The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  It was easy to tell the difference: all the Melaquin components were clear and transparent. Nudging a see-through cable with my toe, I wanted to growl, “Haven’t you people heard of copper?”

  Jelca probably felt the same way—after all, he had to work with the stuff. Many of the glasslike parts were labeled in thick black letters from the marker pen all Explorers carry: RESISTOR, 10 OHMS…USE, AT LEAST 15 AMPS…BAD TUNNEL-TUBE, DO NOT USE! How he had identified these things, I couldn’t imagine; but as I said before, Jelca came from a line of dabblers in electronics. With the aid of his Bumbler, he could analyze almost anything, given enough patience…and enough duplicate parts for the times he guessed wrong.

  “Did he explain what he was making?” I asked Oar.

  “Foolish things,” she answered. “He claimed he could make a machine to talk to people far away…and a version of our food maker machine, only small enough to carry.”

  Practical thinking on Jelca’s part: a radio and a nutrient synthesizer. That gave him a way to contact other marooned Explorers, and the means to feed himself while he traveled to wherever the others were. After a moment, I corrected myself—the means to feed himself and Ullis, plus Oar’s sister if she was traveling with them. It would take a big synthesizer to produce enough food for three people…but if Oar’s sister was as strong as Oar, she might have no trouble carrying heavy equipment for hours on end.

  Carefully I prowled the room, examining everything Jelca had made during his time here. I recognized several nutrient synthesizers, the kind that take leaves and other organic material as input, then produce compact food cubes: not fine cuisine, but enough to keep you alive. There seemed to be a progression of prototypes, from one that must have weighed a hundred kilos down to something much less bulky. Jelca had obviously worked to produce the smallest equipment possible so he and Ullis could travel light. Naturally, they’d taken the most compact version with them; but sizing up the best one they’d left behind, I thought I could stand hauling it five or six hours a day, if I built a good carrying frame.

  Thank you, I whispered to the air. Jelca had left me the means to follow him.

  The Picture Box

  “This box makes pictures,” Oar said behind my back.

  She pointed to a crystal screen embedded in the wall…or more accurately, embedded in what was left of the wall. Jelca had ripped away much of the material around the screen so he could get in behind it—into a mass of fiberoptic cable and circuits feeding the screen. By the looks of it, this was a native Melaquinian television; and Jelca had either tried to repair it or plunder it for parts.

  “The screen showed pictures?” I asked.

  “Yes. Pictures of ugly Explorers.”

  “Jelca and Ullis?”

  “No, different Explorers.”

  “Different…” I forced myself not to lunge for the TV. If other Explorers could broadcast television signals, they must have developed a substantial technological base—either that or they had drawn upon existing Melaquin resources. Now that I thought about it, normal TV/radio waves could never reach here under the lake. The dome must have a concealed antenna or cable feed reaching up to the outside world. Perhaps the planet supported hundreds of hidden villages like this one, connected by a shielded cable network: a network that would allow communication from one village to another, but whose transmissions would not be detectable from space.

  And my fellow Explorers had tapped into that system.

  “Oar,” I said, “I’d like to turn on the machine.”

  “You may not see anything,” she answered. “The pictures only come for a short while, then go away. And they are always the same stupid Explorers saying the same stupid things.”

  It must be a looped signal saying, “Hello new arrivals, here’s where everyone else is.” With clumsy fingers, I clicked the TV’s switch. The screen lit with a display of static. For some reason, I had convinced myself it would show a picture immediately; but ten minutes passed (Oar tapping her toe impatiently) before a picture snapped into view.

  “Greetings,” said a man on the screen. “I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples and I beg…”

  I was too shocked to pay attention to the words. The man on the screen was Chee.

  Part X

  COMMUNICATION

  Ears

  The Chee on the screen looked younger—not so many lines on his face and only a few gray streaks in his black hair. He wore the hair down to his shoulders; but it couldn’t hide the huge misshapen ears sticking out from his head like purple-veined plates.

