Transcendental (10 page)

“Agreed?” Riley said.

“Do I have a choice?” said the captain.

Riley shook his head. “But the plan is better for you as well. You know the weaknesses of the ship and its crew. This will increase your chances, too.”

The captain shrugged.

“We know that this seems like a threat to your command and an insult to your captaincy,” Asha said. “But it seems like the only way this mission can succeed.”

“You may be right,” the captain said, “because I’ve just received the latest Jump instructions, and the next one takes the ship into the Great Gulf!”

*   *   *

The image on the view screen in the passenger quarters was epic. The giant pinwheel of the galaxy was reduced to a size that could be covered by a bedsheet, but nothing could minimize the psychological impact of its ponderous immensity: the center blazing with light, spiral arms trailing off into nothingness. Beyond that the deep, dark void between the galaxies.

But that wasn’t what drew the gaze of the watchers. They looked at a spot far down one arm where, they thought, they could imagine the
Geoffrey
and, adjacent, the emptiness between spiral arms that the captain had called “the Great Gulf.”

“But that isn’t our galaxy,” Asha said.

“So it might seem,” Tordor said, speaking with the authority of a million years of galactic history. “But, in fact, this is an image processed from signals sent by creatures of the galaxy you call Andromeda.”

“What?” Riley asked.

“True,” his pedia said. “Or not.”

“That’s incredible!” Riley said.

Tordor made a motion that humans might have interpreted as a shrug.

“Sometimes,” Riley said, “I don’t know whether you’re telling the truth or making a joke. Do Dorians make jokes?”

“That would mean,” Asha said, “that this picture is millions of cycles out of date.”

“The stars move slowly,” Tordor said.

“Why would they send it?” Riley asked. “Whoever sent it.”

“Maybe as a gesture of fellowship; maybe as a trap. It all happened thousands of galactic cycles before humans emerged from their system, even perhaps before they emerged from their caves. It was discussed for years in galactic circles, but finally, after grave deliberation, the decision was made not to reply. In any case, the reply would take two million years to arrive, and it was unlikely that the senders would still be around to receive it.”

“Did you receive any other messages?” Asha asked.

“None.”

“None of that makes any sense,” Riley said. “Why should this human ship have a galactic image in its computer?”

“When peace was declared,” Tordor said, “humans were allowed to download galactic data of all kinds. Histories, art, culture, maps … How else do you think this ship can navigate from nexus to nexus?”

Riley did not reveal that capturing—and translating—the galactic navigation maps had been a turning point in the war. Instead he returned his gaze to the display. “Whether all that is true or not is irrelevant. Right now we must consider what lies in front of us. Those galactic maps don’t cover it.”

“The Great Gulf,” Asha said. She contemplated the dark space without emotion.

“It isn’t empty space, you know,” Tordor said. “There are stars in the Gulf, just faint and few.”

“But the distance is still immense,” Asha said.

“And it isn’t certain we can get back if we miss a nexus or if one has evaporated,” Riley said. “We may run out of fuel with no chance of getting any more.”

“And even then the next spiral arm is unknown,” Tordor said.

“What?” Riley said. The surprises were piling up.

“True,” his pedia said.

“We think of the galaxy as being a single entity,” Tordor said. “But it is a series of spiral arms, and our civilization occupies only one of them. Getting to the next one is a perilous enterprise. Close to the galactic center, where the stars are neighbors and the next spiral arm is not so distant, radiation is high, and living creatures do not survive long. In the historical past, five expeditions, each manned by a different species, set out, but only one returned. The crew was dead or dying and the dying were insane; even the ship’s records were indecipherable.”

“Well,” Riley said, “are we going to go along with this gamble?”

“It isn’t our decision,” Asha said.

Tordor turned to the galactics who had been milling uneasily behind the triumvirate of Riley, Asha, and Tordor himself. “The captain has informed us that the next Jump is into the Great Gulf. You all know what that means. Should we consent? Resist?”

