Expendable - James Alan Gardner [60]
Thank you, I whispered to the air. Jelca had left me the means to follow him.
The Picture Box
“This box makes pictures,” Oar said behind my back.
She pointed to a crystal screen embedded in the wall…or more accurately, embedded in what was left of the wall. Jelca had ripped away much of the material around the screen so he could get in behind it—into a mass of fiberoptic cable and circuits feeding the screen. By the looks of it, this was a native Melaquinian television; and Jelca had either tried to repair it or plunder it for parts.
“The screen showed pictures?” I asked.
“Yes. Pictures of ugly Explorers.”
“Jelca and Ullis?”
“No, different Explorers.”
“Different…” I forced myself not to lunge for the TV. If other Explorers could broadcast television signals, they must have developed a substantial technological base—either that or they had drawn upon existing Melaquin resources. Now that I thought about it, normal TV/radio waves could never reach here under the lake. The dome must have a concealed antenna or cable feed reaching up to the outside world. Perhaps the planet supported hundreds of hidden villages like this one, connected by a shielded cable network: a network that would allow communication from one village to another, but whose transmissions would not be detectable from space.
And my fellow Explorers had tapped into that system.
“Oar,” I said, “I’d like to turn on the machine.”
“You may not see anything,” she answered. “The pictures only come for a short while, then go away. And they are always the same stupid Explorers saying the same stupid things.”
It must be a looped signal saying, “Hello new arrivals, here’s where everyone else is.” With clumsy fingers, I clicked the TV’s switch. The screen lit with a display of static. For some reason, I had convinced myself it would show a picture immediately; but ten minutes passed (Oar tapping her toe impatiently) before a picture snapped into view.
“Greetings,” said a man on the screen. “I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples and I beg…”
I was too shocked to pay attention to the words. The man on the screen was Chee.
Part X
COMMUNICATION
Ears
The Chee on the screen looked younger—not so many lines on his face and only a few gray streaks in his black hair. He wore the hair down to his shoulders; but it couldn’t hide the huge misshapen ears sticking out from his head like purple-veined plates.
Those ears looked like botched engineering: some illconceived project to achieve God knows what. Even though it was illegal, there were always fools who tinkered with their offspring’s genes, failing to understand that a change in enzyme A might affect how the body used proteins B, C, and D. Most of the time, such alterations killed the child in utero; but occasionally, the fetus lived to full term, emerging from the womb with deformities like the man on the screen.
A man with the ears of a cartoon caricature. Or an Explorer.
Yes. Those ears would make him a prime candidate for the Academy…if he could still hear. If the malformed ears handicapped his hearing, Technocracy medicine would leap to the rescue: reconstructive surgery, prosthetic replacements, targeted virus therapy—whatever it took. But if the ears were merely grotesque, and the child was intelligent, healthy, psychologically pliable…on to the Academy.
Chee. An Explorer.
Was it really him? Could it just be a close relative, a brother, or even