Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  Even the academy instructors began to notice. Ordinarily they let the cadets create their own culture, but now they understood that the culture had been taken over by a newcomer who was flouting tradition and its custodians. They feared novelty, since their standard practices had worked for so long. They tried to break my will and my power over the group. They separated me from the others, but I had warned my team of this possibility and deputized Samdor to serve in my absence. They imprisoned me for a time on imaginary charges and sent me out to do battle alone. I survived and returned with grisly proof of my success.

  Finally they recognized my leadership and the success of my organization, and let me install my program for the entire academy, forming the cadets into cohesive units and letting each choose a commander—with my approval—and preparing for battle with the same kind of strategic planning. Casualties dropped. Successes mounted.

  Life at the academy was not all skirmishes with the savages or combat training within the yard. We were being prepared to be the new Dorian military leaders. We studied military strategies, combat maneuvers, enough space navigation to understand—and sometimes check upon—the navigators, weapons and weapon repair, chemistry and physics and mathematics, but no literature or art. That we had to acquire—if we had the taste for it—in our leisure hours, such as they were, and secretly, for they were considered suspicious if not, perhaps, subversive.

  We had only limited exposure to current events and politics. We knew about alien civilizations—their citizens were considered lesser creatures who had ventured, almost by accident, into space and could serve, at best, as suppliers to Doria, and, at worst, as servants and their lands potential Dorian dominions. Alien languages were not part of the curriculum. “Let them learn Dorian” was the official attitude. Although I did not understand why this was so, I sensed that this was a mistake. We could not depend upon translators, particularly alien translators, nor even upon mechanical translators. Within each language, I came to believe, was the heart and soul of the people who spoke it. So, as I did with literature and art, I studied alien languages, beginning with the language of the savages to the south. It was then I learned what moved them and how to work with them in ways other than combat.

  In our fourth year we learned of humans—these pretentious interlopers who emerged from their single system as if they were the equals of the long-established Dorians and the others, who, though unequal, had been part of the galactic scene for long-cycles. Our instructors let us know, not by word but by intonation, that humans were inconsequential, that they were nothing to be concerned about except as they disturbed the aliens whom we allowed to coexist.

  This, perhaps, was a Dorian error that was almost fatal, not simply to us but to the entire galactic civilization that had existed for so many long-cycles in equilibrium—an uneasy equilibrium like supercooled water but equilibrium all the same.

  And then it was time for graduation, deliverance from the petty tyranny of the academy and into the great tyranny of military service. But our instructors had one more graduation barrier for us to hurdle—one final hand-to-hand combat to the death for a pair of matched champions—and I learned that the academy may yield but it does not forget. It matched me against my old tribe-mate and second-in-command, my best friend, Samdor.

  I would have refused, but it would have meant death to us both. Samdor did refuse, but I persuaded him that it was better to kill or be killed in combat than to be executed as a coward. I knew he was no coward. He loved me, as he, and I, had loved Alidor. I wanted him to kill me, to end this misery we Dorians called living, but in the end, in front of the jeering instructors and the quiet cadets, something in me deflected his blows and parried his thrusts. I had practiced survival too long.

  I killed Samdor and with that blow became a true Dorian.

  * * *

  Our superiors assigned us to military posts by lot, they said. Only later did I learn that the system was manipulated to place the new officers where they thought we should go, just as the combat by lots was fixed to pit friend against friend. I went to my post as the gunnery officer on a Dorian light-cruiser off the farthest Dorian outpost, where our empire met the humans. They were always encroaching with their inexhaustible numbers and appetites for land and conquest. I went with an empty heart, always seeing the eyes of Samdor as he accepted my fatal blow, seeing the light behind those eyes fade and go out. I tried to accept that, but what I could not accept was the expression of gratitude that flashed over his face at the moment of his death.

  Was death so welcome? Or was his love so much greater than mine that he wished to buy my life with his death?

  The journey to the outpost was long. They did not waste wormhole technology on newly commissioned officers, and we were jammed into the hold of a cargo ship like bales of hay. But we had little hay. We were on short rations from the start of the journey, and many would have died along the way had we been left on our own. Like in the military academy, the fittest were intended to survive. But I organized a small group of natural leaders to see that the rations were divided equally, and that we all lived in a state of semistarvation. Only one died.

  When we reached the fleet, I reported to the commanding officer. His name was Bildor. He was the biggest Dorian I had ever met, and his body was crisscrossed with the scars of battle—Dorian battle, I learned later. He looked at me as if he saw me as a potential rival, but I was clearly his inferior in everything but promise. He would gain nothing by challenging me, but he challenged my ideas instead. “So, you are the newly commissioned officer who thinks he has a better way of doing things?”

  “There is always a better way,” I replied with proper deference.

  “Tradition has brought us to this mighty empire,” he said.

  “New challenges arrive daily,” I said, “for which tradition has no responses.”

  “You will perform your duties as a proper Dorian,” Bildor said.

