Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  * * *

  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.”

  “Me and the sphinx,” she said, and would say no more.

  He got even less from the aliens he tried to engage in conversation, and decided to return to his cubicle for contemplation. But that was not to happen.

  The crew had its own quarters and lounge. They were even more off-limits to passengers than the passengers’ quarters were off-limits to the crew except for repairs or replenishing. That was why the discovery of a crew member’s body in a passenger cubicle was a shocking event. The crew member was Jan. The cubicle was Riley’s.

  * * *

  The head of security appeared first. He was a small, waspish humanoid alien—an oxygen-breather who nevertheless carried a vaporizer that he resorted to regularly like a Victorian dandy with his perfumed handkerchief—who did nothing but check to make sure that Jan was dead and that no weapons were visible. The medical officer was human. He came right behind the head of security. He climbed into the cubicle and examined the body without moving it. Then came the captain. Riley saw him from a distance as he entered the passenger quarters. The captain climbed the rungs of the ladder, looked in at the body, climbed back down, scanned the motley crowd of aliens and the two humans, and disappeared the way he had come. As far as Riley could discern, the captain’s facial expression had not changed. The head of security ordered two human assistants to remove the body and carry it on a litter out the door into the crew’s quarters where, Riley guessed, it would undergo an autopsy for cause of death. From his own discovery of the body and its unnatural rigor, he thought he knew what it was. Once the cubicle was empty the head of security crawled up into it, closed the door, and spent several minutes inside before emerging and leaving the passenger quarters. No one had said a word.

  The passengers who were still gathered around his cubicle looked at one another in silence, looked at the cubicle, and looked at Riley. Riley shifted uncomfortably. Finally, the annoying human woman broke the silence.

  “Somebody doesn’t like you,” Asha said.

  “Or you don’t like somebody,” Tordor grunted.

  Riley thought he detected Dorian humor.

  He shrugged. “Nobody would mistake Jan for me,” he said, “and if I wanted to do away with someone, I wouldn’t leave the body in my own cubicle.”

  Nothing happened for twenty-four hours. Riley knew what was going on: the captain had convened a court of inquiry. He would preside, as regulations required, unless his duties demanded his presence elsewhere, in which case he would delegate his place to his second-in-command, or if some emergency required them both, his head of security. The first sessions of the court would meet in the crew’s quarters.

  While that was going on, the other passengers approached him individually. Some of them offered their sympathy, as if Jan’s death had been a personal loss to Riley, or as if the loss of any human affected the entire species. Others, if Riley and his pedia interpreted them correctly, congratulated Riley, as a member of the human species, for a good death and a happy translation to a better life; or for Jan having been reunited with the great soul of his people; or for being fortunate enough to have escaped into the Great Nothingness from an existence schooled in pain; or they expressed the hope that Jan would be reborn into a superior existence or a superior universe; or, best of all, that in his demise he might have achieved the transcendence they all were seeking.

  Their intentions were something else. Riley knew that while they were mouthing all the right words, they were evaluating Riley’s relationship to the dead man and his possible relationship to the death itself, but, more important, how this event would affect the pilgrimage and Riley’s place in it, and whether Riley’s potential weakness would make him an easier target for elimination or would, at the least, remove him as a rival for leadership; or if, indeed, he had killed Jan and could avoid punishment, whether he was more of a threat than ever.

  As to what he might be threatening, Riley was no closer to figuring that out, except for knowing that it wasn’t Jan that his presence might be threatening.
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  The appearance of the court of inquiry cut short Riley’s re-evaluation of his new situation. The court was less than impressive. In the limited confines of the passengers’ lounge, the captain sat on one of the stools that extended from the wall, removed his pedia from his wrist, and placed it on the table that slid out from the wall, as if to say, “Everything said before this court will be recorded and analyzed and subject to penalties for perjury or obstruction.”

  The captain was a large man with short legs, almost as if he had been cut down to fit into spaceship dimensions. His heavy black eyebrows met over his nose, a nose that overshadowed a dapper mustache—all this in defiance of fashion and genetics. His dominant feature, though, were his eyes; they were blue, and fierce like those of a desert Arab.

