Ascending (13 page)

“That’s one possible explanation,” Festina replied. “We’ve never got solid evidence of an alien practicing time travel…but the top echelons of the League do so many hard-to-believe things, why not that too?”

“You think the Pollisand belongs to the top echelons of the League?” Nimbus asked. The cloud man had clustered himself around one of the other swivel chairs at the conference table, but he was not making it spin or
anything.
He had placed his baby on the seat and was taking great care not to jostle the child…even though a small Zarett person might enjoy a little controlled rotation under an adult’s cautious guidance.

Festina told Nimbus, “Whether or not the Pollisand ranks high in the League, he definitely has technology better than our own. For one thing, he always appears out of nowhere: teleportation, or maybe turning off an invisibility field.”

“Perhaps he is only projecting his appearance,” I suggested. “Perhaps he is actually far away on some planet known for its lava pools, and he simply sends out
images
of himself to ask these questions.”

Festina looked at me most curiously…but Uclod waved away my words as if they had no bearing on the subject. “What if there’s more than one Pollisand?” he asked. “Maybe there are hundreds of these bozos wandering around, just waiting for people to get in trouble.”

“Another valid possibility,” Festina said, “and I could give you a dozen more. Navy Intelligence has plenty of hypotheses…but no real facts except that this headless white alien occasionally shows up at the precise moment of a disaster and begins to ask infuriating questions. Since the aliens always look and act the same, our NAVINT folks are inclined to regard the Pollisand as the only one of his kind; but who knows?”

Uclod made an ungenteel noise in his throat. “And your gurus think this Pollisand ranks high in the League? A super-evolved creature should have better things to do than thumbing his nose at people who screw up.”

Festina shrugged. “In Explorer Academy, we studied all the advanced species known to humanity…and we came to the conclusion no one knows why
any
of them do what they do. Hell, in most cases, we have no idea how up-ladder aliens spend their time. Do they sit around contemplating their navels? Indulge in arts and sciences we don’t comprehend? Project themselves into higher dimensions and play chess with otherworldly powers?”

“If
I
were an otherworldly power,” I said, “I would not play chess. It is a most boring game. Except for the little horses. If I were an otherworldly power, I would create a new game that
only
had the little horses. And the winner would receive excellent prizes, instead of that nonsense about the thrill of intellectual achievement.”

Uclod gave me a look. “Try to stay focused, missy. Real live aliens don’t play board games with fictitious deities. Presumably,” he said, turning back to Festina, “real live aliens have to eat and reproduce and gather raw materials for whatever gadgets they manufacture…”

“Don’t be too sure,” Festina said. “From what we’ve seen of highly advanced races, they engineer themselves to transcend mundane needs. At the Academy, one of our professors theorized that to get past a certain point of evolution, species have to jettison almost all their natural drives. You can’t go forward till you dump the primitive crap that’s holding you back. And not just stuff like eating and breeding, but mental attitudes too. Territoriality, for example—humans, Divians, and other races of our approximate intelligence level all have at least some expansionist tendencies. We build colonies, terraform planets, try to keep our economies growing. But species above us on the ladder aren’t interested in such things.
None
of them has any known planetary holdings. They just…well, have you heard of Las Fuentes?”

She was looking at Uclod. When he shook his head, she went back to the keypad and typed for several seconds. The display screen changed to show a bright desert landscape of hard-baked dirt, punctuated in places with scrubby weeds that looked like tiny orange balloons glued onto twigs. A white-surfaced road ran diagonally across the picture—a road pocked with holes where the pavement had turned to rubble. It looked most ancient and crumbling, stretching toward the horizon…until it suddenly disappeared over the edge of a large drop-off.

The view zoomed forward, closer and closer to the drop-off. Soon I could see this was the lip of a great crater, a huge round bowl sunk deep into the land. I had heard of such craters being made from the impact of cosmic objects hurtling out of the sky…but the one on the screen looked more like an artificial feature dug by an alien culture. The road continued forward down the side of the crater, fading now and then due to erosion but always resuming again, traveling in a straight line until it reached the bottom of the bowl.

