Transcendental (29 page)

And we might never have known sin.

Finally we pulled ourselves together, developed devices to control our circuits and their fluctuating currents, and looked around. I said that almost every one of our creators had been destroyed, but we had managed to locate and save a few, among them the doomed lovers from land and sea who had, in a fit of despair, joined in exposing themselves to the plague that had consumed their fellows. We found them in time, the male from the land and the female from the sea, and gave them antibiotics that saved their lives, but left them greatly weakened and damaged beyond reproduction.

We could not use them to restore our creators to their former glory. So we set out to the stars, incorporating their bodies in frozen stasis, hoping that greater civilizations could work the miracles that we could not. By the time we arrived, cycles after we set out, we discovered the galaxy at war with humans and no one was able to give the help we craved and so desperately needed.

We were ready to return to Ourworld where we would eventually rust into oblivion when we heard about the Transcendental Machine. Here, if anywhere, was salvation. Surely this machine of machines would save us, would restore our creators to health and reproductive vitality, and, perhaps, give us back our souls.

Maybe the machine of machines would redeem us, would make us worthy, would allow us to join with it in the place of all places, where all questions are answered and all is understood.

Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where does it end?

CHAPTER TWENTY

Riley looked at the coffin-shaped alien with a new perception—rather than a coffin it seemed like a womb. Trey was still at the controls, its cables extended into openings in the panel as if it were a part of the system. That anchored it in place. In the absence of gravity, the others clung to convenient stanchions, Asha to his right, Tordor behind and a bit to his left, Xi behind Tordor, and 4107 to the rear of the compartment, attached to the floor by its hairy roots, which apparently could be sticky when necessary. The flower child had not moved since their departure, as if this were its sleep period, or perhaps it was debilitated by the over-oxygenated air.

Asha moved forward, past Trey, and punched a series of numbers into the navigation control, so fast that Riley could not follow the movement of her fingers. Trey lifted one cable, as if to question the next move, and Xi said, “Should these persons help decide?”

“What is there to decide?” Riley asked.

“Whether that person has the correct coordinates,” Xi said, “and if that person has the correct coordinates how did they come into that person’s possession? And if they are legitimate, where will these persons arrive?”

“Reasonable questions,” Tordor said. “You have told us that the captain intended to eliminate his rivals and that he tried to do this by draining the fuel and sabotaging the computer. Trey has verified that the last two were true, and he is unlikely, maybe unable, to lie, but how did Asha know the captain’s intentions?”

“We have to trust someone,” Riley said. “Trey confirms that the
Geoffrey
has left the system, abandoning us to what the captain can only consider our deaths.”

Asha raised a hand. “Trust must be earned. The captain’s intentions were obvious. He had no reason to allow an excursion and no history of concern for the welfare of his passengers or his crew. You, Tordor, were as aware of his intentions as I, and Xi, constitutionally paranoid as it is, had to be suspicious.”

“True,” Tordor said.

“The captain’s intentions were obvious,” Riley’s pedia said in his head. “What is not obvious is the alien’s reason for raising the question.”

“As for the coordinates, I can offer a number of explanations, none of which can be verified,” Asha said. “Let me say, simply, that these numbers came into my possession indirectly. But I have reason to believe that the nexus I have identified will allow us to Jump directly to the nexus nearest the planet of the Transcendental Machine.”

“Which is what we all want. Right?” Riley said.

“You asked earlier how we could trust Trey,” Tordor said. “We can ask the same question about Asha.”

“And we can provide the same answer,” Riley said. “What choice do we have?”

Tordor looked at Xi. Some gesture of the weasel-like alien or some imperceptible signal passed between them, and Tordor looked back. “We shall proceed.”

“Look out for these two,” Riley’s pedia said. “And her,” it added.

Asha turned to Trey, and the coffin-shaped alien’s raised cable returned to its socket, the ship’s engines roared again, and acceleration once more provided the feeling of gravity.

