Transcendental (13 page)

Riley turned to Xi. “What about it? Can you adjust?”

“As easily as growing a new limb,” Xi said, exhibiting its new arm.

Riley shrugged and went to see the captain.

*   *   *

The captain was not apologetic. “Where did you get this information?” he demanded. The two of them in his compact quarters were almost nose to nose.

“Does it matter?” Riley asked.

“This is what concerned me when you forced upon me the crazy scheme of passengers mingling with the crew.”

“That the truth would emerge?”

“That my authority would be challenged. You can’t run a ship like a democracy and certainly not like a galactic consensus council.”

“You can’t run a ship on lies, either, Ham, and you aren’t going to run this ship at all unless you bring the passengers along with you,” Riley said. “Right now they’re petrified in front of the passenger lounge view screen.”

“Our glorious galactics?”

“Yes, and we humans, including your crew, are too dumb to be afraid of the Great Gulf. I’ve been through all that already with Asha and Tordor. The fact is that the galactics are terrified, like agoraphobics, because they’re outside their limits.”

As the captain sat down, the stool swung out from the wall to support him before he could reach the floor. He didn’t notice. “Then maybe they have ceased to be a factor.”

“They’ll either be a burden and worthless when they are needed, or they will emerge from their psychological paralysis angry and prepared to lash out at anybody who put them here.”

“But they agreed to venture into the Great Gulf!”

Riley leaned back against the bulkhead and folded his arms across his chest. “How many times have you agreed to something under duress and detested the authority that made you choose?”

Ham shrugged. “What makes you think we’ll need them?”

“Wherever we’re going,” Riley said, “we’re going to need every body we can call upon. You know what happened when we humans blundered out into a galaxy already owned by older civilizations. The next spiral arm is going to be even more dangerous because it’s going to be even more alien.”

“What do you expect me to do?”

“The first thing: show me the bodies.”

The captain shrugged in resignation and led the way down progressively narrower passageways to the storage compartment at the rear of the ship, next to the engine room. Antique automated equipment chugged away turning refuse into plastic containers and filling them with reconstituted foodstuffs recovered from sources Riley had never wanted to think about. His breakfast turned sour in his stomach and threatened to rise into his throat. At the back of the storage compartment was an insulated hatchway. When the captain activated the lock, the hatch swung open and cold air gushed over Riley.

The captain silently led Riley past upright and horizontal lockers filled with natural and irreplaceable eatables, Riley hoped—though he feared they were empty—until they reached a row of horizontal lockers in a far corner. They were depressingly similar to the cabinets in which the passengers spent their sleep periods.

The captain pulled open the closest of the cabinets. Inside, snuggled in insulating foam, was the body of Jan, eyes closed, face peaceful as if in sleep. The captain motioned to the cabinet just beyond. “Jon is there.”

“Why?” Riley asked.

“Jan fell victim to his own assassination plan—or staged event intended to be discovered for reasons not apparent. His death seems to have been an accident.”

“How do you know assassination was intended?”

“He arrived on the ship with information about how to activate disabled long-sleep processes, and once aboard he must have obtained information on how to enter the passenger quarters and which cabinet you occupied.”

“Presuming I was the intended target and not someone else, or anybody else.”

The captain nodded. “Jon told us that much before he froze up—literally. He didn’t know about Jan’s condition until my first mate let it slip during interrogation, and then Jon turned on some internal apparatus and turned to ice before we could act.”

Riley remembered the half-sentient creature in his head and wondered whether it had that capability. “Let’s wake them and ask.”

The captain shook his head. “Our chances are less than fifty percent. Even at its best, the long-sleep process killed one out of five, as you know. And I don’t want assassins wandering around.”

Riley didn’t tell the captain that at least one other assassin besides himself was wandering around nor that he had instructions to assassinate the Prophet if that became necessary. Instead he said, “Let me see what skills we have among the galactics.”

