Rajnar Vajra: Her Scales Shine Like Music

The following day and evening she didn’t appear, and I was afraid that I’d permanently driven her away.

Next morning, I headed right to the beach, determined to camp there all day. Every few minutes, I called to her. Stupid, I know, but I desperately needed her companionship.

She rose from the lake in the late afternoon like the birth of some alien oversized Venus, and swiftly fashioned a new sculpture, a near-perfect replica of the chair currently supporting me. The only things missing were the little guy wires I’d improvised to keep the thing from blowing away when I wasn’t ensconced in it.

She pushed this replica halfway toward me, set it down on the sand, and waited. I’d formed an idea of what she’d been trying to tell me with her other two sculptures, but had kept playing stupid. Sure, my hopes of rescue were reduced to fumes, but if the RE cavalry did arrive, I wanted the alien campsite to hold full value. If I was right about her motivations, and went along, it would punch a big hole in the potential money bucket.

Now her invitation had become too obvious to ignore. Question was, did I trust her enough to accept? And if I did, and it led where I expected, could I refuse her the help she’d been requesting for so long?

Some decisions—maybe most of them, for all I know—aren’t conscious. While I thought my internal debate still raged, my legs pushed me out of my chair and carried me over to hers. I turned around and sat. Even the texture her fronds had generated duplicated the feel of my chair. They lifted me high into the air as I watched the beach recede.

No queen or king had ever been carried on such a litter, or enjoyed such a butter-smooth ride. I’d expected my pilot-cum-vehicle to merely swing sideways to head in the right direction, but she backed quite a distance from the shore before she turned, never lowering me closer to the water by so much as a millimeter. Maybe she needed some serious elbow room to get her fins correctly aligned. If she had elbows, or fins.

Moving forward at last, with me for a figurehead, she didn’t rush but moved steadily parallel to the shore. She stopped, as I’d expected and feared, opposite the abandoned equipment, spun leisurely until my litter faced the campsite, and placed me so softly down on this beach that it felt like love.

I stood up, took a few steps toward higher ground, and watched her extend a squadron of tendrils straight toward the massive artifact she’d been mimicking for weeks. She stretched her flimsy-looking tentacles farther than seemed possible, but fell short of reaching the generator, if generator it was, by a good twenty meters. The tendrils trembled with strain, but had clearly reached their limit.

No mime had ever conveyed longing so plainly.

She held the posture for a full minute before withdrawing her tendrils all the way back into the lake, and then she waited, her equine-portion eyes steadily watching me.

I felt sick as I reviewed my lovely options and their ugly consequences. Just being this close to the campsite could be grounds to fire me if I were rescued, rescue admittedly becoming more unlikely with each passing hour. Moving one of these artifacts far enough toward the lake for my companion to reach it would surely get me fired, and the company would likely sic their legal department on me to ensure that RE would get the lion’s share of any money coming my way for the rest of my life. Then again, the Global Council could put me away for that life as a traitor to the human race, although, to be honest, betraying my Stardancer friends bothered me more. If my super-rorqual somehow removed the generator from the local inventory, that’s when my prospects would truly turn grim.

And what the fuck did she want the thing for? To begin a collection of junk left by scaredy-cat aliens she’d spooked?

I looked up at the small part of her that was currently visible, and she reached toward the generator again. Longing.

Having so many vital reasons to walk away from this, I could scarcely believe it when my legs began striding toward the artifact. Full of bitter disappointment in myself, nothing bittersweet about it, crushed with a sense of terrible loss with Tara the heaviest loss of all, I recognized that I’d already made my decision when I’d sat in that improvised chair.

I reached my goal, circumnavigated the thing, and touched the smooth surface with the back of my gloved hand in case it held a strong charge. Nothing happened. My instincts suggested I avoid those four deep openings that might be alien sockets, so I put both hands on the fattest part of the generator and gave it a gentle shove, a firm one, and then pushed for all I was worth. Nary a wobble. The device felt immovable, incredibly heavy. I nodded to myself. Suddenly my ethics issue had become an engineering problem.

Given a fulcrum, a long-enough lever, and a place to stand, I could topple this son of a bitch. Unfortunately, all I had available was a shovel with a handle too short to apply enough leverage to topple something this heavy. So I sighed, looking down the barrel of a whole lot of digging.

I went to retrieve the shovel, this time without relying on my previous ferry, and got to work, gradually and very carefully undercutting the artifact so it would fall sideways without falling on me. Luckily for me, it stood at the highest point of the campsite, so once it fell onto its curved side, the shovel’s handle should make a long enough lever to get it rolling. I hoped.

I’ll say this much for shoveling: After a few minutes, I didn’t feel the cold. I did feel some pre-blister irritation despite my gloves, and a great start on lumbago, despite my training in bending from hip joints rather than the back. Awkward positions soon become their own punishment.

A glance lake-ward told me that I’d lost my entertainment value. Even starlight would’ve revealed those scales. I planted the shovel in dirt, trudged over to my shelter, and treated myself to a full ration of dinner. I needed it.

Morning bloomed clear, bright, and warmer than usual. A perfect day not to shovel.

But I did, and after a miserable half hour or so, the thing suddenly lurched, catching me by surprise and providing me a jolt of paralyzing panic as it fell. It hit with a truly sincere thud, landing pretty much oriented as I’d planned. I’m not sure if my laugh came from relief at not being squished, or that I’d finally succeeded.

My laugh didn’t last long, drowned out by something much louder. It came from the lake. I spun around to look. My audience had returned, her scales painfully bright in direct sunlight and her eyes, more tsavorite than emerald, focused totally on me. I have no idea how she produced it, but the noise she’d made reminded me of a huge gong or temple bell struck by a giant’s mallet.

I sat in the cold dirt, slurping some of the water I’d brought along, and waited for my breathing to slow.

“Good news,” I called to her, “the hard part’s over.”

But, oh joy, when I set up my roll-your-own system with shovel handle and a thick rock, the surface dirt and sand proved so soft that it kept the device too trapped for me to get my new and least favorite toy moving. Which meant my troubles were far from over. I’d have to dig a very long trench, one deep enough to reach the firmer soil below.

After another two hours of back-ruining labor, I’d dispensed with my parka and both clothing layers beneath. Sweating in the near-freezing temperature, I stood up to see what my efforts had accomplished so far. My trench now stretched all the way from the object of my affliction perhaps two meters toward the lake. At this rate, I’d be done in about a week. I wasn’t a happy castaway.