Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  …until I saw wisps of mist dribbling out of Festina’s nose.

  “Nimbus!” I cried. “Are you inside my Faithful Sidekick? It is very very wrong to enter a woman when she is unconscious and helpless!”

  The cloud man did not reply; but Festina made a choked “Uhh” noise that sounded as if her entire head was congested with mucous. One arm moved and her body shifted. Seeing the potential for a horrible occurrence, I snatched up little Starbiter and clutched her to my breast mere moments before Festina groaned and rolled over. (Festina rolled onto her back, so she would not have crushed the baby after all. Still, I felt heroic for my lightning-quick reaction. With heroism, it is the thought that counts.)

  As for my friend, she ended spreadeagled face up on the jet black carpet. The carpet sank beneath her, molding itself into a Festina-shaped hollow…as if she had struck the floor after falling from a great height. Festina lay in this personalized gully for nearly a minute, all the time making loud congested grunts and wheezes that were most undignified. I knelt beside her, cradling her head and offering words of encouraging comfort: “Stop those ugly sounds at once, you foolish one! You must not be ill or dying, because that is not how a proper sidekick behaves.”

  As I held her, more mist trickled out of her nose. The bits did not stay outside; whenever she inhaled, all the mist went back in again. After one exhalation, I waved my hand through the fog around her face in an effort to disperse it…but the tiny particles simply swirled past my fingers and returned inside with the next breath. Of course, I could have prevented this by squeezing Festina’s nostrils shut. However, I did not wish to asphyxiate my friend, so I stayed my hand.

  Suddenly, Festina let loose a colossal sneeze. The sneeze was remarkable in several regards: volume of sound, volume of air, and volume of sputum discharged into my face. I wiped off the moisture with great dispatch (or more precisely, with the sleeve of my jacket); and as I was doing so, a burst of fog exploded from my friend, streaming out her nose and mouth, and even little wisps from her ears. In seconds, Nimbus floated before me…while in my arms, Festina opened her eyes and said, “Christ, I feel like shit.”

  “That is because you had a cloud man in your head,” I told her. “It seems he saw you unconscious and succumbed to penetrative urges.”

  Festina stared at me a moment, then closed her eyes, murmuring, “This is all a dream, this is all a dream, this is all a dream.” She opened her eyes, looked at me, and said, “Damn. So much for that theory.”

  The Cloud Man Gets Huffy

  I helped my friend sit up—which was not as easy as it sounds. First, I still held the gooey infant Starbiter in one hand and was attempting not to hurt her (or get too much of her ickyness on me). Second, the floor kept shifting, trying to reshape itself to Festina’s body the moment she moved in any direction. It made me wonder how many people died because of these foolish floors; one could easily sink into a customized crater and starve to death because one could not get out.

  Starvation was a subject much on my mind.

  When Festina finally reached the vertical, she shook her head as if trying to clear her wits. Then with a groan she said, “Shit…what’s happened since I went down?”

  “Very little. The Shaddill have seized the Hemlock and have begun to capture smaller ships.”

  “That’s all they’ve done in six hours?”

  “It has not been six hours,” I told her. “It has been less than five minutes.”

  “But I thought…the first time the Shaddill flashed you, Uclod and Lajoolie were unconscious for…I shouldn’t be awake yet.”

  Nimbus drifted closer—which is to say, closer to Festina. His tiny bits avoided me, as if his whole body were leaning back from my presence. “I thought it advisable to wake you,” he told my friend. “Stimulate your glands and nervous system; get some adrenaline pumping; counteract the effects of the beam.”

  “You can do that?” Festina asked.

  “Apparently,” he said. “I haven’t had much practical experience with Homo sapiens, but my medical training covered first aid on familiar alien species. Apologies if my methods lacked finesse; how are you feeling?”

  “Like crap, but I’ll live. Thanks.”

