Then again, most people aren't born under moons at all. Most people are born under roofs — at least their souls are. And they sluggishly live their lives under roofs. At night they pull the curtains for fear some moon will shine in and infect them.
I liked moonlight. Even colored moonlight.
Moonlight was forgiving when I looked in the mirror.
Down the Bluffs
Chee's body was at my feet. I had clamped his helmet back in place on his suit so that crickets and grass wouldn't go down his collar as I dragged him across the meadow. It wasn't clear whether I should take the helmet off again when I finally got him to the lake. If this burial at sea was a matter of religion, maybe it was important for him to be in actual contact with the water. (And in contact with the fish who would chew his flesh… who would eventually float in the darkness of his picked-clean ribcage, as if he were a skeleton of coral.)
Stupid, Festina, I chided myself, keep it together a bit longer. Be hard, be hard, until you've done what needs doing.
So I pulled my gaze away from the moon and started hauling the admiral down the bluffs.
The slope was steep but not forbiddingly so. I could dig my feet into the sandy soil and keep my balance by hanging onto the weeds that grew on the slanting face.
Burdock. Nettles. Thistles.
Stumbling down in the dark, I didn't like so many thorns clustered around me… but the tightsuit was as tough as plate mail, proof against anything a milquetoast terrestrial weed could dish out. Chee was protected, I was protected, and gravity was in our favor; so we proceeded down the bluffs in a controlled slide, me on my feet tugging Chee on his back, headfirst so he didn't get caught in bushes.
I was also lugging the Bumbler, which I refused to leave back at the Landing site: a slow-witted proximity alarm was better than no alarm at all. I had no partner now to watch my back.
At the bottom of my climb, the weeds ended abruptly at the beach: a wet, narrow beach, littered with driftwood, clam shells, and half-rotted fish. I could see the place clearly, thanks to the moon… and I could smell it clearly too, with the air moldering breezeless in the shelter of the bluffs. Ocean shores smell of salt; fresh water smells of the day's decay.
With the admiral safely down from the bluffs, I rewarded myself with a rest, sitting on a driftwood log: a time to catch my breath, to listen to the waves, to debate whether I should leave Chee's suit open or closed. If he stayed helmet on, he would float — the air in his suit would buoy him up like a life preserver. Floating, he would soon drift to shore; so perhaps I had to take off his helmet and fill his tightsuit with rocks… enough to weigh him down until the water had its way with him.
Was that what he would have wanted? I didn't know. I didn't want to make the decision.
I might have sat on that driftwood a long time, if a glass coffin hadn't risen out of the lake.
Glass
The coffin surfaced silently, sending out ripples under the moonlight. Its glass had a mirror polish, dappled with drops and trickles of water; the sheen reflected the shadowed bluffs, making it impossible to see inside. As smooth as a swan the coffin slid across the waters, until it nudged the beach only twenty meters away from me.
I held my breath as the coffin lid opened. A woman lying face down inside pushed herself up and stepped onto the sand.
A nude woman made of glass.
The glass was clear and colorless. I could see right through her, the beach beyond distorted by a woman-shaped lens.
She was my height, but she looked like an Art Deco figurine. Everything about her seemed sleek and stylized — the long sweep of her legs, the slim torso, the high-cheekboned face. Her hair was not hair but the suggestion of hair: smooth glass swaths which were not differentiated into separate strands. That went for both the hair on her head and the tasteful implications of hair on her pubis… nothing so earthy as real genitalia, but an artistic rendering which hinted at some platonic ideal.
What was she doing here? On a planet with real worms, real butterflies and real killdeer, how could there be such a patently unreal woman? She was out of place, disturbing. Alien.
And so beautiful, she filled me with shame at my own flaws.
The woman walked onto the beach the way glass would walk if it could — smoothly, strongly, boldly. The muscles of her legs and arms slid silkily with the movement; whatever she was made of might resemble glass, but it was not brittle. After a glance that didn't come around far enough to see me, she faced back to the coffin and called out something in a resonant alto voice. The words were no language I had ever heard, but they were obviously commands to her vessel. Its lid closed silently…
…and in that moment of quiet, the Bumbler finally noticed her. Its alarm chittered Beep, beep, beep! in the still night air.
The woman's head whipped around. She couldn't help but see me. Lit by the full moon, her mouth and eyes flew open in horror.
"Greetings," I said as I kicked the Bumbler's SHUT-UP switch. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples. I beg your Hospitality."
With an agonized howl, the woman spun away from me and sprinted for the coffin.
Submergence
By the time she reached her vessel, the coffin lid was fully shut. That didn't stop her — she threw herself onto the top and hammered at the mirrored surface. Glass fists clacked sharply against the glass lid; but the coffin showed no sign of opening, no matter how hard she pounded.
Slowly, the craft slipped back into the water… and the woman hung on, shouting words I didn't understand but could easily guess: "Help, help, a monster!" How else would she react to a purple-faced stranger, dressed in bulky white? The coffin paid no attention to her screams. With increasing speed it withdrew from the shore, fast enough to throw spray in its wake.
Wet glass fingers clung to the wet glass lid — and as water sprayed in the woman's face, her grip slipped with the squeal of glass on glass. The coffin's surface was too slick to offer purchase; and when the sarcophagus started to submerge, a thickening onrush of water pushed the woman clean off, coughing, spluttering… and sinking.
"Bloody hell," I muttered. Could she swim? Could she breathe under water? Did she need to breathe at all?
If she really was glass, she'd be heavy as an anchor.
"God damn it," I said. But I knew I would have to play lifeguard.
Emergency Evac
I couldn't rescue her in my tightsuit: with the helmet off, it would fill with water and drag me down as soon as I started swimming. Growling profanities, I dug my thumbs under the twin flaps protecting the emergency release buttons, then pressed down hard. It was something I'd never done before, not with an active outfit — all our escape drills were performed with deactivated gear to avoid destroying valuable equipment. This time, however, the suit was live… and it stayed that way for precisely two seconds, just long enough for me to splay out my legs and throw my arms wide over my head.
Then the suit exploded off my body.
It went in pieces, splitting along seams invisible to anything less than an electron microscope. The gloves rocketed into the sky while the sleeves peeled themselves back like bananas, then ripped free from my shoulders as tiny charges of plastique blew them away. The breastplate had plastique of its own: enough to blast the front half five paces down the beach and the back half ten centimeters deep into the sand of the bluffs. The crotch slumped away without force — the males on the tightsuit design team must have been squeamish about high-powered explosives near that part of their anatomy — but the leg releases had enough plastique to compensate, spraying a confetti of fabric over a radius of ten meters and leaving me with nothing but shin-high white boots… that and the sweaty cotton chemise I wore to protect against the tightsuit chafing.