Ascending (22 page)

“It’s a good guess,” Aarhus said. “Before
Hemlock
got zapped, we were headed for the planet Jalmut. That’s a Cashling world; most likely, the ships that answered our Mayday are Cashling too. But the Cashlings almost never travel in groups—they’re too egotistical. Get a bunch together in separate ships, and five minutes later, they fly off in different directions. The only time Cashling ships stay in a pack is when one of their prophets organizes a crusade.”

“And what is a crusade?” I asked. “A religious pilgrimage?”

“They get mad if you use the word ‘religious’—most Cashlings are devout atheists, and fly into tantrums at talk of deities or souls. But the truth is that Cashlings are religious as hell. Fanatic believers. They just switch beliefs every other day.”

“How can that be?”

“Doesn’t make sense to me either,” the sergeant replied. “But Cashlings believe in something called
Pu Naram
…usually translated into English as ‘Godly Greed.’ Don’t ask me to define it, because every time you blink, a new prophet shows up to put a different spin on what Godly Greed means. One week, it’s all about taking care of yourself and piss on anyone else; the next week, it’s switched to everybody working in harmony so you can all get rich together; then it’s about compassion and helping others, because tossing pennies to cripples really boosts your ego.” He rolled his eyes. “Cashlings always brag how they have a single unified culture, unlike humans and other species at our level of evolution…but the only unity I see is them flitting from one prophet to another, like flies trying to find the smelliest heap of manure.

“As for their outreach crusades,” he went on, gesturing vaguely at some point beyond the ship’s hull, “it’s traditional for a prophet to gather his or her followers and wander through space every few years. Mostly they visit other Cash-ling worlds, picking up new converts at every stop and losing just as many old ones. The turnover in people is substantial: after three stops, a crusade seldom has anyone it started with…not even the original prophet. Someone new decides he or she is a prophet and takes over the whole flotilla.”

Lajoolie favored me with a weak smile. “My husband once told me crusades have nothing to do with belief. They come from a powerful instinct to homogenize the population: to break up communities that are getting too insular and to shuffle around the breeding pool. Uclod says the Cashlings have had mass migrations throughout their entire history; crusades are just the latest excuse.”

Aarhus nodded. “I’ve heard that too. But never say that to a Cashling either, unless you want to drive the bastard into a rage. Let’s not do that—we’re in enough trouble as it is.”

“Because they wish to take us as slaves?” I said. “We should inform them that nice religions do not do such things.”

“I told you,
Pu Naram
isn’t a religion; the Cashlings call it a ‘proven economic doctrine.’” Aarhus made a face. “And even though the working definition of
Pu Naram
changes ten times a year, it always retains one core principle: screwing aliens, especially ones who can’t fight back. Over the years, outreach crusades have come across a lot of aliens in distress—the Cashlings don’t have a navy like ours, so crusades are the primary source of search-and-rescue. By long-established tradition, a passing crusade won’t save your life until you swear ten years of indentured servitude.”

“But they
must
save our lives,” I said. “Are they not required to do so by the League of Peoples?”

Lajoolie shook her head. “Not unless they caused our predicament in the first place. They aren’t obliged to help us, and if they do, they can charge whatever price they want.”

“Hmph!” I said. “I do not think much of that policy.”

“But the Cashlings love it,” Aarhus answered. “They consider it a wonderful omen when a crusade scoops up slaves—it boosts the prophet’s prestige. Of course, if we’re really lucky, this particular prophet might be liberal enough to take a ransom instead: letting us hand over a bucket of cash instead of ten years’ hard labor.”

He did not sound cheered by that prospect, but I thought it allowed us an excellent means of emancipation. “Then we shall hand over
Royal Hemlock
,” I said. “It is quite large and splendid, even if it is broken. Parts of it even have carpet. The ship must be worth enough to pay all our ransoms.”

“Probably,” Aarhus agreed, “but we can’t use it for that. By Cashling laws of salvage,
Hemlock
already belongs to the crusade—the ship became theirs as soon they took it in tow. They’ll claim everything on board: even the clothes on our backs. If they accept a ransom at all, it’ll have to come from somewhere else.” He gave me a sympathetic look. “Somehow I don’t think you have family at home with cash in their pockets.” Turning to Lajoolie, he asked, “How about you?”

She bit her lip. “No one on my homeworld would pay a cent. As for my husband’s family…”

“I know,” Aarhus said. “They’ve gone missing.”

“What about you?” Lajoolie asked.

The sergeant shook his head. “My only family is the Outward Fleet; and at the moment, I don’t feel like turning to the Admiralty for help. Ten years of slavery is nothing compared to what the High Council intends for us—what they
still
might do if they hear we’re being held by the Cashlings. The council will swoop in, pay our ransoms, and take possession of us from the crusade…whereupon we’ll all disappear down some deep dark well.”

