Ascending (30 page)

“Or maybe it can only be opened from the other side,” Uclod said. “Maybe it’s voice-activated and you have to know the password.”

“I
realize
that,” Festina answered testily. “But let’s check for other alternatives.”

So they checked, looking under bushes, digging in the dirt and fingering the blank wall as if it might conceal some secret access mechanism. Their earnest activity soon maddened me; still propped against the wall, I cried out in my own language, “Open up, you foolish door!”

The door slid silently open.

How To Talk To Me

Festina’s mouth gaped wide and she stared at me. “What did you say?”

“I told it to open.”

“In what language?”

“My own…which I now suspect is actually the Shaddill tongue. And do not shout at me for not telling you sooner; I am very upset the Shaddill indoctrinated my people to speak their villainous language, and perhaps I am also in a weakened state physically and emotionally, so if you scold me, Festina, I shall cry.”

She came forward and wrapped her arms around me. I leaned into the embrace…and unlike the time when she hugged me in the
Hemlock
’s transport bay, I did not feel self-conscious at all. To tell the truth, I was too tired to feel much of anything; but it was comforting and agreeable to be held, not to mention that it helped me stay on my feet.

Festina whispered, “Do you really speak Shaddill?”

“I believe I do.”

“Under the circumstances, that’s a wonderful thing. It gives us a valuable edge.”

“It doesn’t feel…” I caught my breath. “It does not feel wonderful or valuable—to know that all your life, you have been someone else’s creature. One could easily become downhearted, Festina.”

She gave me a squeeze…which became more of a shake as she said, “Stay with us, Oar, come on, stay with us. If you stay awake, you may get to punch a Shaddill in the nose.”

“Oh. That might be pleasant.”

I forced myself to stand straighter. Festina did not release me; she propped herself under my arm and gripped my back to make sure I did not fall. “This is only a temporary weakness,” she told the others. “Oar just needs food.”

“Temporary my ass,” Uclod replied. “She keeps going blank on us. Lajoolie told me she conked out for a full hour on
Hemlock
…and I’ve caught her drifting off a couple other times too. Not to mention she was a zombie for four whole years before I showed up on Melaquin.” He turned to me. “I hate to say it, missy, but your brain is turning to toffee.”

“It isn’t!” I cried. “It isn’t!” Lajoolie flinched; otherwise, I would not even have noticed my slip of the tongue. Two contractions in a row. Suddenly blazing with anger, I pushed myself away from Festina and said, “I am perfectly fine. I am, in fact, quite splendid. Now cease your foolish insinuations, for it is high time we found the enemy.”

I strode majestically toward the open door…but not before I caught a look passing between Festina and Uclod. One might think she would be reproving him for making me so furious; but in fact, her lips mouthed the words, “Thank you”—as if he had done something praiseworthy instead of driving me into a rage. And the little man actually winked back at her.

There is no understanding aliens
at all.

Burrows

The door led into a corridor that was nothing like a proper ship corridor—just a dirt-lined tunnel, as must be dug by rabbits or gophers if the animals were almost the size of a real person. I say “
almost
the size” because the tunnel roof was not quite my height; I had to duck slightly, which did not improve my mood. Aarhus too was forced to stoop, and poor Lajoolie needed to bend most uncomfortably. I expected the short people to boast that
they
had no trouble at all…but Festina was too polite, and Uclod too busy fussing with his wife, trying to think of ways to make movement easier for the big woman. (“Would it help if…suppose I…maybe you could…” None of this improved things in the least, but perhaps Lajoolie found his efforts endearing.)

Nimbus, of course, floated down the middle without difficulty. As we started forward, the cloud man told Festina, “You realize this tunnel is just a mock-up? I sent a few of my cells to check the wall; it’s a type of artificial dirt sprayed over a base of solid steel-plast.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” Festina replied. “It looks like the Shaddill evolved from burrowing creatures. All this soil must make them feel comfortable.”

“Then they are giant space gophers?” I asked.

“Gophers aren’t the only animals who burrow,” Festina said. “Rabbits…worms…beetles…snakes…and those are just terrestrial species. I could list thousands of even stranger burrowers from other planets.”

