Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

  A raspy laugh gurgled in her throat. “All right,” she whispered to Esticus, “I’ll help you.”

  She reached toward him and gave his hand a squeeze. Though her head had turned to slime, her arms and legs were still mostly intact; she let go of Esticus’s hand, scooped him off the floor, and held him to her disintegrating chest. The motion shook dollops of jelly loose from Esticus’s legs, laying bare the bone underneath. Then Immu flexed her powerful haunches for one last great leap.

  Husband and wife plunged together into the pool.

  The Cost Of Salvation

  The Shaddill’s jump did not take me completely by surprise—I had enough time to hurl myself backward out of range of their splash. Festina was far enough removed too, and protected by her uniform; patches of the gray cloth looked wet and glossy, but no splashing honey landed on her exposed head or hands.

  There was only one problem: Festina was still choking. Even as I watched, her body went limp and tumbled clumsily into the dirt.

  “Villains!” I screamed at the Shaddill, now decomposing in the fountain. They were totally immersed, and totally coated with purple, but I screamed at them anyway. “Call off your nanites, you poop-heads! Get them out of Festina’s windpipe!”

  No nano cloud emerged from my friend. I could see no sign of her breathing.

  “Stick-ship!” I yelled in Shaddill-ese. “Tell the nanites to leave my friend! This is an order—obey me!”

  No response. I ran to Festina and knelt beside her. When I opened her mouth, a gold nanite glow shone from the depths of her throat…but the actual blockage was too far down to see, let alone to reach with my finger. Anyway, how could I remove the obstruction if it was made of billions of tiny robots, all following orders to strangle my friend? If I did manage to sweep some away, they would simply rush back into place.

  I needed a means to fight the nanites directly. I needed nanites of my own.

  “Nimbus,” I said aloud.

  Leaping to my feet, I rushed to the webby blobs that held our companions. With so much honey splashing around, the blobs had been struck with spatters…and wherever the honey had touched, the webby surface had dissolved into jelly. Praise to the Hallowed Ones! I thought: the blobs must be made of living matter, susceptible to Blood Honey. Now all I needed was a tool…

  Festina’s stun-pistol lay on the floor a short distance behind me—she had dropped it when she saw it did not work on the Shaddill. I grabbed it and poked the metal muzzle into one of the purple patches on Nimbus’s cocoon. With a twist of the wrist, I flicked the jelly off the gooey surface; the result was a small hole where the jelly had been. Even better, the gun’s metal barrel did not seem affected by contact with honey…which meant I could use it to dig into the blob that held Nimbus prisoner.

  For Festina’s sake, I hoped I could do it quickly.

  Wrapping my jacket around my hands and arms to avoid getting stuck on the blob’s gluey surface, I pushed the cocoon holding Nimbus to the edge of the fountain. Once I had the cocoon in position, I dipped the pistol’s mouth into the basin, got it wet with red liquid, then prodded it into the blob’s exterior. The sheen of honey on the gun’s barrel ate into goopy webbing, turning it to a gel which could then be flicked away. This was not a speedy process—the honey did not corrode the goo nearly as fast as I wished—but little by little I deepened a hole into the blob, telling myself all the while I would soon free Nimbus.

  A part of me realized this might not be true. If Nimbus’s little misty bits were all trapped separately, like millions of bubbles in a solid block of ice, I could never carve them loose in time to save Festina. But if there was one big chamber in the middle, a single holding area like an egg, and all I had to do was pierce the shell to let the cloud man out…

  A great gust of mist shot out from the hole, straight into my face. It felt cool and kindly, a fog of salvation. “Nimbus!” I cried. “There are nanites down Festina’s throat! You must clear them out and start her breathing again.”

  I expected the cloud man’s mist to swoop immediately toward Festina; but it only wisped around and around, swirling close to me, then shying away again. “Clear them out?” Nimbus whispered. “How? I’m not designed for fighting other nanites. I couldn’t begin to take on warrior nano…”

  “These nanites are not warriors, you foolish cloud, they are just translator things. But they will kill Festina unless you take action.”

