From time to time, I could feel Oar glancing at me. I was deliberately walking on her right, so she could only see my good cheek; her furtive peeks were attempts to watch the new skin change. Or perhaps she was only trying to gauge my mood. After minutes of tentative silence, she finally asked, "How are you feeling, Festina?"
"I'm fine." The words came out automatically. "I'm always fine," I said.
"You are not fine, you are troubled. Must I punch you in the nose so soon?"
I gave her a rueful grin. "No." It was tempting to face her, but I didn't. I could feel nothing special in my cheek, yet it seemed to be the center of all my consciousness. "This is just hard," I said.
"Why is it hard? Either you will stay the same, or you will look less ugly. You cannot lose."
"I might have an allergic reaction."
"What is an allergic reaction?"
"It's…" I shook my head. "Never mind, I was just being difficult." I turned my gaze to the crisp white cement beneath our feet. "This is hard," I said again.
We walked another minute in silence. Then Oar said, "I know how to stop you being sad. We can find the Tower of Ancestors in this place."
She looked at me expectantly.
"And that would cheer me up?" I asked.
"It feels good inside the Hall of Ancestors."
"Only if you feed off UV and X-rays," I told her. "I'll pass."
"But if we go to the Tower of Ancestors," Oar insisted, "we can find the foolish Prophet those Morlocks follow. Then we will walk up to him and say, 'Pooh!' Just like that: 'Pooh!' Someone should have spoken to him a long time ago. 'Pooh!' "
I smiled. "You have a knack for theological argument. Good thing you didn't try it with the Morlocks themselves."
"The Morlocks are all very foolish," she replied. "It does not make sense to wear skin when it only looks ugly. Ugliness is bad. You know that, Festina. You will never be beautiful, but you are trying to look better. That is wise. That is correct."
"Thank you," I answered drily. "But even if the new skin works, I may not wear it forever. I just put it on for curiosity's sake. An experiment, that's all. No self-respecting woman places much value on mere appearance…"
Such babble. Even Oar knew I was talking for my own benefit. She gazed at me with gentle pity… and perhaps I would have prattled on to greater depths of humiliation if a naked man hadn't materialized two paces in front of us.
The Naked Man
He didn't step from behind a building. He didn't rise out of the ground or appear in a puff of smoke. One moment the space in front of us was empty, and the next it was occupied. As instant as a scream.
The man was short and brown and hairy. His head was thatched with crinkly salt-and-pepper hair, and his mouth surrounded with a bushy silver beard. Graying curls dappled his chest, arms, and genitals. Beneath all that hair was a wiry body marked liberally with scars — wide slashes of whitened tissue, the kind you see on Opters fanatical enough to refuse stitches, no matter how serious the wound. His eyes had a yellow tint to them, but were still bright and alert. He looked straight at me for a moment, then slammed his fists on his stomach and spoke in a melodious language I didn't recognize.
I looked at Oar to see if she knew what he was saying. She returned my gaze in bewilderment.
"Okay," I sighed to the little man. "Greetings, I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg your Hospitality."
"Why do Explorers always say that?" Oar muttered. "It is very annoying."
"Blame it on boundless optimism," I told her. "Someday I'll say it to someone who doesn't run screaming or try to kill me."
The man did neither. Instead he spoke again, this time guttural words with phlegmy rasps in the throat. It sounded so different from his first speech, I guessed he had changed languages in an attempt to find one I understood. Good luck, I thought to myself. No Explorer bothers with linguistic training; it's taken for granted we'll never understand the native tongues of the beings we meet. If they don't understand our "Greetings" speech, our only recourse is to play charades… very careful charades, trying to avoid gestures that would be misunderstood as hostile.
Accordingly, I lifted my hands, palms out, facing the man. "Hello," I said, more for Oar's benefit than his. "I am unarmed and friendly." To back my words, I smiled, making sure to keep my mouth closed: for many species, baring the teeth means aggression. The man in front of me appeared to be one hundred percent Homo sapiens — the kind with real skin, not glass — but it would still be a mistake to assume too much cultural common ground.
Before the man could respond to my gesture, Oar took her own stab at communicating: a gush of words in her own native language, a flood of syllables that went on for more than half a minute before she paused for breath.
The man blinked once, then turned back to me. His attitude said he didn't understand Oar, and had no interest in trying. He ventured another smattering of syllables, this one a type of singing that reminded me of Gregorian chant. The words, however, weren't Latin — I don't speak the language, but a zoologist knows enough scientific names for animals to recognize Latin when she hears it.
"Listen," I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly, "we aren't going to understand each other this way. Maybe if we…"
I didn't finish my sentence. At that moment, the man flickered in and out of existence like heat lightning.
Flicker
The effect only lasted a second: his image breaking into a moire pattern of optical interference, then righting itself again into a seemingly solid man. It didn't matter how brief the disruption was — it told me two things.
First, the man was a hologram: a good hologram, since it's extremely difficult for projections to fool the eye at a range of three paces. Nevertheless, I knew he was just a constructed image… something I half-expected already, since corporeal men don't appear out of nowhere. (Some members of the League are rumored to have perfected teleportation, but no one with that technology has ever contacted humans.)
The second thing I knew was that Melaquin had started to live on borrowed time. The flicker in this image could only mean some machine somewhere had acquired a fault. It might only be a small malfunction in a nonessential system — the hardware for projecting pictures of naked men was unlikely to be crucial for survival — but even a tiny glitch meant things had begun to break down. No one, not even the League of Peoples, could build equipment that lasts forever; all the automated repair systems in the universe can't hold back the patient creep of entropy. If four thousand years was the lifetime for the systems here on Melaquin…
…the lifetime of the people wouldn't last significantly longer.
Fluent Osco-Umbrian
The man in front of me behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. He launched into another speech in another language — no language I knew, no language I cared about. I bided my time till he finished, then held up my hand to stop him from trying again.
"Don't bother," I said. "Whatever message you want to convey, it's four thousand years too late. You're a simulation, right? Probably the interface projection for an artificial intelligence that oversees this town. Computer-controlled and designed to relate to the first people who came here. To them, you must have looked like a wise old man… someone they'd naturally respect. But to me, you're evidence of the AI's imminent breakdown. Trying to reach me with languages four millennia old; you can't understand Oar, so you haven't kept up as the people here changed. Anyway, I've never liked talking to AIs — they're always smarmy and unctuous."