Ascending - James Alan Gardner [62]
Festina told Nimbus, “Whether or not the Pollisand ranks high in the League, he definitely has technology better than our own. For one thing, he always appears out of nowhere: teleportation, or maybe turning off an invisibility field.”
“Perhaps he is only projecting his appearance,” I suggested. “Perhaps he is actually far away on some planet known for its lava pools, and he simply sends out images of himself to ask these questions.”
Festina looked at me most curiously…but Uclod waved away my words as if they had no bearing on the subject. “What if there’s more than one Pollisand?” he asked. “Maybe there are hundreds of these bozos wandering around, just waiting for people to get in trouble.”
“Another valid possibility,” Festina said, “and I could give you a dozen more. Navy Intelligence has plenty of hypotheses…but no real facts except that this headless white alien occasionally shows up at the precise moment of a disaster and begins to ask infuriating questions. Since the aliens always look and act the same, our NAVINT folks are inclined to regard the Pollisand as the only one of his kind; but who knows?”
Uclod made an ungenteel noise in his throat. “And your gurus think this Pollisand ranks high in the League? A super-evolved creature should have better things to do than thumbing his nose at people who screw up.”
Festina shrugged. “In Explorer Academy, we studied all the advanced species known to humanity…and we came to the conclusion no one knows why any of them do what they do. Hell, in most cases, we have no idea how up-ladder aliens spend their time. Do they sit around contemplating their navels? Indulge in arts and sciences we don’t comprehend? Project themselves into higher dimensions and play chess with otherworldly powers?”
“If I were an otherworldly power,” I said, “I would not play chess. It is a most boring game. Except for the little horses. If I were an otherworldly power, I would create a new game that only had the little horses. And the winner would receive excellent prizes, instead of that nonsense about the thrill of intellectual achievement.”
Uclod gave me a look. “Try to stay focused, missy. Real live aliens don’t play board games with fictitious deities. Presumably,” he said, turning back to Festina, “real live aliens have to eat and reproduce and gather raw materials for whatever gadgets they manufacture…”
“Don’t be too sure,” Festina said. “From what we’ve seen of highly advanced races, they engineer themselves to transcend mundane needs. At the Academy, one of our professors theorized that to get past a certain point of evolution, species have to jettison almost all their natural drives. You can’t go forward till you dump the primitive crap that’s holding you back. And not just stuff like eating and breeding, but mental attitudes too. Territoriality, for example—humans, Divians, and other races of our approximate intelligence level all have at least some expansionist tendencies. We build colonies, terraform planets, try to keep our economies growing. But species above us on the ladder aren’t interested in such things. None of them has any known planetary holdings. They just…well, have you heard of Las Fuentes?”
She was looking at Uclod. When he shook his head, she went back to the keypad and typed for several seconds. The display screen changed to show a bright desert landscape of hard-baked dirt, punctuated in places with scrubby weeds that looked like tiny orange balloons glued onto twigs. A white-surfaced road ran diagonally across the picture—a road pocked with holes where the pavement had turned to rubble. It looked most ancient and crumbling, stretching toward the horizon…until it suddenly disappeared over the edge of a large drop-off.
The view zoomed forward, closer and closer to the drop-off.