Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  “And yet,” I whispered, “one still dies.”

  “Yes. One still dies.” She glanced at the weeping Uclod. “It seems you’ve just recognized your own mortality, Oar. Everyone does sooner or later…then most people immediately try to put it out of their minds. They go into denial, except when the grim truth strikes so close to home it can’t be ignored.” She turned back to me. “Don’t do that, Oar. Stay mindful of death. Stay constantly mindful.”

  She held my gaze a moment, then lowered her eyes with shy chagrin. “Of course, some people say you should also stay mindful of life. I’m still working on that one. C’mere.”

  Festina opened her arms to me and I finally, gratefully, slid into her embrace.

  More Pressing Matters

  We did not stay that way long. Behind my back, someone made the sound that humans call a Polite Cough…but I did not think it polite at all, for it caused Festina to release me. “Yes?” she asked.

  I turned. Dr. Havel stood there in the company of the cloud man, Nimbus…who was now not shaped like a man but a featureless ball of mist. At the center of the ball lay the delicate silvery Starbiter; and do not ask me how a ball of mist can support a ball of baby for I do not know. Some mysteries are too pleasing to be questioned.

  “Uhh,” said the doctor, all shamefaced, “sorry to interrupt you, Admiral, but uhh, ha-ha, Nimbus has been saying some things I think we should, uhh, discuss.”

  “What sort of things?” Festina asked.

  The doctor gestured for the cloud man to answer. “Well,” Nimbus said, particles of mist roiling within him, “I’m sure you realize Grandma Yulai won’t be the last. She’s only the first casualty in a much larger campaign to keep York’s exposé hushed up. If someone on the High Council was desperate enough to murder her—”

  “Wait,” Havel interrupted. “Does it have to be someone on the High Council?” He turned to Festina with his big watery eyes…as if, ha-ha, the admiral would reassure him the universe was not truly cruel. “Maybe it was just someone misguided,” Havel suggested. “A lowly ensign perhaps, who thought killing this woman would make the admirals happy. That could be how it was, couldn’t it?”

  “The council will try to make it look that way if this business ever gets out.” Festina curled her lip. “They’ll find some gung-ho hotshot who’ll confess to doing it unasked…and the admirals will howl with horror that anyone could believe they’d approve of such a deed. For all I know, maybe it was some lousy lieutenant who wanted to impress the High Council. But we have to assume the worst: one or more admirals have gone bug-fuck and they’re ready to out-and-out murder folks who pose a threat.” She gave a grim little smile. “I’m afraid I fall into the threat category. So does Oar. So does everyone on this ship.”

  “But even if the admirals are on the warpath,” Havel said, “they can’t do anything, can they? They’re all on New Earth. They can’t send execution squads to murder us in space—the League would never allow killers to leave New Earth’s system.”

  “The admirals don’t have to send killers. Every planet in the Technocracy has locals who don’t mind slitting throats for a price. And our beloved high admirals know who those people are. Wherever we dock, someone will be waiting for us.”

  “Then we don’t dock,” Havel said. “We’re a navy star-ship, for heaven’s sake—we can survive in deep space for three full years. Even longer if we sneak into uninhabited star systems every so often and mine a few asteroids.”

  “And in the meantime, we let the killers run free?” Festina scowled. “I wasn’t the only Explorer marooned on Melaquin—there were dozens of others, and they’re all at risk. Most are still serving in the fleet; the next time their ships dock, there’ll be assassins waiting in port. As soon as my fellow Explorers go on shore leave, they’ll get their throats sliced. Do you think I’ll sit back and let that happen?”

  “Then let us confront the Admiralty,” I said. “Let us make them stop killing. Let us make them know how awful death is.”

  Festina shook her head. “The admirals are all on New Earth, and it’s way too dangerous for us to go anywhere near there. I don’t just mean New Earth itself—just entering the system may be a risk. Entering any Technocracy system. The council could spread word that Royal Hemlock has turned renegade: non-sentient. Every navy ship might have orders to manufacture missiles and put us down.”