  “It’s not that easy, Oar!” Mist was all around me, wreathing my head, brushing my cheek. “My only way to stop the nanites is smashing my particles against them. High-speed collisions that will hurt me just as much as the nano.”

  “Are you such a coward that you fear a little pain?”

  “I’m not talking about pain; I’m talking about mutual destruction.”

  “And I am talking about the death of my friend!” I swept my hands at him viciously, trying to push him away from me. “You are a healer, are you not? Festina needs healing. That is all you have to think about.”

  “No, Oar. I also have to think about my daughter. And…” His mist shuddered. “…and my owner. My owner’s wishes.”

  “Your owner? Uclod would wish you to help Festina!”

  “I told you, Uclod isn’t my owner—he’s just renting me. I’m the property of…of someone who doesn’t know or care about your friend Festina, and who wouldn’t want me to risk myself on her behalf.” The mist-man shuddered again. “I’m a valuable investment,” he said bitterly. “I have strict orders not to endanger myself on ‘unprofitable moral whims.’”

  “And you listen to such orders?”

  “Oar,” he said. “I told you when I met you, obedience is hard-wired into my genes. I despise it, but I don’t have a choice. It’s how I was built.”

  I stared at him a moment, then closed my eyes. “I will tell you a thing, Nimbus. We are all built in ways we would change if we could—we are flawed or damaged or broken by forces beyond our control. In the end, we are limited creatures who cannot exceed our boundaries.” I opened my eyes again, seeing only mist. “But here is the other half of the truth: our boundaries are never where we think they are. Sometimes we think we are the most wonderful person in the world, then find we are nothing special; sometimes we think we are too weak to do a great deed, then find we are stronger than we believe.” I took a deep breath. “Please save Festina, Nimbus. You do not have to be so hard-wired and obedient. Please save her, and prove you are more than you think.”

  For a moment, he did not answer. His mist shimmered…as if it were glistening in some light beyond the dimness of that dusky room. Then his voice murmured in my ear, “All right. I’ll do what I can.”

  He swept around me one last time, brushing tenderly against my neck. “My daughter is still inside the web. Get her out and keep her safe.”

  “I will,” I promised.

  He swirled away, streaming across the room as fast as an eagle, not slowing down as he flew straight into Festina’s face. The cloud man disappeared up Festina’s nose as he had once before…only this time I was not scandalized by his effrontery, but overjoyed he was going to save her. He would fly down her throat to fight the gold nanites…

  And who would win the battle? Who would survive?

  I did not know.

  Carefully, because I had nothing else to do, I widened the hole into the cocoon that had held Nimbus prisoner. The hole was only three fingers across, the breadth of the pistol’s barrel. Smearing more and more honey into the gap, I increased the breach in the goo-ball until I could stick my arm through safely, with no risk of touching the damp jelly sides.

  All that time, I forced myself not to look in Festina’s direction. Nimbus would succeed; of course he would. There was no other way to save my friend, so the universe was compelled to let Nimbus triumph. I merely had to get Star-biter out of the blob; the moment I managed that, Nimbus would emerge from my friend’s mouth and say, “Oar, everything is all right now.”

  Even before
I reached into the blob, I had caught sight of Starbiter. She lay amongst the webbing so tranquilly, I wondered if perhaps she thought she had returned to her mother’s womb. But she did not protest as I wrapped my fingers gently around her and drew her out into the world. I had long since discarded my jacket, for fear of the patches where honey had turned the cloth to gel…so I cradled the little Zarett tight to my chest, right where she could hear my heart beating.

  “Now, Nimbus,” I said. “Now you will come out.”

  For many long seconds, nothing happened. Then a vicious spasm shook Festina’s body, and she gave a gagging cough. It was the sound of a human about to vomit; I sped across the room and rolled Festina onto her side just as she gagged again. A spew of yellow phlegm erupted from deep within her, spattering onto the ground. It poured out in streams, puddling on top of the soil. I put an arm around her to hold her steady…and I knelt there, supporting Festina with one hand and baby Starbiter with the other.

