To my parents
(except the naughty words)
Thanks to the writing group who helped correct my first mistakes: Linda Carson, John McMullen, and Dave Till. Thanks to Rob Sawyer who helped correct my next mistakes, and to Jennifer Brehl who picked up the ones after that. If there are any slipups left, it’s obviously my fault for hiding them too well.
Finally, a big hello and thank you to my fellow writers in FASS ’77. Somewhere in our script meetings, the phrase “Expendable Crew Member” was spoken for the first time. It rattled around in my head for almost twenty years, and look what finally came out.
Part I
NIGHT
Flashback
“My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance.”
(Again.)
“My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance.”
(Again.)
“My name is Festina Ramos, and I take great pride in my personal appearance.”
(Again….)
My Appearance
My name is Festina Ramos and once upon a time, no one in the Technocracy took greater pride in her personal appearance.
I showered, shampooed, depilated, and deodorized every morning without fail. Nothing stood in the way of my morning ritual: not the fuzz of a hangover, nor the arms of a beckoning bed-partner. My discipline was absolute.
I exercised more than forty hours a week, and always complete workouts: martial arts, running, gymnastics, tai chi…even mountaineering when the opportunity presented itself.
My body fat ranked at the lowest percentile considered healthy. People said they envied my figure. For all I know, they might have been telling the truth.
I chose my civilian clothes with the care of an entertainer dressing for the chips. Even when I was in uniform, fellow officers said that black fatigues suited me.
Their very words: “Festina, that outfit suits you.” They did not say, “Festina, you look good.”
My name is Festina Ramos and even before I was given that name, I was given a lurid port-wine birthmark covering the right half of my face from cheekbone to chin. Years of operant conditioning gave me great pride in my disfigurement.
The Doctors
Each doctor began by saying my condition could be corrected. How would they cure me? Let me count the ways. They would cure me with electrolysis, with lasers, with cryogenics, with plastic planing, with “sophisticated bio-active agents conscientiously applied in a program of restoration therapy.” Some even set a date when I would be booked in for treatment.
Then the appointments were canceled. Sometimes the doctor apologized in person. Sometimes the doctor invented excuses. Sometimes it was just a note from a secretary.
Here is the reason my birthmark endured with purple defiance in the face of twenty-fifth century medicine:
It had military value.
My Calling in Life
My calling in life was to land on hostile planets.
I made first contacts with alien cultures.
I went anyplace the Admiralty didn’t know what the hell to expect.
Officially, I belonged to the Explorer Corps. Unofficially, we Explorers called ourselves ECMs—short for Expendable Crew Members.
Why
Listen. Here is what all ECMs knew.
Violent death is rare in the Technocracy. We have no wars. The crime level is low, and few incidents involve lethal weapons. When accidents happen, victims can almost always be saved by sophisticated local medical centers.
But.
There are no medical centers on unexplored planets. Death may come with savage abruptness or the stealthy creep of alien disease. In a society where people expect to ease comfortably out of this world at a ripe old age, the thought of anyone being killed in the prime of life is deeply disturbing. If it happens to someone you know, the effect is devastating.
Unless…the person who dies is different. Not like everyone else.
Two centuries ago, the Admiralty High Council secretly acknowledged that some deaths hurt Fleet morale more than others. If the victim was popular, well-liked, and above all, physically attractive, fellow crewmates took the death hard. Performance ratings dropped by as much as thirty percent. Friends of the deceased required lengthy psychological counseling. Those who had ordered the fatal mission sometimes felt a permanently impairing guilt.
But if the victim was not so popular, not so well-liked, and above all, ugly…well, bad things happen, but we all have to carry on.
No one knows exactly when the High Council solidified this fact of human behavior into definite policy. In time, however, the Explorer Corps evolved from a group of healthy, bright-eyed volunteers into…something less photogenic.
Potential recruits were flagged at birth. The flawed. The ugly. The strange. If a child’s physical problems were truly disabling, or if the child didn’t have the intelligence or strength of will to make a good Explorer, the full power of modern medicine would be unleashed to correct every impediment to normality. But if the child combined ability and expendability in a single package—if the child was smart and fit enough to handle the demands of Exploration, but different enough to be less real than a normal person…
…there was an Explorer’s black uniform in that child’s future.
My Class
As I record this, I have in front of me a picture of my class at the Academy. In the first row are the ones with problems the camera does not reveal: Thomas, the stammerer; Ferragamo, the man whose voice did not change at puberty; my roommate, Ullis Naar, who usually blinked convulsively every two seconds but managed to keep her eyes open for this photo; Ghent, loudly flatulent…yes, what a joke, who could take Ghent seriously? Not his crew-mates when Ghent was flayed alive by savages during a first contact. A few days of superficial mourning, and then his shipmates forgot him.
The system worked.
Back to the photo. One row of visually acceptable Explorers, and behind them the rest of us: pop-eyed, three-fingered, obese, deformed. No one in the back rows smiled for this picture. Most tried to hide behind the heads of those in front.
What unthinking Director of Protocol demanded that we pose for such a photo? I’d always been told (in smug, self-congratulatory tones) that our society had progressed beyond the days of the freak show.
The majority of my graduating class could have been cured by modern medicine. We all knew it. Which of us hadn’t jacked into a medical library and pored through the texts describing our conditions? Which of us didn’t know the names of at least five techniques to make us into more-normal human beings? Yet those remedies did not exist for us. The Admiralty had a vested interest in keeping us repugnant. As long as we stayed as we were, no one lost sleep over sending us on dangerous missions.
Admirals need their sleep in order to make enlightened judgments.
My Duties
My most time-consuming duty was to review reports from other Explorers. The latest files were transmitted to our shipboard computer every day and stored on bubble till I went over them. Most of the time, the reports were simply copies of the running commentaries all Explorers gave when landing on an unfamiliar planet.
(Upon graduation, Explorers were fitted with permanent throat transceivers that transmitted continuously on planet-down missions. The transceivers were quite visible if you looked closely; but no one worried about a lump on the neck ruining an Explorer’s appearance.)
Some of the transcripts I listened to ended abruptly. We called those transcripts “Oh Shits” because the Explorers often said, “Oh shit,” just before their throat mikes went dead. You always wondered what they saw just before they stopped transmitting. You seldom found out.
“Oh Shit” reports weren’t marked in any special way. Whenever I audited the log of someone I knew from the Academy, I wondered if it would end in “Oh Shit.” An absent voice spoke in the quiet of my quarters and I never knew if the next word would be the last. Sometimes I listened to blank silence for half an hour, not wanting to believe that the report had ended.
The Admiralty never listed Explorers as dead. We were simply Lost…like old shoes that might turn up in spring housecleaning. In private, Explorers used a different expression: we talked about our friends Going Oh Shit.
My Lifestyle
I kept my distance from others on board our ship. I expect they were glad of it. I know I was.
There was once a time when I would eat in the public cafeteria to prove I wasn’t afraid. As I carried my tray into the dining room, conversation would dwindle while the crew waited to see which table I chose. Some days I sat by myself. Other days I was invited to eat at this table or that. Now and then I purposefully joined the group that seemed most likely to lose their appetites looking at me; but I grew out of that after a few months in the service.
It took longer to see through those who welcomed me. Some were obvious, of course, like the ones with religious leanings. For obscure reasons, bright-smiling proselytizers with God in their hearts were drawn to me like beetles to carrion. They may have considered me desperate for acceptance of any kind—an easy convert. Perhaps too, those eager believers thought that associating with a pariah would purify their souls…like flagellation. Whatever the reason, I spent many mealtimes listening to guarantees of spiritual fulfillment, if only I would come out to regular Fellowship meetings.
Different crew members chose to strike up conversations for the purpose of seduction. After all, a woman like me had to be an easy sexual conquest; desperate and lonely, I would roll over like a dog at the first sign of attention.
And with the lights out, they wouldn’t see my face, would they?
I took a number of those calculating seducers to my bed anyway, just for the hell of it—I felt like I was tricking them, exploiting them. In time, however, I wondered who was fooling whom. Ultimately, I decided that celibacy was simpler.
Some people cultivated my friendship in the belief I could help with their careers—as Explorer First Class, I ranked second only to the captain and was sometimes thought to be important. In fact, my rank was merely a ploy to hide the reality of my situation. I would never get a position of command on a starship; I knew nothing about ship operation. My only expertise lay in personal survival.
Was I ever invited to eat with anyone who had no ulterior motive? I can’t say.
Did I ever eat with someone who was interested in me…not my soul, not my body, not the things I might do for them, but for me? No. Never. Not one of them knew me.
After a few months of trying to mingle with the regular crew, I switched to eating alone in my quarters. Rank hath its privileges.
My Quarters
I spent much of the day in my quarters. I had little reason to go elsewhere. I was comfortable there.
My cabin had no traditional decorations. When I was assigned to this ship, the quartermaster offered me a number of standard wall-hangings “to brighten the place up,” but I refused. I also refused to take any of his glass figurines that could be attached with magnets to any flat surface. Half the figurines were abstracts that meant nothing to me; the other half were little better than kittens, mice, and children with large eyes.
My quarters had a practical desk, a practical cartography table, three relatively practical chairs, and a fairly impractical bed. It was a double-sized bed with many active features, called The Luxuriator. I requisitioned it in a moment of folly, thinking if I found the right man or woman, a good bed might give me confidence.
Might make me feel prepared.
Might make me feel I had something to contribute.
No, I can’t find the right words. It humiliates me to think about it.
My Collection
My quarters contained no ornamentation, but hidden in a closed metal locker was my collection. Most Explorers had collections. We were paid well, and had few vices that could absorb our salaries.
I collected eggs. Many people found that amusing: Festina Ramos collected eggs. They pictured a cabin filled with white hens’ eggs, racks of them, bins of them, heaped hodgepodge wherever I had space. Not one of them ever saw my collection. They laughed behind my back about something I would never show them.
In my early days on the ship, I talked about my collection one day at the lunch table. I forget how the subject came up. I was just so glad to find myself in a conversation that wasn’t shop-talk, I ignored my usual caution.
Of course the others laughed…and wanting them to understand, I tried to explain how beautiful some eggs can be. Every color of the rainbow, pale blues and soft oranges and golden yellows. All sizes, all shapes. Some with shells as fragile as tissue paper, some so hard you can squeeze with all your might and not harm them. Insect eggs, small and black like pepper. Amphibian eggs, chains of jellied eyes suspended in water. Eggs from extraterrestrial life-forms, unique as snowflakes, perfumed, cylindrical, clear as glass, red-hot to the touch….
The other crew members didn’t understand. Most of them didn’t try. One or two put on intelligent expressions and said, “That’s interesting.” They were the ones who most made me feel like a fool.
After that, I never discussed my collection in public. I didn’t try to describe it, because I knew I couldn’t. I refused to show it to the crew because I would only be infuriated by their politely unappreciative attention. Why should I watch them feign interest?
Eggs are self-contained worlds, perfect and internally sufficient. On every planet that supports life, there are eggs. Whatever alien paths life may take, there are always eggs somewhere along the trail. My fellow Explorers found this time and time again.
If I heard an Explorer’s report state that eggs had been found on this or that planet, I transmitted a personal request asking for a specimen. I almost always got what I wanted— Explorers help each other.
When I received an egg, I spent several days deciding how to display it. Some I mounted on wooden stands; some I set in china dishes; some I swathed in cotton.
Receiving a new egg was cause for celebration. I took it out of its packing case and, cradled it in my hands, cherishing its fragility or its toughness or its warmth. Sometimes I could hold an egg for a full hour, dreaming I was in touch with the mother who laid the egg or the child who called it home.
But all the eggs in my collection were sterile. They never hatched. Some were never fertilized. The others had been irradiated by the Admiralty to kill whatever was inside them—transport of alien organisms is dangerous.
On nights when I couldn’t sleep, I sat amidst them and listened to their silence.
The Call
It was on a night like that, a silent night, that I sat in my quarters, staring at a list of reports I ought to study. It was late at night, as time was reckoned on the ship. I took great pride in working late hours. Admittedly, time is an arbitrary convention in space; but I still enjoyed knowing I was awake while the rest of the ship slept.
The message buzzer hummed softly in the quiet of my cabin. I turned a dial on my desktop. “Ramos here.”
The face of Lieutenant Harque, the captain’s aide, sprang to life on the screen. Harque had an easy smile and curly good looks, a boy-next-door handsomeness that let him win over people without having a speck of true charm in his self-important body. “The captain would like to see you, Explorer.”
“Yes?”
“In the conference room. As soon as possible.”
“Does she want me to bring Yarrun?”
“I’ve already contacted Yarrun. Harque out.” The picture went blank.
Typical. I had come to expect that sort of thing from Harque. If I confronted him about it, he would claim he was saving me trouble by calling my subordinate for me. I slid back my chair and sighed as I headed for the door.
The light over my desk turned off behind me. It did that automatically. The quick return to darkness always made me think the lamp was eager to see me go.
My Subordinate
Yarrun was waiting for me outside the door. His eyes were bleary—he must have been asleep when Harque buzzed him. Yarrun preferred an early bedtime. To compensate, he got up hours before anyone else was awake. He said he enjoyed the quiet of the ship in the early morning.
I don’t know what he did with the time he had to himself. Perhaps he just tended his own collection—he collected dyed silk.
Explorer Second Class Yarrun Derigha was officially my subordinate because he graduated from the Academy three years after I did. Unofficially, we were equal partners. We worked as a team, the only two Expendable Crew Members among eighty-seven Vacuum crew members too valuable to be wasted.
Yarrun was missing the left side of his face. To be precise, the left half of his jaw never formed and the right hadn’t grown since he was six. The result looked like half a head, with the skin stretched taut from his left cheekbone to his partial right jaw.
There was nothing else wrong with Yarrun. His brain was intact. His Intelligence Profile ranked higher than ninety-nine percent of the population. He had some trouble eating solids, but the Admiralty graciously accommodated that—the cafeteria stocked a large supply of nutritious fluids.
When he talked, his enunciation was unfailingly precise. Since it cost him a great deal of effort, he preferred not to speak if he could help it.
I had known Yarrun six years, first in the Academy, then on the ship. We had saved each other’s lives so often we no longer kept count. We could talk to each other about anything, and we could be quiet together without feeling uncomfortable. I was as close to Yarrun as I have ever wanted to be with anyone.
And yet.
There were still times when the sight of his face made my skin crawl.
In the Halls (Part 1)
The halls were deserted at that hour. The ship only needed a twenty-person running crew at night, and the on-duty crew members usually stayed close to their posts. I loved to walk the empty corridors when the lights had been dimmed and every door was closed. Neither Yarrun nor I spoke. The soft clopping of our footsteps echoed lightly in the stillness of the sleeping ship.
Our ship was called the Jacaranda, named after a family of flowering trees native to Old Earth. The previous captain had actually owned a jacaranda tree and kept it in his quarters. When it was in bloom, he would pin a blossom to his lapel every morning. The deep blue of the flower went well with khaki.
When our current captain took command, she said, “Get that damned thing out of my room. It’s shedding.” The tree was moved to the cafeteria, where it got in everyone’s way and frequently dropped petals onto plates of food.
A few months later, the tree suddenly died. Someone probably poisoned it. The crew held a party to celebrate the tree being reduced to proto-nute, and even I attended. It was the first time I tasted Divian champagne.
Now the only jacarandas on ship were stylized ones stenciled on walls and doors. The colors of these trees indicated the authorization needed to enter a given area. I was allowed into areas marked with red jacarandas and black. I was not permitted to enter rooms marked with orange, blue, green, yellow, purple, pink, or brown.
Red areas were public ones like the cafeteria. Black areas were reserved for Explorers and their equipment. The Admiralty denied that black had any special significance.
Our Captain
The jacaranda on the door of the conference room was red. The door opened as it heard our footsteps approach. Yarrun let me enter first—in public, we made a point of observing rank protocol.
Captain Prope stood at the room’s Star Window, apparently lost in thought. She stared out on the star-filled blackness like the captain of a clipper ship inhaling sea air from the foredeck: spine straight as iron, hands on hips, head tilted back slightly so her chestnut-red hair hung free of her shoulders. If she had been facing us, we would have likely seen her nostrils flared to the wind.
No doubt she had assumed this heroic pose several minutes ago, and had been waiting impatiently for us to walk in. For some reason, she desperately wanted to impress us.
The door closed behind us with a hiss. Prope took this as her cue to turn and notice us. “Oh, come in, sit down, yes.” She laughed lightly, a frothy little laugh guaranteed by Outward Fleet Psych-techs to make subordinates feel like equals. Prope was an ardent student of the Mechanics of Charisma.
“Sorry,” she said. “My mind was somewhere else.” She turned back for one more wistful peek at the night. “I can never get over how beautiful the stars are.”
I did not point out that the view was a color-enhanced computer simulation. A real window would have jeopardized the integrity of the ship’s hull.
The News
We sat in our usual chairs (me on the captain’s right, Yarrun on her left), and rolled up to the conference table.
“Would either of you like coffee?” the captain asked. We shook our heads in unison. “You’re sure? Some fruit juice maybe? No? Well, I hope you don’t mind if I have a little something. I always enjoy a midnight snack.”
She smiled in our general direction, but her eyes were too low to meet ours. Like most people, she could not look at our faces for any length of time. She talked to our chests or our hair or our ears…never to our faces, except for a quick glance now and then to confirm her squeamishness.
For some reason, she thought Yarrun and I didn’t notice.
We watched as she poured herself coffee. In public, she drank it black. When she thought no one was watching, she used double loads of cream and sugar.
For a few moments, she stirred her coffee, even though there was nothing in it. I couldn’t tell if this was reflex or affectation. Finally she said, “I suppose you’re wondering what this is all about.”
She paused, so we nodded.
“Twenty minutes ago,” Prope continued, “I received a coded message from the Golden Cedar. You know the ship?”
“Admiral Chee’s flagship,” I replied. Everyone in the Fleet knew the ship. Half the children in the Technocracy had heard of it. Learning the names of the admirals and their flagships was a Common Curriculum memory exercise for seven-year-olds.
“In three hours, the Golden Cedar will pass within ten thousand kilometers of us.” Prope was watching us out of the corner of her eye, so I knew she was about to drop a surprise in our laps. “At that time, Admiral Chee will secretly transfer aboard the Jacaranda. Very secretly—we three and Harque will be the only ones to know he’s here. You two will see to the admiral’s comfort.” She looked at us with narrowed eyes, as if she doubted we could handle the job. “Any problems?”
“We’ll take care of him.” I kept my voice expressionless, despite the insult. I had been capably dealing with visiting dignitaries for six full years on the Jacaranda—it was one of my standing duties. As high-ranking officers with no shipboard responsibility, Explorers were ideal for babysitting VIPs. VIPs were either aliens who didn’t care what we looked like or self-centered diplomats who didn’t notice.
“Fine.” Prope obviously felt she ought to say something more, but couldn’t think of anything. She remembered her coffee and took a deep grateful swallow. Judging by the resulting expression on her face, the coffee was too hot.
Yarrun asked, “Do you know why the admiral is coming?”
“He’ll tell us when he arrives. All I know is that it’s not an inspection.” She gave another standardized laugh, but this time it was strained with nervousness. “My orders say that if I give the slightest hint I’m waiting for inspection—if I sharpen up discipline, hold drills, even swab the decks—I’ll be put on report.”
She drummed her fingers on the table. None of us said anything for a count of ten.
“It certainly sounds like an inspection,” I finally said.
Prope nodded. “Damned right.”
My First Admiral
Back in my cabin, I debated staying awake for three more hours (in which case I would be tired when the admiral arrived) or going to sleep for a while (in which case I would be groggy). I decided to lie on my Luxuriator bed and see what happened.
Staring at the asbestos white of my ceiling, I thought about the first admiral I had met, Admiral Seele. She was not the first admiral I had seen in person—more than a dozen admirals attended graduation exercises for my class at the Academy. The Admiralty always made a show of being interested in Explorers. The school administrators even said the admirals would be available afterwards to shake hands and make small talk.
I don’t know if any of the class took advantage of the opportunity. I didn’t.
Admiral Seele arrived on the Jacaranda in my first year with the ship. No one could say why she had come. She inspected the engine room, but made no comments or suggestions. She spent an hour alone with every officer, but reportedly spoke only of trivialities and glanced frequently at her watch. She passed one entire day secluded in her cabin, supposedly examining our ship’s log on the computer…but when I walked by her door late in the afternoon, I heard her singing a bawdy song I recognized from Academy days. I hurried on, though I had intended to knock.
The admiral spent most of her time with me. It made me uncomfortable, even as I told myself I had nothing to fear. Mostly, we talked about the Academy and my missions. I had made only two Landings at the time, neither one eventful, but she seemed interested. Her questions showed she knew what was important to an Explorer…unlike most Vacuum-oriented officers, who had no idea what to pay attention to when they had solid ground under their feet. I guessed that part of being an admiral was knowing more than the rest of the pack.
On the last night of her stay, she asked how well I got on with the crew. Were they cooperative? I said I had no complaints. Did I have many friends? No. Any lovers? No. Was I lonely? No, I filled my time. Did I never want to reach out to another human being? No, I was fine.
She started to cry then. She tried to take hold of my hand, but I drew back quickly. She said I mustn’t close myself to the world; I would be miserable if I didn’t let other people into my life.
I walked out of the room without waiting to be dismissed.
The next morning, Admiral Seele left us at Starbase Iris. As she left, she saluted the captain and first officer, but shook my hand. She looked like she wanted to kiss me. Perhaps she couldn’t decide where: on my lips, on my good cheek, or on my bad one.
I concluded then that my first admiral was a maladjusted woman who yearned for me. The Academy had taught us about people who are drawn to Explorers by our ugliness. The attraction has something to do with self-hatred.
Self-Care
The message buzzer hummed and I found I had been sleeping. My neck was stiff and my clothing rumpled. I rolled gracelessly to my feet and thudded over to the desk. “Ramos here.”
Harque’s face appeared on the screen. Wearing his dress gold uniform, he looked annoyingly fresh and knew it. “Admiral Chee is arriving.”
“Thank you. I’m on my way.”
“If I were you, I’d do something with my hair first.” The screen went blank too quickly for me to reply. Clever retorts seldom come easily to me. I stomped angrily to the bathroom and fumbled a while with a comb. Stupid people flustered me so effortlessly. I wished I had a quick mind.
Years of conditioning would not let me leave my room until my part was straight. That irked me too. What fastidious programmer forced this Obsession on me?
To smooth my feathers, I thought of childish ways to get even with Harque. Some scandalous story about him passed to the admiral? No, I was too smart to lie to an admiral, and too ill-informed to know any dirt that was really true. Some night Harque would pull down the sheets of his bed and find a smashed egg there. The Sevro lizards of Malabar IV laid eggs whose yolks were more corrosive than industrial acids.
Wearing a smile and taking great pride in my personal appearance, I stepped confidently out my door.
Part II
MISSION
Worm, Sperm
WORM: The colloquial name for the envelope of spacetime distortion that surrounds each starship, allowing the ship to circumvent relativistic and inertial effects that would otherwise make space travel impracticable.
—Excerpt from Practice and Procedures of Space Travel: An Overview for Explorers,
textbook published by the Admiralty
Only the Admiralty would have the nerve to claim that the colloquial name for our envelope was “the Worm.” To everyone else (except in the presence of admirals), it was “the Sperm.”
Reason 1: When a ship was at rest, the region of interface between its envelope and normal space glowed milky white due to spontaneous creation of particles in the envelope’s ergosphere. The glow shifted to the blue end of the spectrum when the ship moved forward and to the red when the ship reversed, but the color we saw most, the color at anchor, was that suggestive semen white.
Reason 2: The envelope bulged like the head of a spermatozoon where it surrounded the ship itself, then tapered off into a thin tail that stretched some 15,000 kilometers to our stern. In flight, random fluctuations of magnetic fields in space made the tail whip wildly like the tail of a swimming sperm.
Reason 3: Given time, a ship’s crew will attach sexual innuendo to anything. It makes their jobs more exciting.
Waiting in the Transport Room
When I reached the Transport Room, Lieutenant Harque was grimacing at the tracking holo and gingerly twisting dials. Captain Prope leaned over his shoulder and blocked his light. Each time the lieutenant ducked to one side to see more clearly, the captain moved with him like a shadow. I’d seen the routine many times before, and Harque had never asked the captain to step back.
Vile little toady.
In the rare moments that he had a clear view of the holo, Harque was manipulating our aft electromagnets in order to wag the tail of our Sperm. Somewhere far behind us, the Golden Cedar was doing the same thing, with the goal of snagging one tail on the other and forcing the two to fuse into a single continuous tube. It was a ticklish business at the best of times, and worse with a captain breathing down your neck. The best operators in the Fleet sometimes spent more than twenty minutes at the job. Harque was not one of the best operators in the Fleet.
Yarrun sat against the far wall of the room, well out of everyone’s way. He looked more alert now; either he had managed to get some sleep or had forced himself awake with a cold shower, caffeine, something. From the depths of his closet, he had rummaged up his dress blacks, as wrinkled as raisins. Every stitch of clothing Yarrun owned was rumpled and worn; he came from a splinter culture on Novolith with a religious stricture against vanity in one’s attire.
Thanks to Explorer programming, Yarrun was just as obsessive in keeping his clothes mussed as I was in keeping my hair parted straight.
I inflated a chair and sat down beside him. “Are they close?” I asked in a low voice.