  Those ears looked like botched engineering: some ill-conceived project to achieve God knows what. Even though it was illegal, there were always fools who tinkered with their offspring’s genes, failing to understand that a change in enzyme A might affect how the body used proteins B, C, and D. Most of the time, such alterations killed the child in utero; but occasionally, the fetus lived to full term, emerging from the womb with deformities like the man on the screen.

  A man with the ears of a cartoon caricature. Or an Explorer.

  Yes. Those ears would make him a prime candidate for the Academy…if he could still hear. If the malformed ears handicapped his hearing, Technocracy medicine would leap to the rescue: reconstructive surgery, prosthetic replacements, targeted virus therapy—whatever it took. But if the ears were merely grotesque, and the child was intelligent, healthy, psychologically pliable…on to the Academy.

  Chee. An Explorer.

  Was it really him? Could it just be a close relative, a brother, or even a clone? All were possibilities; but I could feel in my gut this was the real Chee.

  Chee had known more about Exploring than any normal Vacuum admiral. When suiting up, for example, he had known to empty his bladder during Limbo.

  An Explorer. An Explorer who somehow became an admiral.

  How long ago had this recording been made? The signal could have looped for decades if it ran off a reliable power source. If Chee had been one of the first marooned here, some forty years ago…yes, I could believe it. The Explorer on the screen was a veteran, probably taking YouthBoost every few months. Forty years would bring him almost exactly to the Chee who had died a few hours ago.

  Forty years.

  Plus ear surgery.

  And some way to escape from Melaquin.

  Chee’s Speech

  With an effort, I forced myself to concentrate on his words, not his appearance. (Chee’s voice—it was definitely Chee’s voice.)

  “…fully expect that more of us will get shanghaied here over time. If you are in that position, I invite you to join my partner and me in the enclave we’ve found. It’s an underground city, fully automated and self-repairing…centuries old. The people are humanoid but glassily transparent; all seem dormant, though we cannot guess the cause. We have had no success in rousing them to consciousness for more than a minute at a time.

  “We’ve had better luck with the technical facilities here: this broadcasting station, for example. If we’ve analyzed its structure correctly, our transmissions should be going out over a high-capacity network, perhaps reaching all around the world. We have also discovered very old machines capable of space flight…or at least they were capable of flight centuries ago. If we can restore one of these ships to working condition, we might use it to get off the planet. We have yet to find a ship with FTL capacity, but we don’t need to get as far as another star system—we just have to escape the restricted airspace around Melaquin, then send a mayday.

  “Therefore, fellow ECMs, I invite you to help us with this project. We may not be space-tech engineers, but we’re smart and resourceful. In time, we can rebuild a ship and get out of here—if we work together.”

  Chee suddenly grimaced straight to the camera. “Shit, that sounded pompous, didn’t it? But you know what I mean. We can get our asses out of here if we don’t fuck up. Some of you must have landed way to hell the other side of the ocean and you’ll never make it here under your o
wn steam; but look around, see what you can scrounge up. This civilization had sophisticated goodies before it went to sleep. Maybe you can find a starship of your own…if not, maybe a boat or a plane that’ll bring you to us, even if you’re thousands of klicks away.

  “And where is here, you might ask? To answer that, I’ll turn the floor over to my partner who’s drawn up a map to show exactly where this city is…”

  Chee reached toward the camera, his hand looming in front of the lens before the shot swivelled to a new angle. In a moment, a woman came into view. She was holding a map, but that wasn’t what I was looking at.

  Her left cheek had a fierce purple birthmark, twin to mine.

  And beneath that birthmark was the face of Admiral Seele.

  My First Admiral, Again

  Admiral Seele. My first admiral. The one who spent several days with me on the Jacaranda.

  The one who paid me so much attention, I thought she wanted into my bed.

  “Shit,” I whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”

  “What is wrong, Festina?” Oar asked. She glanced at the screen. “Are you angry this woman has copied your ugliness?”

