Ascending - James Alan Gardner [38]
Quickly, I wiped my hands off on the floor.
Conversing With A Cloud
“What are you doing here?” I demanded. “We are in the lungs. Should you not be in another organ altogether? Doing whatever foul things a cloud man does to make babies?”
“I visit every organ on a regular basis,” the ghostly entity answered. “In addition to my…husbandly duties…” (he sounded most amused) “…I am also what you might call…a veterinarian. Or perhaps the ship’s engineer. I patrol my mate’s airways and bloodstream in search of…metabolic imbalances…” The misty figure gestured in my direction. “Which led me to you.”
“I am not a metabolic imbalance!”
The cloud man pointed to the place I was sitting. “You’re creating a hot spot,” came the whisper. “And I sensed the presence of…unfamiliar chemicals…”
“My chemicals are very familiar! Have you never heard of glass?”
“There are many kinds of glass,” the cloud said, “and you’re none of them. Your skin is…an amalgam of transparent polymers, serviced by an army of…sophisticated agent-cells…that perform general maintenance and…ward off external microbes. There are also…trace fluids on your exterior, the purpose of which I can’t identify. Not conventional perspiration—possibly just a light body wash to prevent you from caking with dust…possibly something more complicated. All such…biochemical compounds are cause for concern, given the slight but real chance they may have a detrimental effect on my…patroness.”
“Do not be foolish,” I told him. “You can see I have had no detrimental effect—Starbiter is healthy and happy.”
“At the moment, yes,” he answered. “But you’re a stranger with an alien biochemistry, and I find that troubling.”
“I am not a stranger,” I said, “I am Oar. An oar is an implement used to propel boats. Who are you, you poop-head cloud?”
“Nimbus,” he replied. “Or if you want the complete mouthful from the Bloodline Registry books, Capella’s Coronal Nimbus of Lee-Thee Five.” His mist suddenly went blurry…as if every particle of him was shuddering with distaste. “In my grandfather’s day,” he said, “Zarett males were called Lucky or Fogbank or Rain Cloud; but then our owners made contact with Homo sapiens and picked up the Earthling fondness for giving thoroughbreds ridiculous names. My previous mate was called Princess Fly-in-Amber Heliopause, whatever that means. The person who christened her didn’t speak a word of any Terran language, but he gave her a gobbledygook title to impress human buyers.”
The cloud man’s voice had gradually risen from a whisper to normal speaking volume. His new tone sounded a good deal like Uclod…as if Mr. Zarett had taken the little orange criminal’s voice as a model. I also noticed Nimbus was no longer hesitating between phrases. When he spoke his first words, Sad woman, it seemed he knew almost no English; now he spoke it overfluently. Perhaps Starbiter carried Ingenious Language Devices such as a mist man might employ to learn a new tongue within seconds. If so, it was most unfair—I put in weeks of diligent work to acquire my English, and disapproved of persons who bypassed the wholesomely tedious education process by using mechanical aids.
“I do not care about Zarett names,” I told him, “but if you dislike what people call you, choose something else.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” he answered. “We Zaretts have an unshakable instinct to defer to our masters, even when we’d dearly love to do otherwise. The compulsion is too strong to overcome, no matter what the rational part of us thinks about it. Being a good and obedient slave is hardwired into my genes.”
“You are not good and obedient if you complain about your master to someone you have just met. Do you think I will now go to Uclod and say, ‘Please change Nimbus’s name to Fluffy’?”
“It wouldn’t matter,” the mist man replied. “Uclod isn’t my owner. He’s just renting me…for stud purposes.”
I suspect he added that last part just to provoke a reaction