. I had a little Prope inside me who thought death should come glamorously. How juvenile. How stupid.

  Shit.

  Where had Chee gone? Over the bluffs? Did it matter?

  A few paces in front of me, Yarrun was ripping off his helmet. He hadn’t figured it out yet; he must have thought his suit had a malfunction.

  I turned the Bumbler on him, its sensors still keyed to read X-rays. Yes, his transceiver had twisted itself around his windpipe. And now he understood—he turned to me with a look of bitter sorrow.

  Shit.

  They must have built the implants to kill us. Did the choking mechanism activate in response to some natural transmission generated on planet? Or did someone somewhere turn a dial? Had Harque pushed some button, just following orders? Did he know what he’d done?

  Shit.

  Yarrun’s hands reached for his throat. I wondered if he would try to pull off the transceiver assembly. No good, I could see that on the X-rays—the mechanism was wrapped so tightly in place, he’d just rip out his larynx.

  Shit. Oh shit. Yarrun was tapping out SOS in Morse code. Tapping on the transceiver itself. Gazing hopefully at the sky. And he couldn’t know if the transceiver was still broadcasting, and he couldn’t know if any of those goddamned Vacuum assholes on the bridge had even heard of Morse code, and he was still trying the only thing he could think of to save our lives.

  Shit.

  I blasted him with my stunner and he went down in a spiraling slump, as if he was turning to look at me one last time.

  Forget it, forget it. I dropped to my knees beside him, upturning my whole backpack in search of the scalpel from the medical kit.

  Maybe I could stay conscious long enough to perform an emergency tracheotomy. Cut through Yarrun’s throat into his windpipe, below the point where the transceiver was strangling him. Open a new breathing passage.

  I had done a tracheotomy once before. At the Academy. On a cadaver. I couldn’t remember what grade I’d received.

  The first cut had to be vertical—less chance of hitting a major vein or artery. Blood spurted as I worked the knife, but after that it slowed. I hoped that was a good sign.

  My vision was clouding. Didn’t matter. If I screwed this up, what was the difference?

  No. There was a difference.

  The medical kit contained no tracheotomy tube, but it did have an esophageal airway. The airway was so wide. Who had the nerve to cut a hole that big in someone’s throat?

  I did. I had the nerve.

  My head was spinning. My eyes wouldn’t focus. I pulled what I hoped was an ampoule of blood coagulant from the medical kit and sprayed it around the incision. I didn’t know if I’d killed my friend. I’d die without knowing.

  I thought, Yarrun, don’t hate me. I don’t want to be hated.

  Then I thought, Shit, here I go.

  Oh Shit.

  Part VI

  AWAKENING

  Up

  Up. Fight.

  Fight. Harder.

  Up. Up.

  Light.

  Here.

  Ow, Shit

  My head was pounding.

  My throat felt raw and shredded.

  Swallowing was like being clawed by some angry animal. As soon as I swallowed, I felt the urge to swallow again; surely, it couldn’t hurt as much as the last time.

  But it could.

  Ow. Shit.

  I was alive.

  Alive

  I was sprawled facedown, still in my tightsuit. The suit stank of urine and worse, but the blue ok light still glowed on the inside of my visor: no breach in the suit’s skin, and at least an hour of canned air left. For what it was worth, the suit’s monitors considered me in perfect health.

  Monitors are stupid. I tried swallowing again, and regretted it.

  Sloshing inside the suit, I pushed myself up to my hands and knees. My body cast an elongated shadow across the grass of the field; sunset was coming. We had landed an hour or two after sunrise and the season was early fall, so I’d been unconscious nine or ten hours.

  And nothing had eaten me all that time. What a wimp-ass planet.

  A moment later, a stab of memory jolted me. In a panic, I scrambled to my feet and looked left, right, all around.

  Yarrun was gone.

  Searching

  The Bumbler and the medical kit still lay where I’d dropped them. The scalpel…the empty drug ampoule…even the esophageal airway I thought I had inserted into Yarrun’s throat…everything was there except Yarrun. Flecks of dried blood dotted the grass where he had lain, but he was nowhere to be seen.

  From reflex, I tapped my throat transceiver and called, “Yarrun! Yarrun!”

  My words stayed muffled in my suit. Usually, I heard some trickle of feedback on my audio receiver, a tinny echo of my broadcast voice. This time, there was no such echo.

  Radio silence. No-comm. My transmitter had gone Oh Shit.

  Perhaps that was why I was still alive: the effort of strangling me had been too much for my throat implant. It had blown its circuits before finishing the job. Equipment burnouts were not a novelty in the Outward Fleet; the Admiralty tendered supply contracts to the lowest bidder.

