Oof.

Living on light is a fine thing indeed, but it is not enough to sustain substantial activity. This explains why plants do not perform hand-springs. (That and the fact that plants have no hands.) I still carried an armload of glow-wands, but the energy they provided was not enough to keep me going if I persisted in moving about.

"Are you all right, Oar?" Festina called from somewhere behind me.

"I am fine," I said, forcing my voice to be strong. "I am simply…" For a moment, I could not think of a suitable excuse why I might have thumped down hard on the deck; but then I caught sight of the rainbow-colored hemlock tree painted on the wall not far from me. "I am simply contemplating the art," I said — because I did not want the others to treat me as a tottery invalid who could not participate in important activities.

"All right," Festina called. "You enjoy the art."

That is easy for her to say, I thought. The tree on the wall was not enjoyable in any way. For True Artistic Merit, a painting should have dried globs of pigment protruding from the surface so that viewers can pick off little bits and sniff what the paint smells like; at least that is what my sister and I concluded as we developed Our Own Personal Aesthetic with the ancient paintings on display in our home village. But the hemlock image in front of me was tediously two-dimensional, with no protruding bits at all. I was about to make an astute critical remark on this lack of texture, when I noticed the tree possessed a feature I had previously overlooked.

Two glowing red eyes burned dimly amidst the multicolored foliage… as if a certain headless creature was concealed behind the leaves.

Talking To The Painting

"Pollisand?" I whispered softly.

"Who else?" he replied. "The fucking Cheshire Cat?"

He was speaking in his normal raspy-sharp voice. I looked back quickly at the others, but they showed no sign of hearing him. Considering how loud he sounded in my ears, it seemed most strange they had not noticed.

"Nah," the Pollisand said, "your buddies aren’t in on this conversation. It’s just between you and me, sweetums."

"In other words, you are not really here. You are projecting sights and sounds into my mind again…" I stopped. "But I am not connected to Starbiter! How can you contact my brain when I am not linked to anything?"

"Hey," the Pollisand said, "didn’t I tell you I’m seventy-five trillion rungs above you on the evolutionary ladder? Why should I need a Zarett to do my projecting for me?"

"Hmm," I hmmed, thinking very hard. This Pollisand had a most irksome habit of not answering questions — he simply made it seem like he was responding, when he was really evading the subject. In this particular situation, it occurred to me he might be attempting to hide something most important indeed.

"Did you do something to me?" I asked in whispered outrage. "When you took me away and mended my bones, did you do more? Did you perhaps place a Scientific Device in my brain that allows you to link with me at anytime?"

"Ooo," said the Pollisand, "aren’t we clever! At least one of us is. Much cleverer than Dr. Havel. He didn’t find a thing. Then again, maybe there’s nothing to find."

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.