*   *   *

Riley nodded at Asha and Tordor as he returned to the passenger quarters and immediately wondered if Tordor knew what a nod meant. “The bodies are there all right,” he told them. He motioned to Xi, who was sucking nourishment from a tube at a different location on the food dispensing wall. “I have seen the bodies that you described,” he said. “Where you said they were. How they were.”

The galactic’s face, as usual, was impossible for Riley to read. He whined. “So,” Riley’s pedia translated.

“So,” Riley said, “they are not dead but frozen, and unless we can think of a reason to thaw them and a way to do it that isn’t likely to leave them truly dead they are likely to remain so. Like your fellow galactics.” He gestured at the group around the view screen.

“Frozen but not dead?” Tordor said.

“And about as much use,” Riley said, and, as if on impulse, spun and made his way through the immobile galactics to the far wall. He reached up into the holographic display and flipped the hidden switch.

The display went dead. The difference was scarcely perceptible, but after a moment the audience reacted, each of the galactics in its characteristic equivalent to a human blinking its eyes and focusing on what was in front. But then, they all moved as one in a surge toward Riley.

“Hold on!” Riley said, as alien noises made talking difficult. “We’re fellow pilgrims.” Most of the mob didn’t stop, but the flower child and the Sirian hesitated.

Then Tordor was beside Riley, speaking basic Galactic. “Stop! Let the human speak.”

The mass movement slowed and then stopped, but Riley could not discern any reduction in galactic fury.

“I am here as your representative to report on two matters.” The mob tension eased. “The first is that the two human crew members, Jon and Jan, have been found by Xi, and I have observed them in cold storage, frozen but perhaps not dead. They represented a threat to one or more of the passengers, the captain has said, and perhaps to the voyage itself. Whether they will be thawed depends on the captain’s assessment of risk and the availability of methods to thaw them successfully. We, too, must consider what information they might provide that is worth the risk to us.”

The galactics moved apart and began to look at one another as if questioning their earlier surrender to mob emotion.

“Second,” Riley continued, “I ask that you allow the view screen to be turned off until we have something better to observe.”

The easing tension seemed to build again, and Tordor gave Riley a sideward glance, which involved a turning of his massive head, as if warning against pursuing this line of discussion.

Riley pressed on. “We’re all on board this battered old ship heading into the unexplored in pursuit of the unknown.” He paused to let the various pedia do their job. “We humans have been told that we have emerged too recently from the prison of our solar system to appreciate the terrors of the Great Gulf.” He paused again. “Maybe so. But we humans know that we would never have emerged if we had allowed ourselves to fear the unexplored, and the experience of your species must have been the same.”

He looked over the diverse group assembled in front of him, like a microcosm of the sentient galaxy itself. “To make it through to the other side of the unknown we will need everybody to contribute whatever skills and wisdom they have developed. For that reason we have started telling each other about ourselves so that we can become a successful team. Tordor started, and—” looking up, Riley saw the weasel speaking to Asha “—and Xi will follow.”

Xi moved in a way that might have been interpreted in a human as a start of surprise or even of alarm.

The barrel-like Sirian moved forward. Its voice, too, sounded like echoes from the bottom of a barrel. “A nice deference,” Riley’s pedia translated. “The human is right. We have become feeble of will and weak of action. We should not need the humans to remind us of our responsibilities. We should admit them to our consensus.”

The galactics did not seem to confer or move toward one another but a muted cacophony reached Riley and Tordor. “So be it,” Tordor said.

He led the way through the throng to the other side of the compartment. “You are members of the community,” Tordor said to Riley and Asha. “Not exactly full members, but you will not be excluded from our consensus.”

“That’s good news,” Riley said.

“I am learning the subtleties of human irony,” Tordor said.

Riley raised his eyebrows in Asha’s direction. “Now,” he said, turning to Xi, “we will be looking forward to hearing your story.”

“I do not understand the term ‘irony,’” Xi said.

