Ascending lop-5

by James Alan Gardner

  "Very most fast," I said. "We were strengthened by entering the sun. That is how we escaped from the Earthlings and the stick-people."

  "Bloody hell," Uclod said. He swept his hand over his brow, as if wiping off sweat. "Finding a secret like this — it’s like dynamite, missy. Worse than dynamite: pure antimatter. If hopping into a star doesn’t destroy FTL fields but actually makes them stronger… if the Shaddill have deliberately misled us for centuries about the limitations on our FTL envelopes…" He shook his head. "But how could they get away with it? Our people must have run tests — experiments to measure FTL field collapse. That’s the sort of thing engineers do! And if the Shaddill still managed to fool everybody down through the centuries… hell, the Shads will go ape-shit that we’ve discovered the truth. They’re probably after us already. What are we going to do?"

  Lajoolie stood, her movement not making a sound. "Whatever you decide," she said, "I’m sure it will be wise. We’ll leave you to think in peace; when you want, I’ll bring you food."

  She bent over him, cupping her hands gently around the globes of his ears and touching her lips to his bald scalp. It was a most intimate gesture — the kind that makes a watcher embarrassed and angry and lonesome, all at the same time. Then she turned and walked silently away.

  As she passed, Lajoolie took my hand in a firm grip. She led me from the room… and I felt so subdued,I went without argument.

  9: WHEREIN I LEARN ABOUT OUR ENEMIES

  Bone Appetit

  Lajoolie’s hand felt cold holding mine — so cold her blood must have been the temperature of slush. It irks me that aliens never have the correct body heat: they are always too warm or too cool, and too hard or too soft, too dry or too damp, too hasty or too slow, too stupid or too annoying. Sometimes, they are also too strong… which is why I had no choice but to hasten behind the orange woman as she dragged me away from the bridge.

  Partway down the corridor, Lajoolie stopped and placed her free hand on the glowing yellow wall. I did not see anything special about the spot she touched, but after a count of three, the opposite wall opened with a faint sucking sound. It revealed another corridor, taller and narrower than the one we currently occupied. When Lajoolie moved forward, there was no room to walk beside her; therefore, I trailed along behind, trying not to feel like a little girl being pulled to the place of teaching machines by her older sister.[5]

  [5] — The teaching machines in my home village were not the advanced Science kind that plant education straight into your brain. We only had crude teaching machines that made you recite your elevenses tables until you wanted to scream. They were very most stupid machines; alas, they were also unbreakable, even for such a one as happens to possess an excellent silver ax.

  We soon came to a branch, a pair of even narrower bronchial tubes forking left and right. Lajoolie escorted me to the left where the corridor spiraled upward into a wee cubbyhole of a room. Bony ridges jutted from the room’s side wall, making flat surfaces with curved-up lips at the front. Clearly, these were shelves… although if I were a Zarett, I would not go to the inconvenience of growing bones in my lungs, just so people had someplace to put their belongings. The shelves held bowls which appeared to be bone too — suggesting that someone had chopped off parts of Starbiter’s skeleton in order to obtain containers for soup.

  That was quite icky indeed. Even worse, there were cups on the shelves too: big bone cups, which reminded me of skulls. They did not have facial features, but they were almost exactly the size and shape of a half-rotted wolf’s head I found in the woods when I was twelve. There were also bone utensils of recognizable types — spoons, spatulas, and so on — plus a variety of objects whose purpose I could not divine. Some were long and thin, others were boxy, and a few were so oddly shaped (all curlicues and spikes and knobs) that one suspected they had no actual use at all; they were either abstract sculptures, or objects left lying about simply to convey an alien ambiance.

  Lajoolie took a bone-knife from a bone-shelf and laid out three bone-bowls on the bone-counter. I could not tell where the food synthesizer was in this small room, but I assumed obtaining dinner was simply a matter of pressing more bumps on the wall. There was an especially noticeable protrusion just beside the water spigot — a greenish-colored bulge the size of a cabbage, budding from Starbiter’s tissues. I thought there might be small indentations in the bulge, buttons that you pushed in order to specify what sort of meal you wished… so it did not surprise me when Lajoolie reached out to take hold of the protuberance.

