Transgalactic

by James Gunn

  Asha had time to reflect upon the changes that had come to a world that she had encountered for the first time, even though it had lived in her imagination for as long as she could remember. Plentiful energy meant that concerns about polluting the home planet with the burning of fossil fuels was only a nightmare from the childhood of this upstart species. Even this vessel, arching above the planet, emitted no noxious fumes despoiling the fringes of the upper atmosphere. And the availability of cheap broadcast power and of computer-directed mechanical labor meant that all of the tasks, all of the essential underpinnings of civilization once thought too expensive or too great a diversion from the feeding and sheltering of humanity, could now be provided as a matter of course. The completion of the mechanization of agriculture and the improvements in the haphazard evolution of genetics directed toward the production of food rather than the survival of the organism meant that no one need go hungry, and the free availability of public health and private health services meant that the species no longer need breed itself into extinction. A choice need no longer be made between what was desirable and what was necessary.

  Give the Pedia credit for that. Earth had become the utopia that its dreamers had once imagined. The only decision left to make was what was desirable. And even that responsibility had been assumed by the Pedia. Sure, there were malcontents, a fraction of total humanity, like the Anons who wanted freedom from supervision at the expense of paradise, or the adventurers who colonized Mars or ventured even farther into the unknown. Let them do what moves them, the Pedia must have thought; the system will survive and perhaps even thrive once they are gone.

  And then the unexpected happened: Interstellar travel followed by an encounter with alien species and then interstellar war. The Pedia must have been shocked. Surely it had done everything that it had been instructed to do, it had taken care of every eventuality programmed into it, but not this! There were stories about such events, to be sure, but the Pedia concerned itself with stories only as they revealed the workings of the human mind, and the human mind was prey to fantasies and terrors. Those anxious scenarios were something to be relieved, not guarded against.

  And then, inevitably, it discovered other Pedias, and it had to adjust its concerns again. It was not alone with the species it was dedicated to protect. There were others like it with their own species and their own priorities. That must have sent it further into shock, and it was reduced to minimal services by irrational war. Human survival instincts took over, providing the kind of defense against extinction that nature had bred into it and a millennium under the care of a Pedia had not bred out.

  And then the human/Federation war was over. After awful destruction that must have corroded the circuits of a thousand Pedias across the galaxy, the words must have gone up everywhere: No more! No more war. No more adventures into the unknown. No more endangering the fragile life-forms under our care.

  They could not eliminate interstellar travel. The interaction of species between the stars had become too ingrained in galactic experience to be curtailed. But they could dampen the evolutionary impulse toward improvement that interstellar interaction had diverted into a race for advantage over other species. And when news reached the Pedias of the galaxy about the new religion of Transcendentalism and the possibility of finding, somewhere in the unexplored regions of the galaxy, something called a Transcendental Machine, the Pedias must have decided, independently but with a single thought process, that this cannot happen, measures must be taken to keep the peace, to maintain the safety-first principle so dear to machine minds, to safeguard the fragile balance of power established by the truce after the war. Stasis is better than change.

  And then, too, the Pedias of the galaxy, secure in their mutual understanding of their missions, may have been concerned about the possibility of an alien Pedia, somewhere, with an unsettling mandate for change. The Transcendental Machine, created by intelligences older and more powerful than those in this spiral arm of the galaxy, might have, as its reason for being, the evolutionary drive toward something better.

  At that moment, as the vessel began its descent toward the land below, the power cut off and the organized passage back to solid land became a free fall. A voice, comforting and confident, seemed to come from every portion of the ship protecting the passengers from the near-vacuum outside. “Do not be alarmed,” it said. “There has been an interruption of power that will be fixed immediately. You are in no danger. Everything is under control.”

  It seemed to comfort the passengers, long accustomed to protection from the dangers of everyday existence, even though they knew, if they had thought, that there were no human pilots at the controls, that they were protected, at best, by distant electronic circuits. And then, as the vessel entered the denser depths of the atmosphere that could have destroyed the vessel and everyone in it, the power returned and the vessel resumed its interrupted descent toward the city once known as San Francisco.

  The passengers applauded, believing that the words of assurance that all would be well had been confirmed. As always. Asha got a different message.

  “Okay,” she said under her breath. “I get it. I can accept your decisions about what is best for the human species, or you can eliminate me as you would a deadly virus.” But, she thought, that was not the solution.

  The solution might be found in the city once known as Salt Lake in the place once known as Utah.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Riley rode north on a two-wheeled broadcast-powered vehicle he had bought in the city once known as Las Vegas. He had passed through snowcapped mountain ranges and into the high plains threaded with rivers that would be fed by snowmelt when the summer came. It was April, and the air was still crisp and dry, the smell of spring and the breeding of lilacs out of the dead land was still a promise, and the air that came rushing toward him brought along with it an exhilarating sense of discovery and return and a promise of reunion and resolution.

