Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  Then everything went black: black with lonely stars. My body was back in its former position, seated rigidly upright. When I looked around, all I saw was Starbiter’s stringy physique, returned to its normal size: big enough that she could hold me in a tiny corner of her lungs, instead of being cradled in my arms.

  One might think it had all been a dream; but my face still burned as if it had been shoved into searing flame.

  4 Although I had never seen a living rhinoceros, the teaching machines in my village had shown me many excellent pictures of them. Also elephants. And kangaroos. And many other creatures who did not make their homes in my part of the world but had endearing qualities such as being eaten by their mates or spitting lethal venoms.

  8

  WHEREIN I CANNOT FIND A GOOD PLACE TO BE

  Back To The Mundane

  A few minutes later, someone groaned beside me. “Uclod?” I whispered. “Pollisand?”

  A voice muttered garbled words. I did not recognize the language, nor did I recognize the voice—it was too deep for Uclod, too guttural for the Pollisand. “Lajoolie?” I whispered. Perhaps this growling baritone was what she sounded like when not putting on her false soprano. I strongly hoped that was the explanation, because I did not want to deal with another unknown visitor. “Lajoolie, is that you?”

  “Unh…unh…” Unfocused moans came out in the same baritone. Then the voice forced itself to a higher pitch: “What happened? What did you do to me?”

  It was Lajoolie—past her initial grogginess, and now remembering to feign more missish tones. More missish questions too: when she said, “What did you do to me?” she did not sound like someone who truly believed I had worked some devilish trick on her. I got the feeling she spoke as she thought a certain type of woman would; a flighty helpless woman, not a woman whose body was covered with more muscles than a dead squirrel has flies. Clearly, Lajoolie possessed a confused self-image I would have to investigate when I had the time…but for now, I was simply happy not to be alone anymore.

  “There was a terrible stick-thing,” I told her. “What you called a Shaddill ship. It shot you with a Diabolical Weapon Ray, leaving me to effect an escape single-handed. Which I did most proficiently. Since then, I have flown through the sun and defeated the human navy, not to mention meeting…”

  I stopped myself. Perhaps it would not be so prudent to disclose my encounter with the Pollisand. Someone like Lajoolie (or even worse, Uclod) might chide me most scathingly for entering into a poorly defined pact with a powerful alien of dubious motives. Therefore I resolved not to speak of the Pollisand until I had time to ponder the ramifications on my own.

  The Vexation Of Newlywed Sentiments

  Off to my left, a noise went click. The next moment, something crawled up my face—the icky intestine covering my head. It had been in place so many hours, I had forgotten it was there. My vision went black for a moment, then returned; only now I was seeing with my own eyes, where Uclod sat slumped in his chair and Lajoolie was just straightening up from the bumpy controls in front of her seat. Obviously, she had pressed a release that withdrew the linkage attached to our heads…and had also disengaged the straps holding us to our chairs. I felt myself being freed as the straps slithered back into the chair’s jellyfish upholstery; and it was a good thing I was not such a one as stiffened from periods of inactivity, or I would now be a Solid Mass Of Discomfort.

  The straps around Uclod unclasped too. He would have toppled onto his nose if Lajoolie had not leapt to catch him. In that instant, I could see she was extremely fast as well as strong—especially for one who had just lain unconscious many hours. She eased Uclod back into his seat and spent an inordinate amount of fuss arranging him: positioning his body just so, with his head propped up instead of lolling to one side, his hands folded neatly in his lap, and so on…whereas I might have started by checking his pulse to see if other actions were worth the effort. It took at least a minute to convince myself Uclod was even breathing; but at last, when Lajoolie stopped fretting with him, I saw a definite rise and fall in his chest.

  Once Lajoolie had composed her husband to her satisfaction, she seated herself on the floor at his feet and leaned against his legs. I believe she would have liked to lay her head on his knee or rest it in his lap—she was just the type to seek the most submissive posture available. However, she was too tall for either of those positions, so she contented herself with settling her arm across his thighs and huddling tight to his body. I watched her for a count of five, then said, “Should we not try to wake him?”