  Yes, that’s why I’m angry, I thought. I’ll sue her for stealing my trademark.

  Admiral Seele. No wonder she took such interest in me. My mark was on the right, hers on the left; we were mirror images. On screen, as she pointed to her map and blathered about landmarks, she even looked the same age as me…but the recording was made forty years ago, give or take. I could well imagine those forty years had aged the woman I saw now into the admiral who cried for me.

  But how had Seele lost her birthmark? How had Chee lost those monstrous ears? And how had they both become admirals?

  I could think of only one explanation. The two of them had resurrected a spaceship. They had escaped, returned home, and reached a deal with the Council. What kind of deal? I could only think of one: Chee and Seele wouldn’t blow the whistle on Melaquin, provided they were boosted up the chain of command and got the medical treatment needed to make them look like real people.

  What else could it have been?

  “Bastards,” I whispered. “Traitor bastards.”

  They’d sold out their fellow Explorers in exchange for an admiral’s gray uniform and plastic surgery. They’d had a chance to expose the High Council, but held their tongues. Forty years later, Explorers were still getting tossed onto Melaquin like trash.

  “Damn it!” I growled. “How could you do it, Chee? How could you treat us like we were…expendable?”

  The screen gave no answer. In time, the faces were replaced by static.

  A Selfish Thing

  I felt a touch on my shoulder. “Why are you sad, Festina?”

  Oar looked at me earnestly.

  “I’m sad,” I told her, “because someone I thought was my friend did a selfish thing.”

  “That is bad,” Oar said, her hand still touching me. “It hurts when people just do, do, do, without caring. It is very wrong.”

  “Yes, well…I don’t have all the facts.” I took a grudging breath that immediately let itself out again in a sigh. “It’s been a long day for me, Oar; and getting choked unconscious for a few hours isn’t as restful as you think. Is there a place I can sleep?”

  “Jelca’s bed is in the next room,” Oar replied. She pointed toward a door. I felt like saying no—refusing to spend the night under the same roof as the television, as if hostility could punish Chee and Seele from afar. But it couldn’t. And if Jelca had a perfectly good bed within a stone’s throw, why go someplace else?

  Why not spend the night in Jelca’s bed?

  “Damn, I’m a basketcase!” I muttered. “How many emotions can you squeeze into a minute?”

  “I do not understand the question,” Oar replied.

  “Just talking to myself,” I said. Without waiting for her to respond, I walked into Jelca’s bedroom.

  The bed was clear and transparent—a water-filled sack on the floor, with a hard plastic frame around the outside to prevent you from rolling off the edge. I wondered if Jelca had made this himself or if the bed was standard issue for Oar’s people. Did Oar need to sleep? The engineers behind her glassy genes may have designed her to stay awake twenty-four hours a day.

  “Do you sleep?” I asked her.

  “Yes, Festina…whenever I want to. I could sleep now, for example.”

  The hint in her voice was not subtle.

  And so we slept the night together in Jelca’s bed: chastely, but not apart. She was lonely for company. And I had lost so much in one day, I wanted to hold something warm and solid.

  Sick

  I do not remember dreaming that night; but I woke in a dreamlike state, hard-pressed to believe my surroundings were real.

  My arm was draped over Oar’s quiet back. On the other side of her body, my hand looked as big as an inflated glove, magnified by a lens effect from her breasts. The sight disturbed me, as if my flesh was bloated with native microbes. Flustered, I untangled myself from her and rolled away; the water bed gurgled as I moved. After a moment, I settled onto my back and stared at the ceiling, trying to force back a sense of reality.

  Reality.

  How could I grasp reality when everything had a see-through, not-really-there quality? The walls, the bed, the woman beside me…all so elusive. I was marooned on a planet too much like Earth, I had killed my partner, I had watched Chee die, I had slept in Jelca’s bed—but all of it felt so disconnected: details of some other woman’s life. My mind floated, unattached to my body or my past; closed up, walled off. The sensation was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. I had no interest in judging it; I simply let it wash past me.