  I bowed my head and was dismissed. But I knew that Bildor was watching through his senior officers.

  We skirmished with human ships whenever we came across them. But between skirmishes we socialized. I met them, and other aliens, in bars or theaters. I learned a bit of human speech and what passed for humor between us both. We told jokes. I learned something of human history and the history of other species in the galaxy and compared them to our own. That was my education in xenology. I learned what made them drunk and broke down their limited reserves, and tried to hide from them what made Dorians drunk. Not that it would have mattered. Dorians become sullen and withdrawn when drunk on—shall I reveal it?—fermented hay.

  I even grew to like the humans, perhaps even more than I liked my superiors. My superiors were determined to make us hate the humans as much as we hated one another. They pitted us against one another for promotions, in what they called “fight days” that were carryovers from the military-school survival programs. I was clearly the best at personal combat, but after Samdor I refused to fight to the death. Instead, I defeated my opponents and spared their lives. Only one of my superiors dared to challenge me, and in his case I made an exception and killed him. That gained me a promotion to his position as second navigator, and freedom from challenges from below or above. Even Bildor seemed to relax his vigilance.

  So I made my way up in the Dorian service, from lowly officer to second-in-command, and then, when Bildor got killed in a personal duel with the commander of another ship, I got my own ship. I changed the discipline, did away with fight days, encouraged my subordinates to come to me with their problems, to make suggestions, and generally to work toward a harmonious crew.

  Change did not come easy. Dorians are herd creatures, as are most grazers, elevated to sentience long-cycles before by hard times. Some historians have traced the transformation to a tumultuous period of volcanic activity that contaminated the Dorian atmosphere with smoke and ash, causing the death of grass almost everywhere and the near-extermination of the Dorian people. Other scientist
s point to deep pits in the Dorian soil caused, they say, by meteoric bombardment raising clouds of dust and smoke that caused similar death and near-starvation. Whichever is correct—and perhaps both are—Dorians were forced to change. They had to learn. They had to invent. Most of all, they had to survive, often at the expense of another group or another individual. The most successful of these founded Grandor, so remote from Dorian experience and nature, and then the other cities of the northern hemisphere, and, more recently, the southern.

  When, over long-cycles, the crisis passed, those who had founded the cities under the pressure of necessity saw Dorians relapsing into their former indolence and herd mentality, and began a regime of recruitment and training such as I had experienced, with a system that set out to replicate the conditions that had produced the Grandorians. If nature could not be trusted to provide harsh necessity, the system would supply something similar.

  Humans, I learned, were more fortunate, if that is how it might be termed: Earth was not as benign as Doria, and humans had competitors against which they had to struggle, along with more frequent moments of cosmic catastrophe and mutating radiation. Humans’ view of their environment was not the gentle Doria but, as one human poet described it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Fortunate, I say, because humans evolved through struggle and their social systems evolved to ameliorate the pain of survival, not to replicate it. Their aggressive attitudes toward the universe are innate rather than nurtured. Dorians, on the other hand, have to be brutalized before they adopt the more aggressive attitude of humans.

  I thought it was time to change. Perhaps the Grandor system was needed at one time, but Dorians had passed that point. Curiosity, learning, the need to achieve, could be instilled at an early age through programs of education. Battle skills and obedience to command could be developed through programs that emulated real conditions rather than replicated them. Dorians, I thought, could be more like humans.

  I had two short-cycles to retrain my crew. The lower-ranking crew members were as resistant as the officers. Like them, they had survived the Dorian survival-of-the-fittest system, and they would surrender their attitudes, and their positions of privilege, reluctantly if at all. The process was like retraining an abused animal: repeated kindnesses and frequent strokings are required to reverse a lifetime of avoiding predators and the blows of masters.

  I was succeeding, I thought. Morale was higher. The crew seemed once more like my childhood herd, happy, responding better to requests than to orders, coming forward with suggestions, developing into a team rather than a group of individuals. There were throwbacks, to be sure, quarrels, batterings, surly responses, but they were growing progressively less frequent.

  And then the war broke out.

  * * *

  We never knew what started the war, or what was at stake. For long-cycles, after the legendary Galactic War, which probably was a series of wars initiated by a new emerging species, the star empires had worked at keeping the peace. And the uneasy truce that followed the human emergence had seemed a recognition of earlier folly. But it was a truce easily destroyed by a careless action, a misunderstood intrusion, a failure of communication. And then every empire turned upon every other.

  Wars are mass confusion; no one knows who is winning until one side turns and runs or loses its will to continue and sues for peace. Only the historians are able to decide who came out ahead and on what terms, and they are often wrong. Interstellar wars are far more difficult to evaluate. News of battles comes only after many cycles, and even then the information is unreliable. How many of the enemy ships were destroyed? How were they identified? What had their mission been? How many ships did the Dorians lose? What were our casualties? How many colonies were destroyed on each side, how many planets laid waste? How many replacement ships have been built? How many crews have been trained? Do we have sufficient resources to withstand the terrible drain of conflict?

