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By Root 861 0

glow shining from his neckhole. He reached out a foot and patted me lightly on the cheek. “You’re such a skinny girl,” he said with a strange feigned accent, “don’t you know you gotta eat? And not just cotton candy,” he added, waving his foot at the glow-wands I still carried with me. “Those things got no nutrition—they’re ninety percent visible light, capiche? They go right through you, and where’s the good of that? A pretty girl oughta put meat on her bones. X rays, gamma rays, microwaves: the high-energy stuff. Or maybe (such a radical thought!), you might try solid food once in a while. Okay, so a stranger’s cooking can’t match your mamma’s lasagna; you still gotta get some nourishment or you’ll shrivel down to a stick. How you gonna bump off the Shad-dill if you keep starving yourself? I’m not always gonna be free to bring you take-out.”

He finally paused for breath. Then he asked, “Feeling better now, bright-eyes?”

“Yes,” I told him. “However, if this is all just a fiction projected into my brain, how can it affect me as if I was bathed in real light?”

“Oops,” said the Pollisand, “look at the time. Gotta go, bambina. Ciao!”

With that, he simply vanished—not in a fancy way, but disappearing as abruptly as a light being turned off. His exit did not make the slightest sound.

I stared at the place where he had been. All those flecks of paint he shook onto the floor were gone, vanished like snow in a bonfire. When I looked at the tree on the wall, no red eyes stared back; there was just flat uninteresting paint.

“Hmph,” I said to myself. As always, the Pollisand had proved himself an infuriating visitor…but I felt much better, no longer woozy.

Perhaps he was not quite the utter asshole he pretended to be.

Or perhaps he was simply preserving me for something worse later on.

The Advantages Of Immersing Oneself In Mindless Entertainment

Dumping my now-unnecessary glow-wands onto the floor, I rose to my feet and was halfway across the room when Nimbus said, “Listen!” Everyone went instantly silent; in the stillness, I could hear thumping noises to my right.

When I turned in that direction, I saw a heavy metal door embedded in the wall—the entry to the manual airlock. I had not noticed it before in the dim glow-wand light because it was painted the same flat white as the rest of the transport bay…as if someone wished to pretend the door was not even there. Perhaps the navy preferred to downplay the necessity for their ships to contain an emergency entrance.

“Okay,” Festina murmured. “It’s showtime. Everybody on your best behavior.”

Quickly I retrieved my Explorer jacket from Lajoolie and slipped it on—one must endeavor to look official when alien guests arrive. As I was fastening the front flaps, Uclod said, “Hey, here’s a wild thought: do any of us speak Cashling?”

“No need,” Festina replied. “Cashlings spend every waking hour amusing themselves with entertainment bought from other species: Mandasar out-of-shell fantasies, Unity mask dances, human VR chips, the works. Makes Cashlings very cosmopolitan and knowledgeable about alien races. I guarantee whoever comes out of that airlock will speak colloquial English and understand mainstream human body language…as well as knowing the proper form of address for a Fasskister hetman, how to initiate a Greenstrider sex act, and which knife to use in a Myriapod auto-da-fé.”

“Second knife from the left,” Aarhus said. “The one with three black barbs and the engraving of the Horsehead Nebula.”

We all stared at him.

“Hey,” said Aarhus, “I have hidden depths.”

Two Cashlings And Their Spacesuits

With another thump, the door opened. Two gawky figures stood on the other side, both wearing spacesuits of eye-watering flamboyance. One suit was a swirl of red and white stripes, the stripes spiraling down from top to toe and daubed with bright blue curlicues that might be letters in some alien alphabet. The decorations were just as thick around the helmet as anywhere else: if the helmet had a seeout visor, I could not discern where it was. The entire outfit seemed opaque.