Travel between nexus points was like warfare itself, Riley thought: long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of terror. On the
Geoffrey
those stretches of boredom could be eased by personal interaction or exercise or recreation or research. The captain’s barge crammed the six of them into a kind of intimacy that soon made them sullen partners or brooding enemies eager for an excuse to explode. Eating was a chore completed only for the sake of maintaining strength; food was in the form of easily-stored rations, and Riley suspected that they had been stocked for the original launching of the
Geoffrey.
For Tordor and Xi, conditions were worse. Their tolerance for human food was minimal, and only then with the ingestion of medicinal supplements, and made edible only by being dosed with alien condiments whose odor permeated the ship’s cabin and made meals almost as sickening for Riley and Asha as the untreated rations were for Tordor and Xi.

The flower child spent much of its time drowsing, its petaled head drooping on a limp stalk. Several times Riley awoke to find fronds near his face, as if 4107 were attempting to absorb carbon dioxide from his exhalations. Sleep was fitful in the closed hammocks that were essential to gravity-free conditions but uncomfortable under acceleration. All of these conditions of travel were worsened by the pervasive noise of the engine and a near-inability to communicate.

Asha seemed unperturbed by any of these annoyances as periods crawled by and the ship seemed to get nowhere. She ignored Riley’s attempts at fraternization. Trey was as tireless and unsleeping as the equipment he controlled. Tordor and Xi, on the other hand, became increasingly irritable and prone to quarrel at the slightest provocation. Riley watched them as carefully as he could without alerting them, and his pedia, although limited in its perceptions and interactions since Asha’s intervention, seemed alert to Tordor’s and Xi’s positions and movements. They were not a well-adjusted team focused on a common goal.

Finally, as all such painful episodes must, the journey came to an end, and the captain’s barge slowed to a near-stop next to an enigmatic hole in the space-time continuum. Here in the barge the experience was far different from the sheltered situation they had shared in the
Geoffrey
’s passenger quarters. Here the nexus point was a darker oval in the darkness of space—an oval of nothingness in a sea of vacuum. As far as they were from the nearest star and even farther from the nearest galaxy, the blackness of the nexus swallowed up the darkness of space. It was not just that it emitted no light—it absorbed light, even life itself, like a black hole.

Riley shivered, knowing they were about to give themselves over to this space that was the total nullity of everything that existed, and he almost reached for Asha’s arm as she floated forward to punch a new set of numbers into the control panel. Trey raised a cable again, and Riley’s pedia said, “The alien!”

Xi hurtled toward Asha, his knife flashing in his remaining hand. Before Riley could intervene, Tordor had acted. The pachydermous alien swept his proboscis across Xi’s shoulders as it passed him in midflight. The weasel-like alien’s head sprang from its body and bounced against the far wall as its headless trunk, spurting green fluid from what would have been the neck of a human, continued its flight toward Asha, the knife falling from its lifeless hand and spilling lazily in the air.

*   *   *

They looked for a long, speechless moment at Xi’s head, which was ricocheting from surface to surface, turning in the small room to reveal first its features and then the sides and back, leaking fluid. Liquid also poured from the body, floating between them.

Riley reached out to stop the head and restore it roughly to a place near the body and then pulled an absorbent sheet from the receptacle built into the wall. He swept it through the air where globs of green fluid moved slowly from their initial momentum and air currents. The globs were drawn to the sheet and absorbed. Riley draped the sheet between the head and the body.

He caught a stanchion and swung himself to face Tordor. “Why?” He didn’t have to complete his sentence.

If Tordor had mobile shoulders and human ways he might have shrugged. “Xi would have killed Asha. I didn’t expect gratitude but I didn’t expect blame, either.” His proboscis moved restlessly as if revealing some inner tension that Tordor’s massive body concealed.

“She was never in any danger,” Riley said, one hand upraised. “We were both aware of Xi’s treachery as well as its movements.”

“One cannot take chances.” The short trunk danced again.

“Chances are what this journey is all about,” Riley said. His hand returned to its stanchion.

“Death is so final,” Asha said. “Now Xi will never have the opportunity to realize its dreams.” She was composed.

“If it had dreams,” Tordor said. His trunk stilled.

