Ascending lop-5

by James Alan Gardner

  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 Shaddill 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?"

  "Okay," I answered, using her own vernacular. Then, most bravely, I asked, "Do doctors hurt?"

  "If he hurts you," Festina said, "you have my permission to punch him in the nose."

  This made me very happy… but I still looked back with a lump in my throat as I went out the door.

  Festina sat at the table, her eyes staring off into space as if she were thinking very great thoughts. I decided it would be pleasant to think great thoughts of my own; but the only thing in my mind was that I was walking away from my friend.

  13: WHEREIN I AM THOROUGHLY EXAMINED

  More Tiny Things Invading My Person

  Sick bay did not hurt, but it tickled. I could not see what did the tickling, so I blamed Nimbus — I thought he was sending specks of himself to brush against me, making my nose itchy and causing awkward irritations all over my body. But the cloud man swore he had nothing to do with it; he claimed to be suffering personal disturbances of his own, because the air of the infirmary was filled with Analysis Nano.

  I did not know what Analysis Nano was, but the navy physician was delighted to explain. He was, in fact, delighted about every conceivable aspect of existence: the opportunity to examine me was "fabulous"; my personal transparency was "amazing"; and the chance to carry out a task for Festina was "a great, great honor." His name was Havel, a paunchy watery-eyed human who seemed to perceive more reasons to laugh than anyone else in the room. Dr. Havel was constantly chuckling or giggling or snickering over things that seemed quite ordinary indeed. He also displayed much hearty enthusiasm about anything that passed before his eyes… which meant when he said, "Ho, ho, you’re a stunner, the most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen," I was not so gratified as I might have wished.

  Some men are too easy to impress. When they praise your ethereal crystalline beauty, you get the feeling they would be just as ecstatic over a glittery red pebble or a potato shaped like a fish.

  On the other hand, Dr. Ha-Ha-Havel was a good person to approach for clarifications of important Scientific topics — he was so enchanted with the glories of the universe, he would gladly tell you whatever he could, and never suggest you were ignorant for not knowing. Therefore he explained that Analysis Nano was a swarm of millions and billions of tiny machines, so small they could not be seen. They buzzed around patients in sick bay, reading your pulse, your body temperature, and the composition of your sweat. At instructions from the physician, the little bugs could also delve beneath your skin, digging for blood samples or flying down your throat to examine the workings of your stomach.

  I did not want tiny machines journeying through my digestive system; but Dr. Havel said a number of them had already gone down my esophagus, and it did not hurt a bit, did it?

  He was correct. It did not hurt, so I could not punch: him. But everything itched a great deal, as I have already said, and some of the nanos ventured into places they were not welcome. Though I wore my Explorer jacket, the coat did not seem sufficiently skilled at protecting the parts of me that needed safekeeping.

  Myself Exposed

  After five minutes of such indignities, Dr. Havel clapped his hands together with Anticipatory Zeal. "Well then, let’s see what my clever little helpers have discovered."

  He scurried to a table in the middle of the room: the sort of table one might lie upon when being examined by a real physician.[9] However, Dr. Havel never once asked me to lie down; and when I looked at the table, I saw why not.

  [9] — I am familiar with physicians because there were excellent medical machines in my home village. Once every month, I was required to recline on a proper examination table and submit to Necessary Regimens Of Health. These entailed authentic poking and prodding, not annoying little itches that lacked the courage of their convictions.

  The entire table-top was a viewing screen… and there on the screen, life-size, was the exposed anatomy of a woman who could only be me. I do not say I recognized myself — instead of a face, there was an opaque rendering of my skull, not to mention whitish versions of other bones in my body, laid over internal organs depicted in ugly unnatural colors — but the general outline matched my own, so who else could it be?

  "I do not look like that," I said. "My bones are not white; they are pleasingly transparent."

  Dr. Havel laughed the way he laughed at everything. "Quite right, Ms. Oar, quite right, ha-ha. I got the computer to colorize your lovely insides so we could see everything better. You’re clearly designed to be clear, ha-ha, at least to human eyes; but once we scan you on IR and UV, not to mention X-rays, ultrasound, MRI, bioelectrics and so on, we get a lovely picture of what we can’t discern in the visible spectrum."

  He proudly waved his hand toward the image — which I found most disconcerting to look at. When I breathed in, the picture’s lungs inflated; when I exhaled, the picture’s lungs did the same. I tried taking breaths in quick little gasps, hoping the machine would be thrown off and unable to match my rhythm… but no matter what I did, the image on the table imitated it exactly.

  If I held myself quiet, I could fed my heart beating in perfect unison with the ugly crimson heart shown on the screen. Just noticing that made my heart beat faster. The picture’s heart beat faster too. I had the most disquieting sensation the image controlled my pulse instead of the other way around; so I looked at the floor until the sensation went away.

  Meanwhile, Dr. Havel went around the table and placed his finger against the screen — not on my picture, but off to one side, where there was nothing but blank blackness. A host of squiggles appeared where his finger touched: printing in four different colors of light, and little diagrams that probably revealed vital facets of my health.

  "Hmmr Dr. Havel announce
d. "Ms. Oar, it turns out you’re yourself."

  "This is not a clever machine if that is its best observation."

  "Oh," said he, "you think it’s reporting the obvious? Not at all, ha-ha, ha-ha. Before you got here, Admiral Ramos called to brief me… and when I heard your story, I bet the good admiral a modest sum you’d turn out to be a clone of the original Oar. But you aren’t."

  "How can you tell?" Uclod asked.

  The doctor must have been hoping for that question. "See here?" he said most gleefully. He patted his fingers against the screen, right on the picture of my ribs. The image expanded to show a magnified view, twice as big as before. Havel patted again and the picture expanded a second time; several more pats, and all you could see was one little patch of bone, blown up to fill the body-sized screen.

  "All right," the doctor said, "fourth rib, right side: look at this area here." He circled his pudgy hand above the center of the picture, where there was an obvious line etched into the bone. "See this ridge running up the middle? And the bump at the top: one side of the ridge is a bit higher than the other. That’s a fracture site. The bone broke and didn’t quite knit cleanly. It’s only a microscopic discrepancy — whoever set the fracture did a fantastic job, better than any human surgeon. And the healing was more complete than anything I’ve seen in Homo sapiens, But magnify the image a few hundred times, and ta-da! The glitch is there, plain as day."