Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  “I do not look like that,” I said. “My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent.”

  Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. “Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum.”

  He proudly waved his hand toward the image—which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm…but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.

  If I held myself quiet, I could feel my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen—not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.

  “Hmm!” Dr. Havel announced. “Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself.”

  “This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation.”

  “Oh,” said he, “you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me…and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t.”

  “How can you tell?” Uclod asked.

  The doctor must have been hoping for that question. “See here?” he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.

  “All right,” the doctor said, “fourth rib, right side: look at this area here.” He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. “See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy—whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in Homo sapiens. But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day.”

  I stared at the picture. I did not like thinking my rib had a flaw in it, no matter how small.

  “And,” the doctor went on, “there are dozens of similar breaks throughout the skeletal system: the chest, the arms, the front of the face. Ms. Oar, you definitely suffered massive trauma at some point in the past—consistent with falling from a tall building, and your upper torso taking the brunt of the impact. Since I don’t know your species’ rate of recovery, I can’t tell how long ago the damage happened; but it’s safe to conclude you’re the same Oar who plummeted off the tower four years back.”

  “I know that,” I told him. “I suffered Grievous Wounds and it took me time to heal.”

  “You didn’t heal by yourself,” Havel said. “If the bones had knit on their own, the fracture sites would be a million times worse. A lot wouldn’t heal at all—the bone ends would be too apart to grow back together again. Someone damned good at orthopedics set each little break so it would fuse as good as new…and the surgery was performed within a few hours of the damage.

  “On top of that,” the doctor continued, “here’s the real telltale sign you got high-class medical attention.” He pointed to a series of squiggles written in bright red on the table screen. They were not an alphabet I recognized; I assumed they were some hateful Scientific Notation describing tedious Chemicals.

  “Your spinal fluid,” Havel said, “contains the residue of a nifty little drug called Webbalin: developed on the planet Troyen several decades back, when the Mandasars were the best medical researchers in our sector. Webbalin prevents cerebral degradation after your neurons stop getting fresh blood; without it, a human suffers irreversible brain damage within five to ten minutes of coronary arrest. Even if someone gets your heart pumping again later on, you won’t be the same person. Your old brain architecture has fallen apart—the trillions of linkages that make you unique get erased by neuron decay. Even if we grow you new neurons, they won’t link together in the same way. Without Webbalin to keep your original gray matter from rotting, your body might get brought back to life, but your memories and personality sure won’t.”

  “And you found this Webbalin stuff in Oar’s spinal fluid?” Uclod asked.

  “She obviously received a massive dose,” Havel replied. “Enough to leave traces four years after the fact.”

  “Doctor,” Nimbus said, “how soon does Webbalin have to be administered after death? In order to be effective.”

  “It’s usually given before death,” Havel answered. “If a trauma victim’s in danger of dying, you want Webbalin in the patient’s bloodstream as soon as possible. Get it circulating while the heart is still working; then when the crash comes, ha-ha, the brain will be safe for ten hours instead of ten minutes. Gives you a lot more leeway for patching up the poor bastard.”

  “But suppose the patient has already died. Does that mean you only have ten minutes to inject the drug?”

  “Worse than that,” Havel told him. “Ten minutes to get the drug saturating the brain. Which is damned difficult if you don’t have blood circulation. You can force-pump a dose inside the cranium and hope it soaks into the cells…but that’s just farting around to mollify the next-of-kin. It seldom works at all, and it never works completely. If you’re lucky, you salvage thirty percent of the brain, tops. That’s rarely enough to keep the patient alive, let alone, ha-ha, help him remember the password to his bank account—which is often the family’s prime concern.”

  “So if Oar’s brain survived…” Nimbus said thoughtfully.

  “It did survive,” I told him. “It survived just fine. I am quite as clever as I have ever been.”

  “Maybe,” Uclod said, “that’s because you ain’t human, toots. Your brain cells might not rot as fast as the average Homo sap. Maybe that’s how you stayed intact till the Pollisand picked you up.”

  “Or maybe,” Nimbus suggested, “the drug was injected ahead of time. While you were still alive. Before you took the fall.”

  “No one injected me with drugs! I would know!”

  But I was not so certain as I pretended. Only a short time before my fall, I had been lying unwatched in a state of unconsciousness. This was the result of being shot repeatedly with a whirring noise-gun, causing such horrendous damage that I blacked out. When I eventually awoke, I located the villain who shot me and plunged with him from the tower…but during the period I was insensate, there was no way to tell what someone might have done to me.