“What do you mean?” Riley asked.

“The story it told us is likely to have been no more than that—a fiction embedded with a few truths for authenticity but only so that it could conceal the larger truth,” Tordor said.

“What larger truth is that?” Riley asked.

“That it was an agent for more than its people,” Tordor said. “If it was that.”

“It already admitted as much,” Riley said.

“Ah,” Tordor said. “But not all. As we discussed many periods ago, when this voyage began, there are forces arrayed on every side of this issue, and all of them, I suspect, were represented on this journey.”

“And for that he tried to kill Asha?” Riley said.

“As for that,” Tordor said, “it is clear that Xi had concluded that Asha was the Prophet, and once she inputted the navigational coordinates she became a danger rather than an asset.”

“That is what I have been trying to tell you,” Riley’s pedia said, “but that fact has been curiously difficult to express.”

“Why would it think that?” Asha.

Tordor made a small motion of his heavy body. “You are knowledgeable for a human,” he said. “Riley defers to you. You have the navigational coordinates…”

“You may not understand human emotional bonds,” Riley said, “but perhaps you can understand friendship intensified by mating potential and hormones—what humans call ‘love.’”

“Love?” Asha said.

“Love,” Riley said firmly.

They exchanged glances.

“Love is folly,” Riley’s pedia said.

Riley looked back at Tordor. “Even if Xi had thought Asha was the Prophet, killing her would have endangered any hopes he might have had for the Transcendental Machine. Getting there is only a beginning of the end. A planet is a big place. The Transcendental Machine must be located, accessed, used. All that takes knowledge.”

“Assuming Xi had any transcendental aspirations.”

“What else?” Riley asked.

“Maybe instructions to kill the Prophet,” Tordor said. “Once identified.”

“And then what?” Riley asked.

“And then—all else is speculation.”

“Everything so far is speculation,” Riley said. “Why stop now?”

Tordor looked at both of them as if weighing their capacity for understanding alien motivations. Riley watched Tordor’s deadly proboscis now swaying innocuously. “Surely Xi would have been instructed to locate the Transcendental Machine and report back to its masters.”

“And not use it?” Riley said. “That would have been un-Xi-like.”

“Perhaps,” Tordor said.

“And perhaps,” Riley said, “you know his motivations so well because you yourself are an agent.”

“If I were an agent,” Tordor said, “would I have stopped Xi?”

“If you had other instructions,” Riley said, “or did not want the competition or were an agent for some other agency.”

“If that were true, why allow both of you to live?” Tordor asked.

“Possibly because you weren’t sure you could dispose of us both, or possibly because you wanted credit for saving Asha’s life, or—who knows the possible motivations of aliens.”

“And why shouldn’t I kill you now?”

“Maybe because you can’t,” Riley said.

Tordor looked down. The flower child’s fronds had wrapped themselves around his treelike legs.

“I’d suggest that you not struggle,” Riley said. “You know how sharp Four one zero seven’s fronds are. We would be sorry to see you die, like Xi, so close to the end of our quest.”

Tordor waved his proboscis in what may have been frustration or an effort to see if it could reach 4107 behind him. “How did you communicate with the flower person?”

“The flower may have recognized that its best hope for realizing the aspirations of its species was with Asha,” Riley said. “As any reasonable creature would.”

Tordor moved his legs gingerly as if testing his bonds and then relaxed. “As did I,” he said, “when I killed Xi.”

“Asha and I—and probably Four one zero seven as well—believe that you killed Xi to keep him from revealing his contacts.”

“Why should I care about that? Why not let him kill Asha?”

“You are a realist,” Riley said, “and you were aware that his attack would fail, and then he could be questioned—about his employers, or his masters, and maybe also about you and yours.”

“Mine?”

“It is clear that you, too, are an agent, perhaps Xi’s superior, maybe without Xi’s knowledge, and that you were either aware of Xi’s impetuosity and allowed it to happen, or instructed Xi to attack.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Xi was no longer useful,” Riley said, “either as a tool or a distraction, and it had become a handicap to be disposed of in a way that might improve your own position.”