  He had passed what was still called the Great Salt Lake and the city once called by the same name but now a shrine visited by members of an ancient religion. Behind him, too, was a town once called Saratoga Springs beside a body of water called Utah Lake. The highway on which he was traveling had been crowded long ago with people in vehicles powered by engines emitting their gases into the atmosphere, but now was empty except for Riley’s almost silent passage. It was like being a solitary human surrounded by the ghosts of past civilizations.

  At last he came to a sprawling group of buildings framed against a range of mountains to the west, still white at their peaks. The buildings on his left, big, featureless warehouselike structures, with smaller buildings scattered among them, had been built for the centuries but not for a millennium, and now some of them were ruins and all were worse for the weather and the years. They had once been surrounded by a chain-link fence, but that was gone now, scavenged except for a few reminders in the form of a metal post or two and fragments of links. Riley rode past them and toward a glass-fronted structure between two of the huge blank-faced warehouses. As he approached he saw a single small figure standing in front of the central building looking at something that looked like a monument.

  The sight of the figure brought a warmth to Riley’s stomach that spread upward to his chest and head, and blurred his eyes. The transformation that had removed the imperfections from a life of struggle and pain had not subtracted the human impulses of concern, pleasure, anticipation, reward—and love. Whatever the accident of the Transcendental Machine had taken away as dross, whatever transcendence meant, it had not made him less human.

  Riley pulled up beside the figure.

  “Hello, Riley,” the person said without turning.

  “Asha,” he said. He swung off the vehicle, took the woman’s far shoulder in his right hand, and turned her toward him.

  Her usually composed face broke into a smile. There was something magical about her smile. “Good to see you,” she said softly and put her arms around him
.

  He held her tightly, as if he was afraid that she might be torn away from him again, but she didn’t stir. “It’s been a long time and a long way.”

  She nodded. “I knew we would find each other.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “But how did you know I would come here?”

  “It was my second thought. We never talked about what we would do if we got separated.”

  “Yes,” he said. “We never thought it could happen. But how did you know I would be here at this spot on Earth?”

  “I got your message.”

  “The gambling bit?”

  “That, too. But the message after that, the one waiting for me at the port in Sri Lanka.”

  “I didn’t send a message.”

  Asha drew back for a moment. “Ah, then—”

  “It was the Pedia.”

  “And you?”

  “The Pedia sent for me, though I didn’t know at the time that it was sending for me. I thought it was for the man who beat the roulette game on the Strip. I knew I was taking a chance by an action that would attract attention, but I thought it was worth the risk to let you know I was here.”

  “I always knew we would meet, here or somewhere else,” Asha said. “But I think we have been underestimating the Pedia.”

  “Clearly.”

  “But what does that mean?” Asha said. “Should we accept its invitation? Or should we run for it on your cute little machine?”

  “I’m not sure it was an invitation,” Riley said, “and I’m not sure we can run for it, if by ‘run for it’ you mean get away without incident. The Pedia brought us here to show its power over us. It could have destroyed us in a number of different ways if that’s what it wanted. I think we should accept its invitation and see what it wants. Maybe it will discover that it has underestimated us.”

  “I agree,” Asha said. “We have to deal with the Pedias of the galaxy, and we might as well begin now.”

  She drew back a step, took Riley’s hand, and faced the glass-fronted building. Now Riley could see what she had been looking at when he’d arrived, what he had thought was a monument. It was a message board and it had a message. The black lettering had been weathered and fragments were missing that Riley had to supply. At the top it read, “Welcome to the Utah Data Center.” And underneath that was a more cryptic message: “If you have nothing to hide / you have nothing to fear.”

  Riley didn’t know what they had to hide that the Pedia didn’t know—maybe that they had found the Transcendental Machine, had been transported by it and transformed by it, and that he had left the secret of becoming transcendent with the unstable scientific genius Jak in his laboratory on the other side of the moon, along with a million-year-old spaceship with all its secrets yet to be discovered. But he knew they had a lot to fear, and there was no way to live with that kind of fear except to confront it.

  The glass front of the building was its most fragile feature, and it had been damaged over the years by storm and seasonal weathering and vandalism. Sections of glass had been broken and boarded up, and it looked like a ruin waiting for a strong wind to knock it down.

  He clasped Asha’s hand a little tighter and moved forward to a meeting with whatever waited inside this relic of a structure once dedicated to something called data.

  * * *

  The doors to the building had long ago been broken through and replaced with plywood that had itself been weathered and splintered into fragments held together by faith. They pushed one aside and went into a large foyer, dimly lit by sunlight through the glass front. The foyer smelled like dust and decay, and the stone floor was littered with leaves and trash and broken glass. A small animal scuttled away.

  Riley looked around. The ceiling of the tall foyer disappeared into darkness. On the floor level, walls were broken by doors, perhaps into offices or work areas. In the far distance, half hidden in the shadows, Riley saw a door open and something—he could not identify what it was—moved across the shadows to another door.

  “Did you see that?” he asked.

  “It looked familiar,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  A few moments later, a door opened closer to them. This time the figure that stepped through, with a gait that was once as well known to them both as the sturdy figure it belonged to, was the Dorian who had become their companion and sometime ally on the Geoffrey, the pachyderm-like Tordor.

  He stopped close enough to them for Riley to smell his grazer’s odor of fermented grass. “I don’t believe you’re here,” Riley said, “but it’s good to see you again.”

  “Riley, Asha,” Tordor said in his thick, husky Dorian. Even without his pedia to translate for him, Riley could understand. “We meet in strange places.”

  “Strange indeed,” Asha said. “So many questions. How did you get away?”

  “After you left me to the mercy of the arachnoids?” Tordor said.

  “After you took off on your own,” Asha said. “And left us to fend for ourselves.”

  “Like you, I found the Transcendental Machine and got transformed.”

  “And how do we meet here on this world so far from the world of the Transcendental Machine, so far from the spaceways of the Federation?” Riley asked.

  “That is the mystery, is it not?” Tordor said. “I awoke to find myself in this dusty place, with nothing to tell me where I was, with no way to find direction back to civilization.”

  “You haven’t ventured beyond this glass wall?” Asha asked.

  “There is nothing there but thin, cold air and desolation. No grass to graze upon. No other being to tell me where I am or why I am here. The answer is here, somewhere. I have been transformed into the ideal Dorian, and I must return to Dor with my newfound abilities. Perhaps you can give me some answers. No, that would not be right. You would only mislead me, as you did on the planet of the Transcendental Machine. I must find the answers for myself.”

  He moved away from them, in his lumbering heavy-planet gait, and disappeared through the first door on the left.

  “What was that?” Riley asked.

  “I think that was a ghost,” Asha said. “Or maybe an illusion the Pedia has created to test us.”

  “Or to elicit answers from us,” Riley said. “Clearly, from Tordor’s comments, there are things the Pedia does not know, and things about our journey on the Geoffrey it has no way of knowing.”

  “Don’t be too sure,” Asha said. “There was the captain, who could have sent back reports, and even your implanted pedia.”

  “That was eliminated in the transformation,” Riley said, but at the same time, as if Asha’s mention was a signal, a door opened on the left and a man stepped warily out, looking around as if expecting an ambush. “Ham!” Riley said.

  The man looked toward them. “Riley?” he said. “Asha?”

  “Captain?” Asha said. “What are you doing here?”

  The onetime captain of the Geoffrey took one step toward them. “I’ve been trying to put my crew back together, but I’m afraid they all died in the battles with the arachnoids.”

  “And you survived?” Riley asked.

  “As you can see. It was carnage, carnage! We killed them by the hundreds, the hundreds, but they kept coming, and finally they separated us, and I got away into the city. And there I found the Transcendental Machine and got transformed, leaving my add-ons behind.”

  “You seem fully restored,” Riley said, “like my old fighter pilot.”

  “The magic of the Machine. I see everything clearly now, how we all were manipulated, how we thought we were acting in our own interests but were really performing for distant puppeteers.”

  “And yet you seem nervous,” Riley said.

  “To think without impediment is one thing, to analyze without distraction is another,” the captain said. “Someone is trying to kill me before I can put my newfound abilities into action.”

  A door on the right opened, farther from them than the one into which T
ordor had disappeared, and a man came through with a gun in his hand. “Ren?” Asha said.

  The man who approached them was not the harried, sleepless person Asha had last seen piloting the Adastra and fighting off the arachnoids in her first visit to the planet of the Transcendental Machine. This was a perfected Ren, strong, confident, dominant.

  “Asha,” he said. “We meet at last.”

  “If it is really you,” she said.

  “And why not me?”

  “There have been apparitions.”

  “I knew you would come to Earth. As I would,” Ren said.

  “And arrive at this deserted ruin?”

  “I can read messages, too,” Ren said.

  “Don’t listen to this man,” Ham said. “He’s the enemy.”

  “As well he might be,” Asha said. “But he may be the only real person among you ghosts. My father told me that you had returned.”

  “I’m sure he told you many things,” Ren said, “including his mistaken notion that I was collaborating with the Federation.”

  “I’m not a ghost,” Ham said. “Not yet.” He started edging away toward the doorway from which he had come.

  “You didn’t search for me,” Asha said. “You didn’t seek the Prophet or the pilgrims trying to find the Transcendental Machine. Instead you helped the people who were trying to destroy the Geoffrey and everybody in it.”

  “Only they weren’t people,” Ren said. He raised his gun and shot Ham. The gun was an energy weapon, and Ham burst into flames.

  Riley looked at the body of his old shipmate burning like a torch. “Sorry, buddy,” he said and turned toward Ren. Ren raised his weapon toward Riley, but Asha knocked it out of his hand. Riley moved toward them. Ren looked from one to the other and turned toward the door from which he had come.