“Then we must not let that happen,” I said. “We shall battle the Cashlings and…and…”

Sergeant Aarhus just looked at me. He did not have to explain why we could not fight; if we put up resistance, the Cashlings would just go away, leaving us to drift in space. Perhaps we could merely pretend to submit until we were taken aboard the Cashling ships…but by then, they might have locked us in irons. Even worse, the many people of
Royal Hemlock
would be billeted over all the small vessels of the Cashling crusade. I would likely be separated from Festina and Nimbus and little Starbiter and Uclod and Lajoolie and even Aarhus.

That would be Just Awful.

“So what will the Cashlings do first?” I asked Aarhus.

He thought about it. “With our communications dead, they can’t just call and ask us to surrender. They’ll have to send someone over in person.”

“Where will this emissary arrive?”

“The only safe way into the ship is our manual airlock. That’s back in the rear transport bay.”

“Then we must go there,” I said. “We shall meet this Cashling and discuss terms.”

I picked up a glow-wand from the heap around me. Getting to my feet, I was still quite woozy…so I gathered the other wands too and hugged the whole bundle to my chest.

“Lajoolie,” I said, “please carry my jacket for me; I do not wish to wear it now, but I shall put it on before we make contact with the Cashlings.”

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Aarhus asked. “Cashlings are quick to take offense, and we really don’t want to piss them off. Maybe we should let someone else talk to them.”

“If you are afraid to confront them,” I said, “you may remain behind. I can find the rear transport bay without your assistance; I have been there once before.”

Aarhus made a face. “All I’m saying is that talking to these guys will take tact and diplomacy.”

“I am
excellent
at tact and diplomacy. Let us go.”

I strode off down the hall with dauntless determination. Lajoolie fell in behind me, and Nimbus drifted along as well, nestling baby Starbiter in the midst of his mist.

With a heavy sigh, Sergeant Aarhus joined our little procession.

The Drawbacks Of Photosynthesis

Moving through the corridors was a Buoyant Experience. At first, I thought this was simply the result of renewed health and purpose; but then I realized my step was lighter because
I
was lighter. Gravity aboard the ship had begun to diminish…and though I could not leap impossibly long distances, I certainly possessed more spring than usual. This was a most interesting experience, and it kept me amused (bounce, bounce, bounce!) all the way to the transport bay.

By the time we got to our destination, Festina had arrived too. This is an excellent trait in a Faithful Sidekick: anticipating where you will be and attending upon you. Of course, Festina feigned surprise to see me, and pretended she had merely come to await the people who had taken
Hemlock
in tow…but that is what she had to say, because an important navy admiral cannot admit she feels lost and lonely without her very best friend.

Uclod was in the transport bay too, which meant that he and Lajoolie found it necessary to have a tender reunion. Their whisperings and touchings proved most vexatious, so I turned my back on them in a very pointed manner; but Festina, Aarhus, and Nimbus were no more amusing than the Divians, because Festina wanted to be told how Nimbus had induced baby Starbiter to cry for help. This led to much repetitious talk about outreach crusades and why it was not at all wrong for the cloud man to tickle his daughter…which was very quite boring, because I had heard it already.

My only recourse was to walk around the bay on my own, occasionally muttering in the hope someone would ask if I had achieved a brilliant insight. No one took notice
at all
, which made me annoyed and irritable…but just as I was about to berate them for their churlish lack of attention, the heat of my anger turned to spinning dizziness and I sat down hard on the floor.

Oof.

Living on light is a fine thing indeed, but it is not enough to sustain substantial activity. This explains why plants do not perform hand-springs. (That and the fact that plants have no hands.) I still carried an armload of glow-wands, but the energy they provided was not enough to keep me going if I persisted in moving about.

“Are you all right, Oar?” Festina called from somewhere behind me.

“I am fine,” I said, forcing my voice to be strong. “I am simply…” For a moment, I could not think of a suitable excuse why I might have thumped down hard on the deck; but then I caught sight of the rainbow-colored hemlock tree painted on the wall not far from me. “I am simply contemplating the art,” I said—because I did not want the others to treat me as a tottery invalid who could not participate in important activities.

“All right,” Festina called. “You enjoy the art.”

That is easy for her to say,
I thought. The tree on the wall was not enjoyable in any way. For True Artistic Merit, a painting should have dried globs of pigment protruding from the surface so that viewers can pick off little bits and sniff what the paint smells like; at least that is what my sister and I concluded as we developed Our Own Personal Aesthetic with the ancient paintings on display in our home village. But the hemlock image in front of me was tediously t w o dimensional, with no protruding bits at all. I was about to make an astute critical remark on this lack of texture, when I noticed the tree possessed a feature I had previously overlooked.