  She lifted her head, meeting my gaze with large brown eyes. “How?” she asked.

  “In stories,” I answered, “it is customary to slap the face. Beginning lightly, then with increasing force.”

  “I don’t want to do that,” Lajoolie said.

  “You would rather he stayed unconscious?”

  “I’d rather he woke on his own. There’s no hurry, is there? You said we’ve escaped from the Shaddill. And Starbiter doesn’t need to be piloted—once you stopped giving her direct orders, she automatically adjusted her course toward New Earth. The heading was preprogrammed: I checked. So we’re going home and we can take our time.”

  “But waiting is irksomely tedious. It is better when you make the next thing happen right away.”

  Lajoolie stared at me a moment, then shook her head. With a slight smile, she hugged herself tighter to the unconscious little criminal and closed her eyes.

  She was obviously doing this to vex me. Rather than stay and watch her pretend to be patient, I stomped out of the room to explore the ship.

  Obstinate Doors

  I did not do so well as an Explorer. There was only one way to leave the bridge: down the long tubular corridor whose floor had those corduroy ridges over bluish-white skin. The corridor led back to the room where I had landed after sliding down the throat…and I could see no other direction to go from there. Uclod said the Zarett had eighteen rooms, but I did not know where they were.

  “Starbiter,” I said aloud, “we are friends now, are we not? We have ventured together into the sun…and far from home, in a place of lava, we nestled together for comfort. Therefore you know I am trustworthy, and you may safely open concealed doors to reveal your hidden depths.”

  Silence.

  “You may open them any time now, Starbiter. My comrade. My ally in times of distress.”

  But nothing happened. I did not think my bouncing bleating friend would completely ignore me so soon after we had shared precious moments of closeness on an alien plain; more likely, she just could not hear me speaking. Few of us, after all, have ears in our lungs. If I wanted the Zarett to admit me to her inner recesses, I would have to find the proper places to rub my hand or tap my foot.

  Therefore I experimented with rubbing the walls at random: palpating the soft mushiness, leaving fingerprints all over the yellow fungus that lit the room. From the first, I felt most foolish…but as time went on without success, I could not help a sense of betrayal—as if Starbiter was deliberately shutting me out like some unwanted cast-off.

  That made me very sad. Besides the standoffish Zarett, the only people within light-years were in the other room, deliberately being husband and wife together…which was a most appalling spectacle of Married Sentimentality, and I would never want a person to sit at my feet, nor would I willingly sit at someone else’s. But I did not enjoy being all by myself inside a large creature’s lung. I did not even have the Explorer jacket I had brought from Melaquin; it was back in the bridge, and I refused to go get it. What would I say as I entered the room? “Excuse me, I wish something to hug for I am feeling glum?”

  So I seated myself in the middle of the floor and squeezed my legs tight to my chest. I did not cry, not even a single tear; but I kept my eyes tight shut. My eyelids are a lovely silver, almost the only parts of my body that are opaque…and at that moment, with my face pressed against my knees, I did not wish to see anything.

&
nbsp; (My legs act as distorting lenses. Sometimes, when I look through them, the world appears most strange and threatening indeed.)

  One Does Not Expect Hauntings To Occur Inside Lungs

  Something brushed my shoulder. I jerked in surprise—I had heard nobody approach. When I turned, I expected to see Uclod or Lajoolie, or perhaps some icky polyp protruding from the wall and trying to attach itself to me for unknown alien purposes.

  I did not expect to see a ghost.

  It was a thing made of mist, like the spooky patches of fog that form in hollows at sundown. Unlike our milky-white FTL field, this mist had no color: clear as a spray of water, and thin enough for me to see right through to the wall on the far side. But this was no random vapor wafting through Starbiter’s lungs like breath on a winter’s day; it had a vaguely human shape, with legs and arms and head. Nothing was distinct—the feet had no toes, the hands had no fingers, the face had no features at all—but this was definitely a coherent entity leaning over me. It had touched my shoulder with its barely substantial hand…and I could not help flinching, swatting the hand away.