What followed would have been described among humans as a hubbub. Among galactics it was a cacophony of hoots, whistles, grunts, whispers, and limb and torso motions. Finally Tordor turned back to Asha and Riley. “They agree that we should go forward into the unknown,” he said, “but only after the ship has been thoroughly inspected and repaired.”

*   *   *

Fifteen cycles later Tordor reported to the assembled passengers that they were passengers no more but could accurately describe themselves as adjuncts to the crew. Together they had overhauled the ship, and in the process had restored the discipline and morale of the human and humanoid crew. They had become, Tordor said in a burst of eloquence, “our own Transcendental Machine.”

“He’s laying it on a bit thick, isn’t he?” Riley muttered to Asha. They were standing well to the side of the group and detached from it, near the entrance to the sleeping compartments.

“He has his own transcendental motives,” Asha said.

“I wish I knew what they were,” Riley said. “In fact, I wish there were some way to get to know all of these galactics better. But they won’t open up to me, an uncivilized barbarian.”

“Let me see if I can think of something,” Asha said.

“Let it come from her,” his pedia said.

“And so,” Tordor concluded, “let us venture into the unknown, certain that we are as prepared as any ship and crew can be. The engines have been disassembled and rebuilt; the navigation system has been recalibrated; the star charts have been checked and rechecked; the communication equipment has been vetted; weapons have been tested. Let us proceed.”

Tordor gestured toward Riley with his proboscis, a movement with which Riley had become familiar. Riley nodded and slipped back through the hatch that no longer was locked and guarded. The corridor walls had been cleaned and refinished, and the crew members he passed were dressed uniformly in one-piece yellow suits. They saluted as he passed.

He located the captain in the control room. “The galactics have given you the go-ahead.”

The captain grimaced sourly. “Nothing good will come of this usurpation of my authority.”

“You could have said that about this trip from the beginning.”

“Then, at least, we had a chain of command. Now, you can count on it, when a crisis arrives, as it must, no one will know who is in charge. Chaos will follow. And then catastrophe.”

“Or transcendence,” Riley said. “Hasn’t that always been the choice?”

The captain looked at Riley once more. “Did we ever get along?” He turned to the communicator. “The Jump will begin in ten ticks,” he announced.

Riley sat down in the navigator’s chair, no longer so confident of his ability to handle a Jump standing up. “We never got along; we endured,” he said.

And then the Jump began, the bulkheads shimmered, and the ship lights faded into the blackness of another reality. Riley felt his breathing stop and his heart beat strangely, even stranger because it was outside his body and he could see it, contracting and expanding, sustaining the natal emergence of one universe into another.

And then his heart returned to his chest and he breathed again, and in breathing brought back the ship and his own reality. “That was different,” he said, trying not to gasp.

“It’s always different,” the captain said. “This time the Jump was longer and the nexus was fragile. It may not have been used for millions of years. It may not have been there at all.”

“But it was,” Riley said. “And somebody on this ship knew it was there.”

“Yes,” the captain said.

They brooded about it until Riley returned to the passengers’ quarters. There he found the passengers focused on the view screen. It revealed a darkness relieved, if at all, by one faint glimmer of light in the upper left quadrant.

“So,” he said to Tordor and Asha, “we are launched into this—”

“‘Sea of troubles,’” his pedia said

“‘—sea of vast eternity,’” Riley finished defiantly.

“Without a shore in sight,” Asha said. “Tordor has an idea about how we can sustain our morale and gain insights into our companions. He suggests that each of us tell the others how we came to be on this voyage to elsewhere.”

“We might be able to open a window into each other’s souls,” Tordor said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Tordor’s Story

Tordor said:

I was born on an ideal world of great sweeping plains and flowing rivers of sweet water and oases of trees where we could doze in the heat of the day. The sun was yellow, the pull of the world was solid, the days were long, and I was happy to eat and sleep and play mock battles with my tribe-mates. I had two good friends: a male my age named Samdor, who was my constant companion, and a pleasingly muscled female named Alidor that I secretly admired and allowed to beat me in our games. And then I turned five and the recruiters came from the distant cities and my parents said I must go with them. I was bewildered and afraid. Why should my parents send me away? What had I done wrong?

