"There was a terrible stick-thing," I told her, "What you called a Shaddill ship. It shot you with a Diabolical Weapon Ray, leaving me to effect an escape single-handed. Which I did most proficiently. Since then, I have flown through the sun and defeated the human navy, not to mention meeting…"
I stopped myself. Perhaps it would not be so prudent to disclose my encounter with the Pollisand. Someone like Lajoolie (or even worse, Uclod) might chide me most scathingly for entering into a poorly defined pact with a powerful alien of dubious motives. Therefore I resolved not to speak of the Pollisand until I had time to ponder the ramifications on my own.
The Vexation Of Newlywed Sentiments
Off to my left, a noise went click. The next moment, something crawled up my face — the icky intestine covering my head. It had been in place so many hours, I had forgotten it was there. My vision went black for a moment, then returned; only now I was seeing with my own eyes, where Uclod sat slumped in his chair and Lajoolie was just straightening up from the bumpy controls in front of her seat. Obviously, she had pressed a release that withdrew the linkage attached to our heads… and had also disengaged the straps holding us to our chairs. I felt myself being freed as the straps slithered back into the chair’s jellyfish upholstery; and it was a good thing I was not such a one as stiffened from periods of inactivity, or I would now be a Solid Mass Of Discomfort.
The straps around Uclod unclasped too. He would have toppled onto his nose if Lajoolie had not leapt to catch him. In that instant, I could see she was extremely fast as well as strong — especially for one who had just lain unconscious many hours. She eased Uclod back into his seat and spent an inordinate amount of fuss arranging him: positioning his body just so, with his head propped up instead of lolling to one side, his hands folded neatly in his lap, and so on… whereas I might have started by checking his pulse to see if other actions were worth the effort It took at least a minute to convince myself Uclod was even breathing; but at last, when Lajoolie stopped fretting with him, I saw a definite rise and fall in his chest.
Once Lajoolie had composed her husband to her satisfaction, she seated herself on the floor at his feet and leaned against his legs. I believe she would have liked to lay her head on his knee or rest it in his lap — she was just the type to seek the most submissive posture available. However, she was too tall for either of those positions, so she contented herself with settling her arm across his thighs and huddling tight to his body. I watched her for a count of five, then said, "Should we not try to wake him?"
She lifted her head, meeting my gaze with large brown eyes. "How?" she asked.
"In stories," I answered, "it is customary to slap the face. Beginning lightly, then with increasing force."
"I don’t want to do that," Lajoolie said.
"Yow would rather he stayed unconscious?"
"I’d rafter he woke on his own. There’s no hurry, is there? You said we’ve escaped from the Shaddill. And Starbiter doesn’t need to be piloted — once you stopped giving her direct orders, she automatically adjusted her course toward New Earth. The heading was preprogrammed: I checked. So we’re going home and we can take our time."
"But waiting is irksomely tedious. It is better when you make the next thing happen right away."
Lajoolie stared at me a moment, then shook her head. With a slight smile, she hugged herself tighter to the unconscious little criminal and closed her eyes.
She was obviously doing this to vex me. Rather than stay and watch her pretend to be patient, I stomped out of the room to explore the ship.
Obstinate Doors
I did not do so well as an Explorer. There was only one way to leave the bridge: down the long tubular corridor whose floor had those corduroy ridges over bluish-white skin. The corridor led back to the room where I had landed after sliding down the throat… and I could see no other direction to go from there. Uclod said the Zarett had eighteen rooms, but I did not know where they were.
"Starbiter," I said aloud, "we are friends now, are we not? We have ventured together into the sun… and far from home, in a place of lava, we nestled together for comfort. Therefore you know I am trustworthy, and you may safely open concealed doors to reveal your hidden depths."
Silence.
"You may open them any time now, Starbiter. My comrade. My ally in times of distress."
But nothing happened. I did not think my bouncing bleating friend would completely ignore me so soon after we had shared precious moments of closeness on an alien plain; more likely, she just could not hear me speaking. Few of us, after all, have ears in our lungs. If I wanted the Zarett to admit me to her inner recesses, I would have to find the proper places to rub my hand or tap my foot.
Therefore I experimented with rubbing the walls at random: palpating the soft mushiness, leaving fingerprints all over the yellow fungus that lit the room. From the first, I felt most foolish… but as time went on without success, I could not help a sense of betrayal — as if Starbiter was deliberately shutting me out like some unwanted cast-off.
That made me very sad. Besides the standoffish Zarett, the only people within lightyears were in the other room, deliberately being husband and wife together… which was a most appalling spectacle of Married Sentimentality, and I would never want a person to sit at my feet, nor would I willingly sit at someone else’s. But I did not enjoy being all by myself inside a large creature’s lung. I did not even have the Explorer jacket I had brought from Melaquin; it was back in the bridge, and I refused to go get it. What would I say as I entered the room? "Excuse me, I wish something to hug for I am feeling glum?"
So I seated myself in the middle of the floor and squeezed my legs tight to my chest. I did not cry, not even a single tear; but I kept my eyes tight shut. My eyelids are a lovely silver, almost the only parts of my body that are opaque… and at that moment, with my face pressed against my knees, I did not wish to see anything.
(My legs act as distorting lenses. Sometimes, when I look through them, the world appears most strange and threatening indeed.)
One Does Not Expect Hauntings To Occur Inside Lungs
Something brushed my shoulder. I jerked in surprise — I had heard nobody approach. When I turned, I expected to see Uclod or Lajoolie, or perhaps some icky polyp protruding from the wall and trying to attach itself to me for unknown alien purposes.
I did not expect to see a ghost.
It was a thing made of mist, like the spooky patches of fog that form in hollows at sundown. Unlike out milky-white FTL field, this mist had no color: clear as a spray of water, and thin enough for me to see right through to the wall on the far side. But this was no random vapor wafting through Starbiter’s lungs like breath on a winter’s day; it had a vaguely human shape, with legs and arms and head. Nothing was distinct — the feet had no toes, the hands had no fingers, the face had no features at all — but this was definitely a coherent entity leaning over me. It had touched my shoulder with its barely substantial hand… and I could not help flinching, swatting the hand away.
My swat passed through the thing’s arm with no resistance: like sweeping my fingers through smoke. Though the mist looked like fog, it felt dry, and neither cold nor hot just a tiny bit gritty, like dust.
"Go away, ghost," I told it "Go haunt someone else." I waved my hand through its chest, trying to scatter it to bits. The particles of its body, droplets or ashes or soot, swirled on the wind of my movements, but did not fly apart. As soon as I stopped stirring up breeze, the thing drifted back to its original shape, a person leaning over me.