Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  I had never visited a broadcast studio before, but I expected such a place to contain ostentatious banks of Technology. Instead, the room was just a large empty space with jet-black carpet on the floor. The walls were glass, but with a fuzzy feathered texture; this had the effect of suppressing echoes, for the room was extremely quiet, as if some Uncanny Force were muting every sound we made. The very air seemed to press against my eardrums, stifling noises before they reached me: a most eerie and disturbing effect. Compared to the clutter in the rest of the ship, an area with no knickknacks or dead animals should have cheered my heart…but the atmosphere made me most edgy, as if I were cut off from important auditory input that might warn me of danger.

  Lady Bell, on the other hand, was clearly glad to reach the place after fretting through so much delay. No sooner had she entered than she threw herself down on the carpet…and the woolly black surface reshaped itself beneath her, the floor acquiring bumps and hollows molded perfectly to the lady’s body. I had to admit she looked striking, the frost green of her skin almost fluorescent against the heavy black background. This might have been why the floor was so dark; she would not have stood out as well against the ship’s clear glass.

  “Sit down, sit down,” she said with expansive cheer, gesturing to the floor beside her. “Make yourself comfortable. Can my darling husband get you anything? Accelerants? Placations? Our synthesizers have complete pharmaceutical indices for Earthlings and Divians; it’ll only take a second to whip up your favorite stimulant.”

  “How about food?” Festina said, making no effort to seat herself. “Something humans can digest.” She glanced in my direction. “Preferably transparent.”

  I lowered my head, trying not to show shame. It is mortifying when your Faithful Sidekick believes you are crazed with hunger and she makes a scene to ensure you are properly fed. I knew I could not die from starvation, but I was not so certain about embarrassment.

  Fortunately, Lady Bell was not such a one as could feel urgency about someone else’s problem. She therefore did not make a fuss: Oh yes, we must quickly bring sustenance for the poor dear and make her lie down in the meantime. She merely told Rye, “See to that, darling!” and puckered several of her cranial orifices at him. He muttered something in the universal language of unappreciated persons and slunk out of the studio.

  “Now everyone just sit down!” Lady Bell said brightly. “I don’t want you pacing during the show. Pacing will upset the audience—not to mention that the lights and cameras will have a hard time following you. Shadows on one’s face can completely ruin credibility. Sit down, sit down!”

  “Where are the cameras?” I asked, looking around the blank room.

  “Built into the walls, dear.”

  “But the walls are clear glass. They do not contain cameras.”

  “You’re clear glass, and you contain all kinds of things: lungs, kidneys, a heart…pity you only have one of those, but let’s pray it holds out till the recording is over. And your heart will last ten times longer if you just sit down!”

  Grudgingly, I lowered myself to the floor. I do not enjoy anyone offering advice about my health; and I knew I would not enjoy the floor either. Sure enough, the moment my bottom touched the carpet, it began to squirm beneath me. (The carpet, I mean, not my bottom.) A sizable gully sank down to accommodate my feet, while a woolly black hump rose to support my back. I grant that the seat was comfortable—like reclining on a mound of dead sheep whose bones have been softened with hammers. The problem was I did not wish to be comfortable. I did not wish to be soothed because…

  …I worried I would not retain consciousness.

  There. I have said it. Though I told Festina I was fine and resented her suggesting otherwise, I feared my mind would go blank if I allowed myself to relax. Perhaps it would happen even if I did not relax. No matter how hard I fought the Tiredness, I still was most terrified I would sink into the cozy carpet and my brain would cease to function. Mental emptiness had swallowed me too often in the past few hours; it seemed as if I could not spend an idle minute without slipping away from the world. Being forced to sit in a comfy place was almost a sentence of execution…but of course I could not say that for fear of being called a coward.

  So I sat and cringed and shivered.

  “Excellent,” Lady Bell said as the others also claimed sections of carpet. Festina sat right beside me, probably wishing to be within reach in case my brain dribbled out my ears: a gesture which infuriated me greatly.