  “Missiles?” Nimbus said. “You mean bombs? I thought the League of Peoples wouldn’t let ships carry lethal weapons.”

  Festina gave the cloud man a weary smile. “The League won’t let us carry weapons from one star system to another…but they certainly do let us kill dangerous nonsentients. Sometimes it’s nigh on mandatory. How do you think we handle pirates or terrorists? Plenty of nasty folk arm their ships and cause trouble for passers-by. If killers like that leave their home star system, the League takes care of them; but if the bad guys stay in one place, hiding in a handy asteroid belt and popping out from time to time to hijack local shipping, our navy has to declare a police action. A squadron goes in, sets up a secure base, then manufactures warheads from standard ship supplies. The warheads attach to normal probe missiles, and voilà, you’re ready to shoot non-sentients. Once the enemy has been blown to smithereens, you dismantle your leftover warheads and go home with your pockets full of danger pay.”

  Dr. Havel muttered under his breath, “If the League lets you.”

  Festina nodded. “True. The biggest danger isn’t fighting a scruffy bunch of outlaws; it’s afterward, when you find out whether the League accepts your actions. The bad guys damned near always have innocent hostages aboard their ships, so the navy can’t just leap into an indiscriminate fire-fight. You try to negotiate, which seldom works, then you try blockading, then maybe a sneak attack to grab the enemy with your ship’s tractors…and nine times out of ten it still comes down to a shoot-out where you blast the bastards to bat-shit.

  “Afterward, you ask yourself scary questions: did we really do our best to save sentient lives, or is the League going to hand us a death sentence when we reach deep space? Even worse, did we really clean up a nest of homicidal maniacs, or were those so-called terrorists actually high-minded dissenters against some corrupt local regime…and the fat-assed generalissimos fed our navy a pack of lies so we’d wipe out their squeaky clean opposition.” Festina shrugged. “You can never be sure. The only way to learn if you did the right thing is to head home; if the League doesn’t kill you, you’re a bona fide hero.”

  “But even if the League doesn’t kill you,” Dr. Havel said, “they may kill the person next to you.” He dropped his gaze. “Admiral Ramos hasn’t mentioned what usually happens after our navy blows some ship from the sky. Even if you think you’ve pulled off a textbook operation, the League still executes a few people in your crew. Maybe those folks liked the killing too much—or maybe they didn’t do their best to encourage a peaceful surrender. Maybe the League are secretly sadists and they kill a couple crew members at random to keep everyone else nervous. You never know: God forbid the League should explain its actions. All you can say for sure is that the nice woman who always ate lunch with you, and the funny guy from engineering who had a new joke every day…they both got executed by the League and you’re still alive.”

  His voice carried such bitterness, we all stared at him. The doctor did not say more. It occurred to me that a man who laughs at the least opportunity may not be half so jolly as he seems.

  Avoidance

  “Well,” said Festina in a quiet voice, “we won’t give anyone the chance to shoot us. Royal Hemlock will stay far away from Technocracy star systems; even if the council orders the rest of the fleet to vaporize us on sight, we’ll never come within target range.”

  “Then how shall we defeat the villains?” I asked.

  “We’ll go public,” Festina said. “Loud, brash, and the sooner the better. Before I came down here, I asked Captain Kapoor to contact news agencies on the closest planet to us
: a Cashling world named Jalmut. We’ll record our testimony here on Hemlock, transmit everything to the Cashlings, and let them blare it across the galaxy.” She smiled grimly. “I like the idea of putting out the news through nonhumans; it’s less likely the fleet will be able to get to them.”

  “Get to them?” Havel gulped. “What do you mean?”

  “Bribe them, intimidate them, tie them up in red tape. Every human news agency has a few people who’ve been secretly bought by the navy.” She glanced over at Uclod, still huddled against Lajoolie. “That must be how the Admiralty learned what Grandma Yulai was planning: she approached some reporter and the snitches got wind of it. But nonhuman media services are less subject to fleet interference; and once our statements hit general broadcast, the High Council won’t be able to keep things quiet. Even better, they won’t dare bump off the other Explorers who can testify about Melaquin—it’ll be too obvious.

