by Gunn, James
But I could not manage my dreams of Romi. They always ended with small Sirians eating their way through my belly while I stared down, helpless to control them or my temperature, leaving me helpless and weak, doomed to a lifetime as an invalid. And I told no one.
Finally my ordeal ended. My class completed its classwork and we were assigned to ships. Somehow I had managed to retain my status during my inner turmoil, and I joined the Kilsat as junior pilot-in-training. I left Romi behind as a second-cycle cadet and put her out of my mind.
I was happy. Space was my environment; Romi no longer haunted my thoughts or controlled my dreams. I was a natural pilot, responding intuitively to subconscious cues, as if my dear father were guiding my actions from his place of honor near the star that shall not be named. I made friends with my fellow spacers and filled my off-duty moments with good male fellowship. We bonded as Sirian crew members do in the unifying environment of space. We talked of challenges and accomplishments, of ambitions and achievement, and never of family or sacrifice.
The Kilsat made its first Jump during my maiden voyage. That took us beyond the narrow confines of our Sirian system. The experience shook many of my crewmates, but I found it exhilarating, not only space but the realization that the hidden universes within space were my real home. During the second Jump I was at the controls and gloried in the power of transcending time and space. All the universe was mine, I felt, and I dedicated my joy to my father’s memory.
By the time we made our third Jump we were in galactic space, surveying the magnificence of the Galactic Center. Xi told us about meeting with the Galactic Council. What he did not describe was the center itself—not the center of the galaxy but Galactic Center, where the representatives of the great peoples meet and the galaxy is governed. Galactic Center is an insignificant system of rocky planets orbiting an insignificant sun. No one would think of it as a place of greatness, as a place of any importance at all. And that, no doubt, is why it was chosen, along with the fact that it was uninhabited, at least by any member species. And although representatives to the Galactic Council and innumerable bureaucrats inhabit those planets, some for their entire lives, the destruction of the Galactic Center would mean little except to those personally involved.
To look at that impoverished system and realize its importance makes even the most robust Sirian realize the value of inner strength and the pitfalls of appearance. We had learned that principle from the shiftings of Komran beneath our extremities, but here it was brought home to us again.
We looked, we admired from afar, and we departed, learning nothing of the workings inside the capitol of the galaxy beyond what we had learned in the academy. But it was enough for simple spacers, and we pondered its meaning as we returned to Sirius and our lives there, now a crew in the true meaning of the word, functioning as the brain and central nervous system of the ship, working as a single entity. For the first time in my life I felt as I had when I was part of my father, at peace with my world, content in my way of life. The Kilsat had become my father, or, perhaps more accurately, now the Kilsat and my father were one.
But when we returned to Sirius, Romi came back into my life. It was time for the cadet cruises, and, by the evil goddess, she was assigned to the Kilsat. When I saw her, I knew my time of greatest temptation had arrived. Without a word to anyone, I went to the nearest two-person fighter craft, crawled through the tunnel that linked it to the ship, detached it from its mooring bolts, turned off the communications gear, and drifted away before I started the propulsion system.
I knew where I was going. I was headed for the nexus point that everyone knows and nobody dares use, the Jump that ends in orbit around the white dwarf without a name.
* * *
To speak truth, my reaction was not the awe and reverence that I expected. During the lengthy trip I had managed to neutralize the panic that had driven me from Romi, but I anticipated a psychic fulfillment that never came. The Companion was an ordinary white dwarf, shining wanly on a ruined desert of orbital space while Sirius burned brighter than any star above the Companion’s shawl of night. The Companion had not been stripped of planets, as mythology had told us. Instead, while I watched as if from a height, cinder after cinder swam into view. If they had once been gas giants, the gases had been blown away, leaving only a few charred fragments behind. If they had been habitable worlds like Komran, their atmospheres and seas had been stripped from them, along with all the living things that had evolved there. The Companion had consumed its own children long before life came to sentience on Komran.
My father was not there, nor was any other spirit. The desolation before me was matched by the desolation within.
What was there, as I discovered when my black mood eventually lifted, was a lonely beacon, like the sign of intelligent life in a lonely universe. I tracked it to a location near the Companion. There was no planet, no satellite, no ship, nothing within the discernment of my sensors that could send a signal.
The passage from the outer reaches to near-solar space took many periods during which I saw much closer the devastation caused by the Companion’s expansion phase. Finally I came upon the source of the signal: a battered escape capsule of an unfamiliar design turning slowly in the Companion’s wan radiance, getting just enough energy from its rays to sustain its limited operation.
I connected the capsule to my small ship. I could not decipher the instructions beside the capsule’s hatch—they were incised in a cryptic series of lines—but I finally found a button that set off explosive bolts. I sampled the atmosphere, which was within tolerable limits and without apparent toxins. Inside the capsule was a still functioning deep-freeze chamber, and inside the chamber was the ugliest creature I had ever seen—a creature with four weak extremities emerging at awkward angles from a shrunken and fragile central torso and topped by a strange growth dotted with openings and covered in places with threadlike tendrils.
