Expendable - James Alan Gardner [11]
“Of course not. I gave you 20 cc’s of picollin.”
She didn’t hear me. “It doesn’t hurt because God is kind to those who come when She calls. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done, if you say yes, She’ll just sing you to sleep. La, la-lah, la, la-lah…”
The tune she sang in a broken whisper was a lullaby my own mother sang to me, years ago on my home planet of Agua—a lullaby sung over the thunderstorms that rattled our environment dome each night.
Day is done
Night is nigh
Farewell the sun
Sleep deep, don’t cry.
I couldn’t bear to look at her as she sang her own lullaby. Her face was purple with bruises from the fight that had gotten her stabbed. I took out my textbooks and read survival manuals till dawn, long after the singing had stopped.
Melaquin—The Unofficial Story (Part 2)
Phylar Tobit was once an Explorer. He was an Explorer by virtue of being born with a flipperlike left arm that ended in a half-hand where the elbow should have been. The three fingers on the hand looked like tiny boneless sausages.
Tobit lost his malformed arm on a planet whose name was a number and whose dominant lifeform resembled a blotchy cluster of rocks. One of those rocks bit off Tobit’s arm before he even knew the rocks could move…bit clean through his tightsuit, flesh, and bone in the blink of an eye.
The creature died with the first swallow halfway down its throat. Human meat was virulently poisonous to the beast. Statistics show that human flesh is toxic to eighty-seven percent of alien lifeforms who try eating it. Explorers take some comfort from this, like dying bees who know their stings have found a target.
But Tobit didn’t die. His partner stopped the bleeding in time—Explorers are taught every possible emergency surgical procedure. Phylar Tobit returned to a medical base and recovered.
The new Tobit presented the Admiralty with a problem. He was no longer a repulsive flippered thing; he was merely a man who was missing an arm. Further, the arm could be replaced by a myoelectric one—not quite as good as a true arm, but a thousand times more effective than the one he had lost. Perhaps someone in the Admiralty contemplated giving Tobit a prosthetic duplicate of his flipper instead of a real arm…but that would have outraged the entire Explorer Corps, maybe even the regular Vacuum service. Anyway, an off-the-rack arm doesn’t cost as much as a custom-built one, and the Fleet likes to be frugal.
The Admiralty had to accept that Phylar Tobit now looked too much like a real person to serve as an active Explorer. So Tobit and his new plastic arm were assigned teaching duty at the Academy.
He did not get along with his students, and we did not get along with him. This was normal. Our teachers were all former Explorers who had won safe desk jobs, by accident or by gutless sucking up. They were the dregs of the Corps, and we students knew it. The teachers hated us in turn because of the guilt they felt, blithely preparing us for short lives as planet fodder. Perhaps this was planned by the Admiralty, to show us how small-spirited Explorers could become.
What set Tobit apart from the rest was his drinking. The other teachers, still blessed with the repugnance that originally marked them as Explorers, stood under threat of transfer to active duty if they failed to toe the line. Tobit had nothing to fear but absolute discharge, and no Explorer feared that. While he put in his time, he soaked up the oldest drug in the world and was seldom sober.
Every morning he would stumble to class, surrounded by an alcoholic cloud we could smell at the back of the room. Every evening he would sit alone in the Academy lounge, his artificial hand wrapped around a whisky glass with THE BLIND PIG inscribed on it in gold letters. Eventually he would pass out and slide off his chair to the floor. We students would draw lots to see who would have to carry him to his quarters.
One such night, I happened to pull the short straw with another cadet named Laminir Jelca. I had a crush on Jelca at