  After a while, a thought occurred: Maybe I’m sick.

  Everything would be all right if I were sick. I could let the germs take responsibility for the coming hours…days…weeks. Sick people don’t have to participate in their own lives.

  I found myself visualizing the microorganisms that coursed through my bloodstream. Specializing in exobiology had its benefits; I could imagine some great microorganisms.

  My favorite ones looked like eggs.

  Metabolisms

  Oar lifted herself on one elbow and asked, “Are you awake, Festina?”

  “Hard to tell. Do awake people lie around, picturing needle-shaped microbes perforating their capillaries?”

  “Perhaps you should ask my ancestors,” she said. “You may have to tell them what a capillaries is, for they are not so wise as me.”

  “I think I’m sick,” I said.

  Oar put her hand on my forehead. “This is what my mother did when I was sick.” She waited a moment, watching me solemnly. Then she removed her hand and asked, “Do you feel better now, Festina? Or shall I touch you again?”

  I smiled. “I’ll just lie here for a while.”

  “Are you sure? Would you like some food or water? Do you want to go to the bathroom?”

  Hmph. If her goal was to get me out of bed, her words had more effect than a hand on the forehead. Suddenly, I was aware of intense hunger, thirst, and the urge to urinate. For a few seconds, I tried to return to my former comfortably dazed dislocation; but no matter how sick or emotionally overloaded I might be, I hadn’t lost any basic bodily needs.

  “Help me up,” I muttered. “Please.”

  She rolled off the bed and held out a hand. As soon as I took it, she pulled me strongly to my feet, the water bed galumphing beneath me. Some part of me wanted to feel dizzy when I reached the vertical; but the clawing in my bladder focused my attention too effectively to allow lightheadedness. “Show me the toilet,” I growled.

  There was a small one in the building’s back room—a clear glass bowl with a conventionally-shaped seat. Oar entered the room with me and showed no sign of leaving…not that I’d have any privacy anyway, with walls of glass. I sat; I went; Oar wrinkled her nose. “It is yellow, Festina,” she said.

  “I suppose yours is clear?” Then I answ
ered my own question. “Of course it must be—otherwise, I’d see your bladder floating inside your body. You have one hell of an eerie metabolism if even your wastes are see-through.”

  “I have a consistent metabolism,” she sniffed. “And if you are finished….”

  As I got up, I wondered if she had talked this same way with Jelca, three years ago in this very room. I didn’t really want to know.

  Three Days

  When we were both finished in the bathroom, Oar volunteered to get food from the synthesizer. I warned I might be too sick to eat, but I knew it was a lie—I wasn’t sick, I was merely wrecked. Shipwrecked, soul-wrecked, brain-wrecked.

  And I stayed that way for three days.

  Why did it hit me then—in those minutes when Oar was getting food? Why not earlier or later? I suppose it was being alone for the first time since landing on Melaquin: truly alone with nothing to do. No one to help, no bodies to bury…no orders, no mission, no agenda. It was the first time in years nothing was dragging me into the future—I had no duties to keep my mind off what I’d done. I could almost feel things letting go inside me: not the pleasant easing of burdens, but a dismaying loss of cohesion, bits of myself slipping out of place.

  Alone, alone, alone. Alone in a colorless village, all the inhabitants as good as dead except for one childlike woman who could never understand my ugliness, my pettiness, my pain….

  Three days passed. I won’t describe them. I could say I don’t remember them, but that’s dodging the truth. Even if I can’t list what I did, I remember every hour deep in my bones: grieving, raging, raving. I can return to that darkness anytime I want; stand over the pit and look down, shivering with the same furies and regrets. Now and then I deliberately turn back to those days—lift the lid to reassure myself I have not forgotten. At other times the memory rises unbidden; I find myself blurting out, “I’m sorry!” in the silence of an empty room.