  Nimbus fluttered, temporarily losing his human shape. “Then I’ll move on to someone else. The more of us who are conscious, the better we can deal with the Shaddill when they arrive.” He swirled above the other bodies as if looking them over one by one; then he coalesced next to Lajoolie. “This one next,” he said. “We may need muscle.”

  “I have muscle,” I told him. “I am excellent at feats of strength.”

  He did not answer. In fact, his body tightened at the sound of my voice. Perhaps he was simply compressing his components in preparation for flying up Lajoolie’s nose; but it occurred to me, he might be upset at certain insinuations I had made about his behavior: specifically, my remarks about penetrative urges. He was, after all, a creature who burned with shame over something as simple as tickling his daughter or seeing through her eyes. Perhaps he felt equally guilty about entering Festina’s body and forcibly rousing her to consciousness. It was much the same, was it not? Invading a woman’s anatomy without permission, even though the act was justified. And a man in such a state of guilt might be sensitive to allegations that he was acting from base motives.

  He might be very hurt indeed.

  As Nimbus flowed up Lajoolie’s nostrils, I called to him, “I am sorry I suggested you behaved improperly when you entered Festina. I was foolish to jump to such a mistaken conclusion. But it is amusing, is it not, how misjudgments occur? And it is also most traditional. You and I, we are son and daughter of the Shaddill; and as siblings, it is common to fall into ill-founded petty disagreements…”

  I stopped speaking because he had disappeared—completely ignoring my words. Pretending I did not exist, because he was fiercely angry at me.

  Sometimes it is hard to have a brother. Especially when you both make each other feel bad.

  More Arousals

  I do not know if Divians are easier to wake than humans, or if Nimbus had simply gained experience in rousing persons from this type of unconsciousness. Whatever the explanation, the cloud man did not take nearly so long to bring Lajoolie around as he had with Festina. As soon as her eyes flickered open, he proceeded immediately into Uclod’s sinuses, not giving me the tiniest opportunity to apologize again.

  Watching Nimbus work on the two Divians, I wondered why he had not woken them the previous time they had been shot with the Shaddill’s beam. The probable answer was that invading other people’s bodies truly filled him with abhorrence. On the previous occasion, I had been doing an excellent job of piloting Starbiter so there was no need to rouse the two Divians; now, however, our predicament was so dire that it called for Extreme Resuscitation.

  Of course, extreme resuscitation is not pleasant, and neither Festina nor Lajoolie looked to be enjoying their newly regained consciousness. Lajoolie showed a marked preference for lying in a fetal position, occasionally whimpering with pain. Festina remained sitting up, but drooped her head between her knees and muttered unintelligible phrases conspicuously featuring the word “hangover.”

  In an attempt to divert them from brooding on their pain, I said, “Come, we will soon face the villainous Shaddill, so we must make plans for a fight.” But this did not rally their spirits. Lajoolie just groaned and Festina mumbled, “If there is a battle, pray God I get shot.”

  When Uclod regained consciousness, he was no more eager to spring into action than the other two. Nimbus still would not talk—he went directly into Sergeant Aarhus without an instant’s pause. From Aarhus he moved on to Lady Bell, splitting himself into a dozen small fog patches and seeping into her body through a variety of orifices.

  I do not know how he could tell which openings led into lungs, which into stomachs, and so on. However, the cloud man had the lady awake in under a minute…after which she howled most piteously. I opened my
mouth to ask why she made such an appalling racket; but I closed it again when her head sank into her body as if being sucked down the neckhole. The skull fit exactly into her tiny torso.

  This was something one did not see every day.

  The now-headless Bell shifted her position on the floor to lie flat on her spine. Immediately her legs lifted up from the hips, slanting back and arching above her body until her toes touched the carpet near her shoulders—her legs completely covering her torso like two logs laid lengthwise down her chest. Reaching up, she wrapped her arms tight around her thighs, then bent her knees so that her calves were on top of her arms, on top of her upper legs, on top of her headless body. She held that tucked-up position for a brief moment; then the whole stack of Bell crushed in on itself with a sound like knuckles cracking. In a moment, she had reduced herself to a tight little basket of a person, a bundled-up woman who lay on the ground in a heap that reminded me of a discarded turtle shell.

