Ascending

shoulder when I reached the doorway… and to my surprise, I found myself saying, 'I am not a virgin, you know.' Then I stormed away, feeling that my face had become very hot.

No One Ever Congratulates One On Her Daring

I did not wish to return to the bridge — it was not nice seeing Lajoolie snuggled up to Uclod, as if no one else in the world mattered. I feared, however, that if I sat on my own in the corridor, Nimbus would come after me again, claiming I had provoked more metabolic imbalance. 'I am not an imbalance,' I muttered. 'I am, in fact, the only one on this ship who knows How To Behave.'

Dawdling most slowly, I walked down the corridor, hoping some diverting event would occur before I reached my destination… but it did not, and I was forced to enter the bridge after all.

Lajoolie had not budged from her previous position, but Uclod was now awake. The two were talking quietly, nose to nose. I stomped my feet hard as I walked in, to make sure they knew I was there. It would have been gratifying if they had jumped up guiltily at being caught… but they merely turned to face me, moving in exasperating unison.

Their cheeks were almost touching. That was exasperating too.

'So I see you are conscious,' I said loudly to Uclod. 'It is high time — I am most bored flying this ship on my own.'

Uclod’s face looked grim. 'What did the Shaddill want, missy?'

'I believe they wanted to capture us. But we escaped.'

The little man’s eyes narrowed. 'How?'

'I flew into the sun.'

'Into the sun?'

'Yes. And the stick-ship did not follow, for those Shaddill were not as daring as I. Unless,' I added, 'they ran away, not because of the sun but because of the human navy.'

'The human navy,' Uclod repeated.

'The entire human navy,' I said, 'and perhaps they were the ones who scared off the stick-ship. But the humans were not so formidable after all. Starbiter outran them most easily… which might be because her FTL field had absorbed invigorating energies from the interior of the sun. By the way, are there creatures who live inside stars? Giant glass butterflies who sing? Because this would be a highly pleasant universe if such creatures existed.'

Uclod blinked several times. Then he turned away and pushed forward in his seat, tapping the bumps in front of his chair. Unlike machines on Melaquin, Starbiter did not possess an obvious display screen; but the Zarett must have been furnished with some means to convey information to Uclod because the little man slumped back from his console in utterish amazement 'Holy shit,' he whispered, 'we did fly into the sun.'

'Yes,' I said. 'It was very bright.'

'I can imagine.'

'But it was safe and peaceful. No harm came to us. You were wrong when you thought we would burn.'

'Look,' he said quietly, 'I wasn’t concerned about the heat so much as everything else. The gravity. The magnetics. Every damned particle in the subatomic bestiary, plowing into us at fusion intensities. I can show you solid mathematical equations proving an FTL field can’t survive more than a nanosecond…'

'Do not be foolish,' I said. 'Mathematical equations are not solid — they are just scribbles someone writes down. And whoever wrote your equations must have made a mistake, because we are all just fine.'

Lajoolie leaned closer to her husband… if that were possible. She told him, 'The FTL field integrity equations were given to us by the Shaddill.'

Uclod looked at her. His eyes widened. 'Holy shit. Holy shit!'

'The Shaddills?' I said. 'The monstrous villains who tried to eat us with sticks? I would never believe their equations, ever.'

'But… but…' Uclod broke into a series of spluttery noises before he could achieve full words again. 'The Shaddill invented Zaretts. And FTL fields. We’ve been using their equations for centuries and not once… not once… damn.' He looked at Lajoolie. 'This is bigger than some piddly-shit expose on the human navy. We’ve gotta get home at top speed, and…' He glanced at the control bumps in front of him. 'Bloody hell! Do you know how fast we’re going?'

'Very most fast,' I said. 'We were strengthened by entering the sun. That is how we escaped from the Earthlings and the stick-people.'

'Bloody hell,' Uclod said. He swept his hand over his brow, as if wiping off sweat. 'Finding a secret like this — it’s like dynamite, missy. Worse than dynamite: pure antimatter. If hopping into a star doesn’t destroy FTL fields but actually makes them stronger… if the Shaddill have deliberately misled us for centuries about the limitations on our FTL envelopes…' He shook his head. 'But how could they get away with it? Our people must have run tests — experiments to measure FTL field collapse. That’s the sort of thing engineers do! And if the Shaddill still managed to fool everybody down through the centuries… hell, the Shads will go ape-shit that we’ve discovered the truth. They’re probably after us already. What are we going to do?'