  It did surprise me when she used the knife to cut the bulge right off the wall. Then she chopped the material into equal-sized portions and placed the chunks into the bowls.

  "What are you doing?" I asked in horror.

  "Making supper." She sniffed one of the lumps of green. "It smells like choilappa; that’s glazed ort-breast baked with several kinds of Divian vegetables. Of course, this is really just a mixture of simple amino acids and minerals — very basic, digestible by any DNA-based life-form we’ve ever encountered."

  "It is not digestible by me!" I said. "It is a piece of my friend Starbiter!"

  "Yes."

  "You cut it right off her body!"

  "Yes."

  "It is Zarett meat!"

  Lajoolie looked at me, then at the greenish matter in the bowls. "It’s not exactly meat; it’s a specialized skin tissue, purposely produced to be cut off and consumed by a Zarett’s passengers. It grows fast enough to feed eight people three meals a day… which we feed right back to Starbiter if we don’t eat it all. Each meal is artificially scented and flavored to taste like a different dish: it’s Divian cuisine, but humans really enjoy most of our food. There are a few things we eat that make Homo sapiens nauseous — things that hit your taste buds the wrong way — but if you wait half an hour, the artificial flavoring dissipates and the food turns completely bland. Not very appealing, but it’s still got nutritional content."

  With a false smile of encouragement, she handed me one of the bowls. The green mound in it had the color of raw vegetation and the texture of a dead rabbit half-devoured by cougars. "It is a part of my friend," I said. "It is also opaque."

  I set the bowl back on the counter.

  "Oh dear," Lajoolie murmured. Her gaze shifted guiltily to my belly; I hoped she was imagining what my beautifully clear glass body would look like if I consumed a substance of hideous green. She would see it in my mouth as I chewed and in my throat when I swallowed. It would hang like a weedy blob as it churned in my belly. Then it would proceed quite visibly through the remaining stages of digestion and disposal. This would not be at all nice to witness — neither for Lajoolie nor for me. The food turning in my stomach would turn my stomach.

  On Melaquin, we did not have such problems. Our synthesizers only created transparent foods… and the chemical composition of each dish was cunningly designed to remain invisible while the food was in our bodies, from one end of the alimentary canal to the other. Science People have told me the biochemistry of such a process must be most complex; but I do not see why there should be any great difficulty. Avoid opaque meals, and everything else follows.

  "I don’t know what to say," Lajoolie told me. "This is the only food on the ship, It really won’t hurt you…" "It will just make me look ugly and foolish."

  "You could wear clothes," she suggested. "To cover what happens inside you." She took a step toward the door. "I didn’t bring a big wardrobe with me, but there must be something we could make fit. You and I are, uhh, close to the same height."

  "But we are not the same width at all. I am pleasantly slender; you are unnecessarily broad. Fortunately," I said, "I do not need your cast-off garments. Thanks to admirable foresight and planning, I have an excellent jacket of my own. It is a perfect fit… and I shall wear it when I deem necessary. But for now I have no appetite."

  This was not strictly true. For one thing, I had not yet tried on the jacket; and I was not precisely certain what it
meant for clothes to be a perfect fit, since I had never worn clothes before. Nevertheless, I was closer in size to human Explorers than to the muscle-bound woman before me. The jacket back on the bridge would fit better than any of Lajoolie’s apparel.

  As for what I said about having no appetite — I was not yet so ravenous as to consume a part of Starbiter (especially not a green part of Starbiter), but I could feel hunger gnawing with growing insistence. During my four years of basking in the Ancestral Tower, I had built up a modest energy reserve… but that reserve would drain quickly now that I was up and moving. I certainly could not sustain myself with the dim phosphorescent glow from Starbiter’s wall fungus; therefore, I would need solid food soon or I would drop into a coma of starvation.

  But I refused to eat immediately. Not until I relieved my jacket and covered my digestive tract.

  Lajoolie waited another moment to see if I would tuck into the food. Then she shrugged, picked up the green wad from her bowl and took a bite. "It’s quite good," she said. "Really."

