Transcendence (26 page)

Triton grew larger than the round frame that shook slightly at the middle of Pehr’s splice. Less than a second had passed. He tried the control-signals which were labeled around the pov, but each one only gave him numbers, indecipherable numbers.

“
Dammit, Janus!” he bellowed. “What’s wrong? Tell me how to stop the rotten thing.”

At the edges of his splice, Janus’ pale body continued to sway circles, confined by straps against the black fabric of her couch. At the center, Triton expanded dramatically, now revealing more surface detail.

Pehr cast a glance at Eyes, still immobile against the wall to his left. The mechanical eye still stared.

“
Damn you,” Pehr muttered at the man.

He continued calling up commands from the missile. Nothing seemed to work. Indeed, as it pulled farther away, the signal faded and grew more staticky.

The
Bounty
creaked louder as time progressed, as the spinning forces threatened to tear loose the thrust-tube and rip a great rent in the base of the craft, spilling out the ship’s atmosphere, spilling in death. Now Pehr could see the first signs of humanity on that distant surface: A series of circular ditches seemed to be the missile’s bull’s-eye . . . not quite, off to one edge, he could now tell. Pehr caught a flash of metal or glass at the center. That gave him small relief, but then he remembered how fragile was the balance of life in airlock cities, and what a nuclear shockwave could do.

Pehr began frantically altering whatever commands and calculations he could. By depressing one virtual button, the splice was overlaid with rows and columns and three-dimensional helixes of numbers and letters, green and red and yellow. He pressed the new buttons that appeared, trying different combinations, and finally they vanished and were replaced by a single, red one. He triggered it.

The background static of the missile’s engine ceased. Pehr’s heart leaped with hope. He’d stopped it!

But now the circular digs had become short arcs, and he could see individual pieces of machinery in them. The pov closed on the shortest arc. Pehr held his breath, pounding his mental fingers against the visible keys, screaming silently in his head, “Stop! Stop!”

The pov winked out in a flash of whitenoise that made Pehr’s back straighten. He flicked out as fast as he could.

“
God damn that bastard,” Janus said in a husky voice.

“
You okay?” Pehr asked, hurriedly adjusting himself to his nonsplice pov. “What happened?”

“
The bastard trapped me in that thing.” She pulled savagely at the belts holding her down and prepared to push off toward Eyes. “If it detonated, I’m going to kill him.”

“
Wait!” Pehr said. “Have you programmed our landing?”

“
What?” She seemed disoriented.

“
I don’t want to die, all right? Have you programmed our landing?”

“
Oh. Yeah, I just haven’t input it into the maneuvering computers yet.” Her eyes defocused, though her face still had the set of hatred.

Pehr searched again via headcard menu through the individual transmitters located around the ship. He found the forward pov camera and spliced in. At 1x magnification, Triton looked frightfully as it had from the missile’s pov. When he increased magnification, he noticed a tall, growing cloud; nearer the surface, a second cloud was spreading in a strange cyclone pattern around the base of the other.

Pehr flicked out and found himself unable to think of anything but the next second, and then the next. He became entranced with the ship’s creaking.

“
We’re set,” Janus reported. “Let’s get out of this coffin. You made sure we can get into the escape pod?”

“
Yeah. I’ll get Eyes.”

“
Leave him here or I promise I’ll kill him.”

“
He’ll die here, anyway,” Pehr said. Opposing her tore at his insides—especially after what the cyborg had done—but he couldn’t stand the thought of abandoning a man to certain death. Even an evil man.

He looked at Eyes. But was he evil? Hadn’t he merely followed script?

The show seemed suddenly a farce. No, worse. How could I have ever placed so much importance on the show? Pehr wondered.

“
I’m going up,” Janus said, pushing off toward the ceiling handholds, where the pod door was located. She flipped awkwardly in mid-air but managed to grab hold.

“
If you bring him,” she continued, still not looking at Pehr’s eyes, “I’ll kill him when I get the chance.” Her words were quiet yet heavy with emotion. “Your decision. It will just be a waste of lifesupport and fuel. We ought to just purge it into space.”

“
We’ll let the courts deal with him when we get back,” Pehr said, working his way across the cabin to Eyes.

“
Ha!” Janus pulled a lever and the round hatch fell open with a faint hiss. “When we get back? I saw the crater. You mean, we’ll let NKK’s courts at Neptunekaisha deal with it. That sounds fair.” She laughed mirthlessly.

The last thing Miru heard as he stepped into the alien artifact was the rising-pitch hiss of a jet racing closer. Then the sound of immersion in the ocean, but not a noisome one like Earth’s. Sloop, the waters of nothingness, closed over his head. Then silence, or less—a sort of aural vacuum.

The last thing he felt was the terrifying sensation of his body dissolving as in an acid bath. Or, more accurately, being caught in the largest pulse-weapon ever devised, completely shattering each atom from the next. He spread wide over a universe black without stars, butter melted in the sun and spread over a 3D piece of colorless bread so vast that each atom floated infinitely far from the next. But he felt no pain of dissolution.

The last thing he tasted was the inside of his cells as they fragmented—a bitter, metallic, salty flavor that flashed through his consciousness the way one sometimes tastes a powerful hypo injected into an arm. A moment later, nothing.

The last thing he smelled was a brief waft of flesh and human waste. It did not smell of decay, but rather of life, like a meatfarm.

