My Will

But I was an Explorer, a good Explorer, and therefore a realist. I didn't have much time, but I keyed the computer for audio input and dictated the following. "Instructions: lock the room and do not open until you register my voice print or Yarrun's. Confirm?" It beeped once, then responded, "Confirmed."

"If anyone overrides my instructions by asserting that I am dead or Lost on Landing, you will immediately inform Captain Prope and Fleet Central Records that I bequeath my egg collection and all personal effects to…"

To whom? My parents were dead. Yarrun would be my second choice, but he was about to go Oh Shit with me. Perhaps I could leave everything to my old crush Jelca… but no, a classmate told me he had gone Lost three years ago; she hadn't known the details. No other friends came to mind. No one really…

"I bequeath my collection and personal effects to Admiral Seele. Confirm?"

"Confirmed."

There. Everything to my first Admiral, the one who wept and tried to hold my hand. It was a bequest Prope and Harque wouldn't dare ignore. And Seele cared for me in her way. As good a way as any.

I wondered if she belonged to the High Council now. I wondered if she had been the one who picked me to take Chee to Melaquin. If so, receiving my collection would unsettle her.

It would seem like some kind of gesture.

In the Halls (Part 2)

While I was asleep, the day shift had come on duty. The corridors were now filled with crew members striding along, wearing self-important airs that told the world they had Things to Do. Most pretended to be so absorbed by their obligations that they didn't notice me; those who couldn't pull off such obliviousness doffed self-conscious salutes to me without meeting my eyes.

As I passed open hatchways, I heard snippets of conversation. The crew seemed bursting to tell each other that Admiral Chee was on board. ("A real admiral, but he's here incognito, so keep it secret.") Each of them had a theory why Chee was here: Prope was going to be court-martialled; Prope was going to be promoted; the League of Peoples had decided humanity was mature enough to receive another technological "gift," and the Jacaranda was taking the admiral to pick it up.

Once in a while, the gossipers noticed me and instantly went silent. Before I passed out of earshot, their babble began again with, "I'll bet she knows."

And yet no one spoke directly to me. No one asked if I had news. It was as if I were encased in glass walls that no one could break through — not them, and not me.

Even now, that's how I remember the Jacaranda.

First Sighting

On the bridge, Harque sat at the pilot's console and occasionally tapped a key to make course corrections. Chee frolicked behind him in the captain's command chair, swivelling left and right as far as it would go. Thunk, an arm of the chair would hit the engineering monitor panel; thunk, the other arm would hit the communications board.

Prope clenched her fists tighter with every collision… which was no doubt why Chee did it.

Yarrun had already taken his place at the Explorer station, and was programming probe drones for preliminary surveys of the planet surface. This was routine work; he nodded to me as I walked by, then went back to his gauges.

On the view screen, a purple speck had begun to differentiate itself from the background of bluish stars. We were not on a direct course at the moment, so the speck drifted slowly to the left. I grabbed one arm of the command chair and stopped Chee's gyrations long enough to push a button on the chair's control pad. The purple spot blossomed to the size of a baby prune.

"I thought Melaquin was supposed to be Earthlike," Chee said. "Why is it purple?"

"Blueshift from our speed of approach," Prope answered. "I can computer-correct the color if you let me work the controls…"

But Chee had already keyed in the correction, plus an extra level of magnification. He muttered, "She thinks I've never heard of blueshifting. I just forgot, is all. Too long since I've been on a real bridge…"

"Anything special for the probes?" Yarrun asked me for the sake of formality. The rules of rank said he should defer to me, but his programming skills were at least as good as mine, and his planetography intuition was superb. I waved for him to proceed and he turned a knob. "Probes away."

Four projectiles appeared on the screen and sped toward the planet. They looked like ejaculated Sperm, wearing a milky film dragged off the Jacaranda's own envelope. The wispy white coating hung loosely about the probes, held by the faint magnetic fields generated as a side effect of internal electronics; but within a few minutes, those Sperm coverings would lose their grip and fall away into hot little eddies of nonrelativistic spacetime that would take years to normalize. I watched as the Sperm cover slipped off one of the probes, curled, and rolled in on itself; but before the other covers did the same, the computer running the monitor lost its battle to keep the probes visible, and they vanished into darkness.

"Shot our wad, did we?" Chee asked.

Prope winced at the expression.

"Yes, sir," I told Chee. "Now Melaquin knows we're coming."

Sitting on the Edge of Immortality

Time crawled by. The probes would take five or six minutes to reach the planet and assume their initial scan configuration, then there'd be another two minutes before we started receiving data.

One of our instructors at the Academy (Explorer Commander Dendron, afflicted with a progressive muscle disorder that pulled his face taut over his bones like a rubber mask stretched on a cannonball) encouraged us to smoke a pipe of tobacco during this waiting interval. "Nothing like a comfortable pipe," he would say whenever he could manipulate a lecture in that direction. "Calms you, gives you something to do with your hands, and irritates hell out of the Regular Vacuum types. Imbues the upholstery with your presence too — you may go Oh Shit within the hour, but the smell of pipe smoke will stink up everything till the ship gets decommissioned. What other immortality do we have?"

In fact, ECMs were granted another form of immortality besides tobacco fumes: the Memory Wall at the Explorer Academy. The wall recorded the names of all Explorers who went Oh Shit in the course of duty. Perhaps it was significant that Commander Dendron didn't consider our Memory Wall as a true memorial for the Lost. You had to be remembered by "real people" — other Explorers didn't count.

Chee's Pipe

Neither Yarrun nor I had been swayed by Dendron's suggestion; we did not smoke as the probes sped toward Melaquin. Chee, however, chose that moment to pull a briar pipe and leather pouch from an inner pocket of his jacket. As he opened the pouch and pulled out a pinch of dark-brown shreds, the rich brandied aroma of tobacco took command of the bridge. I had smelled pipe tobacco before (Dendron's brand if nothing else), and the odor usually had a metallic tang to it… like the taste of water that has been stored too long in a steel canteen. Chee's tobacco, however, had a thicker, purer scent; somehow nostalgic, though I couldn't imagine why.

Chee must have noticed me eyeing his tobacco, for he offered the pouch for me to inspect. "It's the real thing, Ramos. Rank hath its privileges."

I took the pouch and inhaled deeply in spite of myself. "What do you mean?" I asked.

"This tobacco was stolen under cover of darkness from Old Earth itself. I organized the raid personally. Five Explorers landed on the island that used to be known as Cuba, primed as much ripe leaf as they could get in fifteen minutes, then scampered back to the ship just before the Spark Lords arrived with weapons blazing."