Ascending
( League of Peoples - 5 )
James Alan Gardner
Oar is the last of her kind — a resident of the so-called "planet of no return," once the Admiralty’s dumping ground for undesirables and those who had become expendable. Oar’s transparent body is indestructible. Yet the mind it houses grows weary and will soon surrender to the catatonic torpor that has already claimed the others of her genetically altered human race. But Oar cannot sleep, not yet. There are powerful forces seeking her destruction for reasons unknown. There are old allies who need her assistance and a true history that must be revealed. There is much Oar must accomplish before the "apathetic hibernation" overcomes her, though time is decidedly her enemy. Together with her friend, Admiral Festina Ramos, she must find her final destiny… and in a vast and volatile universe, destiny is never a sure thing.
Ascending
by James Alan Gardner
This one is to all the gang from Clarion West ’89: I’m a lousy correspondent, but I still remember.
A WORD ABOUT OAR
Oar, the narrator of this story, first appeared in the novel Expendable. At the end of that book, she was left for dead after she grabbed an enemy and plunged with him from a window on the eightieth floor of a building.
To human eyes, Oar is as clear and transparent as glass. Although she actually has bones, muscles, and an assortment of internal organs, these were bioengineered to be indiscernible when humans look through her skin.
Oar’s ancestors were humans themselves, born on Earth around 2000 B.C. At that time, a collection of Homo sapiens were removed by aliens to the planet Melaquin, where the aliens gave these people a new home. The aliens didn’t explain why they did this, but they built the humans beautiful glass cities with self-repairing robotic systems designed to provide all the comforts of life.
The aliens gave these humans one additional gift: the people’s children were born as strong, intelligent glasslike humanoids who never grew old or sick, and who were tough enough to withstand damage that would kill normal flesh and blood. Only later did it become apparent that these glass offspring had a flaw: although their bodies could survive for millennia, their minds were not so long-lasting. Around the age of fifty, these people succumbed to so-called "Tired Brains" — they lost interest in all aspects of existence, often just lying down and never bothering to get up again. They could still stir themselves if something remarkable happened, but for the most part, they remained catatonic down through the centuries.
Glass parents continued to have glass children, but in decreasing numbers. The population declined in cities, towns, and villages all over Melaquin — gradual extinction from pure ennui. By the time of the events in Expendable (the Earth year 2452 A.D.), almost the entire species had fallen into apathetic hibernation. Only a few were still young enough to have active brains.
In Expendable, Oar was forty-five… on the verge of her race’s customary "senility."
Now she’s four years older.
From Festina Ramos:
I met Oar beside a moonlit lake, just after dusk on the day I had murdered my best friend. She was tall, sad, and impossibly beautiful: like an Art Deco figurine molded from purest crystal.
Yes — she was made of glass. Looking through her, I could see the beach, the moon, the world… focused through a woman-shaped lens.
When I think about her, I can’t help perceiving her glass body as a metaphor. She was, for example, transparent as glass emotionally. When she was angry, she raged; when frightened, she trembled; when lonely, she wept. She was as open as a child… and people who didn’t know her often dismissed her as childish, unintelligent, bratty. Oar was none of those things — she was a fully grown woman with an intelligence high off the scales (she learned fluent English in just a few weeks), and her constant claims of superiority to us "opaque persons" weren’t arrogant but heartbreaking: an attempt to convince herself she had some value in the universe.
Like glass, she was fragile. Not physically, of course: she was damned near unbreakable, and immune to disease, drowning, even starvation (she could photosynthesize energy from the weakest light sources). She was strong too — fast and agile. But mentally, Oar was ready to shatter. Thousands of years ago, her kind was created by unknown aliens in mimicry of Homo sapiens… but due to a design flaw (accidental or deliberate), the glass race always suffered mental shutdown by age fifty. First, a tendency to boredom; then, a growing listlessness; finally, a descent into torpor, a sleep that could only be broken by the most extreme measures and then only for a few minutes before senility crept back in.
Oar was on the verge of that abyss. Her whole species was. They didn’t die, they just grew Tired: turning into ageless glass statues, alive but dormant. As Oar approached the age when her brain would betray her, she fought her fate, she denied it, she raged; and in the end, it seemed as if she had found a way out. During a battle to save her world from extinction, she sacrificed herself by plunging from the top of an eighty-story tower, taking with her a madman who planned the destruction of her planet. I wept when I saw her body smashed on the pavement… but I told myself that by choosing death, Oar had avoided a more cruel destiny — the gradual loss of who she was, the dull fade-out to oblivion.
Her glass would have warped with age: the lens going dark, the mirror turning cloudy.
But I was wrong. Oar didn’t die in that fall — she was tougher than I ever imagined. Bulletproof glass. And now that she’s back, pursued by inhuman creatures with secrets to hide, the question is whether she can avoid mental oblivion long enough to save those of us who need her help.
Running from aliens, dodging the gunfire, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on before we all get killed… hey, it’s just like old times.
