Gateways (28 page)

We looked, we admired from afar, and we departed, learning nothing of the workings inside the capitol of the Galaxy beyond what we had learned in the academy. But it was enough for simple spacers, and we pondered on its meaning as we returned to Sirius and our lives there, now a crew in the true meaning of the word, functioning as the brain and central nervous system of the ship, working as a single entity. For the first time in my life I felt as I had when I was part of my father, at peace with my world, content in my way of life. The
Kilsat
had become my father, or, perhaps more accurately, now the
Kilsat
and my father were one.

But when we returned to Sirius, Romi came back into my life. It was time for the cadet cruises, and, by the evil goddess, she was assigned to the
Kilsat.
When I saw her, I knew my time of greatest temptation had arrived. Without a word to anyone, I went to the nearest two-person fighter craft, crawled through the tunnel that linked it to the ship, detached it from its mooring bolts, turned off the communications gear, and drifted away before I started the propulsion system.

I knew where I was going. I was headed for the nexus point that everyone
knows and nobody dares use, the Jump that ends in orbit around the white dwarf without a name.

To speak truth, my reaction was not the awe and reverence that I expected. During the lengthy trip I had managed to neutralize the panic that had driven me from Romi, but I anticipated a psychic fulfillment that never came. The Companion was an ordinary white dwarf, shining wanly on a ruined desert of orbital space while Sirius burned brighter than any star above the Companion’s shawl of night. The Companion had not been stripped of planets, as mythology had told us. Instead, while I watched as if from a height, cinder after cinder swam into view. If they had once been gas giants, the gases had been blown away, leaving only a few charred fragments behind. If they had been habitable worlds like Komran, their atmospheres and seas had been stripped from them, along with all the living things that had evolved there. The Companion had consumed its own children long before life came to sentience on Komran.

My father was not there, nor was any other spirit. The desolation before me was matched by the desolation within.

What was there, as I discovered when my black mood eventually lifted, was a lonely beacon, like the sign of intelligent life in a lonely universe. I tracked it to a location near the Companion. There was no planet, no satellite, no ship, nothing within the discrimination of my sensors that could send a signal.

The passage from the outer reaches to the near-solar space took many periods during which I saw much closer the devastation caused by the Companion’s expansion phase. Finally I came upon the source of the signal: a battered escape capsule of an unfamiliar design turning slowly in the Companion’s wan radiance, getting just enough energy from its rays to sustain its limited operation.

I connected the capsule to my small ship. I could not decipher the instructions beside the capsule’s hatch—they were incised in a cryptic series of lines—but I finally found a button that set off explosive bolts. I sampled the atmosphere, which was within tolerable limits and without apparent toxins. Inside the capsule was a still functioning deep-freeze chamber, and inside the chamber was the ugliest creature I had ever seen—a creature with four weak extremities emerging at awkward angles from a shrunken and fragile central torso and topped by a strange growth dotted with openings and covered in places with threadlike tendrils.

Only later—my apologies to present company—did I discover that this
was a human. This was the first human I had ever seen, certainly the first human any Sirian had ever seen except, perhaps, at the highest level of Galactic leadership where, I learned later, human emissaries already were making their demands that soon would result in war.

But all of this was yet to come. Here, now, was this alien creature, and it was dead—or so nearly dead that the difference was imperceptible. If any other Galactic had discovered this castaway, the end would have been certain, but Sirians have such fine control of their temperatures that freezing is not necessarily fatal. Indeed, Sirians have been discovered in hidden glaciers and been revived after being frozen for many hundreds, even thousands, of cycles.

I opened the chamber and set about reviving its occupant, elevating its temperature fraction by fraction, easing the transition from cell to cell, from external to internal, over a period of almost a cycle. Finally the occupant made a sound and shortly thereafter opened what I later learned were its viewing organs.

It made organized sounds that I later learned was something like, “What in the hell are you!”

But we got on and within a cycle, we were able to converse with the aid of my pedia. This human, a male, was part of an expedition to decipher a nexus chart that had been bought from Galactic traders or sold by traitors—he never knew which—and all had gone well until flaws in the coordinates destroyed the ship and all his shipmates, and he launched his escape module through the nexus into the Companion’s system. That I should have discovered the module was a chance beyond calculation, depending as it did upon my fleeing Romi and setting my course for the Companion.

The human told me his designation was “Sam.” He told me many things about Earth and about humans and their history and literature and art. We had nothing to do but communicate, and Sam loved to talk. He was, he said, making up for his long, silent, frozen cycles. He never realized that his stories about Earth horrified me: the struggles, the competition, the battles, the wars. Even in literature and art these bloody activities were celebrated. I realized that I had to get this information to our leaders, and he—unaware that he had revealed humanity’s bloodthirst and its inability to live in a civilized fashion with others—wanted to get back to his leaders with the information gathered about our precious navigation maps.

Of course he had no chance to get back. I did not tell him that when we left the Companion we would return to Sirius and Komran where he would be interrogated at far greater length and in far less pleasant conditions than on my vessel, cramped as it was. I could not let him return with
his information, and I had to return with mine. And then, when he was well enough to travel and we were on our way to the nexus point, he sickened and died. The last words he spoke were, “You are an ugly son-of-a-bitch, Kom, but you’ve been a good friend way out here next to nowhere. It’s been great knowing you.”

I felt much the same way as when my mother ate my father.

