Expendable - James Alan Gardner [53]
Ouch, I thought: and I imagined Jelca and Oar enclosed there together, arms and legs entwined, sailing impassioned through the lake’s silent dark.
Half of me was sick with jealousy. The other half pictured myself in the same position with Jelca; and that half was not sick at all.
The Last of Chee
Oar began to tell me her plan, and in a moment, I collected myself enough to listen. She would board the boat and I would drape Chee’s body over it. At Oar’s command, the boat would sail slowly out into the lake. When they were far enough out, she would tell the boat to submerge and let the admiral slump off into the water. I had a hunch the boat’s glass was so slippery, Chee might slide off sooner than expected. Still, if they only got a stone’s throw from shore, it would be better than I could do wading; so I nodded and complimented Oar on the cleverness of her plan.
She smiled like a queen acknowledging the adoration of her subjects.
After Oar got into the coffin, I was left alone to heave Chee onto the lid. The rocks made him damnably heavy…and he was beginning to stiffen as well. Getting him into position took all my strength, plus leverage from sticks of driftwood; but at last I spreadeagled him face down on the glass, his arms dangling on either side of the coffin and his toes hooked over the forward edge. I wanted to send him out feetfirst, hoping he would stay in place longer—headfirst, there would be nothing to stop him from sliding backward, and the open collar of his suit would catch spray as the boat glided forward.
Oar could never be described as a patient woman. I had scarcely arranged Chee’s limbs when the boat pulled away, backing into the lake. This was the first close view I’d had of the coffin while it was moving; I saw nothing that looked like a propulsion system, nothing that told me how it pushed itself through the water. Whatever engines it had were completely silent. With no exhaust, no bubbling of hidden propellers, the boat quietly withdrew and glided off along the surface.
Soon I could see nothing but Chee’s tightsuit glistening in the moonlight. He lay quite still, his head toward me as he moved away. His thin white hair was slick with lightly splashed water; and I thought of Oar inside the boat, looking up through the glass at Chee’s lifeless face. He was just a stranger to her…. And yet, his death seemed to mean something profound to her.
The moon went behind a cloud and I lost sight of the body. Was that it? Was Chee gone forever? But the cloud passed and the moonlight sparkled again on white fabric far out on the water.
I raised my hand in the only heartfelt salute I ever gave an admiral, and held it there till he was out of sight.
Part IX
ADAPTATION
Seamstress
I don’t know how long I stood there; but I came to myself with a sudden shake, realizing I had been slipping into a daze that could not be healthy. Hypothermia is sly—it creeps in so gradually, you may never realize you’re dying. “And wouldn’t the other Explorers laugh?” I said. “Festina Ramos getting Lost so tamely.”
Then I added, “Wouldn’t my face be red?”
Getting giddy—definitely time for a campfire.
Tinder was easy to come by: brush from the bluffs, dead and dry as straw with winter coming on. Much of the driftwood was dry, too; I chose sticks from high up the beach, on the theory they’d arrived with the lake’s spring peak and had baked in the sun ever since. The hardest thing to find was my jar of matches. They’d been in a pouch of my tightsuit…and since the suit lay in hankie-sized pieces all over the sand, it took time to track down the right hunk.
Five minutes later, I had a fire: warmth, light, salvation. I cuddled up to it till I’d steamed off my immediate chill, then began to make short forays out to retrieve more scraps of my tightsuit.
I had accumulated a pile of fabric beside the fire when I found the pouch I was looking for, impaled on the thorns of a bush whose species I didn’t recognize. A brief struggle pulled the pouch