Gateways (27 page)

Some astronomers confirm these myths with speculation that the satellites of the gas giants such as Kilran were indeed the offspring of the white dwarf who shall not be named. Others, less mystical, believe that they were once independent worlds of Sirius captured by the gas giants, or worlds drawn into the system from the great disk of planetary matter beyond the farthest giant.

Our astronomers tell us that beliefs about the dwarf companion who shall not be named are ancestral memories of the Sirian system, that the companion went through a normal cycle of expansion and collapse, that its planets, if it had any, were consumed in its red, expansion stage, or expelled
into the great darkness. But Sirians have nightmares of being stolen from heaven, never to return, by a powerful blue-white goddess.

Sirians imagine that if they were more powerful, if they could only perfect themselves, they could build a new world around the companion and protect it from the tyranny of their hot blue sun, or liberate Komran itself from the grasp of Sirius as well as Kilran, and rejoin their father. There, on this paradisical dream world, they would shed their fins and live as beings that choose their own fates rather than having them chosen by their solar goddess.

All that is mythology, of course. Sirians know this, but they are dominated by it anyway. I tell you this because these facts control who we are and why we think and behave the way we do, and, ultimately, why I am here, with you, on this ship.

After we have eaten our way out of the father’s body, changed, fully developed but still small, often the father dies, having not stored sufficient food for the brood or having a larger brood than customary or not being strong enough. For these reasons families are carefully planned in these days of scientific understanding, and Sirian females choose mates with care. Only one father out of ten dies today, and the death of the father is considered the fault of the female, a crime that is often punished, sometimes up to and including execution. But some fates are worse than death.

Becoming a father, however it turns out, is a life-changing experience ventured into only by the brave and the strong. Even if a father survives, he often is damaged by the experience so that he lives a life shortened by physical debility and an uncertain ability to control internal temperature that itself can be fatal. No male is a father more than once, and used-up males litter the nursing homes and retirement villas. Some philosophers discuss voluntary suicide or euthanasia to clear the scene for greater Sirian accomplishment.

The continual flexing of Komran’s surface is a second fact of life. Sirians are born knowing that the land under their appendages is undependable. This understanding gives Sirians an advantage over many species, who have an unreasonable confidence in their physical situations. Sirians know that the unexpected can happen at any moment, that they cannot trust their environment, that they must be ready to adjust to any emergency. This realization made them daring sailors on Komran’s tumultuous seas, and, once spaceflight began, sure space voyagers and confident warriors.

And, to say truth, it is safer to be a sailor or a space voyager or a warrior than a nurturing male.

My memories begin when I ate my way through the belly of my father after the food he had stored was consumed by his greedy offspring. My father was a great male. After separating myself from my siblings, I remember seeing my father calmly treating his nurturing pouch with antibiotics and then sewing up the holes we unthinking creatures had chewed. Out of all the others, he picked me as the repository of his wisdom, and we spent many happy hours together as he prepared me to assume the position and power that would have been his if he had not chosen to sacrifice everything for love.

I wish I could say the same for my mother, who ate my father when I was still young and our little piece of Komran was torn apart by quakes. “Do not worry,” he told me. “Komran will provide, and the hungry times will pass. Your mother does what she must to keep herself and her children alive, and she will see that you gain the advancement you deserve.” But she never did.

I did not eat, having already consumed too much of his substance in my unthinking larval state.

But my father was right. The hungry times passed, and our family grew sound again feasting on my father’s memory as we had feasted on his body, and the wise counsel that I passed along in his stead. I became the wise male who served as the head of the family, and part of my wisdom was to reflect that my father did not grow old and feeble like so many males of his generation, sacrifices on the altar of love.

I left home as soon as I could, escaping my mother’s ravenous regard and refusal to shield her children from her warmth, and gave myself over to the state, whose concerns, and even its punishments, were blessedly impersonal. Because of my father’s once-promising career and the wisdom that he had communicated to me I was appointed to the academy for pre-spacers, where I was educated in the mathematics and the physics of space, astronomy and cosmology, history and practices of spaceflight, Galactic culture, and the preeminence of Sirians among Galactics.

My apologies to fellow Galactics for Sirian parochial attitudes. We teach greatness so that our offspring can rise above the treachery of their biology and so that they will never encounter a Galactic or a situation except on terms of equality. We teach greatness so that we can imagine it, and, having imagined it, achieve it.

I studied hard, though with the skepticism that lies behind every thoughtful Sirians’ consciousness of place. We know that the universe is unrelenting and unstable, and so we seek the truth that is unspoken, the reality behind
the deception of appearance. And I studied to make my father proud and his sacrifice meaningful. I was passed on to the space college as the most promising academy student of my class.

College was far more demanding, requiring not only the discipline of the mind but the discipline of the body that lies at the heart of the Sirian experience. We must perform not only the exercises that enable Sirians to achieve and to endure but we must learn to control our inner states. Komran provides its offspring with such physical extremes of temperature and Komranology that we must divorce our inner states from our outer existence. Our happiness is dependent not upon events but upon our determination. We will our happiness just as we will our internal temperatures.