  My swat passed through the thing’s arm with no resistance: like sweeping my fingers through smoke. Though the mist looked like fog, it felt dry, and neither cold nor hot—just a tiny bit gritty, like dust.

  “Go away, ghost,” I told it. “Go haunt someone else.” I waved my hand through its chest, trying to scatter it to bits. The particles of its body, droplets or ashes or soot, swirled on the wind of my movements, but did not fly apart. As soon as I stopped stirring up breeze, the thing drifted back to its original shape, a person leaning over me.

  “Sad woman…sad woman…”

  The words were a whisper, coming from the entity’s entire body: not just from its mouth area, but resonating completely from head to foot. “What is wrong, sad woman?” the creature whispered. “What hurts you?”

  “Nothing hurts me,” I answered. “But I am easily annoyed by intrusive beings of unknown origin. What are you?”

  “The ship’s mate…”

  “What?” I said in outrage. “I was forced to drive this ship myself when there was a high-ranking crew member aboard? Were you incapacitated by the stick-ship’s weapon?”

  “No,” the entity replied, “but I know nothing about…flying Starbiter. She would surely…not obey me…if I tried. I am not…a crew member; I am…the ship’s mate.”

  For a moment I just glowered at him. Then I realized what he was saying: that he was Starbiter’s spouse. The male of her species. Her lover. Which suggested that some or all of the tiny particles making up his body were Zarett seed—designed to fertilize whatever eggs Starbiter produced.

  Quickly, I wiped my hands off on the floor.

  Conversing With A Cloud

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded. “We are in the lungs. Should you not be in another organ altogether? Doing whatever foul things a cloud man does to make babies?”

  “I visit every organ on a regular basis,” the ghostly entity answered. “In addition to my…husbandly duties…” (he sounded most amused) “…I am also what you might call…a veterinarian. Or perhaps the ship’s engineer. I patrol my mate’s airways and bloodstream in search of…metabolic imbalances…” The misty figure gestured in my direction. “Which led me to you.”

  “I am not a metabolic imbalance!”

  The cloud man pointed to the place I was sitting. “You’re creating a hot spot,” came the whisper. “And I sensed the presence of…unfamiliar chemicals…”

  “My chemicals are very familiar! Have you never heard of glass?”

  “There are many kinds of glass,” the cloud said, “and you’re none of them. Your skin is…an amalgam of transparent polymers, serviced by an army of…sophisticated agent-cells…that perform general maintenance and…ward off external microbes. There are also…trace fluids on your exterior, the purpose of which I can’t identify. Not conventional perspiration—possibly just a light body wash to prevent you from caking with dust…possibly something more complicated. All such…biochemical compounds are cause for concern, given the slight but real chance they may have a detrimental effect on my…patroness.”

  “Do not be foolish,” I told him. “You can see I have had no detrimental effect—Starbiter is healthy and happy.”

  “At the moment, yes,” he answered. “But you’re a stranger with an alien biochemistry, and I find that troubling.”

  “I am not a stranger,” I said, “I am Oar. An oar is an implement used to propel boats. Who are you, you poop-head cloud?”

  “Nimbus,” he replied. “Or if you want the complete mouthful from the Bloodline Registry books, Capella’s Coronal Nimbus of Lee-Thee Five.” His mist suddenly went blurry…as if every particle of him was shuddering with distaste. “In my grandfather’s day,” he said, “Zarett males were called Lucky or Fogbank or Rain Cloud; but then our owners made contact with Homo sapiens and picked up the Earthling fondness for giving thoroughbreds ridiculous names. My previous mate was called Princess Fly-in-Amber Heliopause, whatever that means. The person who christened her didn’t speak a word of any Terran language, but he gave her a gobbledygook title to impress human buyers.”

