Ascending

23: WHEREIN I CONFRONT UNPLEASANT TRUTHS

Lady Bell’s Personal Limitations

The door of the airlock opened — and the first thing I noticed was dirt. The smell of dirt, loamy and cloying; the sight of dirt on the ground, dark and glinting with flecks of minerals; the feel of dirt in the air, gritty and humid and hot. Festina, standing in the airlock doorway, took a moment to inhale the deep soil scent… then she threw herself outside and assumed an aggressive posture with pistol in hand, quickly scanning the area for hostile forces.

After five seconds, she gestured for the rest of us to join her. We clambered out into dank sluggish air that pressed most tepidly against one’s skin — all except Lady Bell, who remained shuddering in the airlock.

"What’s wrong?" Festina asked her.

The lady replied, "It’s horrid!"

She stared at the area surrounding us. It had the appearance of a vast tropical mud flat, simmering in twilight just after the sizzling sun has gone down. It even had some kind of foliage — not close to the ship, but off in the distance, clusters of trees and undergrowth rose high from the soil. Farther away still, dirt-covered walls towered up, up, up; in the dusky light, the top of the walls disappeared into shadow, but I assumed that far overhead there must be a roof closing us off from the vacuum outside. We were, after all, inside the stick-ship, even if this great chamber was so huge it seemed like out-of-doors.

"What is so horrid?" I asked Lady Bell. "The temperature is hotter than one enjoys, but there are no robots trying to shoot us. Also, in a spacious enclosure such as this, one can see potential enemies from quite far off, yet there is no sign of anybody. I believe for the moment we are safe."

"Knock on wood," Aarhus muttered under his breath.

"But… but…" Lady Bell said, "it’s so… raw. And open. And exposed."

"Bloody hell," Uclod said to Festina, "are Cashlings agoraphobic?"

"Now that I think of it," Festina replied, "they put all their cities under opaque force domes — which is completely unnecessary on most of their planets. And my old partner Yarrun once told me he visited a Cashling city and wanted to leave the dome to see the countryside… but nobody knew if there was a doorway out. He thought it was crazy: they had a constant flow of people shuttling up and down to orbital space stations, but the Cashlings never went sideways, out into the trees and fresh air."

"We don’t need trees and fresh air," Lady Bell said, clutching one edge of the airlock doorway as if she were afraid we might drag her outside. "We’re civilized. Cities have all the necessities of life… and they don’t have insects. Or poisonous weeds. Or trees that might fall on you."

"If a tree attempts to fall on you," I told her, "jump out of the way. Trees are famed for their slow reaction times."

Lady Bell ignored me. "I think…" she said. "I think I should check on my husband. Yes. That’s what I should do. He must be lying unconscious, somewhere inside. The poor darling. I’d better find him and make sure he’s all right."

Without waiting for an answer, she pushed a button on the airlock control panel and the door swished shut in front of her. Uclod stared after her a moment, then made the odd hiss-whistle noise he and Lajoolie had produced just before vomiting. Obviously, this was his race’s expression of supreme disgust. "I was wondering when she’d remember her missing husband. That Rye guy goes off to fetch food, he gets zapped by the Shaddill, and our godly prophet-lady doesn’t give him the least little thought till she decides to turn chicken."

"Some men don’t like their wives to fuss," Lajoolie murmured. "And some women learn to hide their concern."

We all stared at her a moment; then we quickly turned away and gazed at our feet. "Let’s take a look around," Festina said in a muttery voice. We were glad to follow her forward.

Footprints

The great mud flats stretched in all directions. There was plenty of space to hold all the Cashling ships that had been captured thus far; and even as we watched, another small crusade vessel descended from the sky on a red beam of light, to be deposited a short distance from Unfettered Destiny. The other Cashling craft sat close by — no doubt to make it easier for the admiral robots to move from one ship to the next, looking for… well, looking for me.