Only later—my apologies to present company—did I discover that this was a human. This was the first human I had ever seen, certainly the first human any Sirian had ever seen except, perhaps, at the highest level of galactic leadership where, I learned later, human emissaries already were making their demands that soon would result in war.
But all of this was yet to come. Here, now, was this alien creature, and it was dead—or so nearly dead that the difference was imperceptible. If any other galactic had discovered this castaway, the end would have been certain, but Sirians have such fine control of their temperatures that freezing is not necessarily fatal. Indeed, Sirians have been discovered in hidden glaciers and been revived after being frozen for many hundreds, even thousands, of cycles.
I opened the chamber and set about reviving its occupant, elevating its temperature fraction by fraction, easing the transition from cell to cell, from external to internal, over a period of almost a cycle. Finally the occupant made a sound and shortly thereafter opened what I later learned were its viewing organs.
It made organized sounds that I later learned was something like, “What in the hell are you!”
But we got on and within a cycle, we were able to converse with the aid of my pedia. This human, a male, was part of an expedition to decipher a nexus chart that had been bought from galactic traders or sold by traitors—he never knew which—and all had gone well until flaws in the coordinates destroyed the ship and all his shipmates, and launched his escape module through the nexus into the Companion’s system. That I should have discovered the module was a chance beyond calculation, depending as it did upon my fleeing Romi and setting my course for the Companion.
The human told me his designation was “Sam.” He told me many things about Earth and about humans and their history and literature and art. We had nothing to do but communicate, and Sam loved to talk. He was, he said, making up for his long, silent, frozen cycles. He never realized that his stories about Earth horrified me: the struggles, the competition, the battles, the wars. Even in literature and art these b
loody activities were celebrated. I realized that I had to get this information to our leaders, and he—unaware that he had revealed humanity’s blood thirst and its inability to live in a civilized fashion with others—wanted to get back to his leaders with the information gathered about our precious navigation maps.
Of course he had no chance to get back. I did not tell him that when we left the Companion we would return to Sirius and Komran where he would be interrogated at far greater length and in far less pleasant conditions than on my vessel, cramped as it was. I could not let him return with his information, and I had to return with mine. And then, when he was well enough to travel and we were on our way to the nexus point, he sickened and died. The last words he spoke were, “You are an ugly son-of-a-bitch, Kom, but you’ve been a good friend way out here next to nowhere. It’s been great knowing you.”
I felt much the same way as when my mother ate my father.
When I got back to Sirian space, I discovered that my information had arrived too late. I had been gone for a dozen cycles, and the war was over. But the rumors of the Transcendental Machine were traveling fast. My leaders were concerned. Because I had spent so many cycles with an alien, and especially because that alien was a human, I was urged to volunteer for this pilgrimage.
I agreed, of course. My experience with the Companion had changed me forever. I was no longer a simple Sirian, bound by myths and biological imperatives. I had experienced both the reality and the unreality of others. I was prepared. And, more important, Romi had chosen another, who already had nurtured her larvae to maturity and suffered the consequences.
Why, you may wonder, did I spend such time and thought with Sam? I wondered myself. And then I began to see that when I reached the Companion I lost the reality of my father’s spirit and found Sam. I had begun to think of Sam as my father, and his loss affected me as much.
And he told me, during our long conversations, about the human family and its process of procreation. What if Sirians could procreate as partners, like humans? Could we transcend our biology?
CHAPTER TWELVE
Riley woke feeling relaxed and pleased with himself, the way he had felt when the world was new and he had not yet been wounded by its indifference, the way he felt after he had been with a woman. The cubicle even seemed to hint of passion and pheromones.
But that was all illusion. He knew now that the universe offered nothing for rational existence but heartache and pain, and he had not been with a woman for more than a year. The cubicle did not smell of a woman, it smelled of sweat and dirt and stale emissions, human and alien. And he had no reason to feel relaxed, here halfway between the known and the unknown, confined with enigmatic aliens in a tin can traveling toward holes in space at one-tenth light speed, protected from the universe’s hungry void by a fragile metal shell. And his pedia was silent. Not that this was unusual. It was often silent when he needed it the most, as if it were programmed not to comfort.
He slipped into his simple space coveralls, opened the cubicle door, slid himself out feetfirst, and climbed down the ladder. Asha and Kom were waiting for him.
“Kom wants to thaw Jon and Jan,” Asha said.
Riley turned to Kom. “Why?”
Riley’s pedia translated Kom’s rumble, “I thought you understood.”
“I understood your story,” Riley said. “You lost the human you had tried to save, and now you want another chance.”
“That’s only part of it,” Asha said.