He shrugged. “Since I arrived, the captain has shouted, ‘You almost had it!’ three times.”
“Has she called him a fool yet?”
“No.”
“Then they aren’t close.”
Yarrun and I had spent a lot of time waiting in that room. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble the machinery could make. We knew each bleep, chirp, and fribble a tail-operator could make. After a while, the noises blended into a harmonious whole.
“You almost had it that time, Harque! Can’t you be more careful?”
“Sorry, captain.”
The observation deck where we sat was a U-shaped mezzanine around the actual transport bay, twelve meters below and separated from us by thick pink-tinted plastic. The walls around us sported rainbow-striped jacaranda trees; this was the first area most visitors saw when they came on board, and Prope was desperate to make a jaunty impression.
The control console occupied the base of the mezzanine U. Opposite it, down in the bay, was the Aft Entry Mouth, a circular aperture leading out of the ship and into the Sperm-tail. At present, the Mouth was closed with an irising mechanism that bulged slightly outward under the air pressure of the ship. When the iris opened, anything in the transport bay weighing less than twenty tonnes would be propelled out the Mouth and spat through the tail like phlegm.
It wasn’t an elegant way to travel—Admirals usually arrived in trim little shuttles, as did delicate cargo shipments—but receiving such deliveries meant dropping our Sperm field, then waiting twelve hours while the forward Sperm generator rebuilt the envelope. It only took a second to reestablish the field itself…but aligning the tail to surround the ship rather than drift off on its own demanded extensive calibration efforts that always left the crew in a foul mood. Either the High Council of Admirals had decided not to put the Vac-hands through that strain, or Chee’s business with the Jacaranda was too urgent for any delay.
I was glad it was Chee being transported, not me. Though I had squirted through the tail more than a hundred times, I never enjoyed it. Some Explorers did. Yarrun said it felt like a ride at an amusement center: your feet swooped out from under you, your brain dimmed to black, the space-distorting forces in the tail twisted you through a few hyperdimensions, and then you slid out the other end like sound emerging from a trumpet. Dozens of people had done it without even wearing an impact suit (despite safety regs). The death rate was lower than any other form of transport used in the Outward Fleet.
And yet….
When I stood down there in my suit, waiting for the blue light that said the tail had been secured, I sometimes prayed something would save me from that five second ride. “Sorry, Festina, all a big mistake, you don’t have to go today.”
I was a child who never believed in fairies, but still told herself fairy tales.
Then the light went on, and I would look around one last time, at the rainbow jacarandas, at Yarrun counting the seconds until our ejaculation, and at the iris that waited, eyelike, ready to open.
I always faced that iris full on. No tail-operator ever saw me flinch. Only Yarrun knew that I closed my eyes.
The Arrival
“Got it!” Harque cried with relief.
“About time,” the captain growled. She twisted a knob on the console and spoke into a filament microphone. “Golden Cedar, this is Jacaranda. We have established connection.”
There was a pause of several seconds as our computer coded the captain’s voice for transmission, squirted it to the Golden Cedar 20,000 klicks away, received an answer, and decoded it into sound. “Connection acknowledged. Prepare to receive.”
As Yarrun and I moved to the observation window, the iris blinked open with the speed of a bubble popping. The plastic in front of us, thick as it was, jerked slightly as the air on the other side exploded into the tail, and one of the windows boomed like a drum. Harque and Prope ignored the sound, so Yarrun and I did too.
“Mouth open and ready to receive,” Prope said into the mike. She said it with a straight face.
Pause. “Acknowledged. Stand by.”
Harque stifled a yawn as Prope looked at her watch. She pursed her lips in annoyance, then suddenly drew up into her most heroic stance, a calm smile taking possession of her face. “Let’s look alive, people,” she intoned, her voice half an octave lower than when she was kibitzing over Harque’s shoulder.
Beyond the open Mouth, the milk white Sperm smeared itself over the black of space. Shimmering distortions rippled through the tail’s surface like heat waves. At the heart of the aperture, like a fly floating on cream, lay the black gap through which the admiral would arrive.
A light flashed orange on the console and soft beeping filled the room. Harque murmured, “Five seconds.”
The gap in the center of the hole suddenly expanded like a throat, vomiting out a figure in an impact suit that shone a burnished gold. The suit shot half the length of the room before landing chest first on the floor and skidding to a stop.
Harque leapt back to the console and spun some dials. The iris blinked shut soundlessly. “Pressurizing now,” Harque said in a loud voice that clearly wanted someone to pay attention. But the captain was too busy posing: hands on her hips, and feet spread wider than I, for one, would find natural.
The figure on the floor rolled onto his back and went into a convulsion. His legs shook with quick little kicks and his hands clapped together again and again. “Oh shit, he’s hurt,” Prope said, breaking her stance and pressing her nose against the window. “Harque, buzz the infirmary and tell them to get their asses here on the double. Fast and quiet—the rest of the crew isn’t supposed to know about this.” She closed her eyes and whispered, “Don’t die on my ship!”
As air rushed into the transport bay, the sound of metal clapping on metal became audible over the speakers monitoring the area. Ringing above the clapping was a tinny cry. At first it sounded like screeching, but then it solidified into something like “Wheeeeeee!”
