Heaven's Reach

Lark

HE DIDN’T FEEL COLD. NOT EXACTLY. EVEN though, logically, he ought to.

A cloying mist surrounded Lark as membranes pressed against him from all sides, keeping his body bent nearly double, with knees up near his chin.

Lark felt as he imagined he might if someone crammed him back into the womb.

Soon another similarity grew apparent.

He wasn’t breathing anymore.

In fact, his mouth was sealed shut and swollen plugs filled both nostrils. The rhythmic expansion of his chest, the soft sigh of sweet air, these notable portions of life’s usual background … were gone!

With this realization, panic nearly engulfed Lark. A red haze obscured vision, narrowing to a tunnel as he struggled and thrashed. Though his body seemed reluctant at first, he obliged it to try inhaling … and achieved nothing.

He tried harder, commanding effort from his sluggish diaphragm and rib cage. Lark’s spine arched as he strained, until at last a scant trickle of gas slipped by one nose plug — perhaps only a few molecules—

— carrying an acrid stench!

Sudden paroxysms contorted Lark. Limbs churned and bowels convulsed as he tried voiding himself into the turbid surroundings.

Fortunately, his gut was empty — he had eaten little for days. A cottony feeling spread through his extremities like a drug, filling them with soothing numbness as the fit soon passed, leaving behind a lingering foul taste in his mouth.

Lark had learned a valuable lesson.

Next time you find yourself wrapped up in fetal position, crammed inside a stinking bag without an instinct to breathe, take a hint. Go with the flow.

Lark felt for a pulse and verified that his heart, at least, was still functioning. The persistent stinging in his sinuses — a noxious-familiar stench — was enough all by itself to verify that life went on, painful as it was.

Turning his head to look around, Lark soon noticed that his bag of confinement was just one of many floating in a much larger volume. Through the obscuring mist he made out other membranous sacks. Most held big, conical-shaped Jophur — tapered stacks of fatty rings that throbbed feebly while their basal leg segments pushed uselessly, without any solid surface for traction. Some of the traekilike beings looked whole, but others had clearly been broken down to smaller stacks, or even individual rings.

Knotty cables, like the throbbing tendrils of a mulc spider, led away from each cell … including his own. In fact, one penetrated the nearby translucent wall, snaking around Lark’s left leg and terminating finally at his inner thigh, just below the groin.

The sight triggered a second wave of panic, which he fought this time by drawing on his best resource, his knowledge as a primitive scientist. Jijo might be a backwater, lacking the intellectual resources of the Five Galaxies, but you could still train a working mind from the pages of paper books.

Use what you know. Figure this out!

All right.

First thing … the cable piercing his leg appeared to target the femoral artery. Perhaps it was feeding on him, like some space-leech in a garish, pre-Contact scifi yarn. But that horror image seemed so silly that Lark suspected the truth was quite different.

Basic life support. I’m floating in a poison atmosphere, so they can’t let me breathe or eat or drink. They must be sending oxygen and nutrients directly to my blood.

Whoever “they” were.

As for the jiggling containers, Lark was enough of a field biologist to know sampling bags when he saw them. Although he could not laugh, a sense of ironic justice helped him put a wry perspective on the situation. He had put more than enough hapless creatures in confinement during his career as a naturalist, dissecting the complex interrelationships of living species on Jijo.

If nature passed out karma for such acts, Lark’s burden might merit a personal purgatory that looked something like this.

He strained harder to see through the mist, hoping not to find Ling among the captives. And yet, a pall of loneliness settled when he verified she was nowhere in sight.

Maybe she escaped from Rann and the Jophur, when these yellow monsters invaded the Polkjhy. If she made it to the Life Core, she might clamber through the jungle foliage and be safe in our old nest. For a while, at least.

He glimpsed walls beyond the murk, estimating this chamber to be larger than the meeting tree back in his home village. From certain visible furnishings and wall-mounted data units, he could tell it was still the Jophur dreadnought, but invaders had taken over this portion, filling it with their own nocuous atmosphere.

That ought to be a clue. The familiar-horrid scent. A toxicity that forbade inhaling. But Lark’s bruised mind drew no immediate conclusions. To a Jijoan — even a so-called “scientist”—all of space was a vast realm of terrible wonders.

Have they seized the whole vessel?

It seemed farfetched, given the power of mighty Jophur skygods, but Lark looked for some abstract solace in that prospect. Those traeki-cousins meant only bad news to all the Six Races of Jijo, especially the poor g’Kek. The best thing that could happen to his homeworld would be if battleship Polkjhy never reached home to report what it had found in an obscure corner of Galaxy Four.

And yet, this situation could hardly be expected to make him glad, or grateful to his new captors.

It took a while, but eventually Lark realized — some of them were nearby!

At first, he mistook the quivering shapes for lumps in the overall fog, somewhat denser than normal. But these particular patches remained compact and self-contained, though fluid in outline. He likened them to shifting heaps of pond scum … or else succinct thun-derheads, cruising imperiously among lesser clouds. Several of these amorphous-looking bodies clustered around a nearby sample bag, inspecting the Jophur prisoner within.

Inspecting? What makes you think that? Do you see any eyes? Or sensory organs of any kind?

The floating globs moved languidly, creeping through the dense medium by extending or writhing temporary arms or pseudopods. There did not seem to be any permanent organs or structures within their translucent skins, but a rhythmic movement of small, blobby subunits that came together, merged, or divided with a complexity he could only begin to follow.

He recalled an earlier amoebalike creature, much bigger than these — the invader who had burst through a ship’s bulkhead, scaring away Rann and the other pursuers who had Lark cornered. That one had seemed to look right at Lark, before swarming ahead rapidly to swallow him up.

What could they be? Did Ling ever mention anything like this? I don’t remember.…

All at once Lark knew where he had encountered the foul smell before. At Biblos … the Hall of Science … in a part of the great archive that had been cleared of bookshelves in order to set up a chemistry lab, where a small band of sages labored to recreate ancient secrets, financed and subsidized by the Jijoan Explosers Guild.

Trying to recover old skills, or even learn new things. The guild must have been full of heretics like Sara. Believers in “progress.”

I never thought of it before, but the Slope was rife with renegade thinking even weirder than my own. In time, we’d probably have had a religious schism — even civil war — if gods hadn’t come raining from the sky this year.

He thought about Harullen and Uthen, his chitinous friends, laid low by alien treachery. And about Dwer and Sara — safe at home, he hoped. For their sake alone, he would blow up this majestic vessel, if that meant Jijo could be shrouded once more in blessed obscurity.

Lark’s dour contemplations orbited from the melancholy past, around the cryptic present, and through a dubious future.

Time advanced, though he had no way of measuring it except by counting heartbeats. That grew tedious, after a while, but he kept at it, just to keep his hand in.

I’m alive! The creatures in charge here must find me interesting, in some way.

Lark planned on stoking that interest, whatever it took.