James Van Pelt - Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

“The moon wouldn’t be as large to them as the planet is to us, but it’s true they would see it. Maybe having a goal so visible drew them into space. It might have caused them to develop technologies before they could handle them.”

She let her gaze wander across the landscape. As I said, the personality behind the shell was more interesting than the shell. Whoever animated this one had layers. “I would be afraid. As I slept, I would feel the moon, bigger than anything in the night. It would be bright, wouldn’t it, like another sun?”

“Maybe, I don’t know. I haven’t seen the moon from a distance.”

She sat on the floor so that she could see the landing site between her spread legs, a surprisingly graceful move for a tourist, but then I remembered she’d had weeks more practice than the rest of them. In fact, after me, she would be the most experienced person at the observatory in her skin shell. She pressed her hands against the smooth surface. “Were they a species that made myths? Did they have explanations for their moon, before they began exploring space, I mean? Many species worshipped their sun when they were young. Maybe they worshipped their sun and their moon, or maybe some of them believed in the god of one but not the other. There could have been wars. What if they came to the moon because they hoped to find a god, and when they didn’t they had no reason to live?”

I wanted suddenly to sit beside her. My normal presentation didn’t cover this material. They were the questions I thought about. “We know some about them, but not what you are asking. The artifacts don’t tell us everything.”

Two more tourists came into the room, two of the male shells. One held the other’s arm. “We were experimenting with durability,” said the first, supporting the weight of the other’s arm in his hands.

“The digits break,” said the second. “And they hurt! It still hurts! Must be a flaw in the design. If the system is damaged, you should get the signal and then be able to turn it off. I’m very uncomfortable!”

“He’s never had an endoskeleton. I told him the little things could snap, but he put them in the door anyway,” said the first one apologetically.

Two of the man’s fingers were bent backwards unnaturally. The knuckles were swollen and purple.

I thought that I was lucky he hadn’t destroyed the shell entirely. On the last tour, a tourist entered an airlock without protection and opened it. When I talked to the angry guest remotely an hour later to explain that he’d lost his damage deposit, he complained that he shouldn’t be responsible for a unit too fragile for a change in environmental conditions. He also complained about the pain. “I was so distracted that I almost stayed with it until it expired. I’ll have to have the experience wiped. Very traumatic,” he said bitterly.

I said to the man with the broken fingers, “We can load you into an undamaged shell.”

“Good,” he said. “I’m going to try the other gender. I understand the experience is different.”

They left, headed for the decanter center where he would transfer his consciousness to an empty shell.

The woman on the floor laughed, an utterance tourists didn’t handle well. “I talked to him earlier. He was mad because they wouldn’t rent him two shells at the same time so he could have sex with himself. I’ll bet he didn’t break his fingers in a door.”

I shook my head, a gesture I’d seen in one of the historical records. I realized she wouldn’t know what it meant. “What a waste. You’d think he could get whatever weird simulated interactions with himself he wanted, without renting real shells.”

She leaned forward, almost folding herself in half on the floor. “I can always tell when it’s a simulation.”

Thirty feet below, every pebble cast a long shadow. Shadows filled the footprints too, shallow as they were. She was right. If this were a simulation, I’d feel the falseness of the information. My senses would bump against the experience. Tech folks called it “perceptional dissonance,” the distance between what the simulation is feeding to your consciousness and what your sensory organs are not telling you. Most beings don’t notice the dissonance, or they don’t care, but, for purists, the real experience is worth the tiny improvement.

“I was here yesterday, before the tour.” She pressed the side of her face against the floor. It would be cool and smooth. “I thought I saw something move next to the lander. That’s why I decided to talk to you.”

My skin prickled, a reaction I’d never felt in this body. “What do you mean?”

“I thought I saw someone in a space suit. Its head was encased. The image only lasted a second.” She sat up, then stood, running her hands up and down her arms. “These shells send so much information. When I touch myself, why do I feel it both with my hand and my skin? It’s redundant. I took a shower my first day; I thought I would fall unconscious with the overload. There were so many sensations, touch, taste, feel, sound, sight. How could these creatures think with their bodies signaling them about everything?”

I’d forgotten what my training days in the shell had been like. Most of the tourists reveled in the sensations—not that these bodies were the most sensitive in the universe. Few rivaled them though.

“Sleep scares me,” she said, “even when I’m tired. In sleep, the shell sends me signals. Strange images. Emotions.”

“Dreams.”

“I know. The orientation mentioned them, but experiencing them is different.”

I wondered if it was possible that she was new to body porting. Veteran tourists didn’t comment on this level of being in the shells, and veterans wouldn’t stay in the same shell for an extended period. Other shells provided as many or more variations, although none of them combined them like these did. “If you go back to your room, I can send you a drug that will tone down the sensory system. You can build to full engagement gradually.”

“No, I’m getting used to it. I do think I’ll go to my room to rest, though. Turning down the light and shutting away sounds helps. They even have a sense of smell! What a vivid world these creatures lived in.”

I nodded. Most tourists noticed the shell’s limitations. No overmeld capabilities. No tie to universal data. Faulty memory. Odd mental connectivity issues that sometimes strung thoughts together in a peculiar fashion. Physiologically induced emotions. Dreams.

“I have more questions, if you have a moment.” She looked at me for the first time. “But I’m tired. Could you come to my room?”

Normally I would say no. This could be another blatant foray into sex.

I surprised myself. “Yes, if I have time.”

When she left, I moved the observatory back to the surface level. The floor reshaped itself to take on the terrain’s contours, wrapping around the artifacts so they could be inspected up close without actually touching them. I knelt at the lander’s feet to reexamine the ancient explorers’ markings on the ground. Nothing had changed. Whatever the dark-haired woman had seen was in her imagination, but I’d seen movement too on the airless surface once, from the corner of my eye, when I glanced away, for an instant, the flag that stood next to the lander shifted as if a hand was placing it there. The impression was so strong that I checked the playback. I saw my own reaction to the movement—I flinched—but the flag hadn’t moved. Another time I saw a figure.

Some of the information they’d included on their probes mentioned religion. Clearly they believed in an afterlife. As desperately as they flung their machines into the sky (the period where they could escape their planet was vanishingly short), I wondered if they were trying to reach their heaven. Maybe the dark-haired tourist was right about them.