Two glowing red eyes burned dimly amidst the multicolored foliage…as if a certain headless creature was concealed behind the leaves.

Talking To The Painting

“Pollisand?” I whispered softly.

“Who else?” he replied. “The fucking Cheshire Cat?”

He was speaking in his normal raspy-sharp voice. I looked back quickly at the others, but they showed no sign of hearing him. Considering how loud he sounded in my ears, it seemed most strange they had not noticed.

“Nah,” the Pollisand said, “your buddies aren’t in on this conversation. It’s just between you and me, sweetums.”

“In other words, you are not really here. You are projecting sights and sounds into my mind again…” I stopped. “But I am not connected to Starbiter! How can you contact my brain when I am not linked to anything?”

“Hey,” the Pollisand said, “didn’t I tell you I’m seventy-five trillion rungs above you on the evolutionary ladder? Why should I need a Zarett to do my projecting for me?”

“Hmm,” I hmmed, thinking very hard. This Pollisand had a most irksome habit of not answering questions—he simply made it
seem
like he was responding, when he was really evading the subject. In this particular situation, it occurred to me he might be attempting to hide something most important indeed.

“Did you do something to me?” I asked in whispered outrage. “When you took me away and mended my bones, did you do more? Did you perhaps place a Scientific Device in my brain that allows you to link with me at any time?”

“Ooo,” said the Pollisand, “aren’t we clever! At least one of us is.
Much
cleverer than Dr. Havel. He didn’t find a thing. Then again, maybe there’s nothing to find.”

The red eyes grew brighter and pushed out from the hemlock’s painted leaves. Attached to those eyes was the rest of the Pollisand’s body, moving outward too—then thickening from flat to fat and coming straight off the wall. If you have ever seen a large headless alien step out of a two-dimensional painting, this was exactly like that…only better, because it was happening to
me.

Since I was still seated on the floor, his huge white body towered above my head. He looked very real as he yanked his rump free from the wall and flicked his short tail to brush flecks of paint off his hindquarters; but no one else in the room even glanced in our direction. This was indeed just a projected image, and my brain was the only one receiving the signal.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, still whispering. “Have you come to observe another dreadful mistake?”

“Hope not,” he said. “But let’s see how you handle the Cashlings.”

“So you will watch whether we anger them?”

“Of course I’ll watch. I’m always watching.”

He gave a full-body shake, and stray bits of paint showered off him onto the floor. They also showered onto my legs, which I had tucked in front of me. Glaring at him, I wiped the tiny flakes of green and red and black off my previously clean thighs. Meanwhile, the Pollisand eased his bulk past me until he stood between me and the other people in the room; only I was in a position to see his eyes, glowing deep in his chest cavity.

Suddenly, the eyes burst into white-hot flame, such as when a forest fire strikes some bone-dry deposit of leaves and pine pitch. The flash of that light flared down upon me, so blinding I shut my eyes…but I could feel the radiance pouring through my body with great invigorating intensity. In less than a second, I was sizzling—the same sort of sizzle one experiences after a full week of basking in the brilliance of an Ancestral Tower.

The heat faded quickly. When I opened my eyes, the Pollisand was back to normal, only a dim crimson glow shining from his neckhole. He reached out a foot and patted me lightly on the cheek. “You’re such a skinny girl,” he said with a strange feigned accent, “don’t you know you gotta eat? And not just cotton candy,” he added, waving his foot at the glow-wands I still carried with me. “Those things got no nutrition—they’re ninety percent visible light, capiche? They go right through you, and where’s the good of that? A pretty girl oughta put meat on her bones. X rays, gamma rays, microwaves: the high-energy stuff. Or maybe (such a radical thought!), you might try solid food once in a while. Okay, so a stranger’s cooking can’t match your mamma’s lasagna; you still gotta get some nourishment or you’ll shrivel down to a stick. How you gonna bump off the Shad-dill if you keep starving yourself? I’m not always gonna be free to bring you take-out.”

He finally paused for breath. Then he asked, “Feeling better now, bright-eyes?”

“Yes,” I told him. “However, if this is all just a fiction projected into my brain, how can it affect me as if I was bathed in real light?”

“Oops,” said the Pollisand, “look at the time. Gotta go, bambina. Ciao!”

With that, he simply vanished—not in a fancy way, but disappearing as abruptly as a light being turned off. His exit did not make the slightest sound.

I stared at the place where he had been. All those flecks of paint he shook onto the floor were gone, vanished like snow in a bonfire. When I looked at the tree on the wall, no red eyes stared back; there was just flat uninteresting paint.