  “On top of that,” she continued, “the whole council will likely get tossed in the clink as soon as we tell our tale, so they’ll find it hard to arrange assassinations. The government on New Earth will go berserk at what’s been happening behind their backs…especially the murder of Uclod’s grandmother. The top echelons of the Technocracy have never cared how the fleet handles its own people, but when admirals start killing civilians—even disreputable civilians like Yulai Unorr—every politician in human space will howl for blood.”

  “They might get it,” Nimbus said. “Blood running in the streets. If the civilian government tries to crack down on the Admiralty, the admirals may crack back. Next thing you know, there’s a civil war.”

  Festina shook her head. “If our statements get out into public broadcast, the admirals’ own people will turn against them. That’s the problem with hiring opportunist scum to do your dirty work; they won’t stick by you when the wind turns. A few admirals may hole up in their mansions with squadrons of hired goons, but the police can deal with that. There’s absolutely no chance the navy itself will stick by the council once the truth gets out—honest folks in the fleet will be outraged, and dishonest ones will leap at the chance to eliminate the people above them.”

  “Then we must disseminate the truth immediately,” I said. “Let us broadcast our messages right now.”

  Festina glanced at Uclod again. Lajoolie had dropped to her knees, the better to hug her little orange husband. They looked most ridiculous like that, the woman so big and the man so small; yet I thought how comforting it must be to have someone who did not mind looking ridiculous when you needed to be held.

  “Uclod is a key witness,” Festina said softly. “We’ll give him a few more minutes. Anyway, we can’t do much till the captain makes arrangements with some news agency. Then,” she continued, “we’ll put a whole lot of nails in the Admiralty’s coffin.”

  “I am excellent at using a hammer,” I said.

  9 I am familiar with physicians because there were excellent medical machines in my home village. Once every month, I was required to recline on a proper examination table and submit to Necessary Regimens Of Health. These entailed authentic poking and prodding, not annoying little itches that lacked the courage of their convictions.

  14

  WHEREIN I PREPARE FOR FAME

  The Insides Of Aliens

  As we waited for Uclod to recover his composure, I inquired about this race who would be handling our broadcast: the Cashlings of Jalmut. I confess I was not truly interested in them, but I did not wish to brood any more about Death so I needed something to occupy my mind.

  The moment I asked, Dr. Havel rushed to locate a picture of the Cashling species. He did not succeed immediately…or rather, he did succeed, but the first images he found were anatomical diagrams wherein the skin was omitted, in order to reveal internal organs.

  I can tell you a Cashling has many internal organs indeed. Cashlings are, in fact, distributed creatures, which means they have more than one of almost everything. They do not, for example, have a single heart: they have several small hearts spread throughout their bodies, and the number varies with age. Babies begin with five working hearts, but develop additional ones as life goes on; by the time they reach puberty, they have twenty hearts pumping day and night, which makes them most energetic and a trial to their parents. From this circulatory peak, the hearts begin to shut down again, an average of one ceasing to beat every seven and a half years. When the last heart stops, so does the Cashling.

  But hearts are not the only things Cashlings have in abundance—they also have numerous mouths. Some of these are attached to digestive systems, others to lungs, and still more to stibbek…long thin organs the size of one’s little finger, designed to test what gases are currently in the air and to induce metabolic changes in response. Apparently, the Cashlings evolved on a world with great atmospheric variability: volcanoes belching sulfur, algae producing unusual effluvia, and plants exuding poisonous vapors in order to kill passing animals and thereby fertilize the soil with corpses. To cope with this, Cashlings developed stibbek as little chemical factories, constantly tasting the wind for threats and producing hormones to counteract the danger.

  “Marvelously complex, ha-ha,” said Dr. Havel…and he began to enthuse about Chemicals again.

  Hmph!