“I understand the other part, too,” Riley said. Kom’s relationship with his dead father, if it had been anything like the one between Riley and his father, was not something he would have wanted to discuss. That is, presuming Kom’s story was true and not simply a convenient half-truth hiding a deeper, darker truth. “But the captain isn’t going to like it.”
“The captain,” Kom rumbled, “can’t refuse.”
That was true. When Riley and Kom confronted the captain, he waved his hand and said, “Do what you want,” as if it didn’t matter anymore. But it did matter, Riley knew, though why it mattered he wasn’t sure.
The captain had other worries.
“What’s wrong?” Riley asked. They were in the control room, but a control room more disordered than Riley had ever seen it. Crumpled paper nearly obscured the air-return vent and handheld pedias adorned several of the flat navigator panels, as if the captain was checking every calculation to find one in which he had confidence. And half the readouts were blank, as if the captain had erased them as Riley and Kom approached. “A disordered control room,” his pedia said, “is evidence of a disordered command.”
The captain looked at him as if it was a question too obvious to answer, and as if the answer was too intimately related to the responsibilities of decision for Riley to appreciate. “We have another Jump coming up,” he said.
Riley shrugged. Space travel was one Jump after another.
“The last one was off.”
Riley shrugged again.
“The next one may be off as well.”
“And it may not,” Riley said. “Whoever is sending you coordinates wants to get to his destination as much as you do, and probably doesn’t want to die, either, or spend eternity somewhere outside of space and time.”
“But he may not be as competent as we have been led to think.”
“After so many accurate nexus points in the uncharted space between spiral arms, it suggests a certain degree of reliability.”
The captain ran his hand through the untrimmed gray-flecked stubble on his head. “Even if he knows where he’s going and knows how to get us there, he may be cutting off our avenue of retreat.”
“Do you want to retreat?” Riley asked.
“I don’t know. Yes. No. No, I don’t want to go back,” the captain said. “But I don’t want to go forward blindly or to have my decisions preempted.”
Kom spoke up, surprising them both by his existence. “The passengers would rebel if you tried to turn back.”
The captain turned on him. “Fuck the passengers!” And then changed his tone: “No, wait. I don’t mean that. The passengers are important. But they were willing to turn back a couple of Jumps ago.”
“Fear, yes,” Kom rumbled. “Decision, no.”
“In any case,” the captain said, “you can tell the passengers that the coordinates come only to my pedia, and without me they could be stranded out here.”
Kom might have shrugged if he had shoulders. “Whoever is sending the coordinates would not like to be stranded out here, either.”
Riley did shrug. “So, you see?” he said to the captain. “Like everything else, your decision may be only an after-the-fact rationalization.”
The captain looked unappeased. “I don’t have to like it.”
“We’re past the point where likes and dislikes matter.”
“Go!” the captain said to them both. “You’re no help.”
Riley turned and led Kom to the storage room near the rear of the ship.
* * *
The crewman in charge of the storage room took one look at Riley and Kom and stood aside. “We have the captain’s permission to move the bodies,” Riley said.
The frozen bodies looked like replicas of the real Jon and Jan carved from ice and colored by hand. Kom lifted them gently from their cabinets, first Jan, then Jon, and lowered them onto a motorized gurney. They trundled it through corridors, careful not to brush brittle limbs against passageways or compartment hatches, until they had the gurney back to the passenger quarters.
Kom had an alien cubicle already chosen—bigger even than the one he had occupied. This one allowed him to position himself between the bodies of Jon and Jan. He closed the cubicle door.
It was, Riley thought, like a cocoon from which might emerge, eventually, three butterflies. The idea of Kom as a butterfly brought a smile to his face.
“You’re smiling!” Asha said. “You should smile more often. It lights up the room.”
“You, too,” Riley said.
She smiled and the passenger quarters did seem to brighten. In fact, it transformed her face from ordinarily attractive to something special, even beautiful. He felt as if he had never seen her before. He turned his gaze away before he revealed his reaction.
The Jump hit them then, without warning, as if the captain was punishing them for questioning his authority. Riley staggered and almost fell, but Asha absorbed the shock without apparent effort. Squeals and cries from the commons room provided evidence that the Jump was a surprise there as well.
This was a Jump as off-center as the previous one. The real world splintered around them like a mirror shattering from within. The hand Riley had placed behind him sank into the gelatinous substance the metal wall had become. Asha sprouted tendrils like a rotting potato and then split into pieces that recombined into grotesque new shapes. He fell through the floor into a stinking pit of writhing entrails that hissed and turned into serpentine aliens. One of them had the captain’s head. It sneered at him before it bared its teeth and struck. He felt its fangs sink into his belly. The pain of its entry turned into a fiery stream that surged through his veins until it reached his brain before everything disappeared and he found himself floating in a universe filled with diamonds against a background of impenetