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

I stood nearly on the dust, in an alien shell, surrounded by warm and nourishing air on the surface of an airless moon. Every seam, every curve in the metal, each crease in the crumpled foil they used to protect the vessel stood in sharp detail in the setting sun. I put my hand on the form-fitting floor that wrapped the lander, only an inch from the actual artifact. What had these beings hoped to find so far from home? Had they been satisfied to reach this inhospitable place?

I put my foot over one of the creased impressions left in the dust, and then stepped into each print for twenty paces so that I retraced the path one explorer took so long ago.

Nothing appeared. No suited figure. I remember the one I saw, its features hidden behind a metallic sheen of faceplate. It had hopped and skipped from the lander to a small solar array, and then vanished. Like the apparition the dark-haired woman had seen, it left no tracks. It might have retraced old footsteps too, as I just did.

A leg that supported our resort stood in the distance, cutting a shadow across the sun. Above me, the bulk of the guest rooms and the rest of the facility blocked the starry sky.

Without making a decision, I found myself at the dark-haired woman’s room. She didn’t speak when she let me in.

“You said you had questions.” I sat on the edge of her bed. The room had no other furniture. Part of a loaf of bread rested on the shelf by the door. We had no idea what the ancients’ food actually tasted like, but we had pictures, descriptions and a good sense of what the shells needed to maintain strength and health. All part of the experience.

She sat next to me. Most tourists don’t wash the shells often enough, and their bodies take on a stench. She smelled of the shower’s cleansing solutions. “Have you done this long?”

“Here?” I said. “Several years. The research is interesting.”

“And none of them are left? They never escaped this sun?”

“There’s no evidence they did. Their planet is tectonically active. All remnants of them and what happened to them has long since been buried. The atmosphere isn’t even the same.”

She turned to me, put her fingers on my arm and squeezed. “They did so much with so little.”

I shrugged, another gesture she wouldn’t understand. “Species come and go. For all I know, the species of my original shell is gone too.”

“You’re very old, aren’t you?”

It was an unexpected question, but how she said it revealed her. “You’re not,” I stated.

“I’m a reconstitute. Who I was broke down—the data corrupted—they said. Sometimes it happens, and out of what was left they made me.”

“How long ago?”

“Twenty years, conscious. There have been several rebuild sessions over time, and they stored me for a while.”

“I’ve never met someone who was young.”

“There’s a lot to see.” I realized she meant there was a lot for her to see, not that there was a lot to see of her.

She turned her back to me. “My skin is irritated. Can you scratch it?” She pulled her shirt off. “Be gentle. It’s all too intense.”

I brushed my fingernails lightly over her back at the shoulder blades.

“Lower, please.”

When I hit the spot she tensed and made a non-speaking sound.

“Is that better?”

“Yes, but please don’t stop.”

I traced circles and zig zags on her skin from the tops of her shoulders to her lower back, redoing the patterns again and again, gradually increasing the pressure. Soon her skin reddened, and I switched from scratching to kneading the muscles.

“That’s good. Can we switch places?”

I nodded. “Yes.” Was she interested in trying the sexual possibilities after all? If so, I had never seen this slower approach. The idea didn’t seem as repellent as it had earlier. I couldn’t tell if my change of attitude was mine or the shell’s, whose physical response showed her attentions had provoked it.

“Can you take your shirt off too?”

She mimicked the actions I’d done to her, barely touching my skin as she circled my shoulder blades or paralleled my backbone from neck to waist. I’d ignored the shell’s possibilities for a long time. It’s true that you can get used to anything, but as I sat on her bed, no longer thinking about shepherding tourists or the difficulties of putting together a coherent story about an eons dead civilization, I became aware again of the shell’s sensory powers. Beside her clean scent, I smelled the bread on the shelf, and the slight chemical tinge that was in the observatory’s air, always. The pervasive but dim light emanating from the walls killed shadows, a welcome change from the starkness of the light on the moon’s surface. My hands rested on my thighs in the soft light. I thought about the oddness of my fingers’ design, but also the cleverness of how they could manipulate tools, their adaptability. And I could hear her breathing, and the sound she made when she shifted behind me, even the whisper her fingernails made against my skin.

Mostly I felt.

I’ve had sex in these shells, and there’s much to recommend the experience, but the action is short, short compared to what the dark-haired woman was doing to my back. She leaned forward, placed her forearms on me, rubbing the skin with her skin, pressing against the muscles, sending signals to me of movement, friction, pressure and warmth.

I made a sound like the one she’d made earlier. For the moment, my universe closed to become focused and small.

The ancients truly were primitives to have so many senses tuned so high. Their lives must have been dangerous and brutal. Why have sensitive spots on their backs, which they would never feel something with, unless they were constantly expecting danger? But if the sense of touch everywhere was to preserve them, why did being touched there feel so good?

I moaned again.

“I can’t groupmeld,” she said. Her hands stopped.

“How is that possible?”

“Limitations in the adaptability of my reconstruct, evidently. I don’t miss it, really. I’ve never known what it is like.” She scratched the small of my back with short, gentle motions. “I thought you might like to know in case you wanted to find me there.”

Her touch floated from spot to spot. My entire back tingled from her ministrations. I said, “I haven’t done a groupmeld for a long time, but it’s a comfort to know I can when I’m ready,” which wasn’t true. I hadn’t integrated my consciousness with the infoquarry since I’d taken over this skin shell, and I didn’t want to. It was the tourists, I think, mistreating the shells, ignoring the import of the artifacts, bumping against anything that would bump back while they were here. They could be in the groupmeld too, adding or taking what they wanted from everyone else. Plus, a groupmeld disoriented me, made me lose a bit of self, at least for a while. Many of the friends I’d had long ago went in and never came out, joining the overmind. The last time I’d melded, I’d sensed for an instant a friend’s familiar thought, like a ghost, but it flittered away, and I couldn’t find it again.

She said, “Sometimes when I get to know someone, they ask to meet me in the groupmeld. I just wanted you to know I couldn’t. I only know what I know, and nothing else, and you can never know me.”

I thought about the lander sitting on the lunar surface and the tracks around it. The ancients left evidence, but I could not talk to them. Being in their bodies wasn’t the same as the groupmeld. I’d never know them either.

She kissed my back, her breath hot and moist. “The skin has a taste,” she said.

I stood. “There are other visitors I should attend to. Will you be at the afternoon session? We’ll do a discussion of the ethics of archeological tourism.”