Ascending

Ascending

by James Alan Gardner

This one is to all the gang from Clarion West ’89: I’m a lousy correspondent, but I still remember.

A WORD ABOUT OAR

Oar, the narrator of this story, first appeared in the novel Expendable. At the end of that book, she was left for dead after she grabbed an enemy and plunged with him from a window on the eightieth floor of a building.

To human eyes, Oar is as clear and transparent as glass. Although she actually has bones, muscles, and an assortment of internal organs, these were bioengineered to be indiscernible when humans look through her skin.

Oar’s ancestors were humans themselves, born on Earth around 2000 B.C. At that time, a collection of Homo sapiens were removed by aliens to the planet Melaquin, where the aliens gave these people a new home. The aliens didn’t explain why they did this, but they built the humans beautiful glass cities with self-repairing robotic systems designed to provide all the comforts of life.

The aliens gave these humans one additional gift: the people’s children were born as strong, intelligent glasslike humanoids who never grew old or sick, and who were tough enough to withstand damage that would kill normal flesh and blood. Only later did it become apparent that these glass offspring had a flaw: although their bodies could survive for mille

Glass parents continued to have glass children, but in decreasing numbers. The population declined in cities, towns, and villages all over Melaquin — gradual extinction from pure e

In Expendable, Oar was forty-five… on the verge of her race’s customary "senility."

Now she’s four years older.

From Festina Ramos:

I met Oar beside a moonlit lake, just after dusk on the day I had murdered my best friend. She was tall, sad, and impossibly beautiful: like an Art Deco figurine molded from purest crystal.

Yes — she was made of glass. Looking through her, I could see the beach, the moon, the world… focused through a woman-shaped lens.

When I think about her, I can’t help perceiving her glass body as a metaphor. She was, for example, transparent as glass emotionally. When she was angry, she raged; when frightened, she trembled; when lonely, she wept. She was as open as a child… and people who didn’t know her often dismissed her as childish, unintelligent, bratty. Oar was none of those things — she was a fully grown woman with an intelligence high off the scales (she learned fluent English in just a few weeks), and her constant claims of superiority to us "opaque persons" weren’t arrogant but heartbreaking: an attempt to convince herself she had some value in the universe.

Like glass, she was fragile. Not physically, of course: she was damned near unbreakable, and immune to disease, drowning, even starvation (she could photosynthesize energy from the weakest light sources). She was strong too — fast and agile. But mentally, Oar was ready to shatter. Thousands of years ago, her kind was created by unknown aliens in mimicry of Homo sapiens… but due to a design flaw (accidental or deliberate), the glass race always suffered mental shutdown by age fifty. First, a tendency to boredom; then, a growing listlessness; finally, a descent into torpor, a sleep that could only be broken by the most extreme measures and then only for a few minutes before senility crept back in.

Oar was on the verge of that abyss. Her whole species was. They didn’t die, they just grew Tired: turning into ageless glass statues, alive but dormant. As Oar approached the age when her brain would betray her, she fought her fate, she denied it, she raged; and in the end, it seemed as if she had found a way out. During a battle to save her world from extinction, she sacrificed herself by plunging from the top of an eighty-story tower, taking with her a madman who pla

Her glass would have warped with age: the lens going dark, the mirror turning cloudy.

But I was wrong. Oar didn’t die in that fall — she was tougher than I ever imagined. Bulletproof glass. And now that she’s back, pursued by inhuman creatures with secrets to hide, the question is whether she can avoid mental oblivion long enough to save those of us who need her help.

Ru

1: WHEREIN I AM NOT DEAD AFTER ALL

My Story

This is my story, the Story of Oar. It is a wonderful story. I was in another story once, but it was not so wonderful, as I died in the end. That was very most sad indeed. But it turns out I am not such a one as stays dead forever, especially when I only fell eighty floors to the pavement. I am made of sterner stuff than that.

Actually, I am made of glass: clear, see-through glass. I am therefore extremely beautiful… more beautiful than you, but you should not feel bad about that, because you ca

I do not die in this story. Those of you who have looked at the last page — which is only sensible, because you wish to make sure I do not make a long speech telling what lessons I have learned — those who have looked at the end will know that instead of dying, I win everything. I defeat the bad people, am adored by the good people, and get to say, "I told you so," as freely as I wish.

That is the whole point of being in stories: to have a Happy Ending.

My Technique

When I decided to present my story to opaque persons, I endeavored to learn what chronicling techniques are popular with your kind. My research methods were most diligent… which is to say, I waited for my friend Festina to leave the room, then instructed her computer to show me any documents she had written of a narrative nature.

Therefore, I have discovered that the proper way to write for Earthlings is to divide one’s tale into modestly brief sections with titles at the top, such as My Technique. This is certainly an Effective Literary Device, especially when addressing persons with a short attention span. The technique also helps one skim ahead for sections whose titles seem more exciting than the passage one is supposed to read next. Thus one can jump forward to read Facing A Hellish Maw before coming back to Conversing With A Little Man Whose Sole Amusing Quality Is That He Is Colored Orange.