  His second-in-command, an athletic blond human, sat on his left, his head of security, the waspish humanoid, on his right. A couple of humanoid guards stood on each side of the entrance and summoned witnesses one by one. The captain saved Riley for last. Riley thought it was a psychological ploy, though it might have been merely an investigator’s strategy.

  At last Riley stood in front of the captain, rejecting the easy comfort of a nearby stool.

  “Riley,” the captain said, “this is a serious business.”

  “Death is like that.”

  “You found the crewman?”

  “As you know.”

  “Describe the circumstances.”

  “I was returning to my cubicle at the end of my twelve-hour wake cycle—”

  “You spend only twelve hours awake?”

  “I like to spend a few hours alone before my sleep cycle, and a day isn’t very long to recover from days without sleep. When I opened the cubicle door, I saw the body. I recognized the crewman as one I had shared the cable ride with—Jan, he called himself.”

  “And then?”

  “I sounded the alarm.”

  “You didn’t check to see if the crewman was dead?”

  “I’ve seen many dead men.”

  “You didn’t touch him?”

  “I didn’t need to. I could feel death’s icy breath.”

  “He was frozen,” the captain said.

  “So I assumed,” Riley said.

  “It seems likely that the deceased sneaked into the passengers’ quarters when nobody was in the sleep area, crept into your cubicle, and was surprised by a quick freeze from the long-sleep nozzles.”

  “Possible but unlikely,” Riley said. “The cubicle was locked and with a combination that I reset. The long-sleep nozzles were inactive. I checked. And Jan had no possible reason to seek me out.”

  “He also had no reason to jump ship at Terminal nor to sign aboard the Geoffrey.”

  “No apparent reasons.”

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Obviously he had reasons. Some obvious—he didn’t like his previous berth, the crew or the captain didn’t like him, he was in trouble for infractions of rules or laws, or he simply wanted adventure. Or perhaps some more subtle—he was paid or persuaded by someone else to join the Geoffrey for a purpose yet undisclosed, he was a convert to transcendentalism, he had some personal reason to seek transcendence…”

  “Enough,” the captain said. “This board is adjourned until further notice.”

  The captain paused at the door, after motioning the others to leave before him. “If this is some kind of double-reverse trick, Riley, or we find evidence that you had a hand in Jan’s death, this trip will be your shortest.”

  “Captain,” Riley said, “I’m as innocent as you.”

  But the captain was long gone.

  * * *

  The lounge filled with passengers as soon as the captain’s court had left. Even the aliens from the other environmental venues—the flower child, the aquatic alien, the caterpillar—joined the group.

  “The court decided…?” Tordor asked.

  “Nothing,” Riley said.

  “You tell?”

  “Nothing. I had nothing to tell them. You?”

  “Also.”

  “And them?” Riley indicated the rest of the group.

  “Them, too.”

  Surprisingly, the weasel stepped forward. His arm was half regrown. He spoke in hisses that suddenly Riley’s pedia changed into language. “… beginning,” the weasel concluded. He peered up at Riley.

  “The captain and his crew not trusted,” Riley’s pedia backed up to retrieve. “This death only beginning.”

  “That is only a suspicion,” Riley said, his pedia translating the speech into a series of modulated hisses that surprised even Riley as they emerged from his limited vocal apparatus. “And the death is of a crew member, not a pilgrim.”

  The Sirian moved into the little group. “I overhear,” it said. Riley’s pedia was much quicker at picking up the guttural language. “We depend upon crew and officers to take us where we wish to go. They can take us wherever, sell us, remove us one by one and keep the money each of us has paid for this journey.”

  The flower child spoke like the rustling of leaves in the wind. The pedia was silent. Tordor translated. “It says, ‘This gathering has many talents—captain, crew, navigator. If must, can run ship.’”

  “Passengers must trust their ship and its crew,” Riley said. “This is no different. The person killed was a crew member, not a passenger, and his death may have had many purposes, but one of them was not to threaten this pilgrimage. Perhaps to threaten a pilgrim.”

