Thank you, I whispered to the air. Jelca had left me the means to follow him.
The Picture Box
"This box makes pictures," Oar said behind my back.
She pointed to a crystal screen embedded in the wall… or more accurately, embedded in what was left of the wall. Jelca had ripped away much of the material around the screen so he could get in behind it — into a mass of fiberoptic cable and circuits feeding the screen. By the looks of it, this was a native Melaquinian television; and Jelca had either tried to repair it or plunder it for parts.
"The screen showed pictures?" I asked.
"Yes. Pictures of ugly Explorers."
"Jelca and Ullis?"
"No, different Explorers."
"Different…" I forced myself not to lunge for the TV. If other Explorers could broadcast television signals, they must have developed a substantial technological base — either that or they had drawn upon existing Melaquin resources. Now that I thought about it, normal TV/radio waves could never reach here under the lake. The dome must have a concealed antenna or cable feed reaching up to the outside world. Perhaps the planet supported hundreds of hidden villages like this one, connected by a shielded cable network: a network that would allow communication from one village to another, but whose transmissions would not be detectable from space.
And my fellow Explorers had tapped into that system.
"Oar," I said, "I'd like to turn on the machine."
"You may not see anything," she answered. "The pictures only come for a short while, then go away. And they are always the same stupid Explorers saying the same stupid things."
It must be a looped signal saying, "Hello new arrivals, here's where everyone else is." With clumsy fingers, I clicked the TV's switch. The screen lit with a display of static. For some reason, I had convinced myself it would show a picture immediately; but ten minutes passed (Oar tapping her toe impatiently) before a picture snapped into view.
"Greetings," said a man on the screen. "I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples and I beg…"
I was too shocked to pay attention to the words. The man on the screen was Chee.
Part X
COMMUNICATION
Ears
The Chee on the screen looked younger — not so many lines on his face and only a few gray streaks in his black hair. He wore the hair down to his shoulders; but it couldn't hide the huge misshapen ears sticking out from his head like purple-veined plates.
Those ears looked like botched engineering: some ill-conceived project to achieve God knows what. Even though it was illegal, there were always fools who tinkered with their offspring's genes, failing to understand that a change in enzyme A might affect how the body used proteins B, C, and D. Most of the time, such alterations killed the child in utero; but occasionally, the fetus lived to full term, emerging from the womb with deformities like the man on the screen.
A man with the ears of a cartoon caricature. Or an Explorer.
Yes. Those ears would make him a prime candidate for the Academy… if he could still hear. If the malformed ears handicapped his hearing, Technocracy medicine would leap to the rescue: reconstructive surgery, prosthetic replacements, targeted virus therapy — whatever it took. But if the ears were merely grotesque, and the child was intelligent, healthy, psychologically pliable… on to the Academy.
Chee. An Explorer.
Was it really him? Could it just be a close relative, a brother, or even a clone? All were possibilities; but I could feel in my gut this was the real Chee.
Chee had known more about Exploring than any normal Vacuum admiral. When suiting up, for example, he had known to empty his bladder during Limbo.
An Explorer. An Explorer who somehow became an admiral.
How long ago had this recording been made? The signal could have looped for decades if it ran off a reliable power source. If Chee had been one of the first marooned here, some forty years ago… yes, I could believe it. The Explorer on the screen was a veteran, probably taking YouthBoost every few months. Forty years would bring him almost exactly to the Chee who had died a few hours ago.
Forty years.
Plus ear surgery.
And some way to escape from Melaquin.
Chee's Speech
With an effort, I forced myself to concentrate on his words, not his appearance. (Chee's voice — it was definitely Chee's voice.)
"…fully expect that more of us will get shanghaied here over time. If you are in that position, I invite you to join my partner and me in the enclave we've found. It's an underground city, fully automated and self-repairing… centuries old. The people are humanoid but glassily transparent; all seem dormant, though we cannot guess the cause. We have had no success in rousing them to consciousness for more than a minute at a time.
"We've had better luck with the technical facilities here: this broadcasting station, for example. If we've analyzed its structure correctly, our transmissions should be going out over a high-capacity network, perhaps reaching all around the world. We have also discovered very old machines capable of space flight… or at least they were capable of flight centuries ago. If we can restore one of these ships to working condition, we might use it to get off the planet. We have yet to find a ship with FTL capacity, but we don't need to get as far as another star system — we just have to escape the restricted airspace around Melaquin, then send a mayday.
"Therefore, fellow ECMs, I invite you to help us with this project. We may not be space-tech engineers, but we're smart and resourceful. In time, we can rebuild a ship and get out of here — if we work together."
Chee suddenly grimaced straight to the camera. "Shit, that sounded pompous, didn't it? But you know what I mean. We can get our asses out of here if we don't fuck up. Some of you must have landed way to hell the other side of the ocean and you'll never make it here under your own steam; but look around, see what you can scrounge up. This civilization had sophisticated goodies before it went to sleep. Maybe you can find a starship of your own… if not, maybe a boat or a plane that'll bring you to us, even if you're thousands of klicks away.
"And where is here, you might ask? To answer that, I'll turn the floor over to my partner who's drawn up a map to show exactly where this city is…"
Chee reached toward the camera, his hand looming in front of the lens before the shot swivelled to a new angle. In a moment, a woman came into view. She was holding a map, but that wasn't what I was looking at.
Her left cheek had a fierce purple birthmark, twin to mine.
And beneath that birthmark was the face of Admiral Seele.
My First Admiral, Again
Admiral Seele. My first admiral. The one who spent several days with me on the Jacaranda.
The one who paid me so much attention, I thought she wanted into my bed.
"Shit," I whispered. "Shit, shit, shit."
"What is wrong, Festina?" Oar asked. She glanced at the screen. "Are you angry this woman has copied your ugliness?"
Yes, that's why I'm angry, I thought. I'll sue her for stealing my trademark.
Admiral Seele. No wonder she took such interest in me. My mark was on the right, hers on the left; we were mirror images. On screen, as she pointed to her map and blathered about landmarks, she even looked the same age as me… but the recording was made forty years ago, give or take. I could well imagine those forty years had aged the woman I saw now into the admiral who cried for me.