When I got back to Sirian space, I discovered that my information had arrived too late. I had been gone for a dozen cycles, and the war was over. But the rumors of the Transcendental Machine were traveling fast. My leaders were concerned. Because I had spent so many cycles with an alien, and most of all with a human, I was urged to volunteer for this pilgrimage.

I agreed, of course. My experience with the Companion had changed me forever. I was no longer a simple Sirian, bound to myths and biological imperatives. I had experienced both the reality and the unreality of others. I was prepared. And, more important, Romi had chosen another, who already had nurtured her larvae to maturity and suffered the consequences.

Why, you may wonder, did I spend such time and thought with Sam. I wondered myself. And then I began to see that when I reached the Companion I lost the reality of my father’s spirit and found Sam. I had begun to think of Sam as my father, and his loss affected me as much.

And he told me, during our long conversations, about the human family and its process of procreation. What if Sirians could procreate as partners, like humans? Could we transcend our biology?

We are called the People, just as species throughout the galaxy call themselves the People. Whatever language we use—the movement of air through passages that restrict its flow in various distinguishable ways, the rubbing of mandibles, the gestures of tentacles, the release of pheromones, or, in our case, the disturbance of air by the movement of fronds—the translation is always the same. We are the People.

Our world is called Earth, as every world is called Earth in its own language. You might call it Flora, because we were a flower people, and for uncounted generations we lived our simple lives of seedlings springing from the soil, growing into maturity and sprouting flowers, enjoying fertilization, dropping our petals and then our seeds upon the soil, and depositing our decaying bodies to nourish the next generation. The generations were uncounted because every day was the same, and every year: we were born, we
lived, we reproduced, and we died. Flora was a big world, drawn by its massive gravity into great plains and placid seas, and we thrived in peace and plenty amid mindless warmth and fertile soil. That is the time the People look back upon as Paradise before we were expelled.

True, Flora had grazers, herbivores who lived among us and nourished themselves with our vegetable plenty, and predators who prevented the herbivores from destroying themselves by overgrazing and overpopulation, but the People responded in one of the great breakthroughs of Floran evolution: we made ourselves unpleasant fodder, and when the grazers evolved in response, we developed poisons. The grazers died off, and then the predators, and only weeds remained as competitors. We developed herbicides, and then we were truly supreme and supremely content in our mindless vegetable way. Flora was ours and we were Flora.

Then a passing astronomical body came into our ideal existence like divine punishment for our hubris, showering Flora with devastating radiation that nearly destroyed all life on the planet including the People, stirring Flora’s inner fires and releasing continents from their loving embrace. The paradise that Flora had been became the hell that Flora was: eruptions poisoned the air and lava flows covered the plains; the continents crashed together and pushed upward great mountain ranges. The People perished.

Centuries passed and long-buried seeds poked their ways through cracking lava. Among them was a single great Floran, now known as One. Before One, Florans had no separate existence. From One all contemporary Florans trace their origins. Through a process instigated by the destruction caused by the invading astronomical body, perhaps, or more likely by the radiation that showered the planet from the passing cosmic missile or released with magma from Flora’s long-sheltered interior, One developed the ability to pull its roots from the soil, an ability it passed along to its descendants. With maneuverable roots, this great Floran no longer had to trust the uncertain breeze to distribute its seeds to suitable soils; it, and its descendants, moved meter by meter and year by year to sheltered valleys where Florans could deposit their seeds in soil prepared to receive them, with more than a hope that chance would alow them to grow and flower.

Each generation took as its designation an ascending number. I am the forty-one hundred and seventh generation since the great One. All the preceding generations have changed, generation by generation, to gain movement, intelligence, and understanding of the world that nurtured and then tried to destroy them, and the uncaring universe that destroys as blindly as it nurtures.

How can I describe the impact of intelligence? Every species represented here has experienced it, but none remembers. Florans remember. The history of their species is recorded in the seeds of their consciousness. At first it was only the memory of process, the irresistible bursting from the seed-pod, the passionate thrusting upward toward the sun and downward toward moisture and food, the satisfying flow of nutrients through capillaries and their cellular transformation into substance, the delightful flowering, the ecstatic fertilizing, and the determined growth of seeds into which all past and future was poured, and the fading sere time that ends in death. But then awareness of environment entered, and from that all else flowed.

We learned that the universe was more than the sun, the soil, and water. The universe held many suns, the Earth held many soils, and the rivers, the lakes, and the seas held many waters, and some of these were nurturing and some were not. We learned that we could manipulate our environment, controlling the fertility of the soil and the rain that fell upon it, and then that we could manipulate ourselves, controlling the patterns of biological inheritance we passed along to our seeds. And we learned to limit our reproduction so as not to exhaust our resources and thus, having postponed our flowering and our going to seed, learned that we could postpone the dying that went with it.

Longevity beyond the season meant an acceleration of the learning process. We learned to develop special breeds, some for greater intelligence to provide more understanding of the universe, some for a new ability you call vision to perceive the world and the universe in new ways, some for manipulative skills to make us independent of our environment, and some for memory to store the wisdom gathered by the others. And finally we learned the terrible truth—that the passing cosmic body that had expelled us from paradise was not some chance interstellar visitor, not some cosmic joke by the cosmic jokester, but a relativistic missile flung across our path by uncaring aliens, envious of our world and eager to reap the benefits of a heavy planet and the mineral wealth that it might vomit from its depths.