I had clearly been their quarry. Apart from wondering why that was — and I wondered about it a great deal — one had to ask what the robots were supposed to do after I was secured. If, for example, they were under orders to carry my unconscious body to a place of imprisonment, how long before the Shaddill realized the robots had been waylaid? Perhaps only a few minutes. We must needs act quickly, before an alarm was raised; we had to bring the Shaddill to their knees (if they were such creatures as possessed knees) before they even knew we were coming.

But where to go? We were in the middle of the flats, with no exit in sight. Almost certainly, there had to be a door in the distant wall of the chamber — perhaps many doors. But the wall was curtained off by those thick stands of trees, and in the grayish twilight, it was impossible to see where doors might be hidden. Considering how large this hangar area was (almost the size of the cavern that held Oarville), it would take hours to walk the circumference… perhaps longer if the jungle-ish forests at the edge hindered our progress.

The same thoughts must have passed through Festina’s mind. She had stopped on a clear patch of ground and was turning in a slow circle, peering at the horizon with narrowed eyes. "Wish I had a Bumbler," she muttered. That was a device human Explorers carried for scanning their surroundings; it had many Scientific Abilities, such as amplifying dim light and magnifying faraway objects. However, we did not possess such a device, so we would be forced to rely on our own ingenuity.

I am excellent at ingenuity.

"Here is what we must do," I said. "We must spread out to look for tracks. The robots were heavy creatures of metal, and the ground is only dirt. They must surely have left discernible footprints. We shall find those footprints and follow them back to the point where the robots entered this chamber."

Uclod’s mouth dropped open. "Missy!" he said, in tones of admiration. "Good thinking!"

"Oar’s right," Festina agreed. "Let’s be quick about this."

The footprints close to the Cashling ships were too jumbled to read; but when we fanned out a short distance, Sergeant Aarhus found a clear pair of booted tracks leading back in a straight line toward the distant walls. They were like a great big sign saying THIS WAY OUT.

Since time was short, we followed the tracks at a run… and since Uclod was short, Lajoolie carried him. (Nimbus showed no apparent difficulty keeping up with our pace — he simply compacted his body into a horizontal raindrop shape and flew right along beside us.)

It took five minutes to reach the trees: five minutes during which we saw nothing but mud, mud, mud. The mud was not the deep mucky kind, and our feet were not completely swallowed with every footfall; nevertheless, the run was strenuous business, especially for one with low reserves of energy. If at the end I was wheezing, it is not evidence I was piteously out of shape — I was in excellent shape. How many of you could pass four years without food, then run for five minutes on muddy terrain? You would most likely die from exertion… and when you arrived in the afterlife, you would say to the Hallowed Ones, "We are sorry we mocked poor Oar for gasping a little bit. She is clearly a splendid physical specimen, and doubting her was very very wrong."

Apology accepted.

Mini-Chilis

As we came in under the trees, we were forced to slow down — not because I was panting for air and feeling most fluttery in the stomach, but because the undergrowth was prohibitively profuse. The only way forward lay along a narrow path that had apparently been slashed by the robots; this was not a long-established trail, but a route that had recently been forced through the snarl by dint of brute strength. If there was indeed an exit door somewhere ahead, it must not be used very often.

We had only gone a short distance forward when Festina stopped and craned her head back to look up into one of the trees. Here in the forest shadows, everything was harder to see than in the open… but I could make out yellowish objects hanging amongst the tree’s dark leaves. Festina jumped high and grabbed one, pulling it off its stem with a soft pop. When she held it out for the rest of us to examine, I saw it was a waxy fruit the color of dandelions, two fingers wide at the stem and narrowing down to a point.

"Looks like a half-sized yellow chili pepper," Aarhus said.

Festina nodded. "Back home, we called them mini-chilis. The trees grew wild all over Agua."

"This is a tree from your home planet?"

She shook her head. "It wasn’t native to Agua, it was a transplant. Don’t know where it came from originally, but it was brought by Las Fuentes… those aliens who abandoned their colonies five thousand years ago." She looked down at the fruit. "Everywhere Las Fuentes went, they planted mini-chilis. Must have been one of their favorite foods."

My mouth watered. "Are mini-chilis tasty?"

