Ascending - James Alan Gardner [37]
Therefore I experimented with rubbing the walls at random: palpating the soft mushiness, leaving fingerprints all over the yellow fungus that lit the room. From the first, I felt most foolish…but as time went on without success, I could not help a sense of betrayal—as if Starbiter was deliberately shutting me out like some unwanted cast-off.
That made me very sad. Besides the standoffish Zarett, the only people within light-years were in the other room, deliberately being husband and wife together…which was a most appalling spectacle of Married Sentimentality, and I would never want a person to sit at my feet, nor would I willingly sit at someone else’s. But I did not enjoy being all by myself inside a large creature’s lung. I did not even have the Explorer jacket I had brought from Melaquin; it was back in the bridge, and I refused to go get it. What would I say as I entered the room? “Excuse me, I wish something to hug for I am feeling glum?”
So I seated myself in the middle of the floor and squeezed my legs tight to my chest. I did not cry, not even a single tear; but I kept my eyes tight shut. My eyelids are a lovely silver, almost the only parts of my body that are opaque…and at that moment, with my face pressed against my knees, I did not wish to see anything.
(My legs act as distorting lenses. Sometimes, when I look through them, the world appears most strange and threatening indeed.)
One Does Not Expect Hauntings To Occur Inside Lungs
Something brushed my shoulder. I jerked in surprise—I had heard nobody approach. When I turned, I expected to see Uclod or Lajoolie, or perhaps some icky polyp protruding from the wall and trying to attach itself to me for unknown alien purposes.
I did not expect to see a ghost.
It was a thing made of mist, like the spooky patches of fog that form in hollows at sundown. Unlike our milky-white FTL field, this mist had no color: clear as a spray of water, and thin enough for me to see right through to the wall on the far side. But this was no random vapor wafting through Starbiter’s lungs like breath on a winter’s day; it had a vaguely human shape, with legs and arms and head. Nothing was distinct—the feet had no toes, the hands had no fingers, the face had no features at all—but this was definitely a coherent entity leaning over me. It had touched my shoulder with its barely substantial hand…and I could not help flinching, swatting the hand away.
My swat passed through the thing’s arm with no resistance: like sweeping my fingers through smoke. Though the mist looked like fog, it felt dry, and neither cold nor hot—just a tiny bit gritty, like dust.
“Go away, ghost,” I told it. “Go haunt someone else.” I waved my hand through its chest, trying to scatter it to bits. The particles of its body, droplets or ashes or soot, swirled on the wind of my movements, but did not fly apart. As soon as I stopped stirring up breeze, the thing drifted back to its original shape, a person leaning over me.
“Sad woman…sad woman…”
The words were a whisper, coming from the entity’s entire body: not just from its mouth area, but resonating completely from head to foot. “What is wrong, sad woman?” the creature whispered. “What hurts you?”
“Nothing hurts me,” I answered. “But I am easily annoyed by intrusive beings of unknown origin. What are you?”
“The ship’s mate…”
“What?” I said in outrage. “I was forced to drive this ship myself when there was a high-ranking crew member aboard? Were you incapacitated by the stick-ship’s weapon?”
“No,” the entity replied, “but I know nothing about…flying Starbiter. She would surely…not obey me…if I tried. I am not…a crew member; I am…the ship’s mate.”
For a moment I just glowered at him. Then I realized what he was saying: that he was Starbiter’s spouse. The male of her species.