  “Come out now, Nimbus,” I whispered as Festina took a ragged breath. “Your job is done. You have vanquished the enemy. Come out.”

  But he did not come out. He did not appear and he did not appear and he did not appear…until I realized he had already come out and I just did not recognize him. The spew on the ground was comprised half of golden nanites and half of Nimbus.

  Both halves were dead.

  I stared at the puddle as it slowly seeped into the dirt. Then I lowered my face to my friend’s shoulder and wept.

  True Freedom

  “Well, well, well,” said a familiar nasal voice, “three cheers for the visiting team! At the closing whistle, the score is Oar 2, Shaddill nothing.”

  I lifted my head. The Pollisand stood perched on the rim of the basin, looking down at the purple lumps that had once been Immu and Esticus. A creature his size could not possibly balance on the narrow basin wall, but he was there anyway; he pranced a few steps in a rhinoceroid victory dance, then jumped to the floor. “How are you lovely ladies doing?”

  “We are splendid,” I answered, “no thanks to you. But Nimbus is doing most poorly; you must bring him back to life.”

  Deep in the Pollisand’s throat, his eyes grew dim. “Can’t do that,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “You can do that,” I replied. “You have told me repeatedly how clever you are. You could bring Nimbus back just as you did for me; you must do it now.”

  “No, I must not,” the Pollisand said…and there was something steely in his voice, something much different from the grating tone he usually affected. “Your friend Nimbus made a choice, Oar: a conscious decision to be more than a slave to some absentee owner, even though he knew it might cost him his life. I do not tamper with the results of such decisions.”

  “But you saved me…when I consciously made a decision to fall eighty stories!”

  “You didn’t believe you would die. You didn’t believe you could die. When you grabbed your enemy and jumped out that window, you thought he would die but you’d be just fine; hardly a deliberate sacrifice like Nimbus.”

  The Pollisand walked over to the slightly muddy patch beside Festina—all that was left of the cloud man. He put out his great clumsy foot and held it over the soil as if he intended to touch the wetness…but then he stepped back and planted his toes on solid ground.

  “Nimbus knew he wasn’t designed for battle,” the Pollisand said. “As he told you, his only method of fighting was to smash his component cells into the nanites over and over again, until both sides were battered into oblivion. I refuse to trivialize Nimbus’s sacrifice by ‘fixing’things as if his decision never happened.”

  “But…”

  Festina placed a weak hand on my arm. “You aren’t going to win the argument,” she said. With a thoughtful expression, she gazed at the Pollisand. “You care about decisions, don’t you? Good decisions, bad decisions…you care about them a lot.”

  “Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen.” He turned to me. “By the way, kiddo, you finally made an honest-to-god life-or-death choice yourself: when you decided not to rough up Esticus. If you’d broken so much as the little bastard’s finger, the League of Peoples would have put you down like a dog.”

  “Breaking his finger would have killed him?”

  “Hell, no,” the Pollisand answered with a snort. “The Shaddill are just as indestructible as you are—they’d probably survive if you crammed H-bombs down their throats. Furthermore, if you’d just gone ahead and smashed Esticus in the face as soon as you thought of it, the League wouldn’t have minded that either…but then, Immu got to blathering that horseshit about, ‘Hey, you never know,’ and even worse, you got to thinking, ‘What happens if she’s right?’ That’s when you were in trouble: the only time you’ve truly been in danger since we first met. If you genuinely recognized the risks and decided to pummel Esticus anyway…well, as Immu said, that really would have been non-sentient. With the League, it’s never the actual result that counts; it’s what goes through your head.”

  His eyes glimmered in the hollows of his neck. As I gazed at him, a disturbing thought crossed my mind. “If I had made the wrong decision at that time—if the League slew me for non-sentience—you would have let me stay dead. Because then my death would have been a result of my own decision. Correct?”

  “Correct.” The Pollisand’s voice sounded amused.

