Expendable - James Alan Gardner [73]
I found a depth where I could stand on the bottom and keep the tip of the airway just above the surface. The taste of it was sour in my mouth. I had washed it since the Landing, washed it over and over again; but I still imagined I could taste the rusty flavor of blood on the plastic.
Trying to refocus my thoughts, I aimed the Bumbler’s scanner straight up at the outside world. In the muddy water, I had to amplify the Bumbler’s brightness before I could make out the screen; but my eyes adjusted soon enough to give me an adequate view above the surface.
The sky. The creek banks.
Thirty seconds after we had hidden ourselves, a head peeked over the south bank.
At first, it looked like a fully human head: smooth brown skin; darker lips. But as I stared more closely, bile rose in my mouth. The head had no hair—or rather it had an abstracted glass simulation of hair, like Oar’s but a slightly different style…and the eyes were also like Oar’s, silvery globes with mirror surfaces.
The lips drew back in smile…or maybe a grimace. Inside the mouth, the teeth were clear as glass.
Sickened, I realized what I was seeing. This was a glass person just like Oar; but he or she had glued strips of skin onto cheeks, forehead, and throat.
Strips of human skin.
Part XII
SKIN
Hiding
The skin-covered face peered down a few seconds more, then withdrew. I stayed put, hoping Oar would do the same—she was under orders not to come out until I gave the okay. Still, she had only a brief supply of air, and was inexperienced using a scuba breather; I gave the signal to surface at the two minute mark, even though I would have preferred to stay under much longer.
Oar emerged silently and kept her mouth shut. Good; no matter how she might be given to outbursts, her cultural heritage placed priority on not being noticed. They built their villages underwater, they made themselves transparent, they cleaned all trace of their presence from the environment…no wonder Oar had the instinct to stay quiet when strangers were near.
I wondered if Skin-Face was the reason Oar’s people were so good at hiding.
For five minutes we remained in the water with only our heads showing. All that time, some devil’s advocate in my mind kept asking why we should cower. The skin on that glass face was probably just animal hide—perhaps leather from a buffalo carcass, scraped clean of fur and worn for harmless adornment. Believing it was human skin was morbid imagination…that and the blurriness of looking at the Bumbler screen through muddy water.
But if it had been human skin, it came from an Explorer, not someone with a glass body. And perhaps the accompanying radio transmissions had come from Explorer equipment: equipment stolen from my fellow ECMs along with their skins.
I made myself get out of the water when I could no longer control the chattering of my teeth—not fear, but the physical chill of a creek in waning autumn. For a while I shivered on shore, until the sun warmed me back to a tolerable temperature. Thank heavens R&D made the tightsuit from quick-dry fabric; I would only stay soggy for half an hour, after which the material’s natural insulation would be as good as a dry parka. In the meantime, I had to hug myself for warmth and wonder if Skin-Face would reappear.
He didn’t…or possibly she didn’t, although I was inclined to think of the stranger as male. Some atavistic prejudice in my subconscious still believed men were scarier than women.
Say it was a man, a glass man of Oar’s species: he must have heard the Bumbler’s alarm beeping and came to investigate. It had taken him more than a minute to arrive, so he hadn’t been nearby…close enough to hear it, but far enough away that he hadn’t recognized the sound as unnatural. When he saw nothing out of the ordinary, he must have decided the noise was just bird