  “It does seem far-fetched,” Dr. Havel said, “that the Pollisand injected Ms. Oar with Webbalin in advance. There’d be no reason to do that unless he knew she was going to take a swan-dive, ha-ha, onto bare cement. And the only way he could know that is by…”

  “Foreseeing the future?” Nimbus said. “Isn’t that what the Pollisand is noted for? Being in exactly the right place when things go wrong?”

  No one spoke for a moment. Then Uclod muttered, “Bloody hell.”

  Unpruned Anomalies

 
A time passed without conversation…which is to say, Dr. Havel talked and nobody paid attention. What he talked about was me as a “specimen”—his first “marvelous chance” to examine an “alien life-form never before seen by medical science,” and he was “thrilled, absolutely thrilled” to have the opportunity.

  But the foolish thing was, he did not examine me at all: he examined my picture on the table, while I stood bored at his elbow. And instead of praising my beauty or grace, he was forever blathering about Chemicals: substances with long complex names that my body contained, in lieu of other substances with long complex names that it did not. For example, it was apparently most remarkable that my blood did not include Hemogoblins (which I believe are little trolls that live in human veins); in place of those, I had Transparent Silicate Platelets (which, as the name suggests, are miniature plates that carry food from one cell to another).

  Moreover, though I appeared visually similar to Homo sapiens, my composition was entirely different. I had numerous glands not found in humans; my basic internal organs (heart, lungs, and stomach) were arranged differently from Earthlings; even my bones were unique, and their attachments to various muscles deviated greatly from the Terran standard. I was, Havel said, a vastly different species from humans, structurally as well as chemically…but my nonhuman parts were assembled in such a way that I looked “morphologically human” on the outside. “Like a cat,” said the doctor, “who’s been engineered to resemble a dog. Except that cats and dogs have a lot more in common with each other than you do with humans—your body chemistry is utterly extraterrestrial.”

  Finally, it seemed my brain had never undergone a process the doctor called pruning. He said this was something that happens to all known intelligent races by mid-adolescence: a large number of existing connections between mental neurons wither away in the interest of “efficiency.” The theory goes that during childhood, the brain has many surplus linkages between neighboring nerve cells, because there is no telling which will eventually prove necessary. By adolescence, however, a person’s day-to-day experiences have established which connections are actually used and which are superfluous fripperies—links that never get activated in everyday life. The brain therefore discontinues low-use links as a means of streamlining the most common thought processes…making sure that essential mental activity is not slowed by extraneous clutter.

  The doctor claimed pruning is good and desirable: a pruned brain is more quickly decisive, less plagued by needless doubts and uncertainties. After pruning, your brain knows conclusively that objects always fall down instead of up, that it is a poor idea to stick your hand into fire, and that mere animals never really talk; indeed, a pruned brain is resistant to, and even threatened by, any notion it has come to regard as absurd. The “mature” mind shuts the door on the impossible, so it can concentrate on The Real.

  Or at least, that is what Havel claimed.

  For myself, I did not think The Real deserved such drastic sacrifice. If pruning is the price of adulthood, is it not more courageous to remain a child? Of course one knows animals speak infrequently (and it is hard to believe ugly animals such as lizards will ever become engaging conversationalists); but it seems most high-handed to reject the possibility entirely. I tried to argue this point with the doctor, but because his brain had been pruned, he exhibited nothing but galling condescension toward my “naïve” views…which meant I was close to choking him when Festina entered the room.

  This was indeed a welcome interruption. “Hello, hello!” I said in great happiness. I wondered if she would want to hug again, and if I would be so foolishly self-conscious as before, and if maybe I should start the hugging this time to prove I was not standoffish…and none of that happened, because I saw my friend’s face was grave.

  “Uclod,” Festina said quietly, “our communications came back on-line: either the Shaddill have stopped jamming or we’re out of their range. Anyway,” she took a deep breath, “I received a message from my staff on New Earth—your Grandma Yulai has been killed.”

  What Expendable Means

  In a quiet voice, Uclod asked, “How?”

  “Electrocuted by a faulty VR/brain connection. Several thousand volts to the cerebellum. Supposedly an accident.” Festina rolled her eyes in disgust. “And the rest of your family is missing. I hope to God it means they’ve gone into hiding; my people haven’t collected enough details to know if that’s what happened, or if somebody got them too…” Her voice trailed off. “I’m sorry.”