"Don’t know," Festina told me. "Humans who try to eat them always keel over and the before describing the flavor. Totally poisonous to terrestrial life. Our farm lost dozens of cattle because of the damned things — whenever a cow escaped from pasture, she headed straight for the nearest mini-chili tree and gobbled whatever fruit she found on the ground. I guess animals liked the smell; either that, or our herds were suicidal."

Festina looked at the chili a moment longer, then folded her fingers over it in a tight squeeze. "Nasty stuff," she murmured. I thought she intended to hurl it away, but instead she tucked it carefully into a jacket pocket.

Explorers are like that — even in moments of tension, they feel compelled to take plant samples.

Overmany Coincidences

"So," Aarhus said in pensive tones, "this tree was a favorite of Las Fuentes… and it’s here on a Shaddill ship."

"Makes you think, doesn’t it?" Festina took a few more steps down the trail, her gaze moving carefully over the jungle. "A lot of these other plants look familiar too — things from the Agua rainforest. That vine… we called it monkey rope. And this thorn bush is madre sangrienta. Both came to Agua courtesy of Las Fuentes." She stared at the madre bush a moment longer, then turned back to us. "It would take a laboratory to prove these were the same species as the ones on my world; but at first glance, they seem identical."

"Which means what?" Uclod asked.

Festina shrugged. "Las Fuentes abandoned their holdings five thousand years ago. A few centuries later, the Shaddill made their first appearance when they removed Oar’s ancestors from Earth. Could be that in those missing years, Las Fuentes became the Shaddill."

"But," said I, "Las Fuentes became horrible purple jelly."

"That’s what the horrible purple jelly claimed," Festina told me. "It wouldn’t be the first time an alien told a lie."

She started down the trail again. We followed glumly… and I for one made sure I did not step on the poison fruit.

How To Talk To Doors

It turns out that jackets catch on thorns and nettles. Jackets catch on such things all the time. Back on Melaquin, I had never bothered to give wide berth to these hazards, for my skin is impervious to prickly annoyances; now, however, I was constantly getting snagged on passing vegetation, to the point where I strongly considered taking off my jacket and flinging it into the bush. I suppressed this impulse only because Festina had inducted me into the Explorer Corps… and perhaps, if she saw me treating the uniform in cavalier fashion, she would think she had made a mistake. It would be very most sad if Festina said, "Oar, you do not behave like a proper Explorer, so you cannot be one any longer." Therefore, I continued to wear my jacket and simply yanked it loose whenever it got hooked on grabby undergrowth. Sometimes bits of cloth remained behind on the thorns, but it is not my fault if navy apparel suffers from shoddy manufacture.

Because of the snagging and yanking, moving through the jungle was almost as strenuous as running. It was not out-of-breath strenuous; but the constant exertion made my insides feel watery. Then my head went watery too — not a sudden dizziness but a growing sense of disconnection, as my feet kept walking but my mind drifted off. I found myself dreaming of the lovely brightness in my Tower of Ancestors: how peaceful it had been to lie empty for the past four years, without worrying about thorns, or awful Shaddills, or the many ways my life had never gone anywhere…

Muddled blankness crept up on me so stealthily I did not feel it: blankness from fatigue and insufficient food. Time passed in a blur, which is to say, in a discontinuous jump… because the next thing I knew, I was leaning in great exhaustion against a dirt-encrusted wall, with my cheek and nose pressed into the grimy surface.

I turned my head blearily and saw Lajoolie staring at me with fearful concern; the others, however, had focused their attention on a door in the wall a few paces away from me. This door was the metal kind that slides open and shut. At the moment, it was closed… and there was no obvious mechanism for opening it. No doorknob, no latch, no button, no dial.

"We could bash it down," Uclod suggested. He turned to Lajoolie. "You wouldn’t mind doing that, would you, sweetheart?"

Lajoolie gave me a plaintive look, suggesting she would mind very much: I do not think she wanted to use her great strength ever again. Her face overflowed with relief when Festina said, "No bashing if we can help it. For one thing, it’ll make noise. For another, the door might have defense mechanisms — alarms or maybe stunners."