  This was the Cashling defense configuration I had seen in pictures. It may have been quite excellent for protecting vital organs under a thick arrangement of bones…but I did not think it clever to reduce oneself to a form that practically demanded other persons use you as a kickball.

  Our Turn Next

  All this time, the Shaddill ship had been snatching crusade vessels out of the sky. It did this with an extendible tube-stick, a big hose that reached toward one little craft after another and slowly sucked them in. None of the ships tried to flee or dodge the hose—the Cashlings on board must have been unconscious, everyone brought low by the blue-white flash.

  Though I despised the Shaddill, I had to admit they built excellent weapons.

  Each time a ship was captured, the mouth of the hose-stick squeezed shut for a few minutes. I suppose it took that long to swallow what had been eaten, to clear the stick’s mouth so it could gobble up more. In my imagination, I pictured a huge stomach inside the stick-ship, where little crusade craft bobbed listlessly amidst foul digestive juices. Well, I thought, I shall give those great poop-heads a tummy-ache to remember.

  No sooner had those words passed through my mind than the great sucking hose turned its mouth toward us.

  “Uh-oh,” I said. “Uh-oh.”

  Blacking Out Destiny

  “We must now be very brave,” I announced to my comrades.

  Festina lifted her head, saw the oncoming hose-stick, and staggered to her feet. She required a moment to steady herself once she became wholly upright; then she tottered her way to Lady Bell, who was still closed up tight in her basket configuration. “Hey,” my friend said, nudging the Cashling woman with her toe. “Open up.”

  “Go away,” muttered a mouth in the lady’s back.

  “No,” Festina said. “Not till you talk to your ship-soul.”

  I told Festina, “It would be unwise for Unfettered Destiny to take evasive maneuvers. We would only give away that we were conscious.”

  “I know; but we still have things to do.” Festina gave Bell another nudge with her toe…though perhaps it was less a nudge and more of a kick.

  “Leave me alone!” the lady hissed…which is to say, a small number of her mouths spoke the words while the rest did the hissing.

  Festina took no notice. “I won’t leave you alone till you do what I want. It’s in your best interests too. If they take you prisoner, you’ll never be seen again. Do you want to go down in history as the prophet who lost an entire crusade?”

  Lady Bell made a barking wheeze. I suspect this was a rude word in the Cashling tongue. However, as Festina prepared to deliver a kick that showed every promise of being full strength, Bell said, “All right, all right.” An eye opened in the middle of her back. “What do you want?”

  “Tell the ship-soul to opaque the hull. As thick as possible so we can’t see out.”

  “Why?” Lady Bell asked sullenly.

  “In case the Shaddill flash us again.”

  “They’ve already flashed us once. What’s the point of a second shot?”

  “Insurance,” Festina said. “If I were the Shaddill, I’d keep shooting the whole damned crusade every five minutes, just to avoid surprises. They haven’t done that, so maybe the weapon draws too much power to let them bang away indiscriminately. Even so, they might have a smaller version of the weapon inside, and they’ll zap us just before they board our ship.”

  “You think blacking out the hull will protect us?” The lady’s voice sounded most sneerful. “I bet that beam isn’t real light at all—it’ll affect us even if we can’t see it.”

  “You’re probably right,” Festina said. “But I’d feel stupid if we could save ourselves with simple measures and never bothered to try. Do it.”

  Lady Bell muttered something in Cashlingese. I thought it might be an insolent retort, but it must have been a command to the ship; a moment later, the glass roof went completely black. “There,” Bell said. “Happy?”

  “Ecstatic,” Festina replied.

  I myself was not so cheered by the change—without the see-through ceiling, the recording studio felt confined and glowery. It did not help that the floor was black…and the muted silence of the room added to the air of oppression that encompassed me.

