Ascending lop-5

by James Alan Gardner

  The Pollisand walked over to the slightly muddy patch beside Festina — all that was left of the cloud man. He put out his great clumsy foot and held it over the soil as if he intended to touch the wetness… but then he stepped back and planted his toes on solid ground.

  "Nimbus knew he wasn’t designed for battle," the Pollisand said. "As he told you, his only method of fighting was to smash his component cells into the nanites over and over again, until both sides were battered into oblivion. I refuse to trivialize Nimbus’s sacrifice by ‘fixing’ things as if his decision never happened."

  "But…"

  Festina placed a weak hand on my arm. "You aren’t going to win the argument," she said. With a thoughtful expression, she gazed at the Pollisand. "You care about decisions, don’t you? Good decisions, bad decisions… you care about them a lot."

  "Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen." He turned to me. "By the way, kiddo, you finally made an honest-to-god life-or-death choice yourself: when you decided not to rough up Esticus. If you’d broken so much as the little bastard’s finger, the League of Peoples would have put you down like a dog."

  "Breaking his finger would have killed him?"

  "Hell, no," the Pollisand answered with a snort. "The Shaddill are just as indestructible as you are — they’d probably survive if you crammed H-bombs down their throats. Furthermore, if you’d just gone ahead and smashed Esticus in the face as soon as you thought of it, the League wouldn’t have minded that either… but then, Immu got to blathering that horseshit about, ‘Hey, you never know,’ and even worse, you got to thinking, ‘What happens if she’s right?’ That’s when you were in trouble: the only time you’ve truly been in danger since we first met. If you genuinely recognized the risks and decided to pummel Esticus anyway… well, as Immu said, that really would have been non-sentient. With the League, it’s never the actual result that counts; it’s what goes through your head."

  His eyes glimmered in the hollows of his neck. As I gazed at him, a disturbing thought crossed my mind. "If I had made the wrong decision at that time — if the League slew me for non-sentience — you would have let me stay dead. Because then my death would have been a result of my own decision. Correct?"

  "Correct." The Pollisand’s voice sounded amused.

  "But if I had died for any other reason — not as the consequence of a personal decision but through accident or someone else’s malice — you would have been willing to heal me. That is correct too, yes?"

  "To some extent." His eyes glimmered more brightly. "So when you told me hours ago," I said, "there was a teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy chance I might get killed, you did not mean the Shaddill might slay me. You meant I might make a bad decision, and you would not save me from the results." I glared at him fiercely. "Did you foresee everything? Did you know it would come down to me deciding whether or not to punch Esticus in the nose?"

  "Hey," he said, "I keep telling you: I’m a fucking alien mastermind."

  "Or," said Festina, "a complete fraud who takes credit for being a lot more omniscient than he really is. You took damned good care to keep your leathery white ass out of sight till the Shaddill were gone. Could it be you were afraid to tangle with them directly?"

  "Ah, yes," said the Pollisand in an even more nasal voice than usual. "A god or a fraud? Am I or ain’t I?" He lifted his forefoot and patted Festina fondly on the cheek. "You don’t know, my little chickadee, how hard I work to keep the answer ambiguous."

  Another Career Step Upward

  Festina struggled to her feet, barely managing to stay upright until I lent her my arm for support. "All right," she said to the Pollisand, "now that the Shaddill are out of the way, could you maybe deign to help us? Like finding some way to get our friends out of those…"

  With a great gooey slurp, the blobs surrounding Uclod and the rest dissolved into runny gray liquid. It sloshed in sheets to the floor, leaving Lajoolie, Aarhus, and Uclod soaked to the skin but free of their sticky entanglements.

  "Well, would you look at that," the Pollisand said in mock surprise. "The Shaddill must have been right about this ship starting to break down — those confinement chambers were in such bad shape, they could only hold together a few minutes." He gave a theatrical sigh. "It’s a bitch when you live on a ship five thousand years old. Things just fall apart."

  Festina stared at him. "You’re scary."

  "Babe, you don’t know the half of it." Inside the alien’s throat, one of his crimson eyes winked.

  "And you couldn’t have arranged for that to happen five minutes earlier?"

  "Sorry," the Pollisand said. "Lesser species have to fight their own battles."