1: WHEREIN I AM NOT DEAD AFTER ALL
My Story
This is my story, the Story of Oar. It is a wonderful story. I was in another story once, but it was not so wonderful, as I died in the end. That was very most sad indeed. But it turns out I am not such a one as stays dead forever, especially when I only fell eighty floors to the pavement. I am made of sterner stuff than that.
Actually, I am made of glass: clear, see-through glass. I am therefore extremely beautiful… more beautiful than you, but you should not feel bad about that, because you cannot help being opaque. People who are not beautiful — or strong and clever and wise, as I also am — should take comfort from being ugly and boring, because you will never be Called By Fate to undertake Difficult Adventures. Fate does not invite ugly boring people to save the world; and if you do try to save the world (without being beautiful, strong, clever, or wise), you will soon die pointlessly — and how much adventure is there in that?
I do not die in this story. Those of you who have looked at the last page — which is only sensible, because you wish to make sure I do not make a long speech telling what lessons I have learned — those who have looked at the end will know that instead of dying, I win everything. I defeat the bad people, am adored by the good people, and get to say, "I told you so," as freely as I wish.
That is the whole point of being in stories: to have a Happy Ending.
My Technique
When I decided to present my story to opaque persons, I endeavored to learn what chronicling techniques are popular with your kind. My research methods were most diligent… which is to say, I waited for my friend Festina to leave the room, then instructed her computer to show me any documents she had written of a narrative nature.
Therefore, I have discovered that the proper way to write for Earthlings is to divide one’s tale into modestly brief sections with titles at the top, such as My Technique. This is certainly an Effective Literary Device, especially when a
ddressing persons with a short attention span. The technique also helps one skim ahead for sections whose titles seem more exciting than the passage one is supposed to read next. Thus one can jump forward to read Facing A Hellish Maw before coming back to Conversing With A Little Man Whose Sole Amusing Quality Is That He Is Colored Orange.
Most importantly, putting many titles into a story makes it easier to find your place if you happen to use your book to smash an irksome buzzing fly, and you hit the fly so hard that pieces of metal and plastic go shooting out of the book mechanism, so then you are forced to put the story chip into a new reader and you cannot remember where you were.
That happens more often than you might expect.
My Resting Place After I Died
When I woke after my eighty-story plunge, I felt most horrible indeed. Many things inside me hurt worse than they had ever hurt before… which is not saying much, because this was the first time I had been seriously injured, but pain is more dreadful when one is unaccustomed to physical suffering. If I took a deep breath, sharp aches erupted all across my ribs, as if a dozen axes were chopping at me. And behold, I did have an ax pressed against my flesh: a beautiful silver one I have always carried as both weapon and woodcutting tool. However, the ax was not attacking me in any way; it simply lay on my chest, as if someone had put it there after I fell.
To be honest, I was glad to have the ax with me — it provided a sense of protection. For a brief moment, I tried to cuddle the blade more snugly to me as if it were a pet or a toy… but the pain of moving my arms made my vision blur with tears. Every muscle felt bruised to a pulp; I wondered what bruised glass looked like, but knew if I lifted my head to see, the agony would be more than I could bear.
Therefore, I just lay where I was. It happened to be a hot pleasant place to lie, with an abundance of soothing light. I am such a one as absorbs many wavelengths outside the visible spectrum. Radio waves, X-rays, and gamma particles are like vitamins to me, while infrared and ultraviolet are basic food groups. (I also eat real food, as produced by the synthesizing machines found in every community of my world. But when I am not having Adventures, I can survive quite well on nothing hot sunshine, provided I get a little rain as well.)
Where I was lying, I felt a light spray of water from time to time. I opened my mouth and let the drops trickle down my throat. The water tasted slightly of minerals that were probably good for me.
The light and water and minerals indicated I was in a Home for Ancestors. There are many such Homes on my planet Melaquin, though I did not know this before I became a world traveler. These Homes are designed to contain persons with Tired Brains: persons who have lost interest in life and simply want to lie someplace warm. To keep them happy, every town has skyscraping towers where Ancestors can lie all day, getting plenty of light and squirts of enriched water. It is a boring way to spend the time, and I had promised myself I would never get so sad and lonely that I surrendered to languishing numbness… but when one is damaged from falling a long way, it is not so very cowardly to rest for a while in the bright quiet.
So that is what I did.
Clear-Cutting
Now and then, I told myself, "Oar, you must arise, you must find something to do." But there was nothing to do. The Home took care of my physical needs, and beyond that, I could think of no goals I wished to accomplish.
There was a time when my world was full of great people doing great deeds. We had a Thriving Culture, creating lovely music and art and literature — the teaching machines in my home village had taught me all about the splendid achievements of our past. I would gladly recite some of our excellent poetry for you, but it does not translate so very well into Earthling languages and anyway, I confess there are gaps in my grasp of human vocabulary: I have worked hard to memorize your best words, but I cannot be bothered to learn the second-rate ones (which is to say, the ones with no counterparts in my native tongue).