  "I am not interested in eating," I lied. "I am more interested in understanding recent occurrences. Who are the stick-people? The ones you call Shaddill. Why did they treat us as enemies?"

  The big woman chewed for an irritatingly placid period of time before she swallowed. "Until today, I would have said the Shaddill were the most benevolent race in the universe. Now…"

  She sighed. Then, with many an annoying pause to eat, she told me what she knew.

  The Divians Divided

  Lajoolie’s race (the Tye-Tyes) and Uclod’s race (the Freeps) were both offshoots of a species called the Divians. Some one thousand years ago — I do not know if those are Earth years, Divian years, or years of the solar butterflies, because I did not care to ask — the Divians were a single species occupying a single star system. Back then, they did not have Zaretts with FTL fields; they only had primitive rocket-beasts that puttered between their birthworld and a handful of crude colonies on nearby planets and moons. The Divians were totally ignorant of the universe at large… until the Shaddill showed up.

  No Divian saw a Shaddill in person; all communication was conducted through robotic go-betweens who looked exactly like the Divians themselves. No one even saw the Shaddills’ spaceship except three people from an outpost on a remote moon. By sheer chance, this outpost suffered an accident involving a poorly designed something that was supposed to keep a second thing properly fueled, so that the second thing could prevent a third thing from catching fire, but then the third thing did catch fire and even though the fire was put out, the smoke suffocated a beetle-like creature that served as some sort of safeguard for the outpost’s life support systems… and in short, disastrous events transpired, threatening death to all concerned. Since no poky Divian vessel could reach the outpost in time, the Shaddill were prevailed upon to sail to the rescue. Their ship swooped in, picked tip the Divian personnel, and sent them back to safety inside the first Zarett ever — but not before the people from the outpost had seen that the Shaddill drove a ship made of sticks.

  Such a chivalrous rescue put the Shaddill in an excellent light… and the Divians were already inclined to regard the Shaddill as visitors of wondrous philanthropy. The Shaddill had introduced themselves as emissaries from the League of Peoples, ready to induct "acceptable" Divians into the League. In order to be acceptable, persons had to agree to the League’s only rule: never to slay another sentient being, either by deliberate deed or willful negligence. Creatures who obeyed this law were considered sentient themselves and were guaranteed protection; everyone else was considered non-sentient, possibly a dangerous threat to the universe. The League did not actively seek to destroy dangerous non-sentient beings, but they never ever allowed dangerous non-sentients to move from one star system to another.

  The Shaddill offered Lajoolie’s ancestors a choice: to abide by the League’s law (in which case the Divians would be granted the means to venture into the galaxy at large) or to reject the law (in which case they would be killed if they tried to leave home).

  In the abstract, this sounds like an easy decision — few persons would openly say, "I must decline the chance to see the galaxy; I prefer the option of slaughtering whomever I choose." But in concrete terms, the situation was more controversial… because the Divians would be requited to leave all lethal weapons on their homeworld, thus traveling to the stars unarmed. The Shaddill claimed that consciously equipping yourself with the means to kill other beings was direct evidence you were not sentient; those who refused to lay down their guns were not "civilized" enough to join the League.

  (At this point, I asked Lajooli’e what was wrong with carrying, say, a shiny silver ax, if one only intended to use it on bad people who truly deserved what they got? But she told me the League did not view it that way… and the League did not engage in debate, they simply executed those who did not Play Along. That is the problem with aliens — their heads are so full of alien thought processes, they will not see reason.)

  So each Divian of those long-ago days had to make a decision: either to hold on to his or her weapons and stay home, or to lay down arms and go to the stars. The Shaddill promised that those who chose disarmament would be granted pleasant tracts of land in another star system, on a planet specially prepared to mimic the Divian homeworld. The Shaddill also offered excellent enticements as "Welcome to the League" gifts: breeding seeds for Zarett spaceships, making it possible to fly from one star to another; a chemical called YouthBoost that helped people live twice their normal lifespan, without growing weak or shriveled; and new tricks of gene-splicing that allowed the Divians to engineer their offspring into specialized forms — huge muscular women, for example, or talkative little men whose skin automatically turned dark to block out radiation.

