Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  But he could not be sure that Jon was dead. Being dead was a convenient way of avoiding difficult questions. Or if he was dead, how had he died and why?

  The guards watched him enter passenger quarters before they closed the airtight door behind him. Riley heard the lock engage. He didn’t like that, either, but it, too, was something he had to accept, at least for now.

  “What cannot be cured must be endured,” his pedia said. It was full of homilies like that as well as information that sometimes was valuable.

  The prospect of his cubicle was particularly unappetizing right now. When he got to the lounge some kind of ritual observance was in progress. The lounge was filled with participants—worshippers, perhaps, including the aliens for whom the humanoid oxygen environment was deadly or unpleasant—not only the flower child and the caterpillar but the aquatic and the coffin-shaped alien. Those who had heads and necks were looking upward toward the inner skin of the ship that served as a roof to the lounge and a protection from space and the stars. Or prevented passengers from observing the infinite and the eternal. Or joining them.

  The only person not participating in whatever ritual was unfolding was Asha. She, like Riley, was an observer. She stood just inside the port to the lounge, arms folded below her breasts. The worshippers were all facing toward the forward wall, but no one stood there. Apparently, the ceremony required no minister. He wouldn’t find out from that who had called them together.

  A mixed murmur emerged from the group. The alien words were so intermingled that Riley’s pedia had difficulty distinguishing any meaning, and then it singled out one particular stream of words for translation: “I am insignificant but I will be greater. My imperfections will be stripped away. As the pupa emerges from the larva, the adult will emerge from the pupa. No longer a child. Fully developed. Transformed. Perfected. The Transcendental Machine awaits my coming. The universe awaits my emergence.”

  Riley looked at Asha. She shrugged.

  At that moment, as if in response to the mongrel chant, the ship lurched. Riley looked up as if he were one of the worshippers. The spaceship skin above seemed to evaporate, letting in the chill of space and the terror of black infinity. The passengers floated like jellyfish in a sea of night. Riley felt his body turn inside out, as if he had been imprisoned in his own flesh and now all his organs had been liberated. He was paralyzed for an eternity, hurting in every fiber of his body. In front of him the worshippers seemed frozen. Those who had faces expressed mingled ecstasy and horror.

  Then the moment passed. His body felt normal again, and the ship’s hull closed around him. The worshippers moved and lowered their heads. Some of them started to wail.

  After a moment, Riley realized he knew what they had all experienced: it was a Jump from one nexus to another across a fold of space. For a few seconds, or an eternity—time had no meaning during the Jump—they had been outside their known universe of time and space, a state as truly alien as it was possible to be. Too bad, he thought, they had to come back to the same universe in the same old imperfect shapes. Maybe this was where the concept of transcendence had arisen—from the potential of the place Outside. But that had happened only after the beginnings of interstellar flight.

  Throughout the history of humanity, Riley thought, a few individuals, liberated from their everyday existences—by drugs or contemplation or divine intervention or madness—had achieved transcendence. They touched the infinite and brought back a sign—a feather, a stigmata, an engraved stone, a vision—and they tried to share it, with varying success, with those less able to fully access the direct experience. Sometimes, a few of those who were themselves unable to experience transcendence understood and responded with superhuman feats. Or created a religion.

  “Religion,” said his pedia, “is the opiate of the masses.”

  The glow always faded, the inspiration always became corrupted by everyday reality, the dream always became ritual, nothing lasted. Until now, with its promise of something real, a machine that offered transcendence. Not the feeling of transcendence or the illusion of transcendence but transcendence itself—real, observable, repeatable—but perhaps just as remote, as far from human grasp, as paradise itself.

  “A Jump,” he said to Asha.

  She nodded as if the event were too commonplace to deserve comment.

  “Who started the ceremony?”

  She shrugged.

  “You don’t know or you don’t care or no one started it?”

  “The last.”

  “That’s odd,” Riley said.

  “It’s an odd religion,” Asha replied. “Everyone is his or her own messiah.”

  “Including you?”

  She shrugged again.

  “For someone who has ventured her life on an unlikely mission, you don’t seem to be much involved.”

  “And you, too much,” she said.

  * * *

  As the worshippers scattered, Tordor stopped in front of Riley. “You are back,” he said. His syntax was improving—or rather the pedia’s ability to translate Dorian. “No guards.”

  “Jon confessed to a plot, the captain said,” Riley said. “Before he died, the captain said.”

  “Ah,” Tordor said. It was a sound that suggested a familiarity with the ways of the powerful.

  “How did this ceremony happen?” Riley asked.

  “Ah,” Tordor said. It was a sound that suggested a basic inability to understand the ways of sentient beings.

  “You seem to have an insatiable curiosity about your fellow travelers,” Asha said.

  “When your life may depend upon your companions, it pays to learn as much about them as possible,” Riley said, “including whether they are likely to answer some mystical call when you need them most. Or perhaps will sacrifice you to gain an advantage.”

  “If I may guess,” Tordor said, “murder, anxiety, ritual comfort.”

