Ascending - James Alan Gardner [75]
“But they are so ugly!” I said. “They are practically obscene.”
“Don’t say that to their faces. Cashlings are stupendously vain; if you insult them, they may decide not to broadcast our story.”
“Then I will charm them most graciously,” I answered. “I am excellent at winning the hearts of aliens, even when they are thoroughly repugnant.”
Festina looked at me a moment, then broke into a grin. “You do have the knack,” she said. “Come on, let’s get ready for the broadcast.”
A Temporary Nursery
We left Uclod and Lajoolie in the infirmary. They were talking to each other in low voices, Uclod sounding most trembly while Lajoolie spoke with soft calmness. The rest of us had no desire to interrupt such a conversation, and I for one was glad to get away. Each glance in their direction brought home the terrible reality of bereavement; and I did not wish to be reminded of that at all.
The place we went first was a room for Nimbus. He said he had nothing to contribute to our testimony against the High Council, and more importantly, he needed to minister unto baby Starbiter’s needs. Therefore Festina took him to a passenger cabin which was tiny and cramped and blemished with hideous blue paint on the walls, but which had a full-service synthesizer that would let Nimbus obtain food and other necessities for the child. We tarried a moment to make sure he was properly settled in, then left him to his fatherly work.
Departing through the cabin door, we were forced to pass through a gritty black dust cloud swirling silently in the corridor. Festina said the cloud was a swarm of fierce microscopic machines, cousins to the Analysis Nano back in sick bay but designed to keep watch on Nimbus. If any speck of the mist man tried to sneak away from his body, tiny robots in the black cloud would swoop in, grab hold of the speck, and carry it off. The robots had been programmed not to damage Nimbus’s component bits, for he was a sentient creature and therefore not to be killed…but apparently, the League of Peoples would not raise a fuss if all of Nimbus’s individual particles were dissipated like fine dust throughout the ship, thereby preventing them from working together and doing harm.
Festina told me additional sentinel robots lurked in the ventilation ducts of Nimbus’s cabin, and even in the plumbing and electrical outlets. This proved the cloud man was a closely watched prisoner, much less trusted than I…for I only had a single mook chaperoning me whereas Nimbus had billions. Hah!
My Mook
My mook was the sergeant, and he showed excellent taste—he left his two lesser mooks in the infirmary to watch Uclod and Lajoolie, but he went with me himself. That must be the chief reason to become sergeant: so you can assign yourself to monitor the most beautiful security risk.
The sergeant’s name was Aarhus. When he finally took off his helmet, he proved to be a bearded man with hair the color of stone…by which I mean the yellow type of stone, not the gray, white, red, or brown types of stone which are also quite common, so perhaps I should have said he had hair like a goldfinch, except it was not that color at all. It was exactly the color of a pebble my sister once found on the beach, and close to the color of certain leaves in autumn, but not the sort of leaves that turn scarlet. So this tells all you need to know about Aarhus, except that he was tall, and he occasionally said odd things which might have been jokes but one never knew for sure.
The sergeant accompanied Festina and me as we proceeded toward the room where we would record our broadcast; and although he was not discourteous, his presence was still a Burden. This was my first time alone with Festina since we had been reunited, and there were many personal subjects we might speak of…but not with a stranger dogging our steps. In addition, I could not reveal my conversation with the Pollisand: bargaining with aliens is just the sort of thing a