Transcendence (53 page)

For a moment the boy reappears, pleading with pain wrinkling his face. “I’m so sorry for everything, Cap’n Jack. I’m sorry, Miru. Please help me. I won’t be bad anymore, can’t you see I won’t?”

But then the man smacks the boy aside, the boy dissipating into mist, I and I watch his terribly knowing eyes fade, he howling terror as he falls to cells and amorphous spreading only mist not real anymore, gone; the man backing away, horrified, violated, retreating into the irretrievable emptiness of deep space, the mists enveloping him, closing in he can’t fight them off, his landscapes whipping around and around, orbiting the retreating figure like moths around a flickering bulb, now some colliding with others, galaxies of pain and hatred, some shattering into mist.

I hurt you instead
, at another feedbar with blue neon and 3VRD projections so thick of crowd you cannot see me until I am in you and you are me and we collapse braindead;
Is that good now Mommy? Do you forgive me now that I have killed me?
No answer so another, this time in the grocery store freezer section, robots and servonts gliding up and down the aisles, sacrifice retro fool who does not order delivered food, deserves to be me, deserves to feel the sharp shards hot blood cold glass rough plastic woodgrain boardwalk by the sea salty and fish-wet as he smiles drowning drinking the ocean dry but his lungs stop first;
Do you forgive me now Mommy?
No answer so again, this time in the middle of Pershing Street full daylight, falls like discarded nut-hull, this time dead and how it fills me up; soon no more Daddy, no more Mommy, Other-Daddy dies my hands wet and salty with his red tears gut gushing along the blade smiling me forgetting overlaying programs overlay forget forget forget; the body incinerator warming the apartment during teeth-sharp December winds.
Daddy is dead. I am dead, and born again new. Stop looking. I see you two looking, you cannot see because I have not seen for so long get out!

I and I grow sad and sick and desperate, though we now realize we can do nothing to save the boy from the man. He is gone, forever. We simply witness this collapse, then the skeletal cry as emotional and mental bones crack and shatter to dust in the sudden nakedness, the brutal honesty of barriers-down communication. Revelation destroys Lonny as an incinerator destroys a snapstick or stimgum wrapper.

Then the sound of a great wind tearing loose a forest, branches cracking and roots ripping from the earth. The landscapes spin faster and faster, shrinking as they fall upon themselves like a nebula into a black hole; the sound of vacuum replacing mass, the sound of nothingness devouring that which could not withstand close scrutiny.

*I am nothing,* are the last words as there never was a Lonny Marshfield, not just gone but as if never was. I and I feel the last twinge of life, the last part of him who wanted to live, and it is love,
All I’ve ever wanted is love, and forgiveness, teach me love
. But that is just the boy fighting to return, the real he doesn’t want it, and his fangs sever the slip of skin connecting him with I and I.

Quiet again.

Our landscapes float lazily back into view, and now new ones appear, but we don’t need to see those again. We just lived them.

“
It’s time to go.”

“
Right over there,” Pehr said, pointing along a certain skyway or tube or vein. He realized he knew all along, only he couldn’t understand it until just now.

“
We need to leave.”

“
It’ll eat us up, too.”

“
No. Only we can destroy ourselves.”

“
But staying in here too long makes you weak. Can’t you feel it?”

Yes, I can feel it. I and I, since we are the same and we are different, which is the only way we can move here
. . .
I and I rise to our feet and enter one of the skyways. Without having to walk any distance, it opens right before us, long and round with a flat clear floor; it is clear, so I look one last time back at the landscapes of our lives. The mesh of corridors know where we wish to go; rather, we know where we wish to go, and this knowledge allows us to make the trip.

The moment-memory of little boy Lonny waves goodbye. Still those terribly knowing eyes. Dead. *But you’ll always be alive here,* I say, touching my forehead with a finger. The boy turns away.

And, without any noticeable transition, I am no longer I and I, and I am no longer in the pearl.

Janus blinked as sunshine broke the horizon’s black curtain; first the sky had warmed to purple—just a tiny oval of horizon—then dull red, and then the pinpoint sun began to rise. Glass domes shone in the slanting rays, and she knew she had to reach them soon, very soon. She didn’t question why. It didn’t matter. She was needed there. That was the way into the artifact. Pehr needed her. Miru needed her. She needed to get inside the artifact, too.

Eyes
, she thought,
the cyborg. What had happened to him?
She couldn’t remember. She remembered standing on the sloping dish of the crater, just behind the tower where the artifact had been, waiting for him. She would punish him. But then he had slid again, just as he reached her, and didn’t stop sliding until his flailing body submerged in the chemical lake. A great gust of gas rose up from where he sank, but soon even that last trace of him had vanished. She remembered checking her card to see if he had planted a program, to see if he had really drowned. She remembered smiling in a savage, painful, almost guilty way when she found her card dead, as expected. He had tried to enter, she recalled, and her card had held him as it burned itself out. As planned.

She regretted not having had a hand in the cyborg’s death, but felt vaguely relieved. What would it have been like to snag his suit with the hook, to watch his blood boil in the near-vacuum and freeze in the near-absolute-zero? She remembered how Jack still felt, after so many years, about killing. Yes, she was relieved.

“
There,” Janus muttered to herself. A black orb glinted in the morning sunlight. The artifact. She had watched it launch as if under power. So it was a spaceship of some kind.