  “What?” Riley asked.

  “He’s answering your original question about how the service got started,” Asha said.

  “For you, as well?” Riley asked Tordor.

  “Ah,” Tordor said. “Worship with others, eat with others, fight with others.”

  “Another avenue to group solidarity,” Asha said. “You might consider it,” she said to Riley.

  “He can belong,” Riley said. “I’ll try to understand. We’ll see whose method works the best.” He turned to Tordor. “But what brought them together?”

  “No one,” Tordor said. “Everyone.”

  “He means the call to worship was spoken by none, understood by all,” Asha said.

  “I know what he means. I just find it hard to believe.” Riley looked back at Tordor. “Who was the first to come in?”

  Tordor swung his proboscis toward the weasel and the Sirian. “They here. Then—” He gestured toward the coffin-shaped alien, the flower child, the caterpillar, the aquatic, and then the others. “When all here, worship as one. No one first.”

  “Did you hear a call to worship?” Riley asked.

  “No call,” Tordor said.

  “You?” Riley asked Asha.

  She shook her head. “Why do you care?”

  “I want to know what everyone else knows. Clearly everyone else knows a great deal more about transcendentalism than I do. If I didn’t hear a call, and you two didn’t hear a call, and all these did, then that may mean I don’t know enough to be on this pilgrimage.”

  “That thought has crossed my mind,” Asha said.

  “They know more than they should?” Tordor said. It seemed to be a question. Did he mean “too much”?

  Riley shrugged, not knowing whether Dorians understood that gesture, either, and changed the subject. “You noticed the appearance of this part of space during the Jump?”

  “Dark,” Tordor said.

  Riley nodded. He turned on the vision plate that occupied almost an entire wall of the lounge. An interrupted Sirian myth play resumed. Riley quickly switched to the ship’s
forward view. Only a few faint stars appeared. He switched to a side view and then the other. Even fewer and fainter stars. The rear view, however, showed a vast river of stars. Clearly the ship was heading still farther from civilization.

  “Where are we going?” Riley asked. “Do either of you have an idea?”

  “Toward transcendence,” Asha said. A brief smile curled the corners of her lips. She had said that before.

  “There?” Tordor asked. He gestured with his proboscis toward the forward view that Riley had returned to.

  “Ah,” Riley said. It was a sound that suggested Tordor was right and those poor faint stars ahead were unlikely to nourish sentience much less some kind of technological civilization that could produce transcendence for its own species, and perhaps—though even less likely—for other species.

  “You know the captain,” Tordor said. “Competent?”

  “I would have said so,” Riley said, “but now I wonder. People change. People get cautious. People get frightened. Sometimes … people get bought.”

  “If transcendence is real and has escaped discovery until recently,” Asha said, “it must be in an unlikely place.”

  “If it is real,” Riley said.

  “Why are we all here, if it is not?” Asha said.

  “Wager lives, family, fortune,” Tordor said.

  “He means—” Asha said.

  “I know what he means,” Riley said.

  “The question is whether you mean what he means,” Asha said. “Whether you believe.”

  Riley shook his head. “I believe in what I can see and touch. What is knowable.”

  “Then why are you here?” Asha asked.

  “To be convinced,” Riley said. “This myth is exploding across the galaxy like gamma rays from a supernova. Some of you—maybe all of you—believe. If it’s true the reality is too important to miss. So I’m willing to gamble a couple of years of a not-particularly-satisfying existence to find out the truth about what a lot of otherwise smart creatures think is real.”

  “You talk too much,” said his pedia.

  “Maybe more,” Tordor said.

  “Maybe I’m willing to bet it all,” Riley said. “Maybe I’m not a total agnostic.” He laughed. His pedia wasn’t fooled. Neither were Asha or Tordor.

  “Or maybe you hope to transcend your not-particularly-satisfying existence,” Asha said, “or, like the captain, maybe you have still another motivation.”

  “Which brings us back to the captain,” Riley said, “and the question of where is he heading, and why? And can he be trusted?”

  “And who’s going to find that out?” Asha asked.

  She and Tordor both looked at Riley.

  “Ah,” he said. It was a sound a man makes after he has drawn the short straw.

  * * *

  The lock surrendered to Riley’s pedia without foreplay. The built-in alarm took longer. Asha and Tordor looked at Riley with greater respect, under the illusion that his skill alone was responsible.

  Riley eased open the door. No guards. That established a baseline for him: the captain’s overdependence on electronics. In the old days Ham always had trusted his A.I.s too much. Riley looked back and held up his hand toward Asha and Tordor with his five fingers spread. He eased the door shut and trotted down the passageway toward the captain’s quarters following the guide laid out in his mind by his pedia. The captain’s quarters were always close to the control room, and on this old cruiser that had to be centrally located, as far from potential combat damage as possible, and protected, like the control room, by armor.

