Lieutenant Tsh’t raised her glossy head from the soft platform of her mechanical walker, aiming one dark eye at my g’Kek friend.
“It’ssss a place where we fishy things suffered greatly, before coming to your world.”
Had I been human, my ears would have burned with embarrassment. Being a hoon, my throat sac puffed with apologetic umbles. But Huck barged on without noticing.
“Sheesh, it looks big!”
The dolphin emitted snorting laughter from her moist blowhole.
“You c-could say that. The shell encloses a volume of approximately thirty astrons, or a trillionth of a cubic parsec.”
Huck’s stalks expressed a blithe shrug.
“Huh! Whatever that means. I’ll tell you what it reminds me of. It looks like the spiny armor covering a desert clam!”
“Lookssss can be deceiving, young Jijoan,” Tsh’t answered. “That shell is soft enough to cut with a wooden spoon. If you approached and exhaled on it, the patch touched by your breath would boil away. Its average density is like a cloud in a snowstorm.”
That doesn’t sound too threatening, I pondered. Then I caught the startled look on Sara Koolhan’s face. Our young human sage frowned as her eyes darted back and forth, from data panels to the main screen, then to Tsh’t.
“The infrared … the reemission profiles … You’re not saying that thing actually contains—”
She stopped, unable to finish her sentence. The dolphin officer snickered.
“Indeed it does. A star resides at the heart of that soft confffection. That deceptive puff of p-poison ssssnow.
“Welcome, dear Jijoan friends. Welcome to the Fractal World.”
Lark
HE DIDN’T FEEL COLD. NOT EXACTLY. EVEN though, logically, he ought to.
A cloying mist surrounded Lark as membranes pressed against him from all sides, keeping his body bent nearly double, with knees up near his chin.
Lark felt as he imagined he might if someone crammed him back into the womb.
Soon another similarity grew apparent.
He wasn’t breathing anymore.
In fact, his mouth was sealed shut and swollen plugs filled both nostrils. The rhythmic expansion of his chest, the soft sigh of sweet air, these notable portions of life’s usual background … were gone!
With this realization, panic nearly engulfed Lark. A red haze obscured vision, narrowing to a tunnel as he struggled and thrashed. Though his body seemed reluctant at first, he obliged it to try inhaling … and achieved nothing.
He tried harder, commanding effort from his sluggish diaphragm and rib cage. Lark’s spine arched as he strained, until at last a scant trickle of gas slipped by one nose plug — perhaps only a few molecules—
— carrying an acrid stench!
Sudden paroxysms contorted Lark. Limbs churned and bowels convulsed as he tried voiding himself into the turbid surroundings.
Fortunately, his gut was empty — he had eaten little for days. A cottony feeling spread through his extremities like a drug, filling them with soothing numbness as the fit soon passed, leaving behind a lingering foul taste in his mouth.
Lark had learned a valuable lesson.
Next time you find yourself wrapped up in fetal position, crammed inside a stinking bag without an instinct to breathe, take a hint. Go with the flow.
Lark felt for a pulse and verified that his heart, at least, was still functioning. The persistent stinging in his sinuses — a noxious-familiar stench — was enough all by itself to verify that life went on, painful as it was.
Turning his head to look around, Lark soon noticed that his bag of confinement was just one of many floating in a much larger volume. Through the obscuring mist he made out other membranous sacks. Most held big, conical-shaped Jophur — tapered stacks of fatty rings that throbbed feebly while their basal leg segments pushed uselessly, without any solid surface for traction. Some of the traekilike beings looked whole, but others had clearly been broken down to smaller stacks, or even individual rings.
Knotty cables, like the throbbing tendrils of a mulc spider, led away from each cell … including his own. In fact, one penetrated the nearby translucent wall, snaking around Lark’s left leg and terminating finally at his inner thigh, just below the groin.
The sight triggered a second wave of panic, which he fought this time by drawing on his best resource, his knowledge as a primitive scientist. Jijo might be a backwater, lacking the intellectual resources of the Five Galaxies, but you could still train a working mind from the pages of paper books.
Use what you know. Figure this out!
All right.
First thing … the cable piercing his leg appeared to target the femoral artery. Perhaps it was feeding on him, like some space-leech in a garish, pre-Contact scifi yarn. But that horror image seemed so silly that Lark suspected the truth was quite different.
Basic life support. I’m floating in a poison atmosphere, so they can’t let me breathe or eat or drink. They must be sending oxygen and nutrients directly to my blood.
Whoever “they” were.
As for the jiggling containers, Lark was enough of a field biologist to know sampling bags when he saw them. Although he could not laugh, a sense of ironic justice helped him put a wry perspective on the situation. He had put more than enough hapless creatures in confinement during his career as a naturalist, dissecting the complex interrelationships of living species on Jijo.
If nature passed out karma for such acts, Lark’s burden might merit a personal purgatory that looked something like this.
He strained harder to see through the mist, hoping not to find Ling among the captives. And yet, a pall of loneliness settled when he verified she was nowhere in sight.
Maybe she escaped from Rann and the Jophur, when these yellow monsters invaded the Polkjhy. If she made it to the Life Core, she might clamber through the jungle foliage and be safe in our old nest. For a while, at least.
He glimpsed walls beyond the murk, estimating this chamber to be larger than the meeting tree back in his home village. From certain visible furnishings and wall-mounted data units, he could tell it was still the Jophur dreadnought, but invaders had taken over this portion, filling it with their own nocuous atmosphere.
That ought to be a clue. The familiar-horrid scent. A toxicity that forbade inhaling. But Lark’s bruised mind drew no immediate conclusions. To a Jijoan — even a so-called “scientist”—all of space was a vast realm of terrible wonders.
Have they seized the whole vessel?
It seemed farfetched, given the power of mighty Jophur skygods, but Lark looked for some abstract solace in that prospect. Those traeki-cousins meant only bad news to all the Six Races of Jijo, especially the poor g’Kek. The best thing that could happen to his homeworld would be if battleship Polkjhy never reached home to report what it had found in an obscure corner of Galaxy Four.
And yet, this situation could hardly be expected to make him glad, or grateful to his new captors.
It took a while, but eventually Lark realized — some of them were nearby!
At first, he mistook the quivering shapes for lumps in the overall fog, somewhat denser than normal. But