  “Now,” said Bell, “we’ll record everything before we broadcast, so we can edit out slips of the tongue, and perhaps passages of testimony that don’t work…though I don’t want anyone to be self-conscious, just say whatever you want and let me decide whether you’re being tedious and pedantic. By the way, I hope you can all take direction. And perhaps it would be best to do vocal warm-ups right now: run through some tongue-twisters, practice speaking from the diaphragm. You all have diaphragms, correct? Except for you, cloud man, I don’t know what you have. Why don’t you practice holding a nice solid shape rather than wavering about. Try to look like a person instead of a pukka-ball. And make your arms bulgy to suggest muscles. Viewers like muscles. Taut lean muscles gleaming with sweat. Perforated with tight puckered orifices and preferably highlighted in at least two of the primary colors. Umm, well…work on that, do your best. Meanwhile, I’ll call a newsbroker I know on Jalmut—have him put out the word that we’ll soon have some hydrogen-hot footage for sale.”

  She raised her voice slightly and said something in Cash-lingese. I did not know whom she was addressing; but a moment later, a gusty voice whooshed and fribbled an answer from the ceiling. Either the words came from another person elsewhere in the ship, or it was the voice of Unfettered Destiny itself: what humans call the “ship-soul.” I have been told that in the Technocracy navy, the ship-soul is intentionally given a mechanical-sounding voice so it can be distinguished from humans. On Unfettered Destiny, the voice sounded more windy than Bell or Rye, as if it were powered by huge ship-sized lungs instead of the many little lung-ettes of real Cashlings.

  The ship-soul spoke briefly, then fell silent. Lady Bell seemed waiting for more; I suppose she had instructed the ship to contact her newsbroker and was now expecting a reply.

  In the meantime, I squirmed in my too-comfy seat. Uclod and Lajoolie still appeared bleary after their nausea in the receiving bay; Nimbus hovered near them while Festina whispered to Aarhus in confidential tones. I disliked my friend speaking in a manner I could not overhear…but it seemed a great deal of trouble to move into a position where I could eavesdrop, especially when she and the sergeant were probably just discussing tiresome navy topics.

  It was all too much bother to pay attention. In fact, everything in the world seemed excessively complicated. I remember thinking, Why can’t I just sleep for a while? Then I snuggled into the soft woolly floor.

  Enough To Wake Me Up

  Lady Bell said something sharp in Cashlingese. I sat up abruptly, unsure how much time had passed since my last conscious thought. As far as I could tell, no one had changed position at all. Perhaps it had only been a few seconds.

  But I did not know how long I had blanked out, and that terrified me.

  “Is something wrong?” Festina asked. I opened my mouth to say, I am very very scared…but she was looking at Bell, not me.

  I pushed myself up to look at Bell too. Even though the Cashling woman had no face, it was clear she was most upset. In fact, Ms. Prophet was wheezing indignantly from a dozen orifices at once.

  “This stupid ship!” Lady Bell said. “The most important day of my life, and wouldn’t you know, the communication system breaks down. We can’t raise a peep from Jalmut; no trans-light communications at all.”

  As the human phrase goes, a chill went down my spine. In fact, it felt more as if the chill moved upward from my stomach to my shoulders and thence to my face, but perhaps chills behave non-traditionally in artificial gravity. />
  “Uh-oh,” muttered Uclod. “I hate to say it, missy,” he told Bell, “but it sounds like you’re getting jammed.”

  “Jammed?” Aarhus repeated. “Oh crap.”

  “Quick!” Festina said. “We need a long-range scan right now!”

  “No, we don’t,” Nimbus answered quietly.

  He waved a foggy arm, pointing behind our backs. We all whirled to look through the glass bulkhead.

  There, looming across half the sky, was the stick-ship.

  Big Bully

  “Damn, that’s a big sucker,” Festina whispered.

  The Shaddill had appeared alongside Royal Hemlock, a vast brown forest beside a single white tree. Every stick in the Shaddill ship seemed larger than the entire Hemlock: longer and wider, like oaks crowding in on a paper birch. There were hundreds, maybe thousands, of the brown sticks, one of which telescoped lazily toward the dwarfed navy vessel.

  “What are the odds,” Uclod asked, “those bastards will just grab Hemlock and fly away?”