  The Outsides Of Aliens

  While the doctor prattled, I examined the skinless anatomy pictures of the Cashlings. In one diagram, the creature looked squat and rounded like a toad; but in another, it was stretched tall and thin, like a pole with a multieyed head on top; and in a third, the Cashling appeared almost humanoid, with two fat arms and two fatter legs, though the legs were long and the torso short, so the hips were only a hand’s breadth below the shoulders.

  When I asked how there could be so much difference in one species, Festina explained their skeletal structure could shift into three distinct configurations. In the all-crouched-down position, most of the bones lay above the vital organs, shielding the body; it was a Defense Posture which made the Cashling much harder to injure than in other positions. The polelike configuration was nicknamed The Periscope—stretching twice as high as a human, the Cashling could raise its head above brush and other obstacles, in order to scan for danger or tasty things to eat. The drawback of both these arrangements was that the bones locked in place against each other, making it difficult for the Cashling to walk or even crawl. Therefore the third configuration, the high-waisted humanoid one, was most commonly used for everyday purposes. In this form, the Cashlings strutted about like Daddy Long-Legs, taking exaggerated strides that could cover distance quite speedily.

  “Ha-ha, here we are,” called Dr. Havel. He clicked a button that changed the examination table’s screen from the picture of me to a filmed panorama of several dozen Cashlings. They looked quite different with their skins on…for their skins were every color of the rainbow, plus many other colors no self-respecting rainbow would dare exhibit.

  Bright violets. Florid reds. Piercing blues.

  Some were a single solid hue, and always fiercely eye-catching: flashing gold, burnished silver, gleaming bronze. Others were mottled with high-contrast tones, like orange and blue, or yellow and black. A few had stripes like tigers, but in garish colors a true tiger would consider beneath its dignity. Then there were others with swirling circular patterns starting as colored rings around their heads and twirling all the way down their bodies to end in fussy little curlicues on their toes. Only one figure in the picture showed any restraint, a creature who seemed snow white; but when Festina noticed me looking at that one, she said, “He’s sure to be just as strongly colored as the rest, but in a frequency of light our eyes can’t see. Infrared or ultraviolet—Cashling eyes perceive the widest visible spectrum of any race we know.”

  “But these Cashling ones are so foolish!” I said. “Hostile beings could see them from far far away.”

  Festina shrugged. “What hostile beings? Cashlings have tamed all the worlds they live on. No dangerous animals except i
n zoos…and of course, with the League of Peoples, no one has to worry about attacks from off-planet. Cashlings have no need to be circumspect, and they definitely don’t want to.” She waved a hand at the garish picture. “Some primordial circuit in the Cashling brain is attracted to bright colors. Flashy is beautiful. Sexy. The same instinct as a lot of Terran birds. So for several dozen centuries, the most desirable mates have been the ones who look like a laser show. Over time, selective breeding, bioengineering, and cosmetic injections have made the whole damned populace fluorescent.”

  “But they are so ugly!” I said. “They are practically obscene.”

  “Don’t say that to their faces. Cashlings are stupendously vain; if you insult them, they may decide not to broadcast our story.”

  “Then I will charm them most graciously,” I answered. “I am excellent at winning the hearts of aliens, even when they are thoroughly repugnant.”

  Festina looked at me a moment, then broke into a grin. “You do have the knack,” she said. “Come on, let’s get ready for the broadcast.”

  A Temporary Nursery

  We left Uclod and Lajoolie in the infirmary. They were talking to each other in low voices, Uclod sounding most trembly while Lajoolie spoke with soft calmness. The rest of us had no desire to interrupt such a conversation, and I for one was glad to get away. Each glance in their direction brought home the terrible reality of bereavement; and I did not wish to be reminded of that at all.

  The place we went first was a room for Nimbus. He said he had nothing to contribute to our testimony against the High Council, and more importantly, he needed to minister unto baby Starbiter’s needs. Therefore Festina took him to a passenger cabin which was tiny and cramped and blemished with hideous blue paint on the walls, but which had a full-service synthesizer that would let Nimbus obtain food and other necessities for the child. We tarried a moment to make sure he was properly settled in, then left him to his fatherly work.