Besides, I have no real ambition to be a poet… or an artist or even musician. In my whole life, I have only embraced one useful occupation — using my ax to cut down trees, I did this because a human Explorer told me that deforestation was how cultured persons tended their planets: clearing land in preparation for constructing farms and roads and cities. I did not know how to construct things, but I was excellent at chopping down timber; so that is what I did.
It turns out I destroyed so much woodland, the results were noticeable from space… which became a source of much pride — once an Explorer informed me of my achievement.
That Explorer had been an opaque human named Festina Ramos. When I first met Festina, she was lost and frantic, marooned on my planet with no means of escape. I therefore embarked on my first great Adventure: to return Festina to her own people. I did not quite know how that Adventure had turned out, since I suffered my terrible fall before Festina went home; but my friend was not here now, so I assumed we had triumphed in all particulars. Through selfless heroism, I had helped Festina leave Melaquin… and I could congratulate myself on a Glowing Success.
But as I lay inside the Tower of Ancestors, drowsily reflecting on My Life So Far, I felt no thrill of achievement. Festina was gone, as if she had never been here at all — what did I have to show for my time with her? I had chopped down vast stands of trees, but to what end? No farms or roads would ever be built on the cleared land, for my people were almost extinct. To be sure, millions were still alive all around the globe; but they did nothing except breathe and soak up light. They had no goals or purpose… and what purpose could I find alone in a world of the dead?
Of course, there was always the chance a new group of Explorers would visit my planet. Earthling Explorers tended to be repugnantly opaque, not to mention uncouth and slow to understand the simplest things, but at least they could supply me with acclamatory feedback: "Oar, you cut down trees more prettily than anyone else in the universe!" (Except they would put this sentiment in their own words to achieve the effect of sincerity.) Then I would once more feel joy in changing the face of my planet, and would know that my life had Direction.
All I required was someone to assure me I was not wasting my existence on meaningless busy work.
I waited for someone like that to come along. And eventually, he did.
Being Roused By A Small Orange Alien
One day, I awoke to find an alien creature shouting into my face. "Are you Oar?" it yelled in the language of Explorers. "Come on, baby, wake up. Tell me if you’re Oar."
"I am not a baby," I answered. "I am forty-five years old."
"If you’re Oar, you’re older than that. You should be forty-nine by now. Are you Oar?"
"Who wants to know?"
The creature leaning over me was neither glass nor human. However, it was approximately human-shaped, with two arms, two legs, and a head. The head did not have normal ears; instead, there were two bulgy balls on top of the skull, like puffy mushrooms growing from the scalp. For clothes, the alien wore a white short-sleeved shirt, gray short-legged pants, and tan sandals, all of them stained with spills of unknown origin. The creature’s scaly flesh was not transparent like mine, nor anywhere on the pink-to-brown-to-black spectrum of Earthlings. Instead, the skin was a shade of orange that grew darker as I watched: from tangerine to pumpkin to an extremely burnt ocher.
This struck me as thoroughly foolish — an alien who can change color should endeavor to become clear and beautiful, not more opaque and unattractive. But the universe is full of beings with Different Views Of
Life. Often these views are stupid and wrong, but a wise-minded one (such as I) always practices tolerance in the company of irrational persons.
Conversing With A Little Man Whose Sole Amusing Quality Is That He Is Colored Orange
"The name’s Uclodda Unorr," said the darkening orange creature, "but everybody calls me Uclod. As in, ‘Get off my foot, Uclod!’ "
The alien grinned as if it had just told a joke. I decided this creature must be male; only a man could b
elieve I might be charmed by such a feeble witticism. I also concluded he must be a young man — perhaps in his early twenties. An older person would not gaze at me quite so eagerly hoping for approval.
When the alien saw I merely stared at him without amusement, he harrumphed in his throat and went back to his former line of questioning. "So spill it, missy — are you Oar or not? I was told you’d be lying here starkers with an ax cuddled against your wallabies; but I was also told you’d be dead, so there’s obviously something out of whack."
Clutching my ax, I sat up and glared at this Uclod person. Though I was seated on the floor, he was not so much taller than I. If I stood, his head would only come to the level of my wallabies. (You will notice how quickly I pick up words from foreign languages.) "I am Oar," I told him frostily. "An oar is an implement used to propel boats."[1]
[1] — It is a custom of my people to suggest how others may remember our names: since our older citizens have Tired Brains, they need all the memory aids they can get. I was not actually named after a paddle — that would be very foolish, because I am a person, not a stick of wood — but the English word "oar" sounds much like my real name. (For those who wonder what Oar means in my own language, it translates to "extremely clever and beautiful person whom everyone envies even if they are too small-minded to admit it." At least, that is what it means now.)
"That’s exactly the phrase I wanted to hear," Uclod said. "And you’re an acquaintance of Festina Ramos?"
"I am Festina’s dearest friend. We went on a great Adventure recently; she is my Faithful Sidekick."
"Your adventure wasn’t so recent, toots," Uclod replied. "It was four Terran years ago. What’ve you been doing with yourself? Just letting your brain go to mush?"
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