  That still didn’t explain Yarrun’s absence. If the tracheotomy worked, he might have woken before me. Had he pulled out the airway, then wandered off? He might have done so if he was dazed. With his helmet off, he’d been exposed to local air for hours—plenty of time to get infected by an alien microbe and go delirious.

  Damn. How long would he stagger about before he fell off the cliffs into the lake?

  Fighting the urge to race forward, I picked up the Bumbler and walked slowly to the edge of the bluffs. Rushing wouldn’t help Yarrun, especially if I tripped over the edge myself.

  The gathering shadows of sunset didn’t make it easy to scan the scrub brush between me and the lake. However, the Bumbler showed nothing as warm as a human body on the cliffside or the shore below.

  I refused to consider the possibility that Yarrun�
�s body was no longer warm.

  Carefully, I tracked along the bluffs a hundred meters in both directions. The Bumbler showed no significant heat signatures. Added to that, the face of the bluffs was sandy loam, and reasonably moist; if Yarrun fell over the edge, he would have gouged deep scuffs in the dirt on his way down.

  The soil showed no marks of any kind. Nothing human-sized had tumbled over since the last rain.

  Poison Ivy

  I could have continued searching along the bluffs; however, there was still the ravine on the opposite side of the meadow and I wanted to check it before daylight faded. Searching the ravine would not be easy—the trees were losing their leaves with autumn, leaving a layer of red and gold thick underfoot. I hoped the Bumbler was sensitive enough to discern Yarrun’s body heat if he lay under a day’s worth of fallen leaves.

  The weakening rays of sunlight didn’t penetrate much distance into the woods. From the treeline, I could make out a spindly creek running along the bottom of the ravine, but beyond that was only shadow. The Bumbler saw farther, but not well; its effective range was a hundred meters, and the ravine was wider than that. For best coverage, I would have to trek to the bottom and follow the creek, scanning both sides as I walked.

  Grimly, I started down. The undergrowth was ankle-height and patchy—low-light greenery that could survive in the shadow of the trees. Given the Earthlike look of the vegetation, maybe the plants brushing my legs were poison ivy; I couldn’t tell. With all my Explorer training, I had never learned what temperate-zone poison ivy looked like— the Academy could not imagine I would ever face genuine Earth flora.

  Not that I should fall into the trap of believing this world was terrestrial. The trees looked like maples, the worms looked like worms, the insects looked like bees and butterflies, but none of that meant anything.

  This was an alien world. A hostile alien world.

  IR Anomaly

  I reached the creek and stopped by the shore, briefly checking the water for dangerous lifeforms. There were only a few small fish, barely the length of my thumb and as slim as whispers; they darted away when the reflection of my tightsuit fell across the surface. I watched them go, then lifted the Bumbler, turning a slow circle in search of heat traces.

  Halfway around, I found exactly what I wanted: a human-sized blob of bright glowing warmth. The figure was crouched and working at something low to the ground—I didn’t understand what he could be doing, but I was so relieved to see he was moving, I called, “Yarrun! Yarrun!”

  On the Bumbler’s screen, the figure jerked its head around. Then it put on a spurt of effort shoving at something, pushing, heaving.

  Why?

  Suddenly fearful, I slung the Bumbler under my arm and set off at the fastest trot I could manage, the confinement of my tightsuit slowing me down…like the nightmare where you can’t run fast enough to outrace the monster. Fallen leaves thrashed with the sound of surf as I barged through them. Shadows clustered thick under the trees, but the pale white of a tightsuit soon became visible in the twilight in front of me.

  A white tightsuit. A head of white hair.

  Admiral Chee stood and came quickly toward me. His face was red with exertion. He had the overly bold look of someone blocking something with his body.

  “Ramos,” he said, with forced heartiness. “Glad to see you’re finally awake—”

  I pushed past him without a word. He tried to grab my arm, but was neither fast enough nor strong enough to hold me.

  A few paces farther on, Yarrun lay motionless on the ground. Chee had been trying to hide him by stuffing the body into a hollow log. Yarrun’s feet and legs were inside the log now, but his top half was clearly visible.

  His arms limp.

  His face drained of blood.

  His throat butchered.

  So dead he had not even been warm enough to show up on the Bumbler.

  No Weapons

  “I killed him,” I whispered.

  Silence from the admiral.

  “Didn’t I?” I insisted. “I killed him, didn’t I?”

  “You were trying to help,” Chee mumbled. “Emergency tracheotomy, right? And in the heat of the moment—”

  “I killed him because I tried hacking at his throat when I couldn’t see straight. If I’d just left him alone, his implant might have burned out like mine.”

  “Burnout!” Chee exclaimed. “Is that what you—” He stopped himself. “Yes, burnout,” he said. “You were lucky.”