  The cloud man’s voice had gradually risen from a whisper to normal speaking volume. His new tone sounded a good deal like Uclod…as if Mr. Zarett had taken the little orange criminal’s voice as a model. I also noticed Nimbus was no longer hesitating between phrases. When he spoke his first words, Sad woman, it seemed he knew almost no English; now he spoke it overfluently. Perhaps Starbiter carried Ingenious Language Devices such as a mist man might employ to learn a new tongue within seconds. If so, it was most unfair—I put in weeks of diligent work to acquire my English, and disapproved of persons who bypassed the wholesomely tedious education process by using mechanical aids.

  “I do not care about Zarett names,” I told him, “but if you dislike what people call you, choose something else.”

  “It doesn’t work that way,” he answered. “We Zaretts have an unshakable instinct to defer to our masters, even when we’d dearly love to do otherwise. The compulsion is too strong to overcome, no matter what the rational part of us thinks about it. Being a good and obedient slave is hardwired into my genes.”

  “You are not good and obedient if you complain about your master to someone you have just met. Do you think I will now go to Uclod and say, ‘Please change Nimbus’s name to Fluffy’?”

  “It wouldn’t matter,” the mist man replied. “Uclod isn’t my owner. He’s just renting me…for stud purposes.”

  I suspect he added that last part just to provoke a reaction in me. His tactic succeeded; I stood up angrily and said, “This is not the type of talk I enjoy. I cannot tell if you are deliberately trying to appall me, or if you are just a foolish creature who knows no better. Perhaps if I were compelled to follow the sordid profession of gigolo, I too would speak lightly of foul things. But I do not.”

  Turning sharply away from him, I headed for the corridor back to the bridge. I glared at him over my shoulder when I reached the doorway…and to my surprise, I found myself saying, “I am not a virgin, you know.” Then I stormed away, feeling that my face had become very hot.

  No One Ever Congratulates One On Her Daring

  I did not wish to return to the bridge—it was not nice seeing Lajoolie snuggled up to Uclod, as if no one else in the world mattered. I feared, however, that if I sat on my own in the corridor, Nimbus would come after me again, claiming I had provoked more metabolic imbalance. “I am not an imbalance,” I muttered. “I am, in fact, the only one on this ship who knows How To Behave.”

  Dawdling most slowly, I walked down the corridor, hoping some diverting event would occur before I reached my destination…but it did not, and I was forced to enter the bridge after all.

  Lajoolie had not budged from her previous position, but Uclod was now awake. The two were talking quietly, nose to nose. I stomped my feet hard as I walked in, to make sure t
hey knew I was there. It would have been gratifying if they had jumped up guiltily at being caught…but they merely turned to face me, moving in exasperating unison.

  Their cheeks were almost touching. That was exasperating too.

  “So I see you are conscious,” I said loudly to Uclod. “It is high time—I grew most bored flying this ship on my own.”

  Uclod’s face looked grim. “What did the Shaddill want, missy?”

  “I believe they wanted to capture us. But we escaped.”

  The little man’s eyes narrowed. “How?”

  “I flew into the sun.”

  “Into the sun?”

  “Yes. And the stick-ship did not follow, for those Shaddill were not as daring as I. Unless,” I added, “they ran away, not because of the sun but because of the human navy.”

  “The human navy,” Uclod repeated.

  “The entire human navy,” I said, “and perhaps they were the ones who scared off the stick-ship. But the humans were not so formidable after all. Starbiter outran them most easily…which might be because her FTL field had absorbed invigorating energies from the interior of the sun. By the way, are there creatures who live inside stars? Giant glass butterflies who sing? Because this would be a highly pleasant universe if such creatures existed.”

  Uclod blinked several times. Then he turned away and pushed forward in his seat, tapping the bumps in front of his chair. Unlike machines on Melaquin, Starbiter did not possess an obvious display screen; but the Zarett must have been furnished with some means to convey information to Uclod because the little man slumped back from his console in utterish amazement. “Holy shit,” he whispered, “we did fly into the sun.”