Expendable - James Alan Gardner [112]
“Jelca is very very stupid about sperm,” Oar answered.
I gave her a look she couldn’t see through my suit.
Cursed with Hope
Minutes later, we were back on the street. Oar had replaced the suit where she found it, and my skin was rediscovering the joy of breathing; wearing the suit had been like being wrapped in plastic, close and sweaty.
I had decided not to move the ancestors away from the walls just yet. Oar assured me they were all getting enough light and air, and would scarcely notice a few more hours of overlapping each other. Putting the people back would tip off Jelca that he’d been discovered…and I didn’t want that until I was ready to confront him. At the very least, I had to talk with Ullis first. Maybe the other Explorers needed to know too; but maybe not.
Maybe Jelca had a sensible explanation for everything.
I know. I was being foolish. How much more evidence did I need that Jelca had degenerated into a self-centered bastard? Toying with Eel and Oar, then callously discarding them…hiding the generator from his fellow Explorers…giving me the cold shoulder as if I were a Vac-head….
And yet….
Since Oar had first told me he was here, I had dreamt about him. Thought about him. Imagined us together. Even earlier, during my years on the Jacaranda, he had crossed my mind now and then…especially when I lay beside some snoring substitute I had taken to bed because desperation got the better of me. Alone with my eggs, I invented fantasies about Jelca: a fellow Explorer I could make love with, not just a convenient Vacuum crew member to slick myself down.
I had such hopes. Stupid hopes—I knew that. But I had hoped that maybe, losing myself to Jelca would sear off my guilt, burn it away with white heat for just a few seconds. Whom else could I turn to? If I threw myself on another Explorer, or Ullis, or Oar, it would be so hollow, nothing more than drugging myself with sex. But with Jelca it could be different…couldn’t it? He was not just someone within arm’s reach, he was someone I’d thought about, dreamed about….
I’d even dated him. Twice.
This sounds so banal now. It embarrasses me. I’d say I was lying to myself, but the lies were so obvious I didn’t believe them, even at the time. Yet I wanted to believe. I wanted to have something with someone somewhere. Who else did I have but Jelca?
I wondered if Oar was thinking the same thing as we walked down the street in silence: patently false hopes, because the alternative was despair.
Transport Tunnels
We found Ullis in her cabin on the whale. She had jacked in to the ship’s system and was programming with fervid intensity.
“Jelca’s got a second Sperm-field generator,” I said. “Did you know?”
She blinked without speaking for several long seconds. Then she shook her head.
It took some time to give her the full story. When I was finished, she could offer no explanation of what he might be doing. “There’s no reason to generate Sperm tails on Melaquin,” she said. “Even if he wanted to set up a transport tunnel…no. What would be the point?”
“What is a transport tunnel?” Oar asked.
“A way of sending things very quickly from one place to another,” I answered. “A Sperm tail is a long tube of hyperspace…which means it’s really outside our normal universe. Physical laws are very different there. If you stuck your arm in one end of the tube, it would immediately emerge at the other end, even if the ends were thousands of kilometers apart. If you anchored one end here on Melaquin and another on the moon, say, you could reach through, pick up a handful of moon dust, and bring it back just like reaching through an open window.”
“I wouldn’t reach through that window if I were you,” Ullis said. “If you’re standing with normal Earth air pressure behind you, and