“Do you know what Las Fuentes looked like?” Uclod asked. “Before they changed into purple blobs.”

Festina shook her head. “They cleaned their worlds meticulously before they abandoned their settlements—made a determined effort to eliminate any direct clues about themselves. Oh sure, they overlooked a few odds and ends: a small number of tools that were probably designed for four-fingered hands…broken furniture that suggests they always lay down rather than sitting, so they were probably jointed differently than we are. No bodies, though; not a single bone. Shows how advanced their technology was if they could make such a clean sweep. Also shows Las Fuentes didn’t want us to know what they looked like.”

“Just what you’d expect of burrowing creatures,” Aarhus said. “Obsessively secretive.”

“It is not obsessive,” I told him, “it is simply good sense. One must always take pains to go unnoticed, or one might be observed by persons of unknown provenance…”

I stopped. Festina was looking at me keenly. “Your race
is
secretive, isn’t it? And you all live in hidden enclaves like that underground city.”

“Are you suggesting
I
am a Shaddill? That is very most rude of you, Festina. I may speak their language, but I am not such a creature as burrows…or has small four-fingered hands…and I bend in the middle with perfect ease, thereby allowing me to sit wherever I choose.”

“I’m not saying you’re a Shaddill lookalike,” Festina replied, “but your planet Melaquin was the earliest known settlement established by the Shaddill after Las Fuentes disappeared. The Shaddill may have created you as an artificial race who looked human enough to please people taken from Earth, but who had Shaddill-ish characteristics too. The secretiveness, the instinct to hide. They built you concealed towns and villages all over the planet; and they made you transparent, so you’d be damned hard to see, even when you ventured out into the open. If the Shaddill are, uhh, reclusive space gophers, they constructed you to follow in their footsteps.”

“And they taught you their language,” Aarhus put in. “They didn’t do that with any other race they uplifted.”

“The other uplifted races were scientifically advanced,” Festina said. “At least advanced enough to have launched a few rockets and satellites. But Oar’s people got picked up when they were still trying to get the hang of smelting bronze.” She puckered her brow. “Makes you wonder why the difference. What did the Shaddill want with…”

“Children!” Lajoolie blurted out. “The Shaddill wanted children.”

We all turned to look at her. I noticed Uclod turned faster than the rest of us—the little man’s head fairly snapped like a whip. Perhaps a man has especially rapid reflexes for responding when his wife broaches the subject of offspring.

Childlike, Most Childlike

“Uhh,” said Lajoolie, wilting under our collective gaze. “It’s just…well…maybe the Shaddill wanted children. To watch growing up…and…playing…and…things. Because maybe they’d done something to change themselves from burrowing creatures into blobs of jelly, and maybe the blobs of jelly couldn’t have babies, or anyway not normal ones, so the Shaddill…Las Fuentes…were nostalgic for children. They created an artificial race that was sort of like what they used to be—secretive, you know, and hard to notice—but the kids would always be, uhh,
childlike
throughout their entire lives.”

She looked at me with her big brown eyes. “Yes, childlike. And maybe the Shaddill couldn’t take care of the children one hundred percent of the time, so they brought in bronze-age humans to be, uhh, nannies. At least for the first generation. The Shaddill made the children look and act like humans, so the Earthlings would feel more comfortable tending them, but inside, the kids had attitudes that would make the Shaddill find them…lovable.”

There was a silence; for some reason, everyone was now looking at me instead of Lajoolie. “But that is not how it was,” I told them. “My people have stories and records. Flesh-and-blood Earthlings were brought to Melaquin, and the Shaddill asked, ‘Do you want your children to live forever?’ The Earthlings said yes, that is what they wanted…and the Shaddill changed the humans inside, so their off-spring would be made of glass. My ancestors were not baby-sitters; they were loving parents who cared so much for their children, they desired us to be perfect.”

Festina put her hand on my shoulder. “Oar—you shouldn’t put faith in your written records. The humans on Melaquin came from 2000
B
.
C
. Almost no one on Earth could write back then…and if any of the settlers
were
literate, they’d write in their own language, not yours.” She took a breath. “It must have been the Shaddill who wrote your history books.”