  “They don’t want to fly away,” Festina said. “They want to capture everyone who knows too much. You. Oar. Anybody you might have talked to.”

  “Which means the whole damned crusade.”

  “Right. They want to nab every last ship.”

  “How the hell will they do that?” Uclod asked. “We’ve got dozens of little ships. If we scatter in different directions—”

  “They won’t let us,” Festina said. With sudden urgency, she rolled to her feet. “Lady Bell, is there any way to opaque this ship’s hull?”

  “Why would I want to do that?” the lady asked.

  A flash of blue brilliance burst upon us like lightning. For a moment, Festina’s face was reduced to pure black and white: white eyes, black pupils, white skin, black birthmark, white anger, black “I knew this would happen” expression. Then her body crumpled limply to the floor.

  Everyone else was already lying down.

  Another Ship Bites The Dust

  I am such a one as thrives on bright light. I did not feel invigorated by this particular light, but I did not slump over unconscious either. Perhaps, as the Pollisand had joked, many types of light just pass right through my body. At any rate, I am not so weak as opaque persons, so it takes more than a garish flash to subdue me.

  The others, alas, were unconscious…everyone but Nimbus, who still hovered mistlike above the unmoving bodies. It annoyed me that he too had remained awake; one enjoys being special, or at least more special than an entity made of fog. Nevertheless, I could guess why he had not succumbed: a creature consisting of tiny floaty bits might not be affected by Sinister Weapon Beams in the same manner as creatures made from meat…and of course he was nearly as transparent as I, not to mention he too had been designed by the Shaddill.

  Perhaps we had both been constructed immune to Shaddill weaponry. If so, the stick-people were greatly foolish—if I were designing artificial beings, I would make them especially susceptible to my favorite weapons, so I could quell rebellions with dispatch. But then, the Shaddill were villains; and if I had learned anything from the fictional writings of my people, it was that Villains Always Make Mistakes.

  “What shall we do now?” I whispered to Nimbus. “If the Shaddill think we are unconscious, this is an excellent time to take them by surprise.”

  “Don’t be too hasty,” the cloud man replied. “They know you’re here, right? Catching you seems to be a priority for them. And they must suspect their stun-beam doesn’t work on you—it didn’t work when you were in Starbiter, so why should it work now?” He drifted across the floor a short distance, then drifted back again: the cloudish equivalent of pacing. “Maybe they’re hoping you’ll do something noticeable so they can tell where you are.”

  “Ahh,” I said. “That is astute reasoning.” I looked up at the glass roof. “Of course, they will see me as soon as they look in this direction. I am harder to notice than opaque persons, but I am not invisible.”

  “Don’t worry about that,” Nimbus told me. “In a Cashling ship like this, the hull is only transparent one way; you can see out, but no one can see in. The Shaddill won’t spot you that easily.”

  Which meant that with so many ships in the crusade, the Shaddill faced great difficulty determining where I was. Our trying to flee or attack would be a mistake, since it would catch the Shaddill’s attention…but then, I doubted that we could flee or attack. Unfettered Destiny would almost certainly refuse to take commands except from the Cashlings themselves. Indeed, I did not know if I could even leave the studio—without Lady Bell’s or Lord Rye’s permission, the ship’s security systems might not open the door for me.

  That is often the way with mechanical devices—they are most exceedingly mulish. Back in my village on Melaquin, many buildings contained shiny equipment with display screens showing excellent three-dimensional curve-graphs in bold fluorescent colors. The village’s maintenance robots kept these devices free of rust, and presumably in perfect running order; however, no one knew what the machinery did. According to tales from my mother (who received the tales from her mother and so on back through the centuries), the equipment would only respond to commands spoken in the ancient language my ancestors used more than four thousand years ago. That language was not the tongue we had learned from the village’s teaching machines; therefore, my sister and I could only stare at the waves of color constantly painting themselves on the monitors, and dream of what excellent deeds we might do if only we learned the correct words to say.

  Was I not in the same position now?