“Hmph,” I said to myself. As always, the Pollisand had proved himself an infuriating visitor…but I felt much better, no longer woozy.

Perhaps he was not quite the utter asshole he pretended to be.

Or perhaps he was simply preserving me for something worse later on.

The Advantages Of Immersing Oneself In Mindless Entertainment

Dumping my now-unnecessary glow-wands onto the floor, I rose to my feet and was halfway across the room when Nimbus said, “Listen!” Everyone went instantly silent; in the stillness, I could hear thumping noises to my right.

When I turned in that direction, I saw a heavy metal door embedded in the wall—the entry to the manual airlock. I had not noticed it before in the dim glow-wand light because it was painted the same flat white as the rest of the transport bay…as if someone wished to pretend the door was not even there. Perhaps the navy preferred to downplay the necessity for their ships to contain an emergency entrance.

“Okay,” Festina murmured. “It’s showtime. Everybody on your best behavior.”

Quickly I retrieved my Explorer jacket from Lajoolie and slipped it on—one must endeavor to look official when alien guests arrive. As I was fastening the front flaps, Uclod said, “Hey, here’s a wild thought: do any of us speak Cashling?”

“No need,” Festina replied. “Cashlings spend every waking hour amusing themselves with entertainment bought from other species: Mandasar out-of-shell fantasies, Unity mask dances, human VR chips, the works. Makes Cashlings very cosmopolitan and knowledgeable about alien races. I guarantee whoever comes out of that airlock will speak colloquial English and understand mainstream human body language…as well as knowing the proper form of address for a Fasskister hetman, how to initiate a Greenstrider sex act, and which knife to use in a Myriapod auto-da-fé.”

“Second knife from the left,” Aarhus said. “The one with three black barbs and the engraving of the Horsehead Nebula.”

We all stared at him.

“Hey,” said Aarhus, “I have hidden depths.”

Two Cashlings And Their Spacesuits

With another thump, the door opened. Two gawky figures stood on the other side, both wearing spacesuits of eye-watering flamboyance. One suit was a swirl of red and white stripes, the stripes spiraling down from top to toe and daubed with bright blue curlicues that might be letters in some alien alphabet. The decorations were just as thick around the helmet as anywhere else: if the helmet had a seeout visor, I could not discern where it was. The entire outfit seemed opaque.

The other suit was equally opaque and visorless, but sported an aggressive frost green background, with all manner of clashing violet images painted on top—animals and houses and fruit and farm implements…all of which might have been completely different objects than I believed, because with aliens, an item that appears to be a nice juicy peach may turn out to be your host’s nephew in temporary chrysalis form, so it is best not to be too hasty at the supper table.
¹¹

The figures wearing these suits were of course Cashlings; and they had assumed their walking configuration, with long long legs and almost no torso at all. You might think they would look ridiculous, as if their pants were hiked up to their armpits…but in fact, they had a sinister air that made me most queasy. They were all limbs and dangly, like giant spiders who had reared up to human height. Even their garish colors and ornamentation were not as clownish as one might expect—not when most of the light in the room came from the glow-wands I had left in the far corner. The lanky faceless Cashlings stood poised half in shadow, reminding one of flashy-hued snakes about to strike.

When they quitted the airlock chamber, the motion was fluid and fast: two steps and they both had reached us, more speedy than a human could run, though it appeared they were not exerting themselves. The swiftness of their approach was enough to make Lajoolie gasp and back away, tugging Uclod with her. Nimbus retreated too, curling more tightly around his child. Festina and Aarhus did not flinch, but I could see it cost them an effort—they clenched their jaws and silently held their ground as the Cashlings loomed in toward them, shoving their eyeless heads close to my friends’ faces.

Angry at these bullying tactics, I thrust myself forward and declaimed in a loud voice, “Greetings!”

The two Cashlings turned their blank rainbow helmets in my direction.

“I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples,” I told them. “I beg your Hospitality.”

For a moment, there was nothing but silence. Festina’s face looked aghast, as if I had made a hideous mistake speaking the League of Peoples’ words. It struck me belatedly there must have been a reason why she did not proclaim the speech herself; perhaps these Cashling ones took offense at rote recitations. But there was nothing to do except maintain my poise—stand straight with dignity, attempting to project cool confidence. The Cashlings remained motionless for another long moment…then broke into peals of laughter.

First Impressions

It was not true laughter as came naturally to my own race and humans—it was more an imitation, a mimicry from beings who knew the
sound
of laughter but not the sense. Festina had said these creatures were familiar with human ways from watching entertainment shows…but one had to ask how much entertainment they actually derived if they could put no genuine feeling into their ha-ha’s.