  Festina grimaced. "Now that the battle’s over, how about arranging for this old decrepit ship to have a breakdown in its master command module? A short circuit that screws up security protocols and makes it possible for us to issue commands without worrying about passwords or voice identification…"

  The lights in the room flickered. A raspy voice spoke from the ceiling in my own tongue. "Reporting a major malfunction in security module 13953," the voice said. "Awaiting your orders, Captain."

  I looked toward Festina expecting her to answer; but then I remembered she did not speak Shaddill and therefore could not understand what the raspy voice said. "Are you speaking to me?" I asked the ceiling.

  "You believe I am the captain?"

  "Affirmative. Awaiting orders."

  "Uhh… do not repair the security malfunction. I shall give further orders soon."

  Festina looked quickly back and forth between the Pollisand and me. "Was that what I think it was?"

  "I am now in command of this vessel," I announced. "It seems I am excellently well-suited for a career in the navy: I have gone from communications officer to Explorer to captain in just a few hours."

  "Don’t stop yet," Festina muttered. "If we get out of here and bring down the Admiralty, you may end up head of the new High Council."

  "If I do," I told her, "I will not forget the little people who helped me along the way." I gave her arm a reassuring pat, but Festina did not look reassured at all.

  I Become A True Explorer

  Released from their bondage, Uclod and Lajoolie had fallen into one another’s arms… which is to say, Lajoolie was hugging her husband so fiercely his orange skin had darkened several shades. He did not object in the least.

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Aarhus sloshed damply toward us, his navy boots going squish-squish-squish. "So," he said, "did we win?"

  "The Shaddill no longer exist," the Pollisand answered. "Not as Shaddill anyway."

  "In which case," I said, "it is time for you to honor our agreement."

  "What agreement?" Festina asked.

  "I will explain later," I told her. "It is time for Mr. Pollisand to cure my brain… and if you say the remedy is to turn myself into purple goo, I shall punch you in a manner you will find most painful."

  "Yeah, well…" The Pollisand looked down at his forefeet and shuffled in the dirt. "Suppose I told you the remedy was to turn a bit of yourself into purple goo."

  "Then I should still punch you very hard."

  "Oh come on, darlin’," he said, "it’s the cleanest solution to your problem. Sure, I could toss you onto an operating table and rewire your whole brain… but that’d leave you a completely different person. Certainly not the warm and generous bundle of joy we’ve all come to love."

  I narrowed my eyes at him and balled up my fist in a meaningful way.

  "On the other hand," he said quickly, "if we just dab some honey on your skin, a tiny patch of you will go transcendent — uplifting just enough of your consciousness to get you past the Tiredness."

  "Uplifting her consciousness?" Festina asked. "Sounds like bullshit to me."

  The Pollisand growled at her. "Give me a break, Ramos. If you want, I can give a ten-hour lecture on how it’ll release certain hormones to overcome certain other hormones that t
end to suppress yet another group of hormones, and blah blah blah. But the long and the short is if she accepts a teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy transformation, it’ll be enough to offset the physiological processes that are gradually deadening her brain. And," he added, winking at me, "it’ll kick in a long-overdue maturation process that the Shaddill artificially repressed. My little girl," sniffle, "will start growing up."

  Festina glared at him. "Are you sure this isn’t just a prank for your own amusement? Are you sure, for example, you might not have arranged for a delayed-action cure when you saved her life four years ago? Maybe you implanted a curative something in her brain while you were repairing her broken bones… and you just want to smear her with Blood Honey because you like the idea of making her purple?"

  The Pollisand gave a soft chuckle. "I like you, Ramos; I like the way your paranoid mind works. But if I did foresee everything and set up Oar with a brain implant, I’d surely make certain the implant wouldn’t activate until a patch of her glassy-ass skin turned to goo. How else could I consolidate my position as the most annoying creature in the universe?" He turned to me. "I assure you this is necessary if you want to save your brain. A teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy bit of you has to become jelly."

  "All right," I said, gritting my teeth. "If that is what I must do…"

  "It is," the Pollisand said. He went to the fountain and dipped his toe into the honey. Of course the toe did not turn purple — no doubt Mr. Foul Annoyance had such evolutionarily advanced skin, it did not succumb to the honey in the same way as lesser beings.

