Ascending - James Alan Gardner [99]
Two glowing red eyes burned dimly amidst the multicolored foliage…as if a certain headless creature was concealed behind the leaves.
Talking To The Painting
“Pollisand?” I whispered softly.
“Who else?” he replied. “The fucking Cheshire Cat?”
He was speaking in his normal raspy-sharp voice. I looked back quickly at the others, but they showed no sign of hearing him. Considering how loud he sounded in my ears, it seemed most strange they had not noticed.
“Nah,” the Pollisand said, “your buddies aren’t in on this conversation. It’s just between you and me, sweetums.”
“In other words, you are not really here. You are projecting sights and sounds into my mind again…” I stopped. “But I am not connected to Starbiter! How can you contact my brain when I am not linked to anything?”
“Hey,” the Pollisand said, “didn’t I tell you I’m seventy-five trillion rungs above you on the evolutionary ladder? Why should I need a Zarett to do my projecting for me?”
“Hmm,” I hmmed, thinking very hard. This Pollisand had a most irksome habit of not answering questions—he simply made it seem like he was responding, when he was really evading the subject. In this particular situation, it occurred to me he might be attempting to hide something most important indeed.
“Did you do something to me?” I asked in whispered outrage. “When you took me away and mended my bones, did you do more? Did you perhaps place a Scientific Device in my brain that allows you to link with me at any time?”
“Ooo,” said the Pollisand, “aren’t we clever! At least one of us is. Much cleverer than Dr. Havel. He didn’t find a thing. Then again, maybe there’s nothing to find.”
The red eyes grew brighter and pushed out from the hemlock’s painted leaves. Attached to those eyes was the rest of the Pollisand’s body, moving outward too—then thickening from flat to fat and coming straight off the wall. If you have ever seen a large headless alien step out of a two-dimensional painting, this was exactly like that…only better, because it was happening to me.
Since I was still seated on the floor, his huge white body towered above my head. He looked very real as he yanked his rump free from the wall and flicked his short tail to brush flecks of paint off his hindquarters; but no one else in the room even glanced in our direction. This was indeed just a projected image, and my brain was the only one receiving the signal.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, still whispering. “Have you come to observe another dreadful mistake?”
“Hope not,” he said. “But let’s see how you handle the Cashlings.”
“So you will watch whether we anger them?”
“Of course I’ll watch. I’m always watching.”
He gave a full-body shake, and stray bits of paint showered off him onto the floor. They also showered onto my legs, which I had tucked in front of me. Glaring at him, I wiped the tiny flakes of green and red and black off my previously clean thighs. Meanwhile, the Pollisand eased his bulk past me until he stood between me and the other people in the room; only I was in a position to see his eyes, glowing deep in his chest cavity.
Suddenly, the eyes burst into white-hot flame, such as when a forest fire strikes some bone-dry deposit of leaves and pine pitch. The flash of that light flared down upon me, so blinding I shut my eyes…but I could feel the radiance pouring through my body with great invigorating intensity. In less than a second, I was sizzling—the same sort of sizzle one experiences after a full week of basking in the brilliance of an Ancestral Tower.
The heat faded quickly. When I opened my eyes, the Pollisand was back to normal, only a dim crimson