  What did he mean by that? It was pure luck, wasn’t it? Unless the implants weren’t designed to kill us at all.

  I groaned as the truth came to me. Of course they couldn’t have killed us. That would have violated the one unshakeable law of space travel: no lethal weapons on a starship. The League of Peoples never let such weapons through, no matter how well concealed. “The implants weren’t made to kill,” I said aloud. “Just to knock us out for a while.”

  “You didn’t have time to think that through,” Chee said sharply. “You responded to an emergency, that’s all.”

  “I didn’t respond to an emergency—I killed my partner!” My face felt hot. “And you were trying to hide the evidence, weren’t you? Stuff him into a tree so I wouldn’t find him. What were you going to tell me? That he’d been dragged off by predators?”

  Silence.

  “I don’t know,” Chee finally answered. “I just thought it would be better if you didn’t have to confront…if you didn’t have to wake up with him right there.”

  “Right there,” I repeated. “Lying in the grass. Where I killed him.”

  And I began to cry.

  Hell

  Hell is weeping inside a tightsuit.

  I wanted to cover my face with my hands. The helmet was in the way.

  My nose ran. I could not wipe it. Dribbling and hot, untouchable tears poured down my cheeks.

  I hugged my arms across my chest. The suit’s surface was like iron; no matter how hard I tightened my grip, I couldn’t feel my own touch. My arms squeezed against unyielding fabric, never making contact with the me inside.

  Alone, alone, crying alone. I could not even reach myself.

  My Helmet

  In time, the sobs wore themselves out. The misery didn’t. The taste of my running nose was salty on my lips.

  Chee had his arms around me, trying to give comfort. I couldn’t feel him through the suit either.

  He was saying things, meaningless things. “You didn’t know, how could you possibly think clearly, don’t blame yourself….”

  Stupid things. I shoved him away. “Leave me alone.”

  He was looking at me. I wanted so badly to turn away from him that I stared him straight in the eye.

  “Ramos,” he said, “take off your helmet and wipe your nose before you drown.”

  “I can’t take off my helmet,” I sniffled. “There are germs.”

  “How much air do you have left?” Chee asked. “An hour? Two hours? We’re going to be here longer than that.”

  “I’m going to be here forever!” The words came out before I even knew what I was saying. “I’m a murderer now. A dangerous non-sentient. I’m no different from that Greenstrider you talked about—it doesn’t matter what was going through my mind, I should have known.”

  “Look, in the heat of the moment…”

  “No!” I almost screamed the word. “I should have figured it out. I should have. I don’t deserve to be called sentient if I can kill my partner so stupidly.”

  “Ramos…”

  “I can never go into space again,” I said. “Even if a rescue ship arrived this minute, they couldn’t take me away. The League would never let me leave Melaquin. They’ll call me non-sentient, and they’re right.”

  “Take off your helmet,” the admiral ordered. “I refuse to argue with a person who has snot all over her face.”

  In another time and place, I might have been obstinate. I might have played the steely Explorer, sternly adhering t
o Fleet policies no matter how runny her nose was. But just this once, I didn’t have the energy for willpower. With two sullen taps of my finger, I hit the helmet release button and the safety catch. It took five more seconds for the interlocks to disengage and for the pressure regulator to equalize with external atmosphere. My ears popped just as the helmet swung back on its hinges and exposed me to extraterrestrial air for the first time in my life.

  Without a second’s hesitation, I wiped my nose on my sleeve.

  “Good,” said Chee, “you aren’t an utter idiot after all.”

  A Tomb

  We interred Yarrun in the log Chee had chosen—there was no better place for him to go. The miniature shovel in my pack was only adequate for skimming soil samples, not for burying bodies; it would have taken hours to dig a hole deep enough to hold my partner, hours of staring at his throat. I couldn’t bear that.

  The admiral couldn’t do the work either. Whatever strength let him carry Yairun into the woods had dissolved the moment I arrived. Now his face looked like brown chalk; his breathing sounded too deliberate, as if he was forcing himself to keep control. I gave him some excuse about wanting to deal with Yarrun myself and he didn’t object. He simply sat against a tree and watched with weary eyes as I did what had to be done.

  Pushing Yarrun into the log.

  Forcing his helpless body inside, among the ants and beetles and fungus.

  Smelling the odor of punky wood strong in my nostrils, the scent mixed with the tang of Yarrun’s blood and my own stink.

  Toward the end, it occurred to me to lock my own helmet onto Yarrun’s tightsuit, encasing him completely so that carrion-eaters would not sniff him out. Then I finished cramming the corpse into the shadows, stuffing the end of the log with dead leaves until I could no longer see him.

  When it was all over—when I had done what I had to, and what I could—I turned away and threw up.