"Mmmm," I said, in spite of myself. No matter what other things I had on my mind, it's hard to stay focused when all your clothing is blown off in a single zipless whirlwind.
"Mmm. Mmm-hmm."
And you are left standing on a moonlit beach, exposed to the soft night air.
"My oh my," I said.
Then I saw that some of the fabric tatters had slapped like useless bandages onto Admiral Chee's corpse. And I thought of the woman, maybe with the ponderous density of glass, sinking over her head in lake water.
There'd been too many deaths already. I refused to permit another.
Lifeguard
Clasping the Bumbler's strap to my shoulder, I hit the lake running, took one bounce, then knifed out in a shallow dive while I still had momentum. For a woman brought up in the steamy tropics of Agua, the water temperature here was an education. No doubt, an ice-colony boy like Yarrun would have claimed the lake was balmy, but this was still mid-autumn at forty-one degrees north latitude. My muscles did not seize up with the cold; my lungs continued to gasp up air whenever I lifted my head from the water; but I could feel my skin pebble into gooseflesh, and had to grit my teeth to keep them from chattering.
Ahead of me, the glass coffin was nothing more than a V-shaped disturbance under the water. Before it vanished completely I took a sighting on it, trying to estimate the difference between its position now and where it was when the glass woman slipped off. Was I getting close to her? The water was certainly over my head. Trying not to think about undertows, sharks, or water-borne parasites, I swung the Bumbler around and pushed its scanner under the surface.
A visual scan would only waste time; the water was black, the target transparent. I set the sensors to look for heat and cranked up the gain. There was no guarantee the woman would be warm-blooded — who knew if glass had blood at all? — but even if her metabolism just matched air temperature, she had to be warmer than the frigid water around me. The Bumbler would pick her up if she was within ten meters.
The screen flickered then bloomed with something hot right beneath me — something alive, close and moving. My heart choked tight with fear before I realized I was seeing my own legs, treading water. Oh. Tilting the scanner outward, I swung myself in a slow circle… and tried to force from my mind the memory of doing the same when I was searching for Yarrun.
"Where are you?" I muttered. "Come on, come on…"
A bright blob flared on the bottom, only a few meters from me. Steady, steady; and in another few seconds, the Bumbler had sufficient data to resolve the image into a human shape, its arms and legs struggling futilely.
Okay. Okay.
Sling the Bumbler over my shoulder.
Take a deep breath.
Dive.
Even with the heat trace sighting, it wasn't easy to find a transparent woman in night-black water. I swept my hands blindly for at least ten seconds before I made contact: smooth slick skin, warm but diamond-hard. Before I could decide what part of her I was touching, an arm lashed out and grabbed me, catching hold of my hair. She nearly yanked out a handful. Then we were wrestling, unable to see in the dark — the woman wild with the fear of drowning and me trying to get her in a good rescue hold.
It was a match too evenly balanced for comfort. Explorers are trained in every conceivable rescue technique, and I had the added advantage of my martial-arts work, breaking free from people who wanted to grapple. On the other hand, the glass woman was strong and desperate, with a hide like blastproof plastic. When a flailing hand caught me in the stomach, it felt like a hammer — if the water hadn't slowed it down, the blow might have knocked the air out of me.
The slipperiness of her skin was a mixed blessing. It made things easier for me to wriggle away when she grabbed me, but she could also slip from my grip whenever I tried a rescue hold. My only edge was that she had been underwater longer than I had; and once, I even got away from her for a moment, long enough to surface for breath. I didn't worry about losing her in my brief moment of departure — she might be hard to see, but I wasn't. She grabbed me the second I came back within reach.
Little by little, she weakened. After a long confusion of thrashing limbs, I managed to loop an arm around her neck and drag her to the top. We both gasped, spitting and sputtering; then she lapsed into uncontrolled gagging which gave me time to haul her to shallow water. At the edge of the beach, I let her go and we both collapsed, side by side — half in, half out of the lake, propped up on our elbows and sucking at the air.
Out of the corner of my eye, I studied her: sleek and elegant, even when coughing up lake water. I could see right through her to a gnarl of driftwood on the beach beyond her; everything about her was transparent except for her eyes. As she turned toward me, I saw they were silvered like mirrors.
"You can't understand me," I told her, "but you have nothing to worry about. I saved you, didn't I? I mean you no harm."
The woman gazed at me for a moment, then let her head slump back onto the sand. "Fucking Explorers," she said. "Always Greetings, greetings, I mean you no harm. But you only make people sad. Go away, fucking Explorer. Go away now."
And she covered her eyes with her hand.
Part VIII
ACQUAINTANCE
Shocked and Hurt
Without a millisecond's pause, I spun away from her, rolling across the sand and tucking up to my feet in a fighting stance. My mind was scarcely aware what I was doing; the reaction had been programmed into me along with so much else.
It was an ongoing experiment by the Admiralty. In situations of total shock, when the conscious brain was too surprised to make a rational decision, some Explorers were trained to assume an aggressive posture, some to become passive, and some to freeze in whatever position they happened to be. The Fleet wanted to determine if any of the three approaches offered better survival prospects than the others.
If the study had drawn any conclusions, no one bothered to tell us Explorers.
With an effort, I forced myself to lower my fists. The woman's hand was over her eyes — maybe she hadn't noticed my reaction… although if I could see through her hand, why couldn't she? I looked carefully through her glass fingers and saw that her eyelids were an opaque silver, shut tight and trembling.
"You've met Explorers before," I said after a moment. "How else would you know my language? And since dozens of Explorers have come here over the past forty years, it's not completely improbable that an earlier party landed in this neighborhood. They may have followed the same chain of reasoning as we did." I was talking to myself, not her. "But what did they do to you? Why are… how did they upset you?"
She opened her eyes and raised herself on one elbow so she could look at me; she didn't lift her gaze high enough to meet my eyes. "They made me sad," she said. "Fucking Explorers."
"Did they hurt you?" I knelt in the sand so I wouldn't loom over her. "If they hurt you, it must have been an accident. Explorers are programmed… Explorers are taught very strictly never to hurt the people they meet."
"Yes," the woman said, "they are taught many things." This time her gaze met mine for an angry second before dropping away. "Explorers know so much, and it is all stupid!"
I stared at her, trying to decide how to read her. She looked like a grown woman, perhaps in her early twenties; but she talked with the words of a child. Did she only have a primitive grasp of English? Perhaps she learned the language as a child and hadn't used it since. A team of Explorers might have passed through this area when the woman was young, spent a few months, then moved on. Children learn languages quickly… and they form crushes quickly too. Maybe the Explorers had done nothing worse than leaving an overfond child who wanted them to stay.