  Uclod appeared frozen. Lajoolie had moved in behind him as soon as Festina began speaking; the big woman’s arms wrapped around her husband, holding him tight. She seemed made of stone…but Uclod was made of ice.

  “What is that phrase you Explorers say?” he asked Festina. “Uncle Oh-God told me once—when somebody dies in the line of duty. What is it?”

  Festina pursed her lips. “We say, That’s what ‘expendable’means. Because the navy has always treated Explorers as expendable baggage.”

  Uclod stared at her a moment, then shook his head. “No. I can’t say that. Not for my own grandmother.”

  He turned around and buried his face against Lajoolie’s strong body.

  The Utter Truth Of Death

  Through all of this, I had not said a word. Indeed, I could not speak.

  I did not know this Grandma Yulai personally, and the few things I had heard about her were bad. She was a criminal who dominated a family of other criminals.

  And yet.

  She was dead. She had died. She was no different now from the animal corpses one finds in the forest, the fresh ones covered with flies or the old ones as dried and withered as bread crusts.

  Let me tell you a thing: my mother taught me death was holy, a blessing bestowed only on natural creatures. Rabbits and squirrels and fishes could die, but my own glass people could not. We were artificial beings; the Hallowed Ones refused to take us to the Place Beyond because we were not worthy of progressing to the life after life. Our species was cursed, spurned by death…or so my mother said.

  It turned out my mother was wrong. My sister had died, died forever. Perhaps I had died for a short time too…though it does not count if someone brings you back.

  But when I first met Festina, I got most angry with her when she claimed Earth humans could achieve death. I believed she was putting on airs, pretending to be holy herself. The ability to die seemed too wondrous and special to be true.

  However, I did not feel that way anymore. Starbiter had died. Grandma Yulai had died. Even villains like Admiral York and the man who killed my sister had died. For the very first time—there in the infirmary, watching Uclod weep and Lajoolie comfort him—for the first time, I realized just how un-special Death was. How common. It was not the exception, it was the rule: a ubiquitous poison infesting the universe, and those of us from Melaquin were total simple-heads to think death was a blessed gift we had been denied.

  Starbiter: disemboweled and smashed at high speed into the Shaddill ship. Grandma Yulai: her brain burned to smoke by some mysterious device. My sister: shot with invisible sound, churned up and blasted until her insides shattered, then buried to rot in the dirt.

  What did that bode for anyone else?

  Festina could die. Truly die. At any time. Perhaps as a noble sacrifice, perhaps as the foolish result of blind bad luck. The same for Uclod and Lajoolie. The same for me as well—the Pollisand had promised I was not immune to death, and had warned that a time of danger was imminent.

  I could die. Anyone could die. The doctor, the cloud man, baby Starbiter, they were no more permanent than leaves on an autumn tree; one day their winter would come and then they would be trampled in the dirt.

  How could these people stand it? Did they not know? Did they not realize? Why did they not scream and scream at the thought their lives would end?

  But I did not scream either. The utter truth of death had taken my breath away.

  Don’t Die Stupid

&nbs
p; “Are you all right?”

  Festina stood by my shoulder, her face filled with concern.

  “I am not all right,” I whispered. “I am not all right at all.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  I steeled myself, then told her the truth. “Things die.”

  “Yes.”

  “People die.”

  “Yes.”

  “You and I, Festina—we could die.”

  “We will die, Oar. Sooner or later. Maybe in the next second, maybe years from now; but we will die.”

  I looked at her. Was this not a good time for my friend to offer an embrace, a comfort, a reassurance? Lajoolie had enfolded Uclod in her arms, but Festina was only watching me—as if she did not want to make the moment go away. As if she wished the thought of death to impress itself on my brain, deeply, deeply, deeply.

  I fought back tears. “How can you stand it?” I asked. “Why do you not scream and scream?”

  “Because screaming doesn’t do any good. Nothing does any good in the long run. Death will come.” Festina locked my gaze with her blazing green eyes. “But we have choices, Oar. There are some deaths we don’t need to accept. If a blood clot hits my brain right here, right now, there’s nothing I can do about it, so no regrets. But if I die from something I could have prevented if I’d just thought ahead…”

  She shook her head fiercely. “We Explorers have a saying, Oar—don’t die stupid. It’s got a double meaning: don’t die because of your own stupidity, and don’t die in a state of stupidity. Learn things; learn everything you can. Keep your eyes open. Prepare, prepare, prepare. You’ll still die eventually, but by God, in the final second you can tell yourself you didn’t just throw the fight.”