Expendable - James Alan Gardner [45]
I liked moonlight. Even colored moonlight.
Moonlight was forgiving when I looked in the mirror.
Down the Bluffs
Chee’s body was at my feet. I had clamped his helmet back in place on his suit so that crickets and grass wouldn’t go down his collar as I dragged him across the meadow. It wasn’t clear whether I should take the helmet off again when I finally got him to the lake. If this burial at sea was a matter of religion, maybe it was important for him to be in actual contact with the water. (And in contact with the fish who would chew his flesh…who would eventually float in the darkness of his picked-clean ribcage, as if he were a skeleton of coral.)
Stupid, Festina, I chided myself, keep it together a bit longer. Be hard, be hard, until you’ve done what needs doing.
So I pulled my gaze away from the moon and started hauling the admiral down the bluffs.
The slope was steep but not forbiddingly so. I could dig my feet into the sandy soil and keep my balance by hanging onto the weeds that grew on the slanting face.
Burdock. Nettles. Thistles.
Stumbling down in the dark, I didn’t like so many thorns clustered around me…but the tightsuit was as tough as plate mail, proof against anything a milquetoast terrestrial weed could dish out. Chee was protected, I was protected, and gravity was in our favor; so we proceeded down the bluffs in a controlled slide, me on my feet tugging Chee on his back, headfirst so he didn’t get caught in bushes.
I was also lugging the Bumbler, which I refused to leave back at the Landing site: a slow-witted proximity alarm was better than no alarm at all. I had no partner now to watch my back.
At the bottom of my climb, the weeds ended abruptly at the beach: a wet, narrow beach, littered with driftwood, clam shells, and half-rotted fish. I could see the place clearly, thanks to the moon…and I could smell it clearly too, with the air moldering breezeless in the shelter of the bluffs. Ocean shores smell of salt; fresh water smells of the day’s decay.
With the admiral safely down from the bluffs, I rewarded myself with a rest, sitting on a driftwood log: a time to catch my breath, to listen to the waves, to debate whether I should leave Chee’s suit open or closed. If he stayed helmet on, he would float—the air in his suit would buoy him up like a life preserver. Floating, he would soon drift to shore; so perhaps I had to take off his helmet and fill his tightsuit with rocks…enough to weigh him down until the water had its way with him.
Was that what he would have wanted? I didn’t know. I didn’t want to make the decision.
I might have sat on that driftwood a long time, if a glass coffin hadn’t risen out of the lake.
Glass
The coffin surfaced silently, sending out ripples under the moonlight. Its glass had a mirror polish, dappled with drops and trickles of water; the sheen reflected the shadowed bluffs, making it impossible to see inside. As smooth as a swan the coffin slid across the waters, until it nudged the beach only twenty meters away from me.
I held my breath as the coffin lid opened. A woman lying face down inside pushed herself up and stepped onto the sand.
A nude woman made of glass.
The glass was clear and colorless. I could see right through her, the beach beyond distorted by a woman-shaped lens.
She was my height, but she looked like an Art Deco figurine. Everything about her seemed sleek and stylized—the long sweep of her legs, the slim torso, the high-cheekboned face. Her hair was not hair but the suggestion of hair: smooth glass swaths which were not differentiated into separate strands. That went for both the hair on her head and the tasteful implications of hair on her pubis…nothing so earthy as real genitalia, but an artistic rendering which hinted at some platonic ideal.
What was she doing here? On a planet with real worms, real butterflies and real killdeer, how could there be such a patently unreal woman? She was out of place, disturbing. Alien.
And so beautiful, she filled me with shame at my own flaws.
The woman walked onto the beach the way