  “Let us go a different place,” I said to Festina. “It is not pleasant here.”

  “I don’t like it much myself,” she replied, “but the place is soundproof. That might be important.”

  “You think the Shaddill are listening for us?” I asked. “How can that be? We are surrounded by the silence of space.”

  “Yes…but if we weren’t soundproofed, any noise we made would be conducted throughout the ship, eventually making tiny vibrations in the hull. If the Shaddill bounce a laser off the ship’s outer skin, they’ll be able to detect those vibrations. They’ll know we’re in here talking.”

  Lady Bell made a disgusted whoosh. “Are you always this paranoid?”

  Festina glared at her. “Usually I’m more paranoid, but right now I’m still hungover.”

  The ship gave a sudden lurch. “What was that?” Lajoolie cried out.

  “I think we’ve just been swallowed,” Festina answered.

  “Do not worry,” I said, patting her shoulder. “This happens to me all the time.”

  My Plan

  “All right,” Festina said, “we need a plan.”

  “To do what?” Lady Bell asked.

  “To escape. Or at least, to survive.”

  I said, “The villains will come through the receiving bay, will they not? So we should lie in wait behind the boxes cluttered in that area. When the Shaddill arrive, we shall leap from concealment and punch them in the nose.” I paused. “Provided they are such creatures as possess noses. If we leap from concealment and do not see noselike facial features, we shall have to improvise.”

  “Sounds good to me, missy,” Uclod said. “Of course, if the Shaddill do have noses, they’ll probably pass out the second they get a whiff of this place.”

  “Watch your tongue!” Bell snapped.

  Sergeant Aarhus cleared his throat. All this time, he had been sitting on the carpet, no doubt gathering strength after being unconscious. Now he rose and told Festina, “I hate to admit it, Admiral, but Oar’s plan sounds as good as we’ll get. We sure can’t stay in the studio here—it’s got see-through walls and nowhere to hide. We’ll be sitting ducks.”

  “I know.” Festina made a face. “All right—an ambush in the receiving bay. Everyone ready to fight?”

  Uclod, Lajoolie, Aarhus, and I all chorused yes. Nimbus floated delicately forward. “I won’t be much use in a scuffle…and I have to protect my daughter.”

  “Understandable,” Festina said. She glanced at me; I still held the little Zarett girl in one hand, and gooey though the infant was, I did not mind the feel of her so much. She was very most delicately soft, a small light person who seemed so fragile and breakable that Deep Adult Instincts made me want to take care of her. To be honest, I wanted to snuggle h
er a little while longer…but time was short, and I could not throw punches with a child in my fist.

  “Here she is,” I said, cupping her in both hands and holding her out to her father. Nimbus swirled forward, and for a moment, I felt his cool dryness playing around my fingers. It might have been a nudge of forgiveness; one cannot tell with fog, but I do believe it was more than just the bare minimum of contact required to take the girl. Then he was gone, and baby Starbiter was gone too, wrapped in a thick ball of mist.

  “All right,” Festina said, “now what about you, Lady Bell? Are you up for some fisticuffs?”

  “I’ve heard,” Aarhus put in, “that Cashlings are excellent fighters. Stunningly powerful kicks.”

  He said this so unctuously, even naïve baby Starbiter must have recognized his words as purposeful flattery. Lady Bell, however, was not so perceptive; she loosened slightly from her wrapped-up form, with orifices fluttering all over her green skin. It looked like the Cashling form of simpering. “I can handle myself quite well,” she answered in a creamily smug tone of voice. “If it’s absolutely necessary…”

  “It is,” Festina said. “Now let’s get down to the airlock. And once we’re outside the studio, no talking. The engines make enough background noise to cover our footsteps, but let’s not get sloppy.”

  “Sloppy!” Lady Bell said, continuing to unfold back to her more personlike configuration. “I am never sloppy.”