"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 snout… 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!"