Ascending - James Alan Gardner [42]
This was not strictly true. For one thing, I had not yet tried on the jacket; and I was not precisely certain what it meant for clothes to be a perfect fit, since I had never worn clothes before. Nevertheless, I was closer in size to human Explorers than to the muscle-bound woman before me. The jacket back on the bridge would fit better than any of Lajoolie’s apparel.
As for what I said about having no appetite—I was not yet so ravenous as to consume a part of Starbiter (especially not a green part of Starbiter), but I could feel hunger gnawing with growing insistence. During my four years of basking in the Ancestral Tower, I had built up a modest energy reserve…but that reserve would drain quickly now that I was up and moving. I certainly could not sustain myself with the dim phosphorescent glow from Starbiter’s wall fungus; therefore, I would need solid food soon or I would drop into a coma of starvation.
But I refused to eat immediately. Not until I retrieved my jacket and covered my digestive tract.
Lajoolie waited another moment to see if I would tuck into the food. Then she shrugged, picked up the green wad from her bowl and took a bite. “It’s quite good,” she said. “Really.”
“I am not interested in eating,” I lied. “I am more interested in understanding recent occurrences. Who are the stick-people? The ones you call Shaddill. Why did they treat us as enemies?”
The big woman chewed for an irritatingly placid period of time before she swallowed. “Until today, I would have said the Shaddill were the most benevolent race in the universe. Now…”
She sighed. Then, with many an annoying pause to eat, she told me what she knew.
The Divians Divided
Lajoolie’s race (the Tye-Tyes) and Uclod’s race (the Freeps) were both offshoots of a species called the Divians. Some one thousand years ago—I do not know if those are Earth years, Divian years, or years of the solar butterflies, because I did not care to ask—the Divians were a single species occupying a single star system. Back then, they did not have Zaretts with FTL fields; they only had primitive rocket-beasts that puttered between their birthworld and a handful of crude colonies on nearby planets and moons. The Divians were totally ignorant of the universe at large…until the Shaddill showed up.
No Divian saw a Shaddill in person; all communication was conducted through robotic go-betweens who looked exactly like the Divians themselves. No one even saw the Shaddills’ spaceship except three people from an outpost on a remote moon. By sheer chance, this outpost suffered an accident involving a poorly designed something that was supposed to keep a second thing properly fueled, so that the second thing could prevent a third thing from catching fire, but then the third thing did catch fire and even though the fire was put out, the smoke suffocated a beetlelike creature that served as some sort of safeguard for the outpost’s life support systems…and in short, disastrous events transpired, threatening death to all concerned. Since no poky Divian vessel could reach the outpost in time, the Shaddill were prevailed upon to sail to the rescue. Their ship swooped in, picked up the Divian personnel, and sent them back to safety inside the first Zarett ever—but not before the people from the outpost had seen that the Shaddill drove a ship made of sticks.
Such a chivalrous rescue put the Shaddill in an excellent light…and the Divians were already inclined to regard the Shaddill as visitors of wondrous philanthropy. The Shaddill had introduced themselves as emissaries from the League of Peoples, ready to induct “acceptable” Divians into the League. In order to be acceptable, persons had to agree to the League’s only rule: never to slay another sentient being, either by deliberate deed or willful negligence. Creatures who obeyed this law were considered sentient themselves and were guaranteed protection; everyone else was considered non-sentient, possibly a dangerous threat to the universe. The League did not actively seek to destroy