I looked at Yarrun. He looked back, eyebrows slightly raised.
Down in the transport bay, the admiral scrambled to his feet and tossed off the helmet of his impact suit. He turned to the four of us standing at the window and shouted, “See? Like Jonah and the whale.” He pointed to himself. “I’m Jonah.” He pointed to the Mouth. “That’s the whale. A sperm whale. Jonah comes out of the whale. See?” He hugged himself with a clang of metal gloves against the suit’s chestplate.
Prope stared blankly at the wild old man. Harque, at her side, whispered, “Should I cancel the call for the medical team?”
“Not on your life,” she answered.
My Second Admiral
Harque turned a dial and the observation deck began to descend, lowering itself to match levels with the transport bay. As we sank, doors within doors were revealed in the plastic separating us from the bay: a large door that could be opened to receive huge, heavy equipment; a medium door, just the lower half of the largest one, but still big enough to let robot cargo-haulers pass through; and a baby door, set into the medium one, just right for humans.
Prope was obviously reluctant to open any of those doors until the medical team arrived. With her heroic stance abandoned, she shifted her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, probably wondering how to preserve her dignity while dealing with a madman. On the other side of the door, Admiral Chee had begun clinking the metal of his pressure suit with his finger, idly checking which surfaces made which tones. He may have been trying to tink out a song, but I didn’t recognize the tune.
Yarrun cleared his throat. “Captain…hadn’t we better let him in?”
“How do we know it’s safe?” she asked. “He might have a disease.”
Yarrun glanced at me, then turned back to Prope. “Captain, the admiral’s behavior may be peculiar by the standards of mainstream Technocracy culture, but we could be mistaken in applying those standards to him. If the admiral comes from a Fringe World, his apparent childishness may simply be cultural idiosyncrasy.”
“Trust an Explorer to talk about cultural idiosyncrasy,” the captain muttered. And trust a Fleet captain to ignore it, I thought to myself. Officers of the Vacuum Corps invariably came from the great homogenized paunch of the Technocracy, with no representation from the more eclectic Fringes. But the captain admitted, “I suppose we have to let him in sooner or later. Go ahead, Harque: open the door.”
The human-sized door slid into the floor with a hydraulic hiss. Harque snapped the admiral an ostentatious salute. Prope did the same a guilty second later, and Yarrun and I fluttered our hands somewhere near our foreheads. Chee blinked at all of us for a moment, then waved his hand dismissively. “Piss on saluting. I’m here incognito. I don’t have to salute if I don’t want.”
“Of course not, sir,” Yarrun said, smoothly changing his salute to a hand extended for shaking. “Welcome to the Jacaranda. I hope the ride over was pleasant?”
“The only fun I’ve had in thirty years. Can I do it again?”
“I’m afraid not, sir,” I said after a glance at the tracking holo that glowed above the control console. “The Golden Cedar has already broken the tail-link, and it’s heading out of range.”
“I can call them back. I’m an admiral.”
Captain Prope looked down the hall, apparently praying for the med team to arrive. In the meantime, I reminded Chee, “You’re here incognito, sir. If you were to begin transmitting orders….”
“Oh.” His face fell. “This secrecy stuff was a piss-poor decision on my part. Or was it my decision? I forget. Let me read my papers.”
He reached into the front pouch of his impact suit and pulled out four sealed packets. One of them had my name on it, but he shoved that one and another back into the pouch. He took one of the remaining packets himself and handed the other to Prope. While he fiddled with his packet’s lock mechanism, Prope pressed a thumb to her own packet’s registry plate and flicked the top open. She withdrew a slim viewpad and retired to a corner to read.
The admiral finally got his own package open and pulled out a sheet of paper…paper made from trees. I supposed that admirals were too exalted to receive orders by viewpad like the rest of us.
Chee shouted, “Aha!” as he looked at the paper sheet. “I didn’t decide this. Orders direct from the Admiralty High Council. Can I countermand those?”
Yarrun and I busied ourselves examining the deck at our feet. Harque swallowed hard and answered, “No sir, you can’t.”
“Oh well,” Chee shrugged. “Maybe some other time.” He folded his orders into a paper airplane and threw it wobbling across the room.
Yarrun whispered to me, “I have a nasty suspicion. Ever been to Melaquin?”
“What do you mean?” I whispered back. Before he could answer, Prope shut her viewpad with a crisp click. She had a far too satisfied smile on her face. “We’re going to Melaquin,” she said.
Under my breath I muttered, “Oh shit.” But Yarrun only nodded to himself.
Melaquin—The Official Story
Melaquin (AOR No. 72061721)
Third planet in the Uffree system.
Orbital survey data: CLASSIFIED.
Explorational data: CLASSIFIED.
Historical data: CLASSIFIED.
Official status: INAPPLICABLE.
—Excerpt from the Admiralty Object Registration Catalogue,
distributed by the Admiralty to all sciento-military personnel
Melaquin—The Unofficial Story (Part 1)
I first heard of Melaquin from a dying prostitute on the Fringe World He’Barr. She had taken a knife under the ribs in an alley fight and happened to collapse against the door of my dormitory room while wandering in a daze. I watched her bleed to death on my bed over the course of an hour and a half.
