Ascending - James Alan Gardner [16]
“Because you thought I might flee? Or make trouble?” I glared at him. “From now on, you can best avoid trouble by keeping me well-informed. Do you understand?”
The only answer I received was a slight shudder under my feet. “Starbiter doesn’t like it,” Uclod said, “when people threaten her dad. You might remember that, missy, if you want to avoid trouble.”
“What will she do? Eat me? She has already succeeded in that.”
“We didn’t get eaten,” Uclod replied, “we got inhaled. Back where the throat curved, we got shunted away from the stomach and into the lungs…which are set up as living quarters. There’s eighteen rooms in here, bedrooms, bath, the works, all made from enlarged alveoli: cells for air storage. The old gal’s got real alveoli too, tiny little buggers like the ones in your own lungs, but these special eighteen cells were engineered big enough for people our size to live in.”
“So we were not swallowed but instead Went Down The Wrong Way. When that happens to me, I cough.”
“Starbiter’s not going to cough!” Uclod answered most snappishly. “Just…” He glared at me. “Just forget she’s alive, okay? Think of her as a normal spaceship, nothing fancy, nothing strange. Now come with me down this bronchial tube to the bridge.”
He walked to the far end of the room and stomped his foot once on the floor. A section of the wall opened like a sphincter to reveal a passageway leading onward. The passage was lit with the same buttercup-yellow as the room we were in.
“If you can have light down here,” I said, “why not in the throat too?”
“That’d be nice,” Uclod admitted, “but it’s not practical. The light here comes from a phosphorescent fungus growing on the alveolar membrane—a symbiote that absorbs nutrients from Starbiter’s bloodstream. You can’t get the fungus to root in the throat: the saliva tends to dissolve…umm…well, saliva is like water, right, and fungus won’t grow under water.”
He could not fool me—he had intended to say the saliva would dissolve items passing into the digestive system. And here I was, still damp with spittle, and beginning to get unpleasant runnel trails where the liquid was drying.
Fortunately, my Explorer jacket had washed down the same route as Uclod and me. It was soaking wet too, but I picked it up and began to mop myself as I followed the little man forward.
2 I do not mean Starbiter was yawning as a bored person does. She could not have been bored at all—it must be very interesting to have a beautiful glass woman enter your mouth. But it is a time-honored figure of English speech to say that darkened cavities “yawn”…and I am excellent at reproducing others’ clichés.
4
WHEREIN I TERRIFY A GIANT
The Soul Of Timidity
The corridor was long and round like the inside of a worm. The ceiling hung just low enough that I had to duck, which meant I trudged along with my head bent over. In that position I could only see the floor, which was most unattractive—the floor’s surface was corduroyed with riblike ridges spaced a fingerwidth apart, and in the gaps you could see icky bluish-white skin with snaky purple veins. One walked up on the ridges, with one’s feet never touching the skin beneath…but I could tell the skin would feel soft and weak and distressingly pulpy. It reminded me of dead birds and animals I had sometimes found while cutting wood: half-eaten, bloody, wet with dew, withered in some parts and bloated in others.
Ugly, ugly death.
But the skin below my feet was not dead, though it looked most revoltingly corpselike. I tried to ignore it and continued to walk, head down, Uclod’s feet padding in front of me, until we passed through another sphincter and entered a second yellow-lit room.
Two more orange feet stepped in beside Uclod’s. I lifted my head and saw a creature much like the little man but with important differences. First, this was obviously a female; she wore short gray pants and a white shirt of the same style as Uclod’s, but under the woman’s shirt lurked a sizable pair of wallabies. Also lurking under her clothes were massive muscles