My Heart
Jelca.
Jelca.
I'd heard he'd gone Oh Shit a few years ago — nothing in the official records, just a rumor. I should have realized there was only one place you could disappear without leaving records in the Fleet archives.
Jelca was here on Melaquin. And not just on the planet — he was somewhere close by. He had not landed on a different continent; he had not landed on some isolated island; he was here. At least, he had been here three years ago. How far could he have traveled since then?
My heart beat faster, though I knew it was foolishness. I scarcely knew Jelca — after that night we carried Tobit to his quarters, we had gone on two dates, no more. There was every chance Jelca had treated Oar badly… and yet, I was already making excuses for him in my mind. She had misunderstood mere friendliness; and perhaps Duty had forced him to leave.
Never mind that my excuses didn't make sense. In the heat of the moment, "making sense" was my enemy.
I had killed Yarrun. Chee had died. But if Jelca was here, I was not alone.
In that moment of weakness, I thought Jelca would save me.
Jelca's Partner
"Where is Jelca now?" I asked as calmly as I could.
"He went away with her," Oar replied. She made the word "her" sound like excrement.
"Her?" I repeated.
"The ugly woman who blinks."
"Ullis? Ullis Naar?" My old roommate with the permanent twitch in her eyes.
"Yes, Explorer Ullis Naar. She blinks and blinks until you scream at her to stop. She is so stupid!"
I said nothing. Ullis was not stupid; she had a good brain and a better heart. In our years rooming together at the Academy, I had never heard Ullis say an unkind word about anyone. Sometimes… sometimes we avoided her, when the stress of our studies exhausted us so much, we didn't have the strength to put up with her blinking; but she never made us feel guilty afterward. If she had become Jelca's partner after graduation, he was lucky.
So was she.
I tried not to think of her alone with Jelca on this planet. It gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Away
I asked, "Where did they go, Oar?"
"Away." She pointed in the direction of the bluffs-south. "They said they had to join with other fucking Explorers, but that was just an excuse. Jelca left because he wanted to go."
Other Explorers… Jelca must have contacted some of the others marooned here. He could have cobbled together a radio, possibly by cannibalizing his Bumbler — he came from a Fringe World where children learned electronics from the age of three — and he'd managed to contact other Explorers on the planet.
"Oar," I said, "you have to believe Jelca wasn't making up excuses. If he found out about other Explorers, he'd have to…"
I didn't finish my sentence. Oar's fierce expression told me she wouldn't believe a word in Jelca's defense. "Okay," I conceded. "Okay." There was no point in angering her. She sniffed a bit, then went for another handful of pebbles.
Visible Light
In time, Chee's pockets bulged with rocks. The interior of his suit was less full, but it would do — when I gave his body an experimental shove, I could barely move him. No amount of ballast would weigh him down forever, but we'd done enough to keep him submerged for a good long time, provided we started him out deep enough.
Getting him away from shore was the trick. I could drag the body as far as I could wade, but it was too heavy to swim with — smart Explorers don't dogpaddle while carrying an anchor. Oar had shown she couldn't swim at all, and the wrinkled curls of driftwood on the beach were too small for building a raft. For a moment, I considered giving up on the burial at sea and just digging a grave in the sand; but then I thought about Chee's last desperate attempt at speaking. "Suh… suh…" Although I had no confidence he really wanted to be committed to the water, I wanted to do something that felt like granting his final request.
"Oar," I said, "do you have any ideas how to take my friend out into the lake?"
She answered immediately, "We will carry him on my boat."
"You have a boat?"
"It will come when I call. Stay here."
She walked away down the beach, giving me the chance for something I'd been longing to do since she appeared. Casually activating the Bumbler, I aimed the scanner at her smoothly sculpted back and did a quick run through the EM band.
In the visible spectrum, she was transparent; but at every other wavelength, she gauged very close to Homo sapiens. IR readings showed her body temperature was less than a degree warmer than mine — or what mine would have been if I weren't shivering on an open beach in a wet cotton chemise. On UV, she looked just as opaque as I did; and on X-ray, she actually showed a skeleton and the ghosts of internal organs. To my untrained eye, the images of bone and tissue looked entirely human… except that none of it showed up with visible light.
An invisible heart, beating in her chest.
Invisible lungs, processing air.
Invisible brain, glands, liver, gall bladder… all wrapped up in a glassy epidermis that let light through unimpeded.
Could she possibly be a machine? Unlikely. Machines tend to have IR hot spots: power packs, transformers, things like that. Oar's body temperature was more evenly distributed — like mine, to be honest, with head and thorax warmer than the extremities but none of the sharp gradients you see in androids. Organisms also emit waves in the radio band with a completely different pattern from machines; nervous systems transmit their signals in ways wires can't imitate… not even biosynthetic wires made from organic molecules.
No — Oar was not built on an assembly line. That still didn't make her "natural"… most likely, she was the result of DNA tinkering. She or her ancestors had been purposely altered. More important, she'd been altered for the benefit of eyes like mine. No other species in the League of Peoples perceived exactly the same set of wavelengths as humans. If other sentient beings looked at Oar, they'd see her IR glow, or perhaps a full X-ray layout. They certainly wouldn't see the perfect transparence that greeted my human eyes.
The only plausible explanation was that humans had lived on Melaquin, either now or in the past. The planet had worms, killdeer, and monarch butterflies; why not Homo sapiens too? And for some reason, those humans had fabricated this new transparent race… transparent to human eyes, if not to the eyes of extraterrestrial species.
Of course, I had no idea why they'd do such a thing. Why make yourself hard for your fellow creatures to see? Were they trying to hide from each other? But Oar still showed up on IR, UV, and other wavelengths. She couldn't conceal herself from high-tech sensors… and surely her culture had such gadgets. They were sophisticated enough to engineer themselves into glass; they must understand basics like the EM spectrum.
Maybe turning to glass was simply a fashion statement. Or a religious practice — implementing some teaching that glassiness was next to godliness. No, I told myself, that was too easy: too many sociologists threw up their hands and said, "It's just religion," when they found a custom they didn't understand at first sight. An Explorer doesn't have the luxury to dismiss anything.
I had to be scrupulously honest: I didn't understand why people would make themselves glass… and perhaps this whole train of thought was merely jumping to conclusions. Melaquin showed no roads, no cities, no signs of technology — scarcely consistent with a culture that could engineer people into near-invisibility.
Unless…
…at the same time they made a race so hard to see, they also removed all signs of their presence on the planet.
Unless these see-through bodies and the dearth of development were all attempts to hide that this planet was inhabited. Even if they showed up on IR, glass bodies were still harder to see than normal flesh and blood.
And if that was true, what were they hiding from?
I shivered; and this time it had nothing to do with air temperature or damp clothes.