  "Where do you want it?" he asked, walking back to me on three feet to keep his damp toe from touching anything. "Bottom of your foot so it’s hardly ever visible? The tail of your spine so it’s covered by your jacket? Atop one breast like a purple tattoo?"

  I turned to Festina, thinking I might ask her advice… but as soon as I looked at her, I knew what it had to be.

  I lifted my finger and pointed to my right cheek. The Pollisand moved before Festina could stop him.

  EPILOGUE: BECAUSE I HAVE ALWAYS WISHED TO COMPOSE ONE.

  Dealing With Tedious Details

  Being the captain of a huge alien starship is not so much fun as you might think, because there are many fearsome burdens. The greatest burden turns out to be one’s Faithful Sidekick, who is constantly worried one will speak carelessly to the ship’s computer and thereby Precipitate A Tragic Incident. Festina dictated to me exactly what commands I should give the stick-ship, and forced me to recite the instructions several times in English before allowing me to say the same in Shaddill-ese. Even then, she required me to think and think and think about the proper Shaddill-ese translation for each word; she would not let me speak until I had pretended to ponder for at least ten seconds over each instruction.

  Of course, I did not really think about the translations that much — I was more concerned with contemplating the new appearance of my face (which reflected quite nicely in the fountain’s basin). The Pollisand had only brushed my cheek lightly with his toe, no more than a casual dab… yet he had created a precise duplicate of Festina’s birthmark in both size and shape. Immediately thereafter, he had produced a strip of clear plastic bandage which he slapped over the jelly smear to prevent it from slopping off my face. The bandage instantly bonded with my skin and is (supposedly) permanent.

  Festina, of course, was anguished at the change in my features — she is a very nice person, but she has a Deep Psychological Fixation about her appearance which renders her a bit crazed. In her heart of hearts, she believes her birthmark makes her very very ugly… whereas she is actually ugly because she is opaque, and the birthmark has little effect, pro or con.

  I hasten to point out that the jelly now composing my cheek, while undeniably purple, is a transparent purple; if I wiggle my fingers behind my head, you can see the movement quite easily, staring straight through my cheek and my brains and all. So the blob on my face is not a disfigurement, but merely a Colored Highlight that adds an extra-special accent of beauty. I am even more ravishing than ever… which I know is hard to believe, but after all this time listening to my story, you must surely realize I would never tell you falsehoods.

  Nor will I tell you all the finicky arrangements we made in the next few minutes. Of course, we ordered the stick-ship to stop swallowing the little Cashling vessels, and to put back everything it had captured. We also released the crew of the Royal Hemlock from the stick-ship’s sinister holding cells. The cells contained many other individuals of various species, all of whom had been kidnapped by the Shaddill due to these individuals being too smart for their own good. Captain Kapoor promised he would transport the prisoners back to their homeworlds as soon as possible… or to any other world they wished to visit, as a pleasant consolation prize for being locked in Durance Vile by wicked fur-beetles.

  Speaking of fur-beetles, their jellied remains disappeared from the fountain while we were busy with other matters. I hoped they had merely gone slurp down the drain, but Festina suspected they had used some newborn mental power to transport themselves to wherever the rest of their people lived: an alternate dimension (whatever that means), or perhaps a distant Jelly-Planet where all the furniture jiggles. It seemed most unfair that these monstrous villains should simply ascend to their own nirvana without suffering retribution; but then I realized it could not be a very good nirvana considering that everyone there was all googly… and perhaps it was not a nirvana at all, but a horrible awful hell, where the only entertainment was persuading others to join you. So I decided not to make myself glum over never punching a Shaddill, and I regarded this as a sign of my Growing Maturity.

  I believe I shall be excellent at maturity.