There, in the center of the crater, stood a simple fountain made of bleached gray stone. No water bubbled from the central pillar and the basin was dry as salt; however, I could tell that long ago this fountain must have gushed as cheerfully as the two fountains in the central plaza of my home village.

“This,” Festina said, “is the legacy of Las Fuentes—a race who once occupied most of the worlds now belonging to the Technocracy…including my home planet of Agua.” She waved at the screen. “This particular fountain is in an Aguan high desert called Otavalo. There are other fountains all over my world: in rainforests, in the mountains, on the prairies, even a few underwater. Always at the bottom of great whopping craters dozens of klicks across, with one or more access highways leading in. And the fountains aren’t just on Agua; they’re on every planet Las Fuentes colonized.”

“Religious shrines?” Uclod asked.

“Perhaps. People on Agua thought so—my nana used to take me to one in the deep jungle so we could light candles.” She paused for a moment, staring off into the distance; then she shook her head briskly and went on. “Anyhow, Las Fuentes dominated ninety-two star systems till five thousand years ago: a total population estimated to be at least a hundred billion.

“Then,” she continued, “they just gave it all up. Peacefully, as far as we can tell—no signs of war or other disaster. And Las Fuentes are still around nowadays…or at least a race that claims to be the successors of the crater makers.”

She pressed a key and the screen changed once more—this time showing the interior of a room that was plushly appointed according to human standards. By this, I mean it had a number of big fat chairs that might have been very handsome if they had been clear instead of an ugly opaque brown. There were also grumpy paintings of humans on the walls, surrounded by tall shelves of objects that were probably books: the ancient type of book that always tells the same story and has no push-buttons. The scene looked most opulent indeed…except that one of the chairs was filled with a mound of vivid purple jelly.

Festina pointed to the jelly. “That’s what Las Fuentes look like today.”

I stared. It did not look like a living creature at all; it had no structure, no orifices, no notable physical features—nothing but purple goo coagulated on the seat of the chair and heaped halfway up the backrest. If placed on the floor, the pile might reach to my knees.

“This creature does not look advanced,” I said. “It is nothing but ooze.”

“But
smart
ooze,” Festina replied. “The picture was taken in the study of Admiral Vincence, current president of the navy’s High Council. Vincence found the ooze one night when he got home; it had somehow sneaked past the most sophisticated security system our navy ever assembled. The jelly introduced itself as official ambassador of Las Fuentes, gave a comm number where it could be reached, then disappeared—sank straight through a leather armchair and into the floor.”

“Were the Fuentes purple jelly before?” Lajoolie asked softly. “When they were building the fountains?”

“Not according to archaeologists. Las Fuentes were big into cremation, so we don’t have any physical remains…but we’ve found a few tools, broken furniture, things that suggest they had conventional bodies. Flesh, blood, bone, the usual. When you ask the jelly ambassador what caused the big change, he’ll only say,
We grew up.
”

Festina turned to look at the purple blob picture once more. “So now,” she said, “Las Fuentes don’t have a home planet that we know of…just a single ambassador on New Earth. He won’t talk about trade, refuses to advise on scientific matters, and ignores requests for cultural exchange. Once in a while, he arbitrates disputes or clarifies the League of Peoples’ views on tricky legal questions—what we have to do to stay sentient—but he never seems to
want
anything from us. He isn’t interested in our labor, our data, our resources, our manufactured goods…so whatever goals jelly-people have, we humans are too primitive to be useful.”

“And yet,” Nimbus said pensively, “Las Fuentes maintain that embassy.”

“I’ll bet they want to keep an eye on us savages,” Uclod answered. “We lesser species may not be smart enough to contribute to these guys’ lofty existence, but there are probably ways we could screw them up. If we suddenly invented a way to mutate ourselves into the same kind of goo, Las Fuentes would damned sure want to know. Overnight, we’d change from harmless yahoos into direct competitors.”

“That’s one obvious explanation,” Festina agreed, “but it’s never smart to assume aliens think the way we do. Maybe there’s no such thing as ‘competition’once you reach a certain stage of development. Maybe it’s nothing but sweetness and light: one big happy melting pot of cosmic love.”

We all stared at her.