  Outside the passenger quarters the odors were different. Preoccupied with the Jan mystery and the questions the captain would ask and the answers he might provide, as well as the increasingly annoying intrusions of his pedia, he hadn’t noticed it in his earlier excursion. The passenger quarters smelled alien; the mingled scents of a score of different creatures from a score of different worlds overpowered the smell of human and humanoid effluvia that had circulated through the ship for years until the air renewers gave up. Outside, on its separate air-renewal system, human sweat, respiration, and other emissions dominated. Riley wondered how he had ever endured it.

  “Humans have a unique ability to adapt and ignore,” his pedia said.

  The engine vibrations were pervasive and loud enough to cover his light footsteps, but not enough to conceal the unwary sounds of a crew member approaching.

  He dodged into a cross passageway and waited until the footsteps had passed. The trip didn’t take long—nothing on a ship was far from anyplace else—but he had to avoid discovery, and as he neared the nerve center of the ship, crew density increased.

  As he approached his goal, an alarm went off—a siren and blinking red lights. He turned his back to the passageway as if he were swinging toward the passenger quarters. Crew members pounded by him toward the compartments he had just left. When the movement ceased, he turned once more and found himself in front of the captain’s cabin. The control room would still be manned, but the captain’s cabin would have all the information available in the control room and maybe more.

  The lock on the captain’s cabin opened even more quickly than the one on the passenger quarters. His pedia improved with experience. Riley slipped inside. The cabin was empty. Cabin, of course, was a euphemism for a room that was small even by spaceship standards, big enough for a bunk that folded into one wall, a desk and chair that folded into another, a basin and toilet unit that folded into a third wall, and a fourth wall dedicated to dials and gauges.

  Riley looked at each dial and gauge in turn. He was no navigator. He had piloted a two-man fighter during the war, but he had been ferried to each engagement by a warship, along with a dozen other fighters, and any navigation necessary aboard the fighter was done by computer. But his pedia recorded and analyzed everything he looked at.

  “According to these, we have passed the last known nexus,” his pedia said, “and we’re heading farther out along this spiral arm than my charts record.”

  “If it isn’t listed,” Riley thought, “it isn’t known.”

  “You should not rely on my infallibility,” the pedia said. “My memory is not infinite. But you may be right. Anyway, we can learn nothing from this. We must get back before we are discovered.”

  “What about the captain’s log? Surely he makes entries there.”

  “The captain’s log is virgin.”

  “That breaks every regulation.”

  “Unless he records in another log.”

  His pedia? Riley thought.

  “Maybe. If so, he has it with him. The only electronic activity in the cabin is the repeaters, and I have observed that humans are never without their imperfect pedias. We must get back.”

  Riley searched the compact, impersonal cubbyhole. The bunk bed and the cupboard behind hid nothing other than neatly stacked clothing. Ham had always had a neatness fetish. The lavatory and toilet had only dispensers for soap and depilatory and disposable towels; their surfaces were spotless. The desk had only a voice-activated minicomputer and an electronic tablet, both built in. Both, his pedia assured him, had never been used. That was unlike Ham. When he had been the navigator on Riley’s fighter, he had fondled his gadgets as if they were women’s parts.

  The cabin not only was bare, it was barren. Except for the anonymous clothing in the cupboard, the cabin looked as if it had never been occupied. Riley surveyed the room in frustration, knowing that, as his pedia kept reminding him, his time was almost up.

  Behind him the airtight door opened.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?” the captain said.

  Riley turned. The captain was holding out his wrist pedia.

  * * *

  The captain was accompanied by the two humanoid guards who had escorted Riley back to passenger quarters.

  “Very likely,” Riley said.

  “I should have you thrown in the brig,” the captain said. He looked speculatively at the tw
o guards.

  “Where I could conveniently expire, like Jon?”

  “It would be far easier to simply eject you from the ship.”

  “But you won’t.”

  “Old friends?”

  Riley shook his head. “You’ve got an unruly and maybe rebellious group of passengers back there.”

  “Who staged a fight to create a distraction for you.”

  Riley nodded.

  “The woman seemed to be holding her own with the pachyderm creature.”

  “She’s handier than she looks.”

  “What’s going on, Riley?” the captain asked. “Why are you giving me all this trouble?”

  Riley looked at the two guards. The captain motioned with his head. “Wait outside,” he said.

  As soon as the airtight door closed behind them, Riley said, “Jan’s death was only the precipitating factor. This trip isn’t going to go well unless your passengers have confidence in your ability to take us to our destination.”

  “If there is one,” the captain said.

  Riley leaned back against the cabin wall and folded his arms across his chest. “There better be one.”

  “Unruly passengers are easily handled. When you control air, food, and fluids, rebellion stops quickly.”

  “The Space Authority would never let you have another ship if you returned without your passengers.”

  “What makes you think I want another ship?”

  “Moreover, these are exceptional creatures,” Riley said. “They made it this far and survived a sabotaged vator—”

  “With my help.”

  “And, as you can see, your locks and alarms are inadequate. I think it’s time you made the passengers full partners in this project.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “They need to know where you’re going and what your motives are.”

  “The second part is easiest,” the captain said. “I’m sure you haven’t forgotten our last mission together.”