  Many cycles will be required before any of this becomes clear. The historians are still computing.

  At first our enemy was the humans. They were the newcomers, the troublemakers. We fell upon them near the Sirian frontier, and massacred their ships. I tried to stop it, but I had no time after the orders came. And then the humans retaliated, their ships appearing in our midst out of wormholes that we did not suspect, or detect, and wreaked havoc on our fleet. Only the superior organization of my crew allowed the Ardor to survive, damaged as it was. We were the only ship in the fleet to emerge without a casualty, despite being in the midst of the action.

  At first the high command accused us of cowardice, but visual records proved the opposite. And then I was given command of a fleet and told to attack the humans in return. I disobeyed. I contacted the human fleet commander and spoke to her in my broken Glish and arranged a meeting. Face-to-face we worked out our differences and I returned to my superiors with the offer of peace. Again I was placed on trial for treason. I almost resorted to a personal challenge of the court, once more, but refrained and argued my case with all the urgency and eloquence I could command.

  Reluctantly the high command accepted the terms, and we allied ourselves with the humans against the Sirians and then with the humans and the Sirians against the Aldebarans, and with the humans, the Sirians, and the Aldebarans against the Alpha Centaurans. Finally, exhausted with battle, the galaxy strewn with broken ships, broken worlds, and broken creatures, we made a peace. Ten years of war, a thousand broken planets, and a thousand million casualties, and nothing more. Never again, we vowed, would we go to war. Anyone who broke the peace would be turned upon by all the others. Boundaries were established, spheres of influence were agreed upon, mechanisms for settling disputes were created. We would study war no more.

  I returned to Doria a hero, commander of a battle group that had won every engagement, the inventor of new strategies of command and tactics, but most of all, the crafter of peace. I thought I could challenge the high command. I thought my innovations in training and organization would provide a strategy for change. I thought I might even compete to be the successor to the High Dorian. But instead I was once more placed on trial for disobedience and treason, and escaped punishment only through the basic right of personal combat. The high command had succeeded once more. Doria had won but not in the Dorian way, and the high command, and Doria itself, was not ready to accept victory on any terms but those that emerged from its own traditions. It had used me and now was prepared to throw me away.

  I did not blame the high command or Doria. I wasn’t good enough. I realized my failings as a Dorian, as a sentient creature. Perhaps no one was good enough. Not on Doria, nor on any world. At least we had peace, and I decided to retire to a world at peace, to a galaxy at peace.

  But peace was not so simple. The galactic powers had to set up an interspecies board to evaluate new inventions and their potential for creating change and conferring superiority on one species or another. All such developments, like the human space elevator, had to be shared by all.

  And then came transcendentalism with all its mystery and promise. Now, perhaps, I could be good enough, and here I am.

  * * *

  The group dispersed with the silence that in galactic culture represented acceptance or, sometimes, approval, and sought sleep or rest or contemplation, as individual needs and species behavior patterns determined.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Riley awoke with the memory of Tordor’s story still winding through his head. He wondered if his pedia was responsible, but for once it was blessedly silent.

  When he emerged from his cubicle he found a group of galactics gathered in front of the view screen. He extracted a scanty first meal from the dispensers on the opposite wall: an ambiguous citrus drink in a sealed container with a built-in sipping tube and a bag of unidentifiable synthetic grain. He began sipping the drink as he moved to a spot just behind the group staring at the screen. A stranger would have wondered whether the equipment had been activated. The screen was alm
ost completely dark, with only a flicker of light in the upper right-hand corner that could have been mistaken for static.

  “A goodly number of our fellow pilgrims have risen early,” Riley said to Asha, who was standing behind the flower child.

  “Some do not sleep,” Asha said.

  “Like you.”

  “I rest.”

  “I don’t see Tordor.”

  “Perhaps his storytelling tired him,” Asha said.

  “Or maybe it was the artfulness,” Riley replied, and squeezed a bit of cereal into his mouth.

  “But it was a fine story,” Asha said. “What do you suppose he meant by ‘soul’?”

  Riley motioned to Asha that they should move away from the galactics gathered in front of them. He did not know how well they could hear—if they could hear; the flower child had no apparent auditory organs … but some conversations should be limited. “He was referring to a remark I made to him earlier—that we needed to understand each other better, to peer into one another’s souls. He dismissed it then as ‘human mysticism.’ We should note the Dorian capacity for irony.”

  Asha joined him in his strategic withdrawal, although she seemed impatient with his precautions. “The Dorians look plodding and passive, but they have a reputation for subtlety. Grazing leaves time for long, slow thoughts.”

  “A boy’s will is the wind’s will,” Riley’s pedia said, “and the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts.”

  That doesn’t make sense, Riley thought.

  “Rumination and ruminant come from the same root,” Asha continued. “Don’t underestimate Tordor.”