I stared at her, feeling a tear trickle down my cheek.

“It might not have been a total lie,” she said. “The Shad-dill
may
have altered the humans physically to become…surrogates. The women could have served as hosts for implanted embryos: they’d be more likely to take care of you if they thought you
were
their own children.”

“But if the Shaddill made us to be their children,” I said, “why did they make our brains Tired?”

Silence. I was about to say,
You see, I have defeated your arguments
, when Nimbus spoke softly. “Perhaps they didn’t want you to grow up.”

I whirled upon him. “What do you mean?”

“Perhaps,” he said, still very quiet, “there comes a time—even for beings designed to remain childlike as long as possible—perhaps there comes a time when childhood has to end. When the brain reaches a point where it must either become adult…or become nothing. And the Shaddill preferred you to be nothing.”

His fog wisped in close to me, brushed my cheek, then swirled toward the others. “A while ago,” he said, “Oar and I had a conversation about the Cashlings—how much they’ve degenerated since they were uplifted. Other races have too; even humans and Divians are getting worse.”

He paused, as if waiting to see if anyone would challenge him. The others said nothing; indeed, Festina and Uclod both nodded in solemn agreement. “Suppose,” Nimbus said, “the Shaddill are behind that degeneration. Suppose it’s not just the result of affluence and indolence, but something else: a poison, a virus, radiation, who knows? The Shaddill are advanced enough to sneak some subtle contamination into our environment without us noticing.”

“I find that hard to believe,” Aarhus said. “With all the monitoring we do for pollution, medical threats, any sort of harmful influence—”

“Sergeant,” Festina interrupted, “how long have we had FTL fields? Yet we never discovered how they could be strengthened by the sun. If the Shaddill could hoodwink us on that, why not something else? YouthBoost treatments, for instance—supposedly a gift from the Shaddill to help us all live longer. Every Technocracy citizen over twenty-five gets regular doses. If there was something in YouthBoost that very very slowly, over the course of centuries, damaged the human genome…caused cumulative mental regression…” She shook her head angrily. “And YouthBoost is just the most obvious possibility. Degenerative agents could be hidden in any of the other so-called ‘gifts’ they gave us. Or disseminated in some other way entirely.”

“But the Shaddill wouldn’t do that!” Lajoolie protested. “They’re good…and benevolent…”

Her voice trailed off. After everything that had happened, not even the warm-hearted Lajoolie could force herself to believe the Shaddill were generous benefactors.

“I think,” Nimbus said, “the Shaddill have been waging a war against other sentient races for thousands of years. Not to conquer territory, but to suppress competition. When a species reaches the point where it’s beginning to venture into space, the Shaddill show up with armloads of gifts; and somewhere amidst those presents is a booby-trap that gradually turns the uplifted race into mental defectives who will never cause the Shaddill trouble.”

“But that is horrible!” I cried. “Surely the League of Peoples would object.”

“No,” said Festina, “not if the poison doesn’t actually kill. And not if the uplifted race accepts the gift freely. The League prevents outright murder…but it doesn’t stop anyone from making choices that are suicidally stupid.”

“But why would the Shaddill
do
such a thing?” Lajoolie asked in a trembly voice.

“Maybe from fear,” Uclod answered, taking her hand in his. “Think about it from the Shaddill’s viewpoint—there were all these other intelligent races in the same region of the galaxy, and bit by bit, those races were developing their own technologies. Sure, the Shaddill had a headstart…but maybe they were afraid someone else would catch up. If another species was a tiny bit smarter or luckier or harder-working, the Shaddill might eventually get left in the dust. And what could they do to stop it? The League doesn’t tolerate violence, so the Shaddill couldn’t directly destroy potential threats. Instead, they got sneaky.”

“Trojan horses,” Aarhus murmured. “Gifts that slowly but surely neutralized any race who was close on the Shaddill’s heels. Turning us all into vapid idiots like the Cashlings.” He turned toward me. “Or even worse, what they did to your people on Melaquin. You might have been the Shaddill’s substitute children, but your creators didn’t want you growing up and becoming serious competition. So they damaged you mentally—made certain you’d never mature.”