Her boots crunched in the brittle ice. Such a world! With the sunrise, the winds had accelerated, gusting at times enough to force her to lean into them. Yet so thin that when they died down, she nearly fell onto her face in the blue and pink ice, dirty with interplanetary dust and erupted mud. Long, bright rays of ice pointed in all directions away from the crater, sparkling like beacons. She followed one that led, only a kilometer away now, to an airlock. That would be her first stop. In there, Jack needed her. Why? She couldn’t remember. Must be the cold or the shock of all that had happened during the past hours. But if he needed her, she would put off her entrance into the artifact or spaceship until she gave him the help he needed. She would find out what she needed to do when she found him. An image of a prone Jack: white gurney beneath him, lopsided smile across his beautiful, lonely face; bandage around his head, arm in a sling. She smiled; she was needed.

As she walked, Janus’ mind was quiet and peaceful. Expectant. Only good, hopeful thoughts passed through her mental passageways, like messengers bearing good news. What would the inside of an alien spaceship be like?
Oh, don’t speculate; you couldn’t know
. She quieted her mind and walked.

And now her gloved handed spun an airlock handle. And now the outer door sprang open, and now she was inside, closing the outer door; a red light in a wire fixture lit the tiny room as air began to cycle through the ’lock, and then the inner door opened.

Janus met the glares of two dozen eyes, men and women packed into a room scarcely larger than the
Bounty
’s bridge. They were silent, surely trying to communicate via commcard.

“
I’m here to help,” she said aloud.

Suddenly, something clicked at the back of her skull. Janus realized what had happened.

More voices than she could identify shouted in her head. Her commcard had woken up. Janus performed a quick search and discovered that the commcard had never been damaged in the self-destruct, nor had the command module of her citizen’s headcard, nor had any of the hardwiring or powercells. Nothing organic had died. All she had done was knock down her barriers and defenses to Eyes, the rotten cyborg, the king of clowns, the evil angel.

Janus drew three deep breaths, holding each momentarily, then letting each out slowly. She tried counting down from 100.

But her efforts at relaxation failed when she imagined Eyes scaling the tower first, alive, undrowned, laughing at her as he went to join Jack inside. Perhaps to kill him, perhaps even—
Oh god!
—to kill the aliens. Her horror was momentarily set aside when the crowd of shouting men and women fell away at a command and a single voice spoke to her, not a 3VRD, since that element of her card had burned out:

“
You are Pilot Janus Librarse of the EarthCo warship
Bounty
.”

She identified the speaker, a slim Asian man standing at the rear of the room where an open ’lock joined this segment to another just beyond. Shadows filled the room, moving as solid masses shifted in the half-light. Overhead, a glint of sunlight made its way through a clear dome mounted atop an ultraglas emergency hatch. Janus had a vision of the city as a great conglomeration of such segments, each lit from above. When she remembered the bombing yet saw no significant cracks or compromises in the segment’s walls, she sighed with relief.

She popped her neckseal and removed her helmet. The room tasted strange, pungent. The air was cold. Many other mouths breathed in and out, almost silently but not quite.

“
Yes, I’m Janus Librarse,” she said, and opened her mouth to continue with the apology she and Jack had worked out.

“
My name is Jon Pang,” the man said. “Project Director Liu Miru is asking for you. He is weak. I do not understand how he was brought back to Jiru City. He said you would arrive here shortly, and you have. Will you explain what has happened?”

A whirlwind of emotions surged through Janus—fear, joy, anger, relief, confusion. . . .
Now absolutely nothing made sense.

“
Jack—” she began; “is Captain Pehr Jackson here, as well? Were they transported here by the artifact, or spacecraft? Did—”

“
We thought you could answer our questions,” Jon Pang said. “We simply found Miru in his quarters.”

“
Is Jackson here?” she repeated, adamant.

“
No.”

That was the wrong answer. What could she do now? “I’m sorry, I. . .”

Janus felt her control begin to slip away, her priceless control, that which she had earned so young and had to fight to maintain all the proceeding years. What happened? All this was too much, the repeated battles for life, the warped realities. . . .

But she could not allow herself to lose control when she was needed most. She would not.

“
Take me to see the Project Director,” she said, her voice calm and strong.

A path opened between space-suited and lightly clothed bodies smelling of sweat and urine. Sunlight had begun to disperse the shadows. Janus walked between the parted mass of bodies, a head taller than most, even the men, feeling control and power once more.

She was needed.
If anyone can help answer some questions
, she thought,
I can. Miru and I will find out what happened to Jack. Did Eyes hurt them? Is Jack alive?

Again, she fought down the questions.

As they wended their way through environment-sections attached at right angles to one another, she saw herself as if from above: Janus Librarse, a single figure among dozens of others—clearly an alien, much taller than the others, with pale white skin. The view extended, and she saw the city again, as a whole, filling out more and more as she walked its passages. They passed two brightly lit arboretums, 20 meters wide with domes that rose well beyond the surface of Triton, warm and humid, soaking wet on the inside surface of the ultraglas, runnels of water making channels along the walls. They smelled wonderfully of Earth, soil and vegetation, but not of any Earth she had experienced; rather, of programs to which she had subscribed. And of the Benignus’ world, yes, that was it. Once more, Janus saw the Great House, and her view extended to include the artifact and crater and sunken
Bounty
pod; again, the view grew, and she saw the shattered remains of the ship itself orbiting this moon; then Neptune standing guard, looming like a sun beside them, blue and cold and vast, many times wider than the full Moon from Earth. And then she saw the whole Sol System, bright and warm with the sun at the center, brimming with life; the Earth, milling with life and activity and violence, so unlike the Benignus. . . .