"You all look alike," Jelca shrugged. There was no apology in his voice. "Why are you here?"
"My friend Festina needed my help to come to this place! That is the only reason. She wanted me with her so I came, because she is my friend."
"Friend," Jelca repeated with pointed intonation. "Oh."
My face burned. I wanted to blurt, It isn't what you think… and I hated myself for feeling that way. I hated Jelca too. Why didn't he smile? Why didn't he run forward and sweep me into his arms?
Why didn't he think I was beautiful?
"How's Ullis?" I asked, just for something to say.
"Fine," he said. "Busy. You haven't seen her yet?"
"We just got here. We saw Walton outside."
"Oh. Well." He took his eyes off my face long enough to look at his watch. "It's almost suppertime. I'll show you where the others are."
He still didn't smile; but suddenly he held out a hand to me as if I remained a silly little freshman who'd leap forward at the first opportunity. Maybe I would have. I didn't run to him immediately, but maybe I would have given in after a few seconds, telling myself that this was the start of whatever I wanted.
Who knows?
Before I made up my mind, Oar darted forward and took the offered hand, lacing her fingers with his. Jelca stared at me a moment longer, then shrugged. "This way," he said.
Monstrosity
We walked to the central square. It was a huge space, several hundred meters on each side… and almost completely filled with a giant glass whale.
"The spaceship," Jelca said.
I winced. A spaceship that looked like a whale? And a killer whale at that, an orca, with lines etched into its exterior skin to suggest the usual pattern of black and white coloration. It stood on its tail at the very center of the city, as tall as any nearby skyscraper. Its bulbous body no doubt contained living quarters, engines, and so on, but all of it was glass, glittering with prismatic refractions.
Could it fly? Like any whale, it looked streamlined enough. Still, it was a far cry from Technocracy starships. They were simply long cylinders with a "Sperm head" at the front — an oversized gray sphere that generated the Sperm-field back along the hull. The orca had no such sphere: nothing more than a huge glass parasol sticking out of its snout… as if the whale had a beach umbrella clenched in its teeth.
"So that's our way home," Jelca said.
"You're going into space in a whale?" I asked.
"It's a ship, Festina." His voice flared with hostility. "Why should appearance matter?"
"It doesn't," I answered. "How are you going to get it out of here?"
"There are roof doors." He looked up briefly, then shook his head. "You can't see them from here. Can't see them from outside either. A whole section of the mountain just opens up."
"And off you go in an orca."
I meant to sound lighthearted and teasing, but Jelca didn't take it that way. "The whale was all we had to work with," he snapped. "A remnant of the Melaquin space program, whenever that was. This city has all kinds of ships, each stupider than the last. Birds, bats, insects… even a rabbit, for Christ's sake. The people here didn't care. They scarcely worried about trivialities like aerodynamics, or tradeoffs between weight and strength of materials. Ninety-nine per cent of each ship was built by the city's AI, using League of Peoples technology. Oh no, the AI wouldn't actually build a working starship; but if you ask for a hull as strong as steel and a thousand times lighter, there's no problem with that! So the locals built a whale, probably because it was romantic."
"It is an excellent whale," Oar said approvingly. "I have seen pictures of such animals, but I did not know they were so large."
"It's a ship, that's all," Jelca replied. "And it happens to be the biggest in the city — the only one with enough room to house all the Explorers here." He turned to me. "Sixty-two Explorers now, counting you."
"Sixty-two?"
"And five non-Explorers," he went on, "who haven't got around to dying yet. Admiralty officials who got 'escorted' here — two embezzlers, two addicts, and a pedophile, all of whom the High Council preferred to have disappear rather than go through the messy embarrassment of a trial." He gave me an angry look. "Isn't that great? Getting banished here with the likes of them? The admiral Ullis and I came down with was a total piece of shit… took bribes from a contractor so the guy could keep selling shoddy equipment to the Fleet. God knows if anyone was hurt because of it; the admiral never asked. Never tried to learn what damage he'd done. And the council condemned Ullis and me to the same fate as a man like that!"
I said nothing. Jelca's words sounded like a rehearsed speech: a sore that had festered inside him so long, he was happy to have a new listener to hear. I knew the feeling. On the other hand, it had never occurred to me that most Explorers came to Melaquin in the company of criminals and other genuine undesirables. Somehow, I'd thought the exiles would all be people like Chee — out of control but not vicious. Naive, Ramos, I thought; too quick to romanticize the High Council as tyrants and their victims as heroic political prisoners. No one was as good or as bad as I might like to believe.
"What happened to your admiral?" I asked.
"YouthBoost meltdown," Jelca answered with a shrug. "The usual fate of the scum who are sent here — they're old and fat and ready to fall apart as soon as they're cut off the teat. They keel over and problem solved… except for us Explorers, stuck in this hellhole."
"It is not a hellhole," Oar growled. "Melaquin is an excellent planet!"
"Sure," Jelca said. "Everything a man could want." He gave me a sideways glance. "That's why the council gets away with it, you know… why the League lets them get away with it. To an alien, there's nothing wrong with dropping Explorers on Melaquin; what other planet in the galaxy is better suited for human life? Depositing us here is damned safer than assigning us to explore a subzero ice-world or thousand degree inferno. Melaquin is a paradise for our species. When the council maroons us here, the League probably thinks it's a favor. Forget that we're cut off from civilization, forget that we'll never see our friends and family—"
"Your friends and family are probably very stupid," Oar interrupted. "Festina is very bored with the way you complain and wishes you would talk about something else."
Jelca gave a humorless laugh. "Sorry to bore you, Festina." He turned to Oar. "What do you think Festina would rather talk about?"
"She would rather talk about my stupid sister, Eel."
"What about her?" Jelca asked.
"Where is she?"
"She's your sister," Jelca said. "If you don't know where she is, why should I?" Before Oar could react, he gave her hand an ungentle tug. "Enough talk. I can smell supper and it's making me hungry."
The First Supper
The next few hours were an exhausting jumble.
I met the other Explorers — some familiar to me, but many stranded on Melaquin long before I was drafted into the Fleet.
I let people go through my pack: the candy rations I hadn't yet touched, the entertainment bubbles I'd brought because I had room, the odds and ends of equipment that might be used in the spaceship. There are no words to describe the joy of the female Explorers when they found my first aid kit contained two dozen menstruation swatches.
I told my story: the parts I wanted to tell anyway. I did not describe how Yarrun died; besides, the others were more interested in the lark-plane we'd left outside. One of the older men, a gray-haired Divian named Athelrod, headed out immediately to inspect the craft… on the hunt for spare parts he could cannibalize.