And the last sight he beheld was that of the object’s interior: A dull, radiative brown without texture or shape. Just before it faded to black, he noticed a pattern that he couldn’t quite identify—but only for a moment, as his mind struggled to see something it could make sense of. After all blurred black, he glimpsed an afterimage of something like a plain stretched as far as his mind could grasp—yet more than a plain, as he considered: It curved up and down and in on itself, and was textured with shapes like volcanoes or spines. He wondered if he were seeing the inside of the object.

And then nothing.

Yet still he was conscious of not being able to hear, or feel, move, taste, smell, or see.

Terror filled him as water filled the oceans—he was terror, because he was nothing else.

After a while—if time meant anything now to him, he who was no more than a mind—he realized he wasn’t dead. Or, if so, he was still conscious. That meant his terror was useless, for it no longer served a purpose. He would try to understand what had happened.

Hello? his mind’s voice asked. Panic swept like a wind through the ephemeral passages of his mind, washing out from under him the fragile ground of rationality upon which he had stood.

More time passed, a maddeningly immeasurable amount, before he brought himself under control again. He realized then that Pang would have experienced this . . . place? as a kind of hell. To anyone else he knew, it would have meant instant annihilation of the spirit. Miru realized that he had been wise, indeed, to be the first to enter the object. But now he must try to learn what it was teaching him.

Are you an entity? he asked. Nothing. He could hardly remember having thought the words. Have I? he wondered, and asked again, only to endure the same sensation of nothingness.

This is a test, he told himself. This is not a hungry entity but a device. It would be illogical for an entity to assume this shape out here, where it would encounter no more than one prey in a million years.

But what if it only needs one during its whole lifetime? I do not know what sort of entity it is.

Stop this foolishness! he screamed at himself. There was no sound, and he again had to fight back the terror of nonexistence.

This is merely the inside of my head, he told himself. An outside observer would merely see me standing before the object, rapt.

A new terror struck him: What if bombs fall on my immobile figure?

Let me free! I am a man!

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He was no one.

Perhaps this was the worst thing that could have happened to him, who had always feared he barely existed.

And then—he could no longer resist—his mind erupted with the stored memories of a lifetime, filling the emptiness with images as real as if he were living them again.

He saw the world suddenly red and blurry on March 20, 2158, in the birthing ward of NKK’s Ryukyu Submerged Island. The following years washed past as if he were a dolphin swimming through them, through a tunnel as dense as his experiences, as broad as his worldview, and as long as his life, each year passing in a fraction of what felt like a second. Occasionally, he would slow almost to a halt as an important incident densified the matter of his life.

He was a small boy, squatting naked over a child’s waste port, but he no longer had need to use it. His tight-faced mother scolded him for having filled his pants. He was old enough now to use the port, too old to make his mother clean his pants.

He was a little older, sitting in the middle of his parents’ compartment. He made a plastic killer whale swim around and around a model of the island, represented by a round soya carton. A chunk of color was missing on the whale’s head, so it looked as if he were sick. When the whale grew tired, Miru looked up at his father, seated on the big cotton recliner. The man’s eyes were half-closed and his lips moved without sound: He was busy at work. Miru looked to his mother. She stood with her hands in the little curved slots on the outside wall, murmuring words that reassured him because they were everpresent in his life and meant his mother was near.

The nice man whom Miru could see through stood between Miru and his mother; the man was showing him different kinds of foods and things and telling him which would make him sick if he ate them.

It was making Miru hungry and tired, like the killer whale. He called to his mother, but she couldn’t hear him. He tried the special-talk in the head, but she was too busy to notice. So he finally stood and walked to the kitchen-box and got a special bar. As always, it tasted so good and sweet, but somehow it made him sad.

A few years later, he accidentally noticed the wars for the first time. One of the local net ganglia had gone unsane and had to be shut down. Briefly and suddenly, all the BWs became accessible to everyone, some even to children’s cards. He remembered specifically the face of a man, a white man with brown hair and a little worm of a mustache on his upper lip. The face was the only thing he could pick out from the confusion of explosions and shrieks and smoke and fire. The face seemed startled and somehow very lonely. The eyebrows rose as if to ask a question. The lips parted slightly. Dirt covered both cheeks.

Then the man coughed, and out splashed a red liquid. That was all. The face vanished, and Miru realized he had been watching only a tiny portion of a kaleidoscope of battle. When the psychedelics began to tug at his senses, when the 3VRD became too real, he flicked out as fast as he could.

The dreams never went away, that face, but they changed every time. Once, the face was that of Father; the island was on fire and exploding. All the rescue boats filled with evacuees, but there were too many people. Too many people. Fire danced crazy columns on the water. Miru woke up with tears cold on his cheeks and hot eyes, and he desperately wanted to tell Mother, who lay right beside him on her mat. But she slept with her eyes half-open, which meant she would be furious if he woke her. He learned to comfort himself: The wars will stop one day. But at some dark corner of his mind, he knew they were raging continuously all around him, in every country in the world. Just that he could no longer access those BWs didn’t mean they ceased to exist; indeed, his imagination created worse scenes than he could have spliced. But they wouldn’t last forever, would they? Who could permit that?

He was ten as he stood near the second above-line railing and looked out across the sea. He smelled the salt air and burned methane fumes. The sky, where it met the ocean, was grey. The waves were white-tipped and vast ships broke through even the tallest of them.