Ascending

'A big white thing like a headless animal?' she asked.

'That’s what we were told,' Uclod answered. 'Right, Oar?'

'Yes,' said I, most reluctantly. 'Is this creature known to you, Festina?'

One of the mooks by the door laughed under his breath. The sergeant glared at him. So did Festina. Without taking her eyes off the mook, my friend said, 'He’s known, all right.'

'Who is he?' Uclod asked.

Festina did not answer right away; instead, she pressed a button on the conference table’s surface. A section of table in front of her rolled open to reveal a vidscreen and keypad. She tapped on the keys a moment, then turned to face the false window that had been showing all those pleasant stars.

The window had changed. Now it displayed a picture of a beast I recognized all too well — a headless white rhinoceros with eyes down his throat. 'That,' Festina said, 'is an alien who calls himself the Pollisand. Possibly the most frightening creature in the entire galaxy.'

Cleverly feigning ignorance, I said, 'This Pollisand is a wicked villain?'

'No. Not in the usual sense. But if the Pollisand is in the area, consider me officially terrified.'

'Why?'

'Because he’s a gawker. A disaster junkie. Someone who loves showing up at a certain kind of catastrophe.'

Festina pressed more keys. The picture screen shifted to a different view of the Pollisand: this time standing inside a poorly lit mom filled with machinery. In front of him sat a human woman wearing a baggy green outfit of the type called overalls. She was not looking at the Pollisand, but he was definitely looking at her.

'This,' said Festina, 'shows the Pollisand’s first appearance in human space. The year 2108 on the planet Meecks, in the control room of the Debba colony’s fusion reactor. Surveillance cameras recorded this headless white alien materializing behind the command console at the very moment a technician finished entering a manual override on a safety mechanism that was supposedly malfunctioning.'

Festina rose from the table, strode to the display screen, and glared at the baggy green woman. 'The techie was an utter numskull. She’d misdiagnosed the problem, botched the solution, disabled a warning alarm so no one would know she’d screwed up… then kept hot-dogging with moronic attempts to stop cascading system failures throughout the installation. Result? Total reactor meltdown. Not a big boom, but the entire power generation system got slagged. Considering the outside temperature was ninety degrees below zero, it looked like the colony would freeze to death in a matter of days.

'And that’s when the Pollisand showed up.' Festina pointed to Mr. Headless Asshole on the display screen. 'Right in the control room, at the precise moment meltdown became inevitable. He pranced up to the woman and began to ask questions. Why did you do that? Why didn’t you call for help? Why did you ignore the expert systems? Is there some disturbance in your personal life that’s rendered you mentally incompetent? It’s hard to feel sorry for a techie so stupid, but it must be rough getting badgered with questions right after you’ve doomed a hundred thousand people to become icicles.'

'Did the colony die?' Lajoolie asked softly.

'The colony did; the colonists didn’t. They sent out an SOS and got evacuated before they came downwith terminal frostbite. Unlucky for them, they were picked up by a Cashling outreach crusade… which means nothing to you, Oar, but suffice it to say, the colonists became indentured servants for ten years to pay off the cost of their rescue. After a decade of grunt work and listening to Cashling sermons on Godly Greed, those people must have wished they’d frozen.'

Uclod wore a large frown. 'You’re sure the reactors melted because of that technician?'

Festina nodded. 'There was a thorough investigation. Why do you ask?'

'Because it’s awful damned convenient this Pollisand just happened to be in the right place at the right time.'

'Isn’t it though,' Festina agreed. 'And since his first visit, he’s showed up in human space over and over again: always right after someone has made a disastrous mistake.'

She moved back to the table and reached toward the keypad… then withdrew her hand. 'I’ve got pictures of other Pollisand sightings, but they aren’t pretty. He’s particularly drawn to the Explorer Corps. Whenever someone has body parts bitten off, gets impaled on a poisonous plant thorn, or steps in something that explodes, there’s a chance the Pollisand will appear out of nowhere and ask, Why did you think that was safe? Why didn’t you walk around? What was going through your head… besides that big wooden spike?'

Uclod snorted. 'You’re sure he isn’t to blame for these so-called accidents?'

'No one’s sure of anything. But we’ve never found a shred of evidence that he sets up these scenarios himself. It’s always people going about their normal business, making their own catastrophic decisions.'

'Could he not have a Sinister Ray,' I said, 'that compels one to commit foolish deeds?'

'Theories like that have been suggested,' Festina replied, 'especially by the people caught acting like imbeciles. But investigations don’t bear it out; almost always, these folks have a history of similar stunts before the one that really cooks their goose. Coworkers are likely to say, It’s exactly the kind of stupidity we expect from that idiot… which begs the question why the idiot didn’t get fired long before, but incompetence is the norm in our beloved Technocracy.' She turned back toward the screen and scowled at the baggy-suited woman.

'So if the Pollisand doesn’t cause these accidents,' Uclod said, 'how can he tell they’ll happen? You think he can see the future? He knows someone’s going to mess up, and gets a kick out of calling you a dope?'

'He doesn’t call people dopes,' Festina said. 'I could play you recordings of his conversations with Explorers — Explorers who’ve just got themselves or their partners maimed through bonehead mistakes. Judging by the Pollisand’s tone of voice, he truly wants to know why they made such bad choices: like he’s trying to get some insight into the human decision-making process.'

'You mean he can tell in advance when someone’s going to flip the wrong switch,' Uclod said, 'but he has no idea why? What is he, some sort of time traveler? When he hears that someone screwed the pooch, he goes back into the past so he can find out the details?'

'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 so 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 is 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 LasFuentes?'

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.