"Come out now, Nimbus," I whispered as Festina took a ragged breath. "Your job is done. You have vanquished the enemy. Come out."
But he did not come out. He did not appear and he did not appear and he did not appear… until I realized he had already come out and I just did not recognize him. The spew on the ground was comprised half of golden nanites and half of Nimbus.
Both halves were dead.
I stared at the puddle as it slowly seeped into the dirt. Then I lowered my face to my friend’s shoulder and wept.
True Freedom
"Well, well, well," said a familiar nasal voice, "three cheers for the visiting team! At the closing whistle, the score is Oar 2, Shaddill nothing."
I lifted my head. The Pollisand stood perched on the rim of the basin, looking down at the purple lumps that had once been Immu and Esticus. A creature his size could not possibly balance on the narrow basin wall, but he was there anyway; he pranced a few steps in a rhinoceroid victory dance, then jumped to the floor. "How are you lovely ladies doing?"
"We are splendid," I answered, "no thanks to you. But Nimbus is doing most poorly; you must bring him back to life."
Deep in the Pollisand’s throat, his eyes grew dim. "Can’t do that," he said. "Sorry."
"You can do that," I replied. "You have told me repeatedly how clever you are. You could bring Nimbus back just as you did for me; you must do it now."
"No, I must not," the Pollisand said… and there was something steely in his voice, something much different from the grating tone he usually affected. "Your friend Nimbus made a choice, Oar: a conscious decision to be more than a slave to some absentee owner, even though he knew it might cost him his life. I do not tamper with the results of such decisions."
"But you saved me… when I consciously made a decision to fall eighty stories!"
"You didn’t believe you would die. You didn’t believe you could die. When you grabbed your enemy and jumped out that window, you thought he would die but you’d be just fine; hardly a deliberate sacrifice like Nimbus."
The Pollisand walked over to the slightly muddy patch beside Festina — all that was left of the cloud man. He put out his great clumsy foot and held it over the soil as if he intended to touch the wetness… but then he stepped back and planted his toes on solid ground.
"Nimbus knew he wasn’t designed for battle," the Pollisand said. "As he told you, his only method of fighting was to smash his component cells into the nanites over and over again, until both sides were battered into oblivion. I refuse to trivialize Nimbus’s sacrifice by ‘fixing’ things as if his decision never happened."
"But…"
Festina placed a weak hand on my arm. "You aren’t going to win the argument," she said. With a thoughtful expression, she gazed at the Pollisand. "You care about decisions, don’t you? Good decisions, bad decisions… you care about them a lot."
"Deliberate choices are the only sacred things in the universe. Everything else is just hydrogen." He turned to me. "By the way, kiddo, you finally made an honest-to-god life-or-death choice yourself: when you decided not to rough up Esticus. If you’d broken so much as the little bastard’s finger, the League of Peoples would have put you down like a dog."
"Breaking his finger would have killed him?"
"Hell, no," the Pollisand answered with a snort. "The Shaddill are just as indestructible as you are — they’d probably survive if you crammed H-bombs down their throats. Furthermore, if you’d just gone ahead and smashed Esticus in the face as soon as you thought of it, the League wouldn’t have minded that either… but then, Immu got to blathering that horseshit about, ‘Hey, you never know,’ and even worse, you got to thinking, ‘What happens if she’s right?’ That’s when you were in trouble: the only time you’ve truly been in danger since we first met. If you genuinely recognized the risks and decided to pummel Esticus anyway… well, as Immu said, that really would have been non-sentient. With the League, it’s never the actual result that counts; it’s what goes through your head."
His eyes glimmered in the hollows of his neck. As I gazed at him, a disturbing thought crossed my mind. "If I had made the wrong decision at that time — if the League slew me for non-sentience — you would have let me stay dead. Because then my death would have been a result of my own decision. Correct?"
"Correct." The Pollisand’s voice sounded amused.
"But if I had died for any other reason — not as the consequence of a personal decision but through accident or someone else’s malice — you would have been willing to heal me. That is correct too, yes?"
"To some extent." His eyes glimmered more brightly. "So when you told me hours ago," I said, "there was a teeny-tiny-eensy-weensy chance I might get killed, you did not mean the Shaddill might slay me. You meant I might make a bad decision, and you would not save me from the results." I glared at him fiercely. "Did you foresee everything? Did you know it would come down to me deciding whether or not to punch Esticus in the nose?"
"Hey," he said, "I keep telling you: I’m a fucking alien mastermind."
"Or," said Festina, "a complete fraud who takes credit for being a lot more omniscient than he really is. You took damned good care to keep your leathery white ass out of sight till the Shaddill were gone. Could it be you were afraid to tangle with them directly?"
"Ah, yes," said the Pollisand in an even more nasal voice than usual. "A god or a fraud? Am I or ain’t I?" He lifted his forefoot and patted Festina fondly on the cheek. "You don’t know, my little chickadee, how hard I work to keep the answer ambiguous."
Another Career Step Upward
Festina struggled to her feet, barely managing to stay upright until I lent her my arm for support. "All right," she said to the Pollisand, "now that the Shaddill are out of the way, could you maybe deign to help us? Like finding some way to get our friends out of those…"
With a great gooey slurp, the blobs surrounding Uclod and the rest dissolved into runny gray liquid. It sloshed in sheets to the floor, leaving Lajoolie, Aarhus, and Uclod soaked to the skin but free of their sticky entanglements.
"Well, would you look at that," the Pollisand said in mock surprise. "The Shaddill must have been right about this ship starting to break down — those confinement chambers were in such bad shape, they could only hold together a few minutes." He gave a theatrical sigh. "It’s a bitch when you live on a ship five thousand years old. Things just fall apart."
Festina stared at him. "You’re scary."
"Babe, you don’t know the half of it." Inside the alien’s throat, one of his crimson eyes winked.
"And you couldn’t have arranged for that to happen five minutes earlier?"
"Sorry," the Pollisand said. "Lesser species have to fight their own battles."
Festina grimaced. "Now that the battle’s over, how about arranging for this old decrepit ship to have a breakdown in its master command module? A short circuit that screws up security protocols and makes it possible for us to issue commands without worrying about passwords or voice identification…"