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.
One such night, I happened to pull the short straw with another cadet named Laminir Jelca. I had a crush on Jelca at the time. He was a senior and I a freshman; I suppose that's all that was necessary. He had some kind of genetic scalp condition that left his skull bald and covered with lesions, but in low light, if you half-closed your eyes, the scabby patches almost looked like hair.
Jelca and I slung Tobit's arms around our shoulders and dragged him up two flights of stairs to the instructor dormitories. The man smelled of sweat and saliva and scotch. I happened to have the artificial arm around my neck and was afraid it might come off. It would make me look foolish in Jelca's eyes; I could picture myself staring slack-jawed at the detached arm, blood rushing to my cheeks (my cheek), so I carried the load as gingerly as I could and fretted Jelca would think I was making him take all the weight.
When we reached Tobit's door, we had to spit-wash some dirt off his hand before the security plate would recognize his palm-print.
Tobit's futon was unrolled just inside the door. Jelca was all for throwing the man on it (face down so he wouldn't drown in his vomit), then leaving immediately. Like a lovesick schoolgirl, I preferred to bask in Jelca's company as long as possible, so I persuaded him we should at least take Tobit's boots off and arrange the body comfortably.
It had been many days since Tobit had changed his socks. The musty smell of overwear rose up from them and our noses wrinkled as we untied his bootlaces. The smell was painful to us; I couldn't understand how Tobit could bear it. As an Explorer, he must have been programmed for obsessive grooming like the rest of us, but somehow he had sloughed it off.
As soon as we finished with the shoes, Jelca and I were desperate to wash our hands. Tobit's washroom was down a short hall, past the open door of a study whose floor was covered with fallen books, scattered botanical samples, and a whisky-soaked dress uniform: more defiance of Explorer conditioning. The mess turned my stomach, but also intrigued me. In his way, Tobit had freed himself from the rigidity of Fleet service.
Jelca and I washed our hands together, using a bar of white soap veined with dark cracks. We were talking about something — I forget what, the mess around us I suppose — and I was secretly wondering what a senior would do if a freshman kissed him, when Tobit's voice snapped our heads toward the doorway.
"Good evening." The words were slurred and he leaned heavily against the doorframe for support, but he appeared to believe he was charming. "I am about to piss. If the sight of a man pissing offends you, I suggest you avert your eyes."
"We'll go," Jelca said, shaking water off his hands.
"You will not go," Tobit replied. "I will." And he did, in the toilet beside us, while Jelca and I looked away at the filthy bathtub.
"I suppose you're wondering why you're here," he said as he zipped up. "You're here to celebrate my birthday."
"Actually, we were just helping you— " I started, but he ignored me.
"Today, I am forty years old… as they measure years on Rigel IV. Yesterday I was thirty-eight years old as they measure years on Barnard's Planet, and the day before I was fifty-six years old as they measure years on Greening. This is the greatest gift of humanity's drive to populate the galaxy. With the aid of the registration catalogue, you can celebrate a birthday every day of your life. Come with me."
He lurched out of the bathroom and disappeared down the hall. Jelca and I exchanged looks, then followed him into the study.
We found him with his forehead pressed against the screen of his computer terminal, as he painstakingly typed on the keyboard with one finger. "This is my birthday program," he mumbled into the terminal. "It's searching the databases to find where my birthday will be tomorrow. In case you haven't noticed, it's almost midnight, and I like to start celebrating right on the dot."
"If it's that late," said Jelca, "we really should be going."
"And leave me alone on my birthday? Heartless bastard. Don't worry, I'll pass out soon and you can sneak away. Steal something when you go — I'll never remember your faces. I have some good stuff here. Medal of Valor somewhere." He swept his hand through the clutter on his desk, knocking a stylus to the floor. "Well, the medal's not here now, but I got it out the other day, just to check. After a while, I forget whether things really happened. In case you hadn't noticed, I drink."
The terminal beeped out the first bars of "Happy Birthday" and Tobit roared in triumph. "Yes! It's going to be my birthday again tomorrow. See, on the screen? Come on, come on, look at it." He tapped the words on the glass and read, "HAPPY BIRTHDAY, PHYLAR, YOU OLD SOT. TODAY YOU ARE 41 YEARS OLD AS YEARS ARE MEASURED ON… Hot shit, I'm forty-one on Melaquin! How about that?" He looked at us proudly, as if he'd done a trick.