The recruiters were thinner than us grass-eaters but tall, strong, and distant. They came in a big, gas-filled aeronef, and they spoke to the recruits only to give orders and said nothing to each other. Some fifty of us had been collected from the plains tribes, most of them my age, a few younger and a couple a year older and meaner. They bullied the younger ones, stole their food, and made them fight each other until they rebelled, and then the older recruits beat them. The recruiters did not seem to care. Later I learned that letting the recruits fight among themselves and establish their hierarchy was the custom, that children had to learn how to survive under difficult circumstances, in strange lands, and without friends. We were being transformed into good Dorians.

Only two of us died on the long trip to the northern highlands. One of them was Alidor.

I had never seen a city before. My parents had told me stories about powerful Dorians who flew through the sky and traversed the great void between the stars, but I thought they were fairy tales, like the fanciful stories my tribe-mates spun during the long evenings. But the city of Grandor, the great city of Doria, grew out of the northern mountain range like a forest of fairy palaces, glittering with crystalline reflections in the evening sun and, as the sun dropped behind the mountains, glowing with light. The spires of the city seemed to rise above even the peaks that surrounded it.

It was as marvelous as my parents had described it, and I would have exclaimed at its beauty, and the people who had built it, if I had not been bruised and afraid. We were herded off the ship and prodded into crude quarters, little more than stalls for sleeping, without privacy. Drink was available at a central trough; to eat we had a poor quality of grass, without grains or fruit. Later I learned that this treatment was intended to toughen us against future hardship, and, anyway, quality food was expensive to bring from the plains and was reserved for the citizens who governed the city and the world and the worlds beyond.

We got used to it, as young people will, and to the morning run up and down the mountainsides, to the mock combat in the afternoon, with and without weapons, and to the classrooms where we were taught mathematics and engineering and spacecraft, the military history of Doria, and the minor skills of computers and accounting. The classrooms were the good times when it was possible to doze off if one had a classmate willing to nudge one awake when the instructor looked one’s way. Otherwise, a club was likely to come crashing down upon one’s skull, and more than one young Dorian met his end that way. I was lucky. I got only a lump or two, but I had a thicker skin and a thicker skull than most. My classmate died. Sometimes I envied him.

In the evenings Dorian heroes would tell us stirring tales of combat, and I wondered if I would ever be like them: strong, confident, swaggering, deadly, full of honors, mating at will. I could not imagine it. None of us dozed then. Sometimes they showed us patriotic films or films of space combat. The ones we could follow seem staged for the cameras. In the real ones we could observe nothing except for moments when battles were too confused to distinguish friend from enemy. We were always tired. If we napped then, nobody cared.

So it went, year after year, as I grew to be even taller than the recruiters and my plains fat was converted into muscle. I was the one who triumphed in the mock battles, even when I faced our instructors, and I gloried in my new-found strength and skill. One by one my fellow students, those that survived, recognized my preeminence. Of my cohort of fifty, only twenty reached the age of decision. I personally killed the two older ones who had bullied us on the way to Grandor.

The age of decision was ten. I no longer wept for my parents and my siblings. I had given up ever seeing them again. I knew that if I returned they would be required to put me to death as a disgrace to the family and the tribe, and I would have to kill them instead. So I only dreamed about the flowing plains of grass and the sweet streams and the clear blue sky, and about running, running endlessly and untiringly under that yellow sun, knowing that it could never be anything but a dream.

We lined up at graduation to learn our fates, and heard our records read aloud and our destinations announced. Some fulfilled my worst nightmare: they were rejects, to be returned to their families and certain death, or to wander the plains as rogue males, ostracized by everyone they met and subject to termination by anyone. Some became factory supervisors. Some became engineers or scientists. Some were assigned to bureaucratic posts within Grandor or one of the lesser cities scattered along the coasts to the far southernmost tip of land, while others received postings to other planets under Dorian rule, or became recruiters, like those that came for us five years before.