James Gardner - Ascending

"If I do," I told her, "I will not forget the little people who helped me along the way." I gave her arm a reassuring pat, but Festina did not look reassured at all.

I Become A True Explorer

Released from their bondage, Uclod and Lajoolie had fallen into one another’s arms… which is to say, Lajoolie was hugging her husband so fiercely his orange skin had darkened several shades. He did not object in the least.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Aarhus sloshed damply toward us, his navy boots going squish-squish-squish. "So," he said, "did we win?"

"The Shaddill no longer exist," the Pollisand answered. "Not as Shaddill anyway."

"In which case," I said, "it is time for you to honor our agreement."

"What agreement?" Festina asked.

"I will explain later," I told her. "It is time for Mr. Pollisand to cure my brain… and if you say the remedy is to turn myself into purple goo, I shall punch you in a manner you will find most painful."

"Yeah, well…" The Pollisand looked down at his forefeet and shuffled in the dirt. "Suppose I told you the remedy was to turn a bit of yourself into purple goo."

"Then I should still punch you very hard."

"Oh come on, darlin’," he said, "it’s the cleanest solution to your problem. Sure, I could toss you onto an operating table and rewire your whole brain… but that’d leave you a completely different person. Certainly not the warm and generous bundle of joy we’ve all come to love."

I narrowed my eyes at him and balled up my fist in a meaningful way.

"On the other hand," he said quickly, "if we just dab some honey on your skin, a tiny patch of you will go transcendent — uplifting just enough of your consciousness to get you past the Tiredness."

"Uplifting her consciousness?" Festina asked. "Sounds like bullshit to me."

The Pollisand growled at her. "Give me a break, Ramos. If you want, I can give a ten-hour lecture on how it’ll release certain hormones to overcome certain other hormones that tend to suppress yet another group of hormones, and blah blah blah. But the long and the short is if she accepts a teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy transformation, it’ll be enough to offset the physiological processes that are gradually deadening her brain. And," he added, winking at me, "it’ll kick in a long-overdue maturation process that the Shaddill artificially repressed. My little girl," sniffle, "will start growing up."

Festina glared at him. "Are you sure this isn’t just a prank for your own amusement? Are you sure, for example, you might not have arranged for a delayed-action cure when you saved her life four years ago? Maybe you implanted a curative something in her brain while you were repairing her broken bones… and you just want to smear her with Blood Honey because you like the idea of making her purple?"

The Pollisand gave a soft chuckle. "I like you, Ramos; I like the way your paranoid mind works. But if I did foresee everything and set up Oar with a brain implant, I’d surely make certain the implant wouldn’t activate until a patch of her glassy-ass skin turned to goo. How else could I consolidate my position as the most annoying creature in the universe?" He turned to me. "I assure you this is necessary if you want to save your brain. A teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy bit of you has to become jelly."

"All right," I said, gritting my teeth. "If that is what I must do…"

"It is," the Pollisand said. He went to the fountain and dipped his toe into the honey. Of course the toe did not turn purple — no doubt Mr. Foul Annoyance had such evolutionarily advanced skin, it did not succumb to the honey in the same way as lesser beings.

"Where do you want it?" he asked, walking back to me on three feet to keep his damp toe from touching anything. "Bottom of your foot so it’s hardly ever visible? The tail of your spine so it’s covered by your jacket? Atop one breast like a purple tattoo?"

I turned to Festina, thinking I might ask her advice… but as soon as I looked at her, I knew what it had to be.

I lifted my finger and pointed to my right cheek. The Pollisand moved before Festina could stop him.

Dealing With Tedious Details

Being the captain of a huge alien starship is not so much fun as you might think, because there are many fearsome burdens. The greatest burden turns out to be one’s Faithful Sidekick, who is constantly worried one will speak carelessly to the ship’s computer and thereby Precipitate A Tragic Incident. Festina dictated to me exactly what commands I should give the stick-ship, and forced me to recite the instructions several times in English before allowing me to say the same in Shaddill-ese. Even then, she required me to think and think and think about the proper Shaddill-ese translation for each word; she would not let me speak until I had pretended to ponder for at least ten seconds over each instruction.

Of course, I did not really think about the translations that much — I was more concerned with contemplating the new appearance of my face (which reflected quite nicely in the fountain’s basin). The Pollisand had only brushed my cheek lightly with his toe, no more than a casual dab… yet he had created a precise duplicate of Festina’s birthmark in both size and shape. Immediately thereafter, he had produced a strip of clear plastic bandage which he slapped over the jelly smear to prevent it from slopping off my face. The bandage instantly bonded with my skin and is (supposedly) permanent.

Festina, of course, was anguished at the change in my features — she is a very nice person, but she has a Deep Psychological Fixation about her appearance which renders her a bit crazed. In her heart of hearts, she believes her birthmark makes her very very ugly… whereas she is actually ugly because she is opaque, and the birthmark has little effect, pro or con.

I hasten to point out that the jelly now composing my cheek, while undeniably purple, is a transparent purple; if I wiggle my fingers behind my head, you can see the movement quite easily, staring straight through my cheek and my brains and all. So the blob on my face is not a disfigurement, but merely a Colored Highlight that adds an extra-special accent of beauty. I am even more ravishing than ever… which I know is hard to believe, but after all this time listening to my story, you must surely realize I would never tell you falsehoods.

Nor will I tell you all the finicky arrangements we made in the next few minutes. Of course, we ordered the stick-ship to stop swallowing the little Cashling vessels, and to put back everything it had captured. We also released the crew of the Royal Hemlock from the stick-ship’s sinister holding cells. The cells contained many other individuals of various species, all of whom had been kidnapped by the Shaddill due to these individuals being too smart for their own good. Captain Kapoor promised he would transport the prisoners back to their homeworlds as soon as possible… or to any other world they wished to visit, as a pleasant consolation prize for being locked in Durance Vile by wicked fur-beetles.

Speaking of fur-beetles, their jellied remains disappeared from the fountain while we were busy with other matters. I hoped they had merely gone slurp down the drain, but Festina suspected they had used some newborn mental power to transport themselves to wherever the rest of their people lived: an alternate dimension (whatever that means), or perhaps a distant Jelly-Planet where all the furniture jiggles. It seemed most unfair that these monstrous villains should simply ascend to their own nirvana without suffering retribution; but then I realized it could not be a very good nirvana considering that everyone there was all googly… and perhaps it was not a nirvana at all, but a horrible awful hell, where the only entertainment was persuading others to join you. So I decided not to make myself glum over never punching a Shaddill, and I regarded this as a sign of my Growing Maturity.