Ascending - James Alan Gardner [165]
Whether you like science fiction or fantasy (or both!), Eos has something for you in Fall 2001.
15 It is possible Festina was making a joke when she gave me this list of events. Or not.
EOS SPOTLIGHT
JAMES ALAN GARDNER
From Festina Ramos:
I met Oar beside a moonlit lake, just after dusk on the day I had murdered my best friend. She was tall, sad, and impossibly beautiful: like an Art Deco figurine molded from purest crystal.
Yes—she was made of glass. Looking through her, I could see the beach, the moon, the world…focused through a woman-shaped lens.
When I think about her, I can’t help perceiving her glass body as a metaphor. She was, for example, transparent as glass emotionally. When she was angry, she raged; when frightened, she trembled; when lonely, she wept. She was as open as a child…and people who didn’t know her often dismissed her as childish, unintelligent, bratty. Oar was none of those things—she was a fully grown woman with an intelligence high off the scales (she learned fluent English in just a few weeks), and her constant claims of superiority to us “opaque persons” weren’t arrogant but heartbreaking: an attempt to convince herself she had some value in the universe.
Like glass, she was fragile. Not physically, of course: she was damned near unbreakable, and immune to disease, drowning, even starvation (she could photosynthesize energy from the weakest light sources). She was strong too—fast and agile. But mentally, Oar was ready to shatter. Thousands of years ago, her kind was created by unknown aliens in mimicry of Homo sapiens…but due to a design flaw (accidental or deliberate), the glass race always suffered mental shutdown by age fifty. First, a tendency to boredom; then, a growing listlessness; finally, a descent into torpor, a sleep that could only be broken by the most extreme measures and then only for a few minutes before senility crept back in.
Oar was on the verge of that abyss. Her whole species was. They didn’t die, they just grew Tired: turning into ageless glass statues, alive but dormant. As Oar approached the age when her brain would betray her, she fought her fate, she denied it, she raged; and in the end, it seemed as if she had found a way out. During a battle to save her world from extinction, she sacrificed herself by plunging from the top of an eighty-story tower, taking with her a madman who planned the destruction of her planet. I wept when I saw her body smashed on the pavement…but I told myself that by choosing death, Oar had avoided a more cruel destiny—the gradual loss of who she was, the dull fade-out to oblivion.
Her glass would have warped with age: the lens going dark, the mirror turning cloudy.
But I was wrong. Oar didn’t die in that fall—she was tougher than I ever imagined. Bulletproof glass. And now that she’s back, pursued by inhuman creatures with secrets to hide, the question is whether she can avoid mental oblivion long enough to save those of us who need her help.
Running from aliens, dodging the gunfire, trying to figure out what the hell’s going on before we all get killed…hey, it’s just like old times.
About the Author
JAMES ALAN GARDNER is a 1989 graduate of the Clarion West Science Fiction Writers Workshop, and has had several science fiction stories and novellas appear in publications such as Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Amazing Stories, and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He is the author of seven previous novels: Expendable, Commitment Hour, Vigilant, Hunted, Ascending, Trapped, and Radiant. He was the grand prize winner of 1989 Writers of the Future contest, has won the Aurora Award, and has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He lives in Canada.
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