Expendable - James Alan Gardner [51]
So was she.
I tried not to think of her alone with Jelca on this planet. It gave me a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach.
Away
I asked, “Where did they go, Oar?”
“Away.” She pointed in the direction of the bluffs—south. “They said they had to join with other fucking Explorers, but that was just an excuse. Jelca left because he wanted to go.”
Other Explorers…Jelca must have contacted some of the others marooned here. He could have cobbled together a radio, possibly by cannibalizing his Bumbler—he came from a Fringe World where children learned electronics from the age of three—and he’d managed to contact other Explorers on the planet.
“Oar,” I said, “you have to believe Jelca wasn’t making up excuses. If he found out about other Explorers, he’d have to….”
I didn’t finish my sentence. Oar’s fierce expression told me she wouldn’t believe a word in Jelca’s defense. “Okay,” I conceded. “Okay.” There was no point in angering her. She sniffed a bit, then went for another handful of pebbles.
Visible Light
In time, Chee’s pockets bulged with rocks. The interior of his suit was less full, but it would do—when I gave his body an experimental shove, I could barely move him. No amount of ballast would weigh him down forever, but we’d done enough to keep him submerged for a good long time, provided we started him out deep enough.
Getting him away from shore was the trick. I could drag the body as far as I could wade, but it was too heavy to swim with—smart Explorers don’t dogpaddle while carrying an anchor. Oar had shown she couldn’t swim at all, and the wrinkled curls of driftwood on the beach were too small for building a raft. For a moment, I considered giving up on the burial at sea and just digging a grave in the sand; but then I thought about Chee’s last desperate attempt at speaking. “Suh…suh…” Although I had no confidence he really wanted to be committed to the water, I wanted to do something that felt like granting his final request.
“Oar,” I said, “do you have any ideas how to take my friend out into the lake?”
She answered immediately, “We will carry him on my boat.”
“You have a boat?”
“It will come when I call. Stay here.”
She walked away down the beach, giving me the chance for something I’d been longing to do since she appeared. Casually activating the Bumbler, I aimed the scanner at her smoothly sculpted back and did a quick run through the EM band.
In the visible spectrum, she was transparent; but at every other wavelength, she gauged very close to Homo sapiens. IR readings showed her body temperature was less than a degree warmer than mine—or what mine would have been if I weren’t shivering on an open beach in a wet cotton chemise. On UV, she looked just as opaque as I did; and on X-ray, she actually showed a skeleton and the ghosts of internal organs. To my untrained eye, the images of bone and tissue looked entirely human…except that none of it showed up with visible light.
An invisible heart, beating in her chest.
Invisible lungs, processing air.
Invisible brain, glands, liver, gall bladder…all wrapped up in a glassy epidermis that let light through unimpeded.
Could she possibly be a machine? Unlikely. Machines tend to have IR hot spots: power packs, transformers, things like that. Oar’s body temperature was more evenly distributed—like mine, to be honest, with head and thorax warmer than the extremities but none of the sharp gradients you see in androids. Organisms also emit waves in the radio band with a completely different pattern from machines; nervous systems transmit their signals in ways wires can’t imitate…not even biosynthetic wires made from organic molecules.
No—Oar was not built on an assembly line. That still didn’t make her “natural”…most likely, she was the result of DNA tinkering.