  An Annoying Au Revoir

  The Pollisand disappeared about the same time as the jellied Shaddill — again while our attention was distracted by more pressing business. He left behind a slip of paper with words written in glowing letters exactly the color of his eyes:

  HEY KIDS, IT WAS TRULY SPLENDIFEROUS WORKING WITH YOU, I MEAN THAT IN THE SINCEREST POSSIBLE WAY. AND GUESS WHAT? MY CRYSTAL BALL SAYS I’LL BE SEEING ONE OR TWO OF YOU AGAIN REAL SOON. BET YOU’RE LOOKING FORWARD TO THAT. HUGS TO YOU ALL, AND BIG WET KISSES. OH WAIT, I FORGOT; I CAN’T KISS YOU BECAUSE I DON’T HAVE ANY GODDAMNED LIPS! COUNT YOUR BLESSINGS, SCHMUCK-HEADS. — THE P.

  As soon as we had all read this, the letters on the message blazed brighter and set the paper on fire. No one made any effort to extinguish it.

  "Do you think he really knows what’s going to happen?" Lajoolie asked most fearfully, staring at the burning note.

  Festina made a face. "He obviously gets a kick out of jerking our chains — and whether or not he’s prescient, he’s definitely a first-class schemer. If he wants us embroiled in his machinations, he’ll manage it somehow."

  "Ah, Admiral, ever the optimist," said Aarhus. "Some see the glass half full, some see it half empty, and some see it crawling with toxic alien parasites who want to devour your pancreas."

  Festina shrugged modestly. "Hey… it’s a gift."

  Final Dispositions

  So here is how we all ended up.

  Lady Bell and Lord Rye never left Unfettered Destiny while it remained in the hold of the stick-ship. They cowered like cowards until we told them everything had been resolved in our favor. After that, Bell insisted we still must pay the "ransom" we agreed to — so we recorded our testimony as originally promised, and the result was broadcast to the entire sector.

  This caused much stir amongst the peoples of the galaxy. It also caused a torrent of broadcast money to flood into the Cashlings’ pockets… whereupon Bell and Rye bade adieu to their vocation as Prophets and set off to become producers of sensationalistic VR extravaganzas. Apparently, this was not an uncommon career path for persons of their race.

  Because of our broadcast, the admirals of the navy’s High Council found themselves the targets of Public Outrage, not to mention repeatedly being invited by civilian police
to "assist in criminal inquiries." Each high admiral tried to shift the blame for the reported atrocities onto his or her colleagues, while he or she claimed to have been kept "out of the loop." A few of the villains also managed to disappear before being apprehended by authorities. Despite such developments, Festina felt certain the majority of the council could not possibly escape incarceration, even if a few managed to wriggle away from the clutches of the law.

  It has not yet been determined who murdered Uclod’s Grandma Yulai; but as Festina predicted, that particular crime garnered a strenuous reaction from the Technocracy’s civilian government. With the League of Peoples forever watching, humans cannot allow a homicide to go uninvestigated. If necessary, Festina says she will look into the matter personally when she returns to New Earth.

  As for the rest of the Unorr family, they had already gone into hiding by the time Grandma Yulai was slain. They realized the High Council might commit drastic deeds in order to conceal their crimes… so the Unorrs removed themselves to a place of safety until all was well. It was only the grandmama who voluntarily remained in the open so as to coordinate the Admiralty’s ultimate exposure.

  Therefore, Uclod and Lajoolie had a family to which they could return: a family who eagerly awaited the couple in order to congratulate them on a job well done. Apparently, Uclod’s relatives were vociferously telling everyone how wise they had been to purchase Lajoolie as Uclod’s wife — Lajoolie had "made the boy a man," had "helped him fly right," and had achieved many other goals expressed in hackneyed phrases. The Unorrs swore they would recommend the same Tye-Tye marriage broker to all of their friends… which was not a pleasant prospect to contemplate, but at least it ensured that the broker would not wreak vicious acts upon Lajoolie’s brother.

  It turned out that one of the vessels in the outreach crusade was a female Zarett with a male Zarett on board. Using monetary credit from his family, Uclod purchased the couple and put baby Starbiter into loving Zarett care… where I imagine she was tucked into a soft spherical crib each night and spoiled with hydrocarbons of excessive sweetness. Uclod also promised to erect a monument to Nimbus in the Unorr family cemetery on the Freep homeworld. Starbiter (the mother, not the daughter) will receive an even larger memorial in the same place — perhaps a life-size model with a special fungal coating to mimic a Zarett’s gooeyness. I think that sounds most icky indeed; therefore, I have resolved to visit it immediately if ever I find myself on that planet.