  “But if I had died for any other reason—not as the consequence of a personal decision but through accident or someone else’s malice—you would have been willing to heal me. That is correct too, yes?”

  “To some extent.” His eyes glimmered more brightly.

  “So when you told me hours ago,” I said, “there was a teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy chance I might get killed, you did not mean the Shaddill might slay me. You meant I might make a bad decision, and you would not save me from the results.” I glared at him fiercely. “Did you foresee everything? Did you know it would come down to me deciding whether or not to punch Esticus in the nose?”

  “Hey,” he said, “I keep telling you: I’m a fucking alien mastermind.”

  “Or,” said Festina, “a complete fraud who takes credit for being a lot more omniscient than he really is. You took damned good care to keep your leathery white ass out of sight till the Shaddill were gone. Could it be you were afraid to tangle with them directly?”

  “Ah, yes,” said the Pollisand in an even more nasal voice than usual. “A god or a fraud? Am I or ain’t I?” He lifted his forefoot and patted Festina fondly on the cheek. “You don’t know, my little chickadee, how hard I work to keep the answer ambiguous.”

  Another Career Step Upward

  Festina struggled to her feet, barely managing to stay upright until I lent her my arm for support. “All right,” she said to the Pollisand, “now that the Shaddill are out of the way, could you maybe deign to help us? Like finding some way to get our friends out of those…”

  With a great gooey slurp, the blobs surrounding Uclod and the rest dissolved into runny gray liquid. It sloshed in sheets to the floor, leaving Lajoolie, Aarhus, and Uclod soaked to the skin but free of their sticky entanglements.

  “Well, would you look at that,” the Pollisand said in mock surprise. “The Shaddill must have been right about this ship starting to break down—those confinement chambers were in such bad shape, they could only hold together a few minutes.” He gave a theatrical sigh. “It’s a bitch when you live on a ship five thousand years old. Things just fall apart.”

  Festina stared at him. “You’re scary.”

  “Babe, you don’t know the half of it.” Inside the alien’s throat, one of his crimson eyes winked.

  “And you couldn’t have arranged for that to happen five minutes earlier?”

  “Sorry,” the Pollisand said. “Lesser species have to fight their own battles.”

  Festina grimaced. “Now that the battle’s over, how about arranging for this old decrepit ship to have
a breakdown in its master command module? A short circuit that screws up security protocols and makes it possible for us to issue commands without worrying about passwords or voice identification…”

  The lights in the room flickered. A raspy voice spoke from the ceiling in my own tongue. “Reporting a major malfunction in security module 13953,” the voice said. “Awaiting your orders, Captain.”

  I looked toward Festina expecting her to answer; but then I remembered she did not speak Shaddill and therefore could not understand what the raspy voice said. “Are you speaking to me?” I asked the ceiling. “You believe I am the captain?”

  “Affirmative. Awaiting orders.”

  “Uhh…do not repair the security malfunction. I shall give further orders soon.”

  Festina looked quickly back and forth between the Pollisand and me. “Was that what I think it was?”

  “I am now in command of this vessel,” I announced. “It seems I am excellently well-suited for a career in the navy: I have gone from communications officer to Explorer to captain in just a few hours.”

  “Don’t stop yet,” Festina muttered. “If we get out of here and bring down the Admiralty, you may end up head of the new High Council.”

  “If I do,” I told her, “I will not forget the little people who helped me along the way.” I gave her arm a reassuring pat, but Festina did not look reassured at all.

  I Become A True Explorer

  Released from their bondage, Uclod and Lajoolie had fallen into one another’s arms…which is to say, Lajoolie was hugging her husband so fiercely his orange skin had darkened several shades. He did not object in the least.

  Meanwhile, Sergeant Aarhus sloshed damply toward us, his navy boots going squish-squish-squish. “So,” he said, “did we win?”

  “The Shaddill no longer exist,” the Pollisand answered. “Not as Shaddill anyway.”

  “In which case,” I said, “it is time for you to honor our agreement.”