Lajoolie stood, her movement not making a sound. 'Whatever you decide,' she said, 'I’m sure it will be wise. We’ll leave you to think in peace; when you want, I’ll bring you food.'

She bent over him, cupping her hands gently around the globes of his ears and touching her lips to his bald scalp. It was a most intimate gesture — the kind that makes a watcher embarrassed and angry and lonesome, all at the same time. Then she turned and walked silently away.

As she passed, Lajoolie took my hand in a firm grip. She led me from the room… and I felt so subdued,I went without argument.

9: WHEREIN I LEARN ABOUT OUR ENEMIES

Bone Appetit

Lajoolie’s hand felt cold holding mine — so cold her blood must have been the temperature of slush. It irks me that aliens never have the correct body heat: they are always too warm or too cool, and too hard or too soft, too dry or too damp, too hasty or too slow, too stupid or too annoying. Sometimes, they are also too strong… which is why I had no choice but to hasten behind the orange woman as she dragged me away from the bridge.

Partway down the corridor, Lajoolie stopped and placed her free hand on the glowing yellow wall. I did not see anything special about the spot she touched, but after a count of three, the opposite wall opened with a faint sucking sound. It revealed another corridor, taller and narrower than the one we currently occupied. When Lajoolie moved forward, there was no room to walk beside her; therefore, I trailed along behind, trying not to feel like a little girl being pulled to the place of teaching machines by her older sister.[5]

[5] — The teaching machines in my home village were not the advanced Science kind that plant education straight into your brain. We only had crude teaching machines that made you recite your elevenses tables until you wanted to scream. They were very most stupid machines; alas, they were also unbreakable, even for such a one as happens to possess an excellent silver ax.

We soon came to a branch, a pair of even narrower bronchial tubes forking left and right. Lajoolie escorted me to the left where the corridor spiraled upward into a wee cubbyhole of a room. Bony ridges jutted from the room’s side wall, making flat surfaces with curved-up lips at the front. Clearly, these were shelves… although if I were a Zarett, I would not go to the inconvenience of growing bones in my lungs, just so people had someplace to put their belongings. The shelves held bowls which appeared to be bone too — suggesting that someone had chopped off parts of Starbiter’s skeleton in order to obtain containers for soup.

That was quite icky indeed. Even worse, there were cups on the shelves too: big bone cups, which reminded me of skulls. They did not have facial features, but they were almost exactly the size and shape of a half-rotted wolf’s head I found in the woods when I was twelve. There were also bone utensils of recognizable types — spoons, spatulas, and so on — plus a variety of objects whose purpose I could not divine. Some were long and thin, others were boxy, and a few were so oddly shaped (all curlicues and spikes and knobs) that one suspected they had no actual use at all; they were either abstract sculptures, or objects left lying about simply to convey an alien ambiance.

Lajoolie took a bone-knife from a bone-shelf and laid out three bone-bowls on the bone-counter. I could not tell where the food synthesizer was in this small room, but I assumed obtaining dinner was simply a matter of pressing more bumps on the wall. There was an especially noticeable protrusion just beside the water spigot — a greenish-colored bulge the size of a cabbage, budding from Starbiter’s tissues. I thought there might be small indentations in the bulge, buttons that you pushed in order to specify what sort of meal you wished… so it did not surprise me when Lajoolie reached out to take hold of the protuberance.

It did surprise me when she used the knife to cut the bulge right off the wall. Then she chopped the material into equal-sized portions and placed the chunks into the bowls.

'What are you doing?' I asked in horror.

'Making supper.' She sniffed one of the lumps of green. 'It smells like choilappa; that’s glazed ort-breast baked with several kinds of Divian vegetables. Of course, this is really just a mixture of simple amino acids and minerals — very basic, digestible by any DNA-based life-form we’ve ever encountered.'

'It is not digestible by me!' I said. 'It is a piece of my friend Starbiter!'

'Yes.'

'You cut it right off her body!'

'Yes.'

'It is Zarett meat!'

Lajoolie looked at me, then at the greenish matter in the bowls. 'It’s not exactly meat; it’s a specialized skin tissue, purposely produced to be cut off and consumed by a Zarett’s passengers. It grows fast enough to feed eight people three meals a day… which we feed right back to Starbiter if we don’t eat it all. Each meal is artificially scented and flavored to taste like a different dish: it’s Divian cuisine, but humans really enjoy most of our food. There are a few things we eat that make Homo sapiens nauseous — things that hit your taste buds the wrong way — but if you wait half an hour, the artificial flavoring dissipates and the food turns completely bland. Not very appealing, but it’s still got nutritional content.'