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 glow shining from his neckhole. He reached out a foot and patted me lightly on the cheek. "You’re such a skinny girl," he said with a strange feigned accent, "don’t you know you gotta eat? And not just cotton candy," he added, waving his foot at the glow-wands I still carried with me. "Those things got no nutrition — they’re ninety percent visible light, capiche? They go right through you, and where’s the good of that? A pretty girl oughta put meat on her bones. X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves: the high-energy stuff. Or maybe (such a radical thought!), you might try solid food once in a while. Okay, so a stranger’s cooking can’t match your mamma’s lasagna; you still gotta get some nourishment or you’ll shrivel down to a stick. How you gonna bump off the Shaddill if you keep starving yourself? I’m not always gonna be free to bring you take-out."
He finally paused for breath. Then he asked, "Feeling better now, bright-eyes?"
"Yes," I told him. "However, if this is all just a fiction projected into my brain, how can it affect me as if I was bathed in real light?"
"Oops," said the Pollisand, "look at the time. Gotta go, bambina. Ciao!"
With that, he simply vanished — not in a fancy way, but disappearing as abruptly as a light being turned off. His exit did not make the slightest sound.
I stared at the place where he had been. All those flecks of paint he shook onto the floor were gone, vanished like snow in a bonfire. When I looked at the tree on the wall, no red eyes stared back; there was just flat uninteresting paint.
"Hmph," I said to myself. As always, the Pollisand had proved himself an infuriating visitor… but I felt much better, no longer woozy.
Perhaps he was not quite the utter asshole he pretended to be.
Or perhaps he was simply preserving me for something worse later on.
The Advantages Of Immersing Oneself In Mindless Entertainment
Dumping my now-unnecessary glow-wands onto the floor, I rose to my feet and was halfway across the room when Nimbus said, "Listen!" Everyone went instantly silent; in the stillness, I could hear thumping noises to my right.
When I turned in that direction, I saw a heavy metal door embedded in the wall — the entry to the manual airlock. I had not noticed it before in the dim glow-wand light because it was painted the same flat white as the rest of the transport bay… as if someone wished to pretend the door was not even there. Perhaps the navy preferred to downplay the necessity for their ships to contain an emergency entrance.
"Okay," Festina murmured. "It’s showtime. Everybody on your best behavior."
Quickly I retrieved my Explorer jacket from Lajoolie and slipped it on — one must endeavor to look official when alien guests arrive. As I was fastening the front flaps, Uclod said, "Hey, here’s a wild thought: do any of us speak Cashling?"
"No need," Festina replied. "Cashlings spend every waking hour amusing themselves with entertainment bought from other species: Mandasar out-of-shell fantasies, Unity mask dances, human VR chips, the works. Makes Cashlings very cosmopolitan and knowledgeable about alien races. I guarantee whoever comes out of that airlock will speak colloquial English and understand mainstream human body language… as well as knowing the proper form of address for a Fasskister hetman, how to initiate a Greenstrider sex act, and which knife to use in a Myriapod auto-da-fe."
"Second knife from the left," Aarhus said. "The one with three black barbs and the engraving of the Horsehead Nebula."
We all stared at him.
"Hey," said Aarhus, "I have hidden depths."
Two Cashlings And Their Spacesuits
With another thump, the door opened. Two gawky figures stood on the other side, both wearing spacesuits of eye-watering flamboyance. One suit was a swirl of red and white stripes, the stripes spiraling down from top to toe and daubed with bright blue curlicues that might be letters in some alien alphabet. The decorations were just as thick around the helmet as anywhere else: if the helmet had a see-out visor, I could not discern where it was. The entire outfit seemed opaque.
The other suit was equally opaque and visorless, but sported an aggressive frost green background, with all manner of clashing violet images painted on top — animals and houses and fruit and farm implements… all of which might have been completely different objects than I believed, because with aliens, an item that appears to be a nice juicy peach may turn out to be your host’s nephew in temporary chrysalis form, so it is best not to be too hasty at the supper table.[11]
[11] — Or so I have been told by human Explorers. Explorers are extremely prone to lecturing on the Diverse Facets Of Alien Life… and then telling most entertaining stories ("This did not happen to me but to a friend") of instances when an Explorer did dare to eat a peach.
The figures wearing these suits were of course Cashlings; and they had assumed their walking configuration, with long long legs and almost no torso at all. You might think they would look ridiculous, as if their pants were hiked up to their armpits… but in fact, they had a sinister air that made me most queasy. They were all limbs and dangly, like giant spiders who had reared up to human height. Even their garish colors and ornamentation were not as clownish as one might expect — not when most of the light in the room came from the glow-wands I had left in the far corner. The lanky faceless Cashlings stood poised half in shadow, reminding one of flashy-hued snakes about to strike.
When they quitted the airlock chamber, the motion was fluid and fast: two steps and they both had reached us, more speedy than a human could run, though it appeared they were not exerting themselves. The swiftness of their approach was enough to make Lajoolie gasp and back away, tugging Uclod with her. Nimbus retreated too, curling more tightly around his child. Festina and Aarhus did not flinch, but I could see it cost them an effort — they clenched their jaws and silently held their ground as the Cashlings loomed in toward them, shoving their eyeless heads close to my friends’ faces.