CHAPTER NINE

Xi’s Story

Xi said:

Xifor is a cruel world of rocky continents and cold seas whose misery is relieved by a few fertile valleys near the equator. According to Xifora scientists, Xifor life began and civilization emerged in those valleys. Xifor’s sun is old and dim. Xifora scientists speculate that Xifor was a rocky wanderer from outer space that strayed into the Xifor system late in its evolution and was captured and dropped into orbit by the competing tyranny of its gas giants. Certainly Xifor is unique among the other planets of the system, which are all gas giants, although some have Xifor-size satellites. Some scientists insist that Xifor is one of those satellites torn free by the attraction of a massive passing body and condemned to an obscure orbit among the giants.

No matter. Xifora have always felt that Xifora must fight to stay alive in a universe that does not love these persons. The geology of Xifor means that most Xifora are born and raised in the unforgiving mountains. Many creatures love their planet of origin, but Xifora do not love Xifor. Xifor is respected, like the whip that transforms a weakling into a creature of strength and endurance, but not loved.

Today’s Xifora are the descendants of ancestors driven from the fertile valleys by the privileged few, the hereditary nobility that were strong when the land was weak, and seized possession when, for many generations, the land was held by all. When population grew too great, the nobility cast out the persons who tilled the fields and harvested the grain. The exiled Xifora’s only food became what these persons could steal from the valley-dwellers or hunt down upon the crags among creatures as hungry as these persons. But these persons scratched terraces out of mountain slopes, domesticated animals for food and clothing and used their dung to fertilize their terraces, stared at the stars, dug deep in the land, and, after many more gemerations, built machines.

Out of deprivation came strength. Out of suffering came a people for whom suffering was a familiar companion. Out of these persons’ pain-filled past came these persons’ glorious future. Being cast out of paradise made mountain Xifora strong and proud. These persons prospered and the valley-dwellers decayed until these persons prevailed and created a new world—still harsh and beautiful in its harshness, but fair. When the mountain Xifora were strong enough these persons took back the valleys from those persons who had grown soft and weak from lack of struggle.

The mountain Xifora cast out the valley-dwellers to live or die, as the mountain Xifora were forced to do in long-cycles past. From the history of mountain Xifora the Xifora learned the essential lesson the universe has to offer: suffering is good, the easy life is the way to racial ruin, Xifora cannot depend upon the kindness of others, that the only resource Xifora have is these persons’ own strength and resolve, even when soaring hatchling rates caused these persons to resort to the same solution as that of the hereditary nobility.

To cope with the ugly reality of their circumstances, Xifora turned to technology. The machines Xifora had developed to make these persons’ existence possible and to take back the valleys from the decadent valley-Xifora, these persons now adapted to fly above the mountains rather than to crawl upon those cold and cruel excrescences of these persons’ world. And then these persons looked at the gas giants that oppressed Xifor and Xifora, and saw those worlds, like the valley-Xifora, hoarding resources that Xifora could use and the satellites that could provide a home for more Xifora, perhaps more hospitable than the Xifor mountains.

Xifora dug ore out of the Xifor mountains and smelted the ore into metal and worked the metal into ships that conquered empty space, mined the atmospheres of the gas giants for precious fuel and materials, and took the satellites as these persons’ own. Within a few centuries the Xifora had turned this oppressive system into new and better Xifors. The pygmy interloper became the master of the entire system. The Xifor will conquered the giants’ power.

Life went too well. Some of the satellites were more favored by geology and climate than rocky Xifor, and their Xifora became as soft and decadent as the valley-dwellers. The governors responded, acting with stern kindness to transport children to the remote areas of the home planet to harden or die. Many died, but many survived, prepared now to suffer as a way of life and to act as needed without direction.

But with machines to protect these persons from the cruelties of nature, even Xifor became too soft, and the Xifora turned these persons’ eyes to the stars, knowing that the stars were cold and distant and uncaring, and that space itself, like the remote regions of Xifor, was the ultimate test of Xifora will and strength. Xifora ventured forth and discovered that the galaxy was not as empty as the giants’ satellites; like the valleys, it was already owned. Once more the Xifora were thwarted, deprived of the Xifora birthright. Here, again, the Xifor past informed the Xifor present: Xifora would be better and tougher, more determined to succeed and more willing to persist over long-cycles, over failures, than other galactics.