"So what do we do instead?" Uclod asked.

Festina ran her hands over the door’s surface, obviously groping for unusual features. As she did, she told the rest of us, "Look around nearby. Maybe there’s a hidden switch."

"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 look-alike," 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 offspring would be made of glass. My ancestors were not babysitters; 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 Shaddill 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."

"Yes," Nimbus told me, "by keeping your people childlike, the Shaddill eliminated you as a threat and made you all the more endearing: a society filled with happy healthy kids, rather than the usual messiness of a civilization run by adults. When your brains get to the critical point of Grow up or shut down… you’re designed just to go to sleep."

"Not much better than dying," Uclod growled.

"But," Nimbus replied, "less distressing as the Shaddill look down from the sky. That cute little boy they watched three hundred years ago… he’s not dead, he’s just at a slumber party with his friends. Perhaps the Shaddill could give him a stimulant so he’d get up for a while, walk around, show off the sweet little mannerisms that made his creators feel so fond. Then away they’d go again until the next time they felt like visiting the kids for a few hours."

"Bloody hell," Festina whispered. "Very neat… and despicable." She gave my shoulder a squeeze. "If all this is true…"

I waited to hear how she would finish the sentence. But what could she say? If all this is true, poor Oar, poor you! It is too bad you face a malfunctioning brain because your creators wanted you lovable but helpless. We too find you lovable, and are charmed by your naive innocence; we will be very most sad when you finally fall to the ground and do not get up.

In the end, all Festina could do was give my shoulder another squeeze.

My Vow

I looked around at my companions — their somber faces, their eyes shifting away from me as if I were already some walking dead umushu whose gaze they could not meet — and for one brief moment, I nearly lost heart. These were my only friends in the universe, and they believed I was doomed: a wind-up toy to amuse foul aliens, and now I was running down. They thought of me as a frivolous child who did not understand the world, a person who had not grown up and could not grow up. For one brief moment, a great sorrow washed over my soul, as I feared they were correct.

Perhaps I was not a glorious heroine, destined for grandeur.

Perhaps I was just a silly girl-child who had filled her own head with nonsense — deluded herself into thinking she was special.

For I had to admit, my brain was getting Tired. It had been that way for the past four years. Recent events had temporarily stirred me from my stupor… but over and over again, I had almost slipped back to nothingness. How long before I reached the point of no return?

If the Pollisand was telling the truth, I could still be cured — provided I embraced his cause to "wipe the Shaddill off the face of the galaxy." When he first made his proposition, I had glibly answered, Yes, I shall help; but I had understood so little of who and what the Shaddill were. Even now… even now, there were only conjectures. I did not know. But if all those conjectures were correct…

…I wished to do more than just punch the Shaddill in the nose. I wished to keep punching and punching until they said they were sorry, and even then, I did not think I would stop. I truly wished to hurt them, not because I wanted to win favor with the Pollisand, but because it was what such villains deserved.

After all, working with the Pollisand might not save me why should I trust an alien to keep his word? The universe was full of betrayal. And what would it mean to be cured? Who would I become? A tedious plodding grown-up? A stodgy sighing person who did not fall down from Tiredness but who went around three-quarters Tired all day, pretending that because her feet were moving, her brain must still be alive?

Nimbus suggested I must become adult or become nothing; I did not know which option I feared more. But whatever happened to me, I swore I would not succumb to oblivion until I had made the Shaddill regret what they had done.

That was my vow. That was what I solemnly promised to the universe: to every glass elder lying comatose in a tower, to my original flesh-and-blood ancestors, and even to alien races like the foolish Cashlings whose brains were crumbling wrecks. Somehow, I thought, this must all be avenged.

Therefore, in my most secret inner soul, I swore a terrible oath to do so.

"Come now," I said to my friends, "we are wasting time, and perhaps I have little time left. Let us perform at least one great deed in our lives before we vanish forever."

I did not wait for them to answer — I strode down the dirt-caked tunnel, trusting that somehow I would find the Shaddill. My friends hesitated a moment, then followed close behind me.