Expendable - James Alan Gardner [101]
Moving to her, I took her arm and patted her hand. “It’ll be all right…really.”
“I am scared,” she said in a small voice. “I feel strange in my stomach.”
“Don’t be afraid. Whatever happened between you and Jelca—”
She interrupted. “Will he want to give me his juices again?”
Ouch. “Do you want him to do that?” I asked.
“I am not such a one as needs Explorer juices!” she snapped. “I just do not want him to think I am stupid.”
“No one thinks you’re—”
“They left without telling me! All of them: Laminir Jelca, Ullis Naar, and my sister Eel. I woke one morning and they were gone. They took Eel with them, but not me.”
I studied her for a moment. “You’re angry at Eel?”
“She was my sister. She was my sister but she went with the fucking Explorers and left me alone.”
“Oar…” I wrapped my arms around her. “You aren’t alone now. You’re with me. We’re friends.”
She hugged me, crying, her head on my shoulder. That was how we were standing when the elevator opened…and damned if I didn’t try to pull away, for fear Jelca might see us like that.
Oar’s grip was too strong for me to escape. Anyway, there was no one waiting on the other side of the door.
Reflections on the City
Beyond the door lay a city.
A city.
Oar’s home had been a village; Tobit’s a town. Here, in a cavern hollowed out of a mountain, there was space for thousands of buildings, perhaps millions of people.
All glass. All sterile. All empty and sad.
Listen. When you think of a glass city, do you imagine a crystal wonderland, bright-lit and glittering? Or perhaps something more mysterious, a glass labyrinth dreaming in permanent twilight? Then you don’t understand the ponderous monotony of it all. No color. No life. No grass, no trees, no gardens. No friendly lizards basking in the plazas, or pigeons strutting across the squares. No smells of the marketplace. No playgrounds. No butterflies.
Nothing but a vast glass graveyard.
I don’t know what the League intended on Melaquin. To build a refuge? A zoo? How had those humans of four thousand years ago reacted when they saw this new home? They had food, they had water, they had medicine and artificial skin; they even had obedient AIs to help and teach them. With all those comforts, it would be hard to walk away…but it would also be hard to live here, eternally colorless and odorless.
Or perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps those ancient people filled these streets with music…held dances, played jokes, painted murals on every glass surface. They were finally free from fear and want; their beautiful glass children would never starve down to skeletons, or cough themselves bloody from TB. Those first people might have lived joyously and died in comfortable peace, convinced this was truly a paradise.
That was four thousand years ago: the early ages of what humans call civilization. If those first generations painted these walls, the paint had long since flaked away. If they sang and danced, the tunes were forgotten. Human roots ran shallow on this planet; when the people of flesh died, their works crumbled, leaving only immortal glass.
Glass buildings. Glass children. Children who seemed to make no artworks, no songs, no sloppy messy life.
Was the problem physical…some lack in their glands, something the League left out when making these new versions of humanity? Or was the problem social? When the fear of death was gone, when offspring were rare, did you lose the incentive to achieve something beyond yourself?
I still don’t know. Whatever went wrong on Melaquin happened in every settlement on the planet—an astounding thing in itself—and it happened so long ago that no evidence remained of the loss.
All I saw was glass. A glass city.
Oar no doubt thought it beautiful. She too was glass.
Signs
The elevator was set into the outermost wall of the city: a wall of rough-hewn stone, striated with geological layers slanted twenty degrees to the horizontal. I have never liked caves—I