  Reflecting gloomily on my inability to control the Cash-ling ship, it struck me that once again I had boarded a vessel, only to find it rendered inoperable shortly after my arrival. This was not an amusing pattern of starship behavior. Moreover, the trend was accelerating. I had lasted seven hours on Starbiter, before she ripped herself apart; then an hour on Royal Hemlock before the dreadful act of sabotage; and finally, only ten minutes on Unfettered Destiny before the attack on the Cashlings made it impossible to command the ship to do anything.

  Perhaps I should endeavor to board the Shaddill craft. If I managed to do that, the stick-ship might explode instantly into a cloud of radioactive dust.

  Hah!

  The Fate Of The Hemlock

  Thinking about the stick-ship, I raised my head to the glass ceiling and stared at the alien vessel. A hollow tubelike stick now extended from the Shaddill ship’s belly: reaching out slowly like a snake slithering up to its prey, the stick thwacked against the Hemlock’s hull. Of course I heard no sound through the vacuum of space; but the navy craft shuddered and shook silently with the impact. The collision must have been forceful enough to knock people in Hemlock off their feet—if any of them were still standing after the beam weapon’s attack.

  For a moment, the pair of ships just floated there, as if the white navy cruiser were impaled on the big brown stick. Then a thousand tiny vines sprung from the end of the stick, some circling the Hemlock widthwise while others streamed out along the ship’s length, and still more wrapped around the hull in long weaving spirals. In places, the vines crisscrossed each other; in others, they sprouted side tendrils that intertwined and appeared to fuse together. Considering how far we were from the two vessels, the vines must have been quite thick—perhaps as wide around as my entire body; otherwise, I would not have been able to see them at such a distance. But they moved with the speed and flexibility of much smaller strands, until they had completely bound the Hemlock in their great sinister web.

  The telescoping stick began to retract: back into the body of the Shaddill ship, dragging with it the trussed-up Hemlock. Two nearby sticks snaked out of the woodpile as if they were interested in having a closer look at the captured prize. They drifted lazily outward, skimming their heads along the length of the navy ship in opposite directions; then they struck simultaneously, jamming their open mouths onto either end of the cruiser. Once the Hemlock had been capped fore and aft
in this fashion, it was quickly pulled down into the weaving brown forest. I lost sight of it as dozens more sticks slithered up and over the ship, like a mass of brown snakes squirming onto a single white one.

  So that is the end of the Hemlock, I thought. And how long before the Shaddill gather up the crusade ships as well? Even as the words crossed my mind, a new stick telescoped from the Shaddill vessel, reaching for one of the crusade’s smaller craft.

  Our own ship had pulled a goodly distance away from Hemlock; therefore, if the Shaddill began scooping up the nearest crusade ships, they would not get to us for a few minutes. However, it was only a matter of time before they swallowed us all.

  A Gargantuan Sneeze

  I turned to say something to Nimbus—I do not know what it was going to be, I simply wanted to speak and hear his voice in return—but the cloud man had vanished. I blinked and peered around the room. There was no sign of him, not even a little bit. I was about to cry out in anger and f e a r when I noticed baby Starbiter resting in the pit of Festina’s stomach.

  That was a strange place indeed for an infant Zarett.

  I moved nearer for a better look. Festina had fallen into a twisted three-quarters position, her bottom half lying sideways on her right hip, but her top half slumped over so her chest and arms lay almost flat on the floor. This left a covered nestlike area under the shelter of her belly, a dark little cave where a small Zarett person could rest safely. Nimbus must have placed Starbiter there in the shadow of my friend’s body, where the little girl would be protected while her father was busy with other activities.

  But what was the foolish man doing? Where had he gone?

  I looked around frantically. The recording studio possessed numerous air vents in its floor and ceiling; a creature made of bits could have left through any one of them. Perhaps he planned to seek Unfettered Destiny’s bridge, hoping to take control of the ship. Nimbus might well speak the Cashling tongue—he had, after all, served on ships owned by Cashlings, and had demonstrated an ability to learn languages quickly. If he could give orders to this ship in Cashlingese, he might…he might…I did not know what he might do, since we had already agreed not to draw unwanted attention. But the bridge was the only place I could imagine the cloud man might go…