Expendable - James Alan Gardner [114]
“How do I get there?” After getting directions, I headed out at a run.
Walton and Athelrod stared after me with bewildered expressions.
The Coming Cold
The air outside was cooler than the day before—enough to prick up goose pimples on my bare legs. At the west end of the valley, the sun had already dipped below the far peak, though the sky was still coldly bright. Trying not to shiver, I hurried up the forest trail that led to the weather station. The world smelled of damp pine and winter.
I found Jelca sitting on a high rock looking down on the river that wound along the base of the mountain. The water ran fast and shallow; even though it was dozens of meters below us, I could hear the rattle of it running over its gravel bed. The sound was cold. The world was cold. In the forest behind us, each tree felt closed in on itself, withdrawing into its own thoughts as winter approached. The stone everywhere—under Jelca, under my feet, under the snow caps of the mountains—looked like it had been dark gray once but was now bleached pale with disappointment.
Jelca turned to look my way. He said nothing. Behind him, a small anemometer rotated listlessly as its cups accepted the wind.
I waited for him to speak.
“Ullis told me it was artificial skin,” he said at last.
“Yes.”
“Really just a bandage.”
“That’s right.”
He stared at my cheek a few more seconds. “So that’s it then. You’ve made it.”
“Made what?”
“Full human status.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
He said nothing for a moment. He wasn’t even looking at me. Then: “You know what the strange thing is? When I thought of you, I pictured you this way. Without the birthmark. I would have said it wasn’t part of my mental image of you; the birthmark made no impression on my mind. But I was wrong. When I saw you yesterday, you looked like one of them. The bastards who banished us here. It was like they’d stolen one more thing from me.”
He thought of me, I told myself. I wanted to ask him a hundred questions about what he’d thought, when it happened, everything that had passed through his mind.
No. I refused to let down my guard with him. Not now.
Probably never.
“I’m being ridiculous,” he said. “Why should I mind that you look so beautiful?”
Beautiful. He found me beautiful.
“Jelca,” I said. “Did you kill Eel?”
He was silent a moment, then nodded.
Accidents and Reality
“It was an accident,” he said.
I sat down on the rock, separated from him by only an arm’s length. The stone was cold beneath me…very cold, despite its exposure to the long day’s sun.
“An accident,” he repeated. “A mistake right from the beginning.” He glanced at me. “You probably think I’m shit.”
I didn’t trust myself to say yes or no.
“There’s no point trying to justify myself,” he said. “When I met Eel and Oar, I was just looking to vent myself. Vent everything I felt about being heaved into exile with a piss-hole like Kalovski…and there were Eel and Oar. Looking so perfect it made me furious. Artificial people—like all the artificial people in the Fleet and everywhere. So I….”
When he didn’t finish his sentence, I said, “You either raped or seduced them.”
He shrugged. “I either raped or seduced them. Couldn’t tell you which. They didn’t put up a fight, but they didn’t understand what was going on either. It happened, the two of them together that first time, because I couldn’t stop myself. Well, no—because I couldn’t bother to stop myself. I couldn’t think of any reason that made it worth the trouble.”
“Eel and Oar themselves should have been enough reason.”
“You’d think so,” he admitted. “But the truth is, they weren’t real women. None of them are real human beings. They’re glass models of human beings…or what the League of Peoples believes humans should be. Beautiful dead ends, just as most people in the Technocracy are beautiful dead ends.
“You know what I once thought?” he went on. “I thought the whole Explorer Corps was a training program for real people. Everyone else was pampered and spoiled, but we were real. The Admiralty wouldn’t let doctors cure our problems because they wanted