Transcendental (3 page)

“Gee,” Jon said. “I never knew one of these strings to fail.”

“Yeah,” Jan said.

“It didn’t fail,” Riley said. “It was blown apart.”

“Golly,” Jan said.

“Yeah,” Jon said.

“We’re going to go on a pilgrimage, all right,” Riley said, “but it wasn’t the one we intended.” He looked at the woman. He knew she had heard the conversation, but she didn’t say anything. She had straightened out her legs, though. Her feet were on the floor and her hands held the edge of the bench.

Riley continued to look around the room, to take stock of the effects of the explosion. Two aliens had been killed in the gyrations of the climber, a third had broken a leg, and a fourth had lost a tentacle. The half-dozen informal self-protection groups combined efforts to treat injuries and ration supplies and protect individuals from predation. Clothing and other materials were shared with those who suffered from the increasing cold.

Through all the mutual aid, Riley kept thinking it was all useless, like maintaining law and order when the wave front of a supernova was scheduled to arrive in a few days.

Seventy-one hours of desperate fatigue and soreness later Riley felt a thump and the increased weight of deceleration. Creatures fought for a place at the windows, but only blackness, without stars, could be seen. An hour later, he heard more thumps, followed by the sound of the release of the airlock door beyond the privacy room. The fetid air inside the climber was invaded by the only slightly less fetid air of a spaceship.

“Boys,” Riley said to Jon and Jan, “we’ve been saved.”

They emerged, one by one, into the airlock of a ship. A party of space crew greeted them with food and drink and blankets, and received Jon and Jan with particular warmth.

Riley recognized one of them. He wore the insignia of a spaceship captain.

“Hello, Ham,” he said.

“Up to your old tricks, Riley?” the captain said.

“Thanks to you,” Riley said.

CHAPTER TWO

The
Geoffrey
accelerated as soon as the passengers in the elevator car had been retrieved and the car had been jettisoned to resume its interrupted journey into deep space. As he was directed down the narrow passageway into the decontamination chamber and the isolation of the passenger quarters, Riley asked a crew member what had happened to the carbon-fiber cable on which the car had climbed.

The crew member shook his head. “That stuff don’t wear out, and you can’t cut it.”

Riley was too tired to ask the crew member about it, and he had no more opportunity to talk to the captain before getting to the decon. Passengers’ quarantine was standard: exotic bacteria, viruses, and fungi lurked inside bodies for weeks, and some alien physiologies were always deadly to the unprepared. And passengers offered nothing to a voyage but trouble: the less the crew saw of them the better for the welfare of the crew and the vessel.

Riley was desperate for sleep, but he knew that was something he couldn’t do at least until he got to his quarters and had a chance to check his pack for a certain item. In the meantime, he’d simply have to stay vertical and alert through the decon process … and once he and the other passengers were in the passengers’ lounge, the joys of acceleration.

Acceleration was jerky, which spoke of old engines, the maintenance of which had been sketchy at best, or perhaps of a crew that was still learning its ship. Maybe both. There would be no JumpingOff nexus this close to a system, so acceleration, at a constant one-earthgravity, would last at least one hundred hours and give planet-acclimated passengers a chance to adjust to the environment of space and the fragile tubes that flung themselves through it.

Riley endured acceleration, with its unexpected moments of free fall, as he always had, with grim contemplation. He took his mind off the unsettling sensations by reviewing the past seventy-two hours. His pedia helped him recall the waiting room on Terminal, and he identified an alien or two he had overlooked: a caterpillar-like creature that lifted its forward section cautiously to look around, and in the far corner an aquatic alien in a cloudy tank bubbling with gas.

He reviewed the events in the climber, adding details to his picture of events: who was where and when and what they were doing. He could not tie any movements to the point at which the climber had accelerated, or the point at which the cable had been severed, although the coffin-shaped alien had been closest to the wall that housed the controls.

“Insufficient information,” his pedia said. Riley sometimes hated his pedia, but he hated even more its confessions of imperfection.

Until he found some privacy, he would have no opportunity to explore his pack and see what the weasel had left or planted on him. First he had to keep track of his fellow passengers … the pilgrims. The passenger compartment was divided into living zones adaptable to the requirements of the various kinds of creatures who sought passage. Some required special atmospheres or special diets, or special configurations of accommodations; the steward had to be a person of many parts.

The crew was no problem. Providing similar amenities for the crew who had to work the entire ship would have been impossible. Human vessels were manned by humans, or by humanoid species that could tolerate human environment. And the
Geoffrey
was a human vessel.

The aquatic alien, its writhing tentacles breaking the murk of its aquarium, disappeared shortly after boarding. Other exotic aliens followed. The rest, including the coffin-shaped alien, were gathered in the passengers’ lounge. His contemplation was interrupted by a familiar grunting.

“Saved by higher power,” Tordor said, leaning back on his tail to brace himself against acceleration.

“At least one closer to the controls,” Riley replied.

“And for greater purpose,” Tordor said.

The enigmatic woman looked scornful. Riley turned to her. “Where do you think we’re heading?”

“Toward transcendence,” she said.

“Where is that?” he continued.

“Wherever you find it,” she said.

“Better question,” Tordor said, “what direction?”

“Only the captain knows that,” Riley said.

“You speak like man who understands.”

“You, too. You know your way around a ship.”

Tordor waved his proboscis in a movement that Riley’s pedia interpreted as “of course.” “We leave Terminal,” he said.

Riley nodded, hoping that nods were part of Dorian gesture vocabulary. To gather at Terminal for a journey inward made no sense. They were headed farther out along this arm of the galaxy, and there were few stars farther out.

The
Geoffrey
was a war-surplus vessel, a cruiser much like the one aboard which Riley had served part of his service time. A lot of warships had been converted to civilian use after the Galactic War. War surplus meant the ship was armored around the flight deck and engine room, and some of its weapons array might still be operational. It also meant that passenger quarters were primitive.

Of course all accommodations on spaceships were primitive. The romantic notion that spaceships had staterooms like surface ships, or even the modest efficiency compartments standard on overpopulated planets, misunderstood the price of space in space. Privacy was costly, and the cost was comfort. Each humanoid passenger was assigned a cubicle in a wall of cubicles, like drawers in a morgue; a built-in metal ladder allowed access to those above waist level.

Each cubicle was two meters long, one and a half meters wide, and one and a half meters high. Each was equipped with air, temperature, and humidity controls, that sometimes worked, an adjustable mattress, a shelf for personal items, a cupboard at the far end for clothes, and a light. An overhead viewer could be positioned for viewing from a half-sitting or lying-down position. The ship’s computer offered fictional and nonfictional materials, views from the ship’s front, back, and sides, revealing the great emptiness of space, and basic information about the ship, its layout, and its operations. Riley scanned the information that would, he knew, become part of his pedia’s memory. He might have to know his way around as well as any crew member.

The cubicles were no place for claustrophobes, but then neither was space itself.

Before the discovery of the JumpingOff places, the cubicles had been equipped for long sleep as well; the connections and outlets had never been removed. Everybody who had been through the old ways blessed the unknown human genius who had deciphered the galactic network map. Going into long sleep was painful and waking up was even worse, but not as bad as not waking up, which happened two times out of ten. Nobody would have put up with it except that casualties in ships that saw action in the Galactic War averaged 50 percent of the crew—each time a ship went out.

The alien compartments were different. They weren’t more spacious, but some were arranged vertically or slanted, had an adjustable mixture of atmospheres, and an adjustable wavelength of light. Everything about them was temporary, obviously thrown together in a hurry after the passenger manifest was received. Some were still under construction.

Riley felt a fleeting moment of relief that he didn’t have to trust his comfort, much less his life, to that kind of ramshackle accommodation. His cubicle was one from the top, third from the left, in a stack of sixteen. As soon as he entered his cubicle and disabled the viewer, he opened his pack and stowed away his few belongings, piece by piece, inspecting each of them, until he was left with the empty pack. He went over it millimeter by millimeter. Finally, under one magnetic closure, he found what he was looking for: a mere metal sliver, an electronic bug of some sort, or perhaps a concentrated explosive, or a poison timed for release.

He left it as he found it, made sure the door to the cubicle was locked, and said “sleep” to his pedia. He figured he’d have no trouble sleeping, too. After the seemingly endless hours of trying to stay alert, especially in the long period after the explosion, he might sleep forever …

*   *   *

The passenger lounge became a gathering place of social significance. It offered cramped closets for elimination and slightly larger closets for cleansing with recycled fluids of various kinds.

Any passengers who wore clothing and couldn’t manage the contortions necessary for dressing in the confines of the cubicles had to dress in the lounge. But passengers thrown into intimacy for long stretches of time lost most semblance of modesty, even if that was part of their culture.

The lounge also served as a dining hall where various kinds of food were available from wall units, when serviced properly. Some popular items soon were depleted, or weren’t replaced, or were hoarded by crew members, and eventually it came down to a choice between eating what was available if it wasn’t poisonous—or starve. Shelves and stools slid out from the walls for species that sat.

In spite of its many purposes the lounge was not large, perhaps twenty meters square, and when all the passengers gathered little empty space remained. Some species, though, hibernated during long passage or were culturally antisocial or xenologically impaired, and no more than a dozen were present at one time, except at story periods. The telling of stories or personal accounts was traditional for long trips; the viewer fictions paled by comparison.

The
Geoffrey
had been old by the end of the war. Now it was even older and more dilapidated. The narrow corridors had been worn bare at shoulder level. Many of the doors stuck, including cubicle doors, and even the emergency doors separating the various compartments of the ship, which were intended to snap shut at the first indication of a drop in air pressure. The cruiser bore a general air of defeat, like a ship that had barely escaped destruction in an ambush but had been consigned to a used-vehicle orbit rather than being rehabilitated. Perhaps it had.

Riley used his time in the lounge to move among the others, picking up more of their language for his pedia and engaging them in conversation when languages permitted, trying to place them in the galactic chess game in which he found himself an unwilling player. What kind of piece were they? How did they move? Whose invisible hand moved them? What was their color?

He felt good about Tordor but questioned whether his judgment was influenced by the alien’s solidity and air of blunt honesty. The weasel was on the other end of the spectrum, not simply because of his appearance of sly subterfuge but because he
felt
untrustworthy. Riley had learned early in his experience with aliens that appearance meant nothing, but he had also learned to trust his instincts. Now his instinct told him that he should trust nothing, and, most of all, not his instincts.

“You must trust nobody but me,” his pedia said.

Nor his pedia.

What he wanted to do was to circulate among the passengers, engage them in conversation, and find out, directly or indirectly, why they were on this pilgrimage to nowhere. He would have found that difficult, but not impossible, with human companions, but in his experience, most aliens did not strike up conversations or ask revealing questions, even if they could communicate with other species at some primitive level.

His pedia was no help. Either it was not equipped to make such judgments, or withheld them, either through its own volition or because of some built-in block.

He settled for talking to the woman. “We’re going to be stuck with each other for months, maybe years. We might as well be friends.”

She shrugged. “Until our interests diverge.”

“And what interests are those?”

“Survival now. Reaching our destinations. Then—who knows?” Her face, passive until now, broke into a smile that dazzled Riley.

“We might as well introduce ourselves. I’m Riley.”

“Asha,” she said.

“And why are you on this crazy journey?”

She swept the room with her arm. “For the same reason as all of them—to escape the inescapable, to find the unfindable, to achieve the unachievable.”

“You like riddles.”