«It's an artifact,» said Irvane, oblivious. «Some sort of carved stone, or maybe porcelain.» He succeeded in freeing the thing from the corpse's grip and it rolled loose on the gravel.
I think even Irvane was taken aback by what he saw, because he didn't immediately seize the thing. I wouldn't have touched it either. It had a wizened gargoyle face of polished white stone, with a blackened hole in the top of its head. «It's another pipe,» someone said.
«Yes,» said Irvane. He was looking at the thing's eyes and they were looking at him. Or so it seemed to me. It was as if the thing's eyes, dark and liquid, were moving behind a translucent veil of stone. As if the stone hadn't melted from the eyes completely.
«Don't touch it,» said Jang, suddenly.
Irvane picked it up, his large face creased with annoyance, as if in resentful reaction to the sharp tone used by Jang, who was, after all, a mere hireling like me.
«It's just a clever carving,» he said, and then his face slackened in some small, but tangible way. «Still a little warm. Maybe heat from the body.»
For some reason everyone edged away from him slightly. But after a moment, Jang reached down and touched the corpse in the center of its chest. «Cold,» he said. «He must have died early last night.»
I took another step back. For some reason, all my formless anxiety had condensed and sharpened around the little carving. I had, after all, felt watched. And the thing had eyes.
I'm a very simple person now.
«Autopsy him,» Hu Moon said.
Jang nodded, and the rest of us went off to our various assignments, Irvane clutching the effigy pipe as tightly as Flash had.
Somewhere there's a manual for expedition leaders which includes a chapter entitled: «Acceptable Social Rituals and How to Organize Them.» Hu Moon had instituted a cocktail hour early in the voyage to Graylin IV, and the habit stuck. Every evening before dinner we gathered in the ship for a ration of grog, or whatever social lubricants we preferred, and then we viewed excerpts from the colony log and discussed the day's events.
Oddly enough, as a group we seemed to prefer antique drugs; I suppose this was due to the conservative nature of most academics. Hu Moon was a traditionalist; she took a tot or two of expensive Mundo del Mano rum. Irvane was another traditionalist; he liked to snort a line of organic cocaine, and it made him a little less phlegmatic. Jang smoked cannabis.., so much for the Jaworld claim that cannabis is the drug of choice for the peaceful person. Jang's preference was clearly based on other factors.
Dueine and I were the only puritans in the crew; we usually shared a healthful vegetable juice cocktail, though I added a shot of pepper sauce to mine.
Dueine avoided all recreational drugs. She claimed a constitutional propensity for addictive behavior, though she didn't seem old enough to have acquired that sort of knowledge about herself.
Dueine, with the directness of youth, asked me why I didn't participate in any of the available chemical distractions. I just shrugged and smiled, my usual response to difficult questions... I didn't care to discuss the specifics of my condition with curious children. She asked me again several times, as if her memory expired every day when she got up, and I'd always given her the same non-answer.
But that night, when she asked, I told her a small part of the truth. «Ah,» I said. «Here's the trouble. When I like something, I really like it. Know what I mean?» I leered at her, just to take the curse off this uncharacteristic outburst of semi-honesty.
She recoiled, naturally enough, though she didn't entirely lose her smile. I happened to glance at Hu Moon and saw that she'd fixed me with a cold poisonous glare.
Jang came in, moving in that unnerving soundless way of his, and Hu Moon set her glass aside. «Well? What did you discover?»
«It was a stroke, as we suspected,» he said.
She turned to me. «Leeson? I thought you said you checked the collars.»
Before I could respond, Jang spoke again. «There was nothing wrong with the collar. It cooked him before he died.»
Hu Moon settled back and took up her glass. «So, he was paralyzed, but it took him a while to expire?»
Jang shook his head. «I don't think so. The stroke was sudden and overwhelming. He died almost instantaneously... but after the collar had been cooking him for a long time, or so the data suggest.»
«Strange,» I said. «I wonder what he found so distracting that he could ignore that.»
Hu Moon's glance slid over me, dismissively. «What do you think happened?» she asked Jang.
«Don't know,» he answered. «It's very odd.»
«Anything else?»
Jang paused, as if considering the relevance of his data. «Perhaps. There were faint traces of some sort of fluid on his skin, resembling a mixture of blood and mucus.»
Hu Moon looked annoyed. «Oh for.... What are you saying? He was attacked by a pack of giant carnivorous slugs? The ones we haven't noticed yet?»
Jang responded with a small smile. «Possibly. But the substance, as best I can tell, is a simple non-biological imitation of those substances. It contains no traces of DNA or any other encoded protein. Fake mucus, fake blood.»
A small tense silence ensued. Then Dueine asked a question that seemed to come from no obvious source. «What did you say Flash did? His crime? That got him made into a servitor?»
Jang gave her a level, considering glance. «I didn't say, because I don't know,» he said, finally. «Do you think it matters?»
She shrugged.
«Well,» Jang said. «Here is my recommendation: we should avoid using icicle labor if possible. The controllers seem to be functioning unreliably, and we don't know why.»
Hu Moon nodded. «I'll consider your advice,» she said.
A chime summoned us to the holotank set up in the center of the ship's lounge. We took seats, and Hu Moon sat next to me. The lights lowered and she leaned against me. I might have enjoyed the contact, except that it was obviously not a friendly one. «Leave Dueine alone,» she hissed in my ear. «Can't you see that you make her uncomfortable?»
«Sorry,» I said, not taking her very seriously.
She made a faint spitting noise. «There are a dozen icicles left in the hold. If you can't control your sexual urges, let me know and I'll have one thawed for you. One of the women is quite fetching.»
I sat in the dark with my ears burning and a lump of rage in my throat. I know that I'm less subtle now than other people, but I can still recognize cruelty when it's offered to me.
We watched scenes from the colony's fifth year.
They had been a fairly small group, less than a hundred, but clever enough to understand the problems associated with limited gene pools. Toddlers ran to and fro under the brown sunlight, and none of them looked much like their parents, though they had the dark skin and curly hair of the colonists, the black eyes and everted lips that had survived the centuries since their ancestors left Jaworld. Probably most of the children had been carried aboard as embryos frozen in stasis boxes, but likely some of the youngest came from living wombs. As the colonists had grown more secure in their new home, some of the women had evidently decided to take the time to gestate babies and were visibly pregnant.
The houses were quietly attractive, long low structures built from the gray fossil coral that cropped out here and there, the steep roofs thatched with plasticized marsh reeds. The doors and window frames were painted ultramarine blue, a touch of pure color in an otherwise umber and sepia landscape.
The colonists wore simple utilitarian garments of gray-brown fiber, identical to the universal one-piece shipsuits still in use these many centuries later. I could see, however, that fashion was raising its inconstant head. Some of the women had begun to wear colorful scarves wrapped at the waist. In their hair, in lieu of the flowers which had not evolved on Graylin IV, many wore the shells of fossil molluscs, thin shiny black disks with a faint blueish opalescence, strung like beads on cord dyed the same blue as the doors.