Expendable - James Alan Gardner [56]
Beyond her lay a village of glass. Why should I have been surprised?
We stood near the edge of a space two hundred meters in circumference, covered with a hemispherical dome. The dome was either jet-black itself or transparent to the lightless water of the lake. Underneath the dome stood two dozen buildings, all glass: high Moorish towers where the dome offered enough headroom, and squat rectangular blockhouses out on the periphery. Boulevards separated each structure from its neighbors; and looking to the middle of town, I saw a plaza where two glass fountains sprayed water high into the air.
Clear water. Clear glass. I found myself searching for any hint of color, a tint to the glass or a prism-effect that broke light into spectra; but the glass was as pristine as crystal, and the sky too muted for rainbows. I couldn’t even tell where the lighting came from—it was simply there, so pervasive it didn’t allow my eye the relief of shadows.
“Is my home not beautiful?” Oar asked.
“Austere,” I replied.
“What does that word mean?”
“Pure,” I said. “Clean.”
“Yes.” She sounded pleased. “Very very clean.”
Clean of everything—the streets were empty. Oar and I were the only people in sight.
A Tour
“Do you live here alone?” I asked.
“Do not be foolish,” Oar answered. “I have many many ancestors.”
“And they’re here?”
“Yes.”
I looked around. Certain Fringe Worlders believed their ancestors remained participants in their lives—ghosts who walked beside them unseen. The living would leave an empty seat at dinner so great-great-grandma could sit among them; and on Sitz, they took water spritzers with them into the bath, to squirt phantom uncles who might sneak in for a peek. Did Oar believe the same thing? I could think of no tactful way to ask. Oar was easy enough to offend without opening the topic of religion.
“Why don’t you give me a tour?” I suggested. “Show me the things I should see.”
“You should see everything, Festina. And I will show you everything.”
I nodded and put on a smile. Mentally, I reviewed my repertoire of facile compliments for all occasions—enthusing about architecture and other curios did not come naturally to me. Entertainment bubbles may portray Explorers as zealous to investigate alien cultures, but that wasn’t our job; we only established a secure foothold, after which the Fleet unloaded an army of xeno-ethnologists to do the true fieldwork. Right now, Oar’s tour was a chore, one more job between me and thinking about….
I had killed Yarrun.
I had watched Chee die.
“Lead on,” I told Oar. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy this.”
Food
“This makes food,” Oar said.
We stood in a one-storey blockhouse, not far from the access port where I had entered the city. The blockhouse consisted of a single room, with no furniture, no decorations…just a single glass pillar in the center of the floor, as thick as the trunk of a redwood. The surface was smooth, but dusty—all except a spotlessly clean niche half a meter deep, cut into the pillar at waist height.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“You say what you want, and the machine makes that for you.” She didn’t call me stupid this time, but her tone implied it.
“I doubt if your food synthesizer understands my language,” I said. “Unless the machine learned from Jelca and Ullis the same way you did.”
“The woman taught it some of your dishes,” Oar answered. “She said it was not hard to…” Oar paused, straining to remember an unfamiliar word. After a moment, it came to her: “Not hard to pro-gram.”
Good old blinky Ullis, I thought. Like many Explorers, she had been a superb programmer—the result of feeling more comfortable with machines than humans. I sympathized; I too had been a teenage hermit. As a farm girl, however, I had passed the solitary hours working with our livestock, not tinkering with circuit boards. At the Academy, Ullis tutored me in computing, and I helped her with exobiology.
“So,” I asked Oar, “what did Ullis program this machine to make?” I hadn’t eaten since leaving