Ascending - James Alan Gardner [111]
“God damn!” Aarhus cried, throwing up his hand to cover his mouth and pinch his nostrils shut. “Holy fucking shit!”
He reached out to close the door again, but Nimbus said, “Wait.” The cloud man’s top half separated into a dozen foggy ribbons, while the lower half of his body—the part containing baby Starbiter—retained a vague eggly shape. “Wait. Wait. Wait.”
Nimbus swirled out of the airlock, his upper half combing the air in long strips, turning a full circle horizontally, then rotating back in the reverse direction. At first, I did not understand what he was doing…but then I remembered how he had originally sensed me as a “chemical imbalance” (hmph!) back on Starbiter Senior. His little misty bits must possess the ability to analyze the air for toxicity; now he was testing to determine if the smell was harmful or just foul.
After another two circles, the streamers of his upper body coalesced into his former egglike shape. “The air’s not dangerous,” he told us. “Not in the short term anyway. It’s just putrid as hell.”
“But why?” Aarhus demanded…though it is difficult to sound truly demanding when one is muffling one’s mouth with one’s hand. “Have they sprung a leak in their sewage recyclers?”
“No. Cashlings simply have an impressive capacity to counteract atmospheric pollutants. Their stibbek automatically compensate for extreme degrees of…uhh…odorous infelicity. Therefore, I’ve noticed—in the times I’ve served on Cashling ships—they don’t maintain high standards of sanitation.”
The sergeant’s expression turned aghast. “You mean they leave garbage lying around?”
“Anything and everything. They simply can’t be bothered to clean up after themselves. If they’re eating something as they walk down a corridor, they’ll drop whatever they don’t want and leave it to rot. Then they’ll step over the mess for weeks afterward, rather than bend down and pick it up. As for personal hygiene…” A shudder went through Nimbus’s body. “You don’t want to know. Every few years, they have to dock their ships at an orbital station and get robots to scour all exposed surfaces. You and Oar should watch your step; personally, I intend to hover at least half a meter off the floor.”
“Christ Almighty,” Aarhus muttered. “Now I understand why the navy sends Explorers to enter alien vessels. We ordinary swabbies aren’t cut out for stomaching hostile environments.”
“You are not the one with bare feet,” I told him. Then I headed out the hatchway, my eyes most diligently watching the ground.
A Glimpse Of Unfettered Destiny
The Cashling ship Unfettered Destiny was indeed a most God-Awful Mess. Not only was the receiving bay besmirched with organic substances of disgusting provenance (discarded fruit turned spongy brown, hunks of desiccated meat, stains of spilled liquids in a variety of colors and degrees of stickiness) but the bay was full of bric-a-brac: possibly gifts or tribute from the prophets’ disciples, but maybe just foolish knickknacks procured on impulse and tossed aside two seconds after arriving on ship.
How else to explain at least thirty bolts of cloth piled haphazardly against the wall—with every bolt displaying the same pattern. (Jagged green and red zigzags moving jerkily across an electric blue background…and I do mean electric, since the cloth occasionally gave off sparks.) There were also statues lying about, some recognizable (trees, horses, arches) and some depicting objects that did not exist in nature…unless somewhere there is a spherical creature who has a habit of shoving both hands all the way down its throat until they come out the other end.
I will not bother to describe the other items heaped around the room—and there were many heaps indeed, including mounds of gold coins, stacks of data-bubbles, and buckets of glittery crystals that might have been genuine jewels—but I must note the cages, crates, and pens that once contained