“Limitations in the adaptability of my reconstruct, evidently. I don’t miss it, really. I’ve never known what it is like.” She scratched the small of my back with short, gentle motions. “I thought you might like to know in case you wanted to find me there.”
Her touch floated from spot to spot. My entire back tingled from her ministrations. I said, “I haven’t done a groupmeld for a long time, but it’s a comfort to know I can when I’m ready,” which wasn’t true. I hadn’t integrated my consciousness with the infoquarry since I’d taken over this skin shell, and I didn’t want to. It was the tourists, I think, mistreating the shells, ignoring the import of the artifacts, bumping against anything that would bump back while they were here. They could be in the groupmeld too, adding or taking what they wanted from everyone else. Plus, a groupmeld disoriented me, made me lose a bit of self, at least for a while. Many of the friends I’d had long ago went in and never came out, joining the overmind. The last time I’d melded, I’d sensed for an instant a friend’s familiar thought, like a ghost, but it flittered away, and I couldn’t find it again.
She said, “Sometimes when I get to know someone, they ask to meet me in the groupmeld. I just wanted you to know I couldn’t. I only know what I know, and nothing else, and you can never know me.”
I thought about the lander sitting on the lunar surface and the tracks around it. The ancients left evidence, but I could not talk to them. Being in their bodies wasn’t the same as the groupmeld. I’d never know them either.
She kissed my back, her breath hot and moist. “The skin has a taste,” she said.
I stood. “There are other visitors I should attend to. Will you be at the afternoon session? We’ll do a discussion of the ethics of archeological tourism.”
“I know. I’ve heard it before. Can you come back later?” She sat on the bed with her legs crossed, her shirt on the floor, her face turned toward me, a visual echo of the extinct who’d been here before.
“I have many duties.”
Back on the observation deck, the changeless tableau waited. Since the moon revolved very slowly in relation to the sun, the shadows were nearly the same as when I’d left. I accessed the recordings from the last couple of days, examining them closely for the dark-haired woman. She had come to the deck alone yesterday. The image of her walking slowly to the center of the room captured her grace. Truly, she moved like she’d been born in the shell and not recently taken it on. She stopped, dropped to her knees, stared at the lander as if she’d seen something surprising then shook her head and rubbed her eyes. The recording captured nothing on the Moon’s surface, though. The moon and abandoned equipment were the same as they had been for millions of years. Either her apparition was imagination, or it couldn’t be recorded with our instruments.
She didn’t come to the late presentation. The tourists listened as well as any group of them ever did, which meant barely at all. A few in the front of the group looked attentive, but the rest giggled and coughed and touched themselves during my chat. I suppose if they extended their stay, the skin shell’s novelty would wear off. The red-head who had propositioned me earlier was there, wearing clothes this time, but the pants were on backwards and unzipped. A woman next to her kept mumbling in her ear while I talked, and I realized it was the body we’d given the tourist who’d broken his fingers.
The deck was close to the ground again, so the lander stood taller than my head, as did the flag. I liked this time of day best, when the observatory didn’t cast a shadow on the artifacts. The group stood to the side so we didn’t put our shadows on the lander either.
“We have catalogued the numerous sites for your perusal, including site 423 with the dead explorers in the capsule. If you have signed up for the transport option, a shuttle will take you physically to our observatory there, or you may prefer to transfer directly into their flesh units. I suggest you take the real-time journey, though. We have replicated several of their vessels to give you a more authentic recreation of their technology. You will pass over numerous interesting and historical points on the way.”
As I talked, the dark-haired girl joined the group. At the same time, a figure moved in the background, beyond the observatory’s confines. Startled, I kept the presentation going. I’d spoken it so many times before that the speech required no attention on my part.
A bulky figure shuffled toward one of the experiments, kicking up dust that spayed straight away from its feet and fell in perfect parabolas. The equipment on its back made it top heavy, and looked as if it might tip it over at any point. The suit was white with dark gloves. Tubes dangled from the front, feeding into the huge pack on its back, and on its shoulder was a patch that matched the pattern of the flag by the lander.
The dark-haired woman followed my gaze so that she saw the apparition too. Two of the tourists looked behind them, and then chatted with each other. They had seen nothing. Only the dark-haired woman and myself could see the vision.
“It’s just litter,” said the red-haired woman. The woman next to her, who had now wrapped her arm around her waist, said, “They were children, weren’t they? They never escaped their sun. Their consciousnesses were shipwrecked within them.”
The spacesuited figure straightened from its task and gazed at the planet overhead. I tried to imagine what their home looked like when the atmosphere was clear and they could see all the way to the surface. There must have been visible bodies of water. Analysis indicated over half the planet may have been covered, and there could have been water vapor clouds too. What did it look like when their sun caught the water and reflected back like a jewel on fire?
For the longest time, the figure in the spacesuit looked up without moving, and then it vanished. The dark-haired woman was crying. Although the ancient records mentioned physical manifestations of emotions, I’d never seen a skin shell cry.
“We’re having a going away party in the cafeteria,” said the red-haired woman. “The shells are alcohol sensitive.”
I waited until the tourists had left. The dark-haired woman stayed behind too.
She came close to where I stood, next to the lander. “Do you think we made the skin shells so well that we can see the spirits of their dead? Are we seeing ghosts?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. They were a strange people who started a long trip they couldn’t finish.”
From my point of view, I could see most of the footprints they’d left, the scattering of equipment and tools, the lone flag duplicating the patch on the suited figure’s arm, but beyond the jumble of marks in the dust, the Moon’s surface was trackless. They’d only begun. They didn’t have groupmeld or the infoquarry. They couldn’t know any experience other than their own, each one of them, alone in themselves, working together to get so far.
The Moon’s gray surface was sobering and hopeful. Much could be accomplished by the isolated working together.
“How long will you stay?” I asked.
“If you don’t mind, a long time, I think.”
I took a deep breath. Even breathing produced sensations in the ancients’ shape. “I don’t mind.”
“I have to decide what to do with my life.”
Her voice sounded like it had come to belong to her. Unlike the tourists, she wasn’t borrowing it anymore. She was becoming herself in this shell, and I would never know more about her than she could share through the imperfections of speech and the limited (but intense!) senses of the skin shells.
And that seemed enough.
PLANT LIFE
Jermaine said, “Just being around growing young women makes me feel alive.” He poked a finger into the cement planter’s black dirt. “That’s where the excitement is, Bucko, and these are nearly ready to harvest.”