  Riley’s pedia chose Dorian to translate, and from Tordor the statement spread around the room. Some seemed to be in agreement; others seemed disturbed.

  “You,” Asha said, turning to Riley. “You’re the pilgrim?”

  “That’s possible.”

  “Then another logical conclusion might be that you are a nexus of violence,” Asha said. “Beginning with the attack on the Terminal waiting room to the cutting of the vator cable, to this murder in your cubicle. With the first two, the focus could have been any of us, but now, with Jan’s death, you are clearly the nexus. You may be the lightning rod that brings down destruction on all of us.”

  The others, in their own ways, indicated interest.

  “You and the captain think alike,” Riley said. “But lightning rods also have the property of guiding electricity harmlessly into the ground. While I’m alive and attracting attacks, the rest of you are not—unless you get too close, as in the climber.”

  “Or,” Asha said, “you may have begun a process to eliminate everyone who shared the cable ride with you, once the attack on the cable failed.”

  The others gave him more room. No one translated Asha’s remark, and Riley didn’t know whether they all understood, but somehow he thought they did. His pedia was silent. No doubt they had pedias of their own.

  “On the other hand, Jan’s death in my cubicle may have been intended to divert suspicion from someone else,” Riley said.

  The others seemed to digest that information.

  “Maybe I’ll be able to tell you more soon,” Riley said. “The captain said he would reconvene his court when he had more information.”

  He nodded at Tordor and touched Asha on the shoulder as if to say that he forgave her channeling the distrust of the captain and the crew toward fear of him. He climbed the ladder into his cubicle. It was still chilly, but he was used to death and cold. Suddenly superstitious, perhaps, he stuffed a sock into the long-sleep nozzle and went into what he hoped would be a short sleep.

  The sleep was even shorter than he planned. Only three hours had passed when someone banged on his cubicle door. Riley opened it with his toes and peered past them at the ugly face of the head of security.

  “The captain wants to see you.”

  “The desire is mutual,” Riley replied.

  “Huh?”

  “I’m coming.” Riley had lain down fully dressed. He slid from his cubicle and climbed down the ladder. “Lead on,” he said.

  The head of security tried to take hi
s elbow but Riley’s look said that he would be touched only at the other’s peril. The other led him down passageways familiar in their contours and appearance but new in context until they arrived at a small room that had a table and attached benches and food dispensers in the wall. His pedia identified it as the crew’s mess. On the far side of the bench sat the captain. He was alone.

  “Sit down, Riley.”

  Riley sat opposite the captain. “What’s up, Ham?”

  “You’ll call me ‘Captain.’”

  “As you prefer.”

  “Jon has confessed,” the captain said, “that he and Jan had been paid to kill you in a way that would look like an accident.”

  “Why would they do that?” Riley said.

  “That’s what I’d like you to tell me, because it seems likely that Jan was trying to rig the long-sleep nozzles to kill you when he was overcome.”

  Riley was silent.

  “Or,” the captain continued, “you discovered him, rendered him immobile or unconscious, and turned on the long-sleep nozzles yourself.”

  “How would I do that?” Riley asked.

  “We’ve been around a long time, you and me,” the captain said. “We’ve learned a lot of ways to kill.”

  “I had no reason to kill Jan,” Riley said, “and he had no reason to kill me. I’d like to speak to Jon.”

  “You can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “He’s dead.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The two humanoid security guards escorted Riley back to passenger quarters. They wanted to take hold of his arms, but Riley glanced at each, and they stopped. He didn’t know their species’ capabilities but his look said he was confident that he could handle either one of them, or both if necessary. Security guards, whatever their species, believed in their invincibility, but Riley’s air of confidence made them hesitate and decide not to take the chance. His choice was simpler: violence would serve no purpose except to relieve the frustration he felt at the Jan situation—now the Jan and Jon situation. The captain would answer no questions about Jon’s death, and Riley had to accept the captain’s statement or cause a confrontation long before such a tactic would be useful.