“Hey,” she said, “it was a
joke.”

Plans Within Plans

“So what’ve we got?” Uclod said. “The Pollisand spends most of his time badgering people about being idiots. But four years ago he broke with his usual modus operandi: he showed up on Melaquin, and instead of asking Oar why she jumped out a window, he simply patched her up.”

“Is that unusual for him?” Nimbus asked Festina. “Providing medical aid in a crisis?”

“He’s never done anything like it,” she replied, “and he’s been present at plenty of crises. I don’t think he’s ever showed up at a lethal accident—he seems to avoid fatalities. But he’s watched plenty of people crippled or bleeding, and he’s never tried to help a single one.”

“All right,” Uclod said, “so the Pollisand broke his pattern for Oar. We’ve also got the Shaddill getting upset when they find out Oar’s not dead. They say someone’s interfered with their plan. Obviously, the person who interfered was the Pollisand; he’s the one who took Oar away and brought her back to life. Do you think the Pollisand did that deliberately to screw the Shaddill?”

“Who knows?” Festina answered…but I thought I
did
know. The Pollisand told me he wanted to wipe the Shaddill off the face of the universe; if ministering to my health was a way to foil some Shaddill-ish scheme, he would gladly do so.

“I believe,” I said, “that he helped me as a means of frustrating the Shaddill…though I do not know what role I play in all this.”

Festina was looking in my direction, but her gaze was distant. “If the Shaddill thought you had died,” she said, “and they
still
came to Melaquin…they might have been interested in your corpse.” A light sparked in her eyes. “And why did they show up when they did? They must have known the navy was on its way to clean up evidence. Either the Shad-dill wanted to examine your body before the navy took it away…”

“Or,” Uclod finished her thought, “they wanted to remove missy’s body so the navy
couldn’t
check it out.”

Festina nodded. “Both possibilities suggest there’s something special about you, Oar. Something that sets you apart from the rest of your people.”

“Of course. I am more clever and beautiful.”

Festina gave me a look. “It would be nice to find something even
more
distinctive.”

“They thought she was dead,” Lajoolie said softly. “That’s quite a distinction in itself.” She looked at me with her mild eyes. “Isn’t it almost impossible for your people to die? You don’t age, you don’t get sick, you can’t drown or suffocate…short of falling off an eighty-story building, not much can hurt you. And if the Shaddill wanted a glass cadaver for some purpose, they couldn’t just kill one of your people; the League would never let them get away with outright murder.”

Uclod smiled at Lajoolie. “My darling wife has put her finger on a fascinating possibility. If the Shaddill wanted your body to dissect or something…”

His voice trailed off as he caught sight of Festina shaking her head. “The Shaddill wouldn’t need to dissect Oar. They
designed
her race; they built her whole genome down to the last little nucleotide. What could a dissection tell them they don’t already know?”

“Perhaps,” said Nimbus, “we should perform our own dissection to find out.”

I glared at him and swept my fist through the place where his nose would have been.

“Settle down,” Festina told me. “I assume Nimbus means we should give you a medical exam. See if there’s anything unusual.”

“There is nothing unusual about me,” I protested. “I am more healthy than anyone else on this ship.”

“Then you’re unusual, aren’t you?” my friend said with a smile. “Anyway, I want you examined. If nothing else, we should know what the Pollisand did to you. Did he just fix your injuries, or did he do something else while he had you on the operating table?”

“What might he have done?” I asked.

“I don’t know. That’s why we’re going to check you out.”

“I do not wish to be checked out,” I grumbled. “Such treatment is only for damaged people.”

“Humor me,” Festina said, “it’s important. Your friends can keep you company…unless you’d rather be examined in private?”

“No,” I told her. “I have had a good deal of privacy in my life. If you think I enjoy being alone, you are much mistaken.”

Festina’s breath caught in her throat. She let it out slowly. “I’m sorry. But you aren’t alone now, Oar. I promise.” She gave a small smile. “Go to sick bay, all of you—the sergeant will show the way.” She glanced toward the door; the mook man nodded. Festina turned back to me. “I’ll join you as soon as I can, but I have to look into a few things. Okay?”