  Despite these incentives, many Divians were not eager to accept the Shaddill offer. They did not trust aliens who said, "We will take you someplace nice, except you must leave behind all means to resist us." Indeed, the only ones who embraced the deal were wild optimists or people with nothing to lose — those trapped in terrible poverty or under murderous regimes, not to mention persons afflicted with fatal illnesses who threw themselves at the mercy of the Shaddill’s superior medical technology. Oddly enough,Lajoolie told me, there were many many people enduring precisely such desperate conditions: living in fear of war, facing death by famine, or growing sick from poisons in the air, water, and soil.

  Anyone wanting to escape simply had to call upon the Shaddill. A few soft words would do… and even if there were killers breaking down your door or you were locked in a hideous torture chamber, you would be teleported instantly to the safety of a Shaddill carrier ship. In some regions of the Divian homeworld, this possibility of escape only increased the local brutality, as ruling authorities attempted to purge Unwanted Elements by scaring them into flight. Terrifying people into leaving the solar system was virtually as good as killing them…

  …except that a few years later, many of those people came back. Looking healthy and prosperous. Flying wonderful Zaretts. Showing off gene-spliced babies who were more beautiful and intelligent than anyone who stayed behind, not to mention that these children were expected to live hundreds of years without suffering the infirmities of age.

  That is when a number of stay-at-homes said, "Holy shit indeed!"

  For one thing, most who had stayed on the Divian homeworld were suffering difficult times. Their planet had lost a goodly percentage of its underclass — the poor who worked at unappealing jobs for a pittance a day, the sick who fueled the economy by requiring expensive medical treatments, and the persons of despised background who served as scapegoats for those in power. With these people gone, the economy tottered, and the rich had to cast around for new underlings to grease the wheels of industry with their life-blood… but the new underlings were just as likely to jump ship as the old ones. The Shaddill were still around; their offer was still open. At the end of a bad day, anyone could decide that her
boss was a fool, her lovers unworthy, her family more trouble than it was worth, and poof! Away she went to a new life, in a place where no one was hungry and no one had guns.

  When the first wave of emigrants came back to say how wonderful their life was, a second wave of departures went flooding out. Those who were bored. Those whose lives had grown harder since the first wave left. Those who would have gone the first time but feared the Shaddill would butcher them for meat. Young people who could not get jobs, old people who despised the jobs they had, curiosity seekers, petty animals running from the law, faithless paramours abandoning unwanted commitments, unappreciated homemakers storming out of the house, scientists wishing to learn advanced Science things, farmers who could not face one more drought, women cornered by would-be rapists, teenagers whose parents could not understand True Love, get-rich-quick gamblers who were certain they could Make It Big if only they got a fresh start on a planet where the system did not work against you… all of them called or screamed or whispered to the Shaddill, and were swept off to a place of second chances.

  The more people who left, the more chaos for those who stayed behind — and the more incentive for the hangers-on to get out too. Lajoolie said her own ancestors had lived in a large city on a tropical coast, a major port and shipment center. One summer ten years after the Shaddill arrived, a hurricane struck the city, killing or crippling many car-creatures and house-creatures. By the time the storm passed, half the populace had decided rebuilding would be too much trouble, so they disappeared into space. Within a week, eighty percent of the remainder had also flown away: the half-empty city was turning dangerous with gangs and looters, not to mention that hundreds of businesses were forced to close due to lack of customers.

  Then, after all those people departed, there were not enough workers to unload the boats docked in the harbor. Far inland, other cities began to suffer because they did not receive shipments of food and imported goods. People of the inland cities also called on the Shaddill when the hardships grew too severe, making further breaks in the chain of production and supply. For twenty years then, the Shaddill left their offer open: twenty years during which the old Divian economy collapsed. (Scientific civilizations are so spindly and weak, if you take away too many people, the whole system breaks down. Hah!) The homeworld became a dog-eat-dog ruin, abandoned by everyone except those who were too stubborn to leave or too fond of violence to accept the League’s law.