"Try that clear one there," I pointed. "I'll bet it tastes good."
"I cannot put that in my mouth," she objected. "It has touched the green one. It is dirty!"
"This is special food," I said. "It doesn't get dirty." I took the clear blob myself, making sure it hadn't picked up any color from adjacent blobs. "See? It's pretty."
"Now you're touching it."
"My hands are clean… and my skin color doesn't rub off, you know that. Otherwise, you'd be smeared and smudged yourself."
She didn't look convinced.
"Oar," I said, "if you don't like food from the synthesizer, what are you going to eat? Do you want me to kill animals for you? Or rip up plants I think might be edible? Do you want to eat raw fish? Or bright red raspberries?"
Her eyes widened in horror. "I will try machine food," she said quickly, and plucked the clear jelly from my hand. With the get-it-over-quick air of a woman taking medicine, she plopped the blob in her mouth, and swallowed without chewing… as if she was hurrying to get it down before the taste made her gag.
Seconds ticked by silently. "How was it?" I asked.
"I do not know," she answered. "I shall wait to see if I become sick."
Good enough, I told myself. If I could eat her food, she could probably eat mine; but let her work up to it gradually. In the meantime, the sun was bright — she could photosynthesize, like her ancestors back in the village.
"We're ready," I said. "Let's head south."
We Begin
Our climb up the bluffs proved Oar had ample strength to carry the synthesizer — with it strapped to her back, she walked as if its weight were barely there. I worried the straps might chafe her bare shoulders; but as time passed without a peep of complaint, I concluded her skin really was as tough as glass… and hardened safety glass at that.
From the top of the bluffs, our way south ran into the wooded ravine. I veered off the most direct route to avoid passing the log that held Yarrun's corpse; instead, I led Oar along the ravine's spindly stream, traveling southeast according to my compass. Walking wasn't easy — undergrowth tangled thickly along the stream bank — but I stuck with it for ten minutes, till we were far past my partner's shabby burial site. Then we turned due south again, climbing out of the ravine and into more level woodland.
For a long time after that, I still made wide detours around any logs that lay in our path.
Walking (Part 1)
Here is what I remember from that first day.
The peaceful stillness of the forest… and sudden compulsions to break that silence, babbling trivialities to cover the noise of guilt in my brain.
The quality of Oar's voice as she replied to me — the way the surrounding trees absorbed the sound and muted it.
The slash, slash, slash of our feet through fallen leaves.
A covey of quail which suddenly flushed from cover as we approached.
A flock of geese flying south in a lopsided V, their honking distant and piercingly autumnal.
Topping a rise and seeing a great open marsh in front of us, sparkling in the clear sunlight.
The small nose of a muskrat weaving along the edge of the creek in the marsh's center.
Oar fastidiously cleaning her feet after picking her way across mud. ("It is brown and ugly, Festina; people will think I am stupid if my feet are brown and ugly.")
Watching a great blue heron balance on one leg as it scanned the water for prey.
Borrowing Oar's axe so I could cut down a cattail, then pulling the plant's fuzzy head apart as we continued through the swamp.
The maddening suspicion that there were eggs all around me: heron eggs hidden by bulrushes, turtle eggs buried in the mud, frog eggs globbed just beneath the creek's surface. I knew better — on Earth, few species laid eggs so soon before winter — but still I was seized by impulses to look behind patches of reeds or kick the dirt with my toe… as if I had acquired some mystic intuition of eggs calling to me.
I hadn't. I found nothing. And in time, twilight closed around us as we reached the far edge of the marsh.
My Sleeping Bag
Beyond the marsh was forest; we built camp just inside the trees. More precisely, Oar went to gather firewood, while I pulled handfuls of marsh greenery as input for the food synthesizer. Once the machine had begun digesting the plants, I went to my backpack and debated opening my sleeping bag.
Like most Explorer equipment, standard-issue sleeping bags were compact. They had no bulky padding; an open bag looked like a sheath of tin foil, shiny side in. The foil didn't have the weight of a nice down comforter, but it was a good insulator for all its thinness — the glossy interior reflected back most escaping body heat. Surprisingly, the entire bag could be folded into a package no bigger than the flat of your hand.
It could be folded that way exactly once: at the factory where the bag was manufactured. Once you broke the shrink-wrap containing the bag, you would never fold the damned thing neatly again. It turned into a crinkly cranky mess of foil, billowing unmanageably in the slightest breeze and smooth enough to slip from your hands unless you held it in a death grip. The best refolding job I ever managed produced a lumpy wad as big as a pillow. Try jamming that into your rucksack when the original package was the size of an envelope.
So: to open or not to open the bag, that was the question — whether it was worse to spend the night unprotected, huddled against Oar for warmth, or to open the bag now and spend the rest of my life on this planet, fighting with a misshapen clump of surly tin.
To hell with it. I'd sooner shiver.
Around the Campfire
We ate around the campfire, Oar picking out the clear jelly blobs and me eating the rest. It took several courses to fill our stomachs. We would stuff the synthesizer with biomass, wait eighteen minutes, then eat the results while the machine whirred away on another batch.
While we ate, we talked… which is to say, Oar talked and I asked enough questions to keep her going. I wanted to learn all I could about her background, especially what she knew about the history of her planet.
She knew almost nothing. The far past was a blank; even the recent past was vague. Oar couldn't remember her father — her mother had pointed him out in the Tower of Ancestors, but he had been dormant Oar's whole life. Sometime during the pregnancy, he had simply decided enough was enough.
That was forty-five years ago.
It unsettled me that Oar was forty-five: she was almost twice as old as me. On the other hand, I had seen that her people didn't show their age… and why should I think of her as childlike, just because her English was simplistic? How's your grasp of her language? I asked myself.
It brought up an interesting question.
"Oar," I said, "how did you learn to talk like Explorers? Did Jelca and Ullis teach you?"
"Yes."
"They taught you to speak this well… and how long were they here?"
"A spring and a summer, three years ago."
"You learned this much English in six months? That's fast, Oar."
"I am very smart, Festina," she answered. "Not stupid, like Explorers."
It struck me she might be right. Bioengineering made her stronger and tougher than me; why not smarter too? Admittedly, Earth's attempts at building smarter people had seldom met with success: tinkering with the brain was so complex, most intelligence enhancement experiments ended in tragic failure. Even "successful" research projects had a ratio of ten thousand dead or near-vegetable infants for every child who turned out a cut above normal. Still, Melaquin had succeeded in so many other DNA modifications, why not heightened learning ability? It could work with the right approach — nothing crude like a mere increase in skull capacity, but exploring how humans truly differed from other animals…