“Guess I’m on my way to Melaquin,” she had said. I wasn’t sure I heard her correctly—she was slipping in and out of coherency with no discernible transition between lucid speech and babble—so I asked her to repeat her words. “I’m on my way to Melaquin,” she said. “That’s the planet of no return. You know?”
I shook my head.
“Hell of an Explorer you are,” she wheezed. “It was an Explorer who told me. They send you there when they want you gone forever and never coming back home to the blue blue sky pulling black curtains over the little baby boy. He saw me watching and smiled, a great big smile with all his teeth out, like black black curtains…”
While she rambled, I keyed up the registration catalogue and requested details on Melaquin. There was no information to be had.
In time, the woman fell silent with her eyes closed; I wondered if she had finally died. I got up to check her pulse, but she heard me coming toward the bed and shrank away. “You sure you didn’t call the cops?”
“The who?”
“The police. The Civilian Protection Office.”
“You asked me not to call them.”
“I know. That doesn’t answer my question.”
“I didn’t call them.”
“Good.” She coughed, and a trickle of blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She licked her lips as if she couldn’t identify the taste. “I’m an Opter.”
“I guessed.”
“I’m opting to die.”
“Yes.”
She looked at me with a sly smile. Her eyes kept losing focus. “You don’t understand this, do you?”
“I’ve read about Opters,” I said. “Your religion claims that any attempt to prevent death is an affront to your god’s will.”
“You don’t understand.” She let her head flop back onto the plastic sheet I had put over the pillow. Her breath slid softly in and out, gradually slowing.
For a while, I watched her stare blindly at the ceiling. Those blind eyes gave her face an ecstatic radiance that annoyed me. Radiance always did.
“Can’t you close your eyes?” I asked. “Why?”
“I don’t like the way you look.” “You don’t want to have to close them for me,” she said with scorn. But she did close her eyes. After a while she said in a quavery voice, “It doesn’t hurt, you know.” “Of course not. I gave you 20 cc’s of picollin.” She didn’t hear me. “It doesn’t hurt because God is kind to those who come when She calls. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, if you say yes, She’ll just sing you to sleep. La, la-lah, la, la-lah…”
The tune she sang in a broken whisper was a lullaby my own mother sang to me, years ago on my home planet of Agua—a lullaby sung over the thunderstorms that rattled our environment dome each night.
Day is done
Night is nigh
Farewell the sun
Sleep deep, don’t cry.
I couldn’t bear to look at her as she sang her own lullaby. Her face was purple with bruises from the fight that had gotten her stabbed. I took out my textbooks and read survival manuals till dawn, long after the singing had stopped.
Melaquin—The Unofficial Story (Part 2)
Phylar Tobit was once an Explorer. He was an Explorer by virtue of being born with a flipperlike left arm that ended in a half-hand where the elbow should have been. The three fingers on the hand looked like tiny boneless sausages.
Tobit lost his malformed arm on a planet whose name was a number and whose dominant lifeform resembled a blotchy cluster of rocks. One of those rocks bit off Tobit’s arm before he even knew the rocks could move…bit clean through his tightsuit, flesh, and bone in the blink of an eye.
The creature died with the first swallow halfway down its throat. Human meat was virulently poisonous to the beast. Statistics show that human flesh is toxic to eighty-seven percent of alien lifeforms who try eating it. Explorers take some comfort from this, like dying bees who know their stings have found a target.
But Tobit didn’t die. His partner stopped the bleeding in time—Explorers are taught every possible emergency surgical procedure. Phylar Tobit returned to a medical base and recovered.
The new Tobit presented the Admiralty with a problem. He was no longer a repulsive flippered thing; he was merely a man who was missing an arm. Further, the arm could be replaced by a myoelectric one—not quite as good as a true arm, but a thousand times more effective than the one he had lost. Perhaps someone in the Admiralty contemplated giving Tobit a prosthetic duplicate of his flipper instead of a real arm…but that would have outraged the entire Explorer Corps, maybe even the regular Vacuum service. Anyway, an off-the-rack arm doesn’t cost as much as a custom-built one, and the Fleet likes to be frugal.
The Admiralty had to accept that Phylar Tobit now looked too much like a real person to serve as an active Explorer. So Tobit and his new plastic arm were assigned teaching duty at the Academy.
He did not get along with his students, and we did not get along with him. This was normal. Our teachers were all former Explorers who had won safe desk jobs, by accident or by gutless sucking up. They were the dregs of the Corps, and we students knew it. The teachers hated us in turn because of the guilt they felt, blithely preparing us for short lives as planet fodder. Perhaps this was planned by the Admiralty, to show us how small-spirited Explorers could become.
What set Tobit apart from the rest was his drinking. The other teachers, still blessed with the repugnance that originally marked them as Explorers, stood under threat of transfer to active duty if they failed to toe the line. Tobit had nothing to fear but absolute discharge, and no Explorer feared that. While he put in his time, he soaked up the oldest drug in the world and was seldom sober.
Every morning he would stumble to class, surrounded by an alcoholic cloud we could smell at the back of the room. Every evening he would sit alone in the Academy lounge, his artificial hand wrapped around a whisky glass with THE BLIND PIG inscribed on it in gold letters. Eventually he would pass out and slide off his chair to the floor. We students would draw lots to see who would have to carry him to his quarters.