In the third cycle of college Sirians are introduced to space, first on a ship manned by experienced crews and then on ships operated by senior cadets. On my first trip I discovered my natural habitat. While my fellow students were panicking, floundering in weightlessness, puking in corners, and, pink with shame, swinging a cloth in an attempt to blot the evidence, I felt as if I had come home, as if I resided once more in my father’s belly. It was for this my father had nourished me and shared not only his body but his wisdom. I was a spacer.

Among brighter students now, I was not as successful. My classwork had grown more difficult and my efforts, frantic. Even calmed by the remembered voice of my father, I could not excel as I had been able to do before. But my space skills made up for everything. Where other students had to think before they acted, every decision came to me as if a product of body, not mind. I rose to a position of eminence, what humans would call the captain of cadets, on skill alone—and the attitude of leadership that accompanied it.

By the time my class had reached its final year, I had already been assured of the first place to open on the premiere ship of the Sirian fleet. In response, my intellectual pursuits improved, and once more I began to succeed, sometimes beyond others, in Sirian history, in political science, and, preeminently, in space navigation, engineering, gunnery, and command.

Then I met Romi. She was a first-year student from Komran’s other hemisphere. In the ordinary course of life we would never have met. Not only distance but status separated us. I was a commoner, who had survived the hungry times only by reason of my mother’s moral turpitude. But here, in the space college, I was the superior, and as captain of cadets able to give orders to first-year students and expect them to be obeyed instantly. Even unreasonable orders—in fact, as tradition and common sense dictate, the
more unreasonable the better, for crews must obey without thinking, without considering whether an order is reasonable.

But I could not order Romi. She was the most beautiful Sirian I had ever met, and she was in love with me. I felt stirrings within me, thoughts of storing food within my belly, thoughts of ingesting larval children. And then I remembered my father.

I understand that love takes many forms across the Galaxy, that some is powerful and enduring while some is fleeting and casual. I do not know what love is like for a Sirian female—I think it involves the predatory—but for a Sirian male love is a consuming passion that prepares him for what may be the ultimate sacrifice.

I endured the situation for the rest of the academic cycle, trying to limit my contacts with Romi, but every time she passed I felt the primal urges that I knew my father had felt, the urges that betrayed him. I kept my contacts with Romi to a minimum, even going out of my way to make sure our paths did not cross. But I met her in my dreams.

I understand that some Galactics do not dream; some do not even sleep. The dream life of Sirians, however, is as real as—no, more real than—the waking life. We discuss our dreams as if we had lived them. We analyze them. We write them down. We manage them so that they end satisfactorily, giving us strength or wisdom, or reinforcing our self-images.

But I could not manage my dreams of Romi. They always ended with small Sirians eating their way through my belly while I stared down helpless to control them or my temperature, leaving me helpless and weak, doomed to a lifetime as an invalid. And I told no one.

Finally my ordeal ended. My class completed its class work and we were assigned to ships. Somehow I had managed to retain my status during my inner turmoil, and I joined the
Kilsat
as junior pilot-in-training. I left Romi behind as a second-cycle cadet and put her out of my mind.

I was happy. Space was my environment; Romi no longer frequented my thoughts or controlled my dreams. I was a natural pilot, responding intuitively to subconscious cues, as if my dear father were guiding my actions from his place of honor near the sun that shall not be named. I made friends with my fellow spacers and filled my off-duty moments with good male fellowship. We bonded as Sirian crew members do in the unifying environment of space. We talked of challenges and accomplishments, of ambitions and achievement, and never of family or sacrifice.

The
Kilsat
made its first Jump during my maiden voyage. That took us
beyond the narrow limits of our Sirian system. The experience shook many of my crewmates, but I found it exhilarating, not only space but the hidden universes within space were my home. During the second Jump I was at the controls and gloried in the power of transcending time and space. All the universe was mine, I felt, and I dedicated my joy to my father’s memory.

By the time we made our third Jump we were in Galactic space, surveying the magnificence of the Galactic Center. Xi told us about meeting with the Galactic Council. What he did not describe was the Center itself—not the center of the Galaxy but Galactic Center, where the representatives of the Great peoples meet and the Galaxy is governed. Galactic Center is an insignificant system of rocky planets orbiting an insignificant sun. No one would think of it as a place of Greatness, as a place of any importance at all. And that, no doubt, is why it was chosen, along with the fact that it was uninhabited, at least by any member species. And although representatives to the Galactic Council and innumerable bureaucrats inhabit those planets, some for their entire lives, its destruction would mean little except to those personally involved.

To look at that impoverished system and realize its importance makes even the most robust Sirian realize the value of inner strength and the pitfalls of appearance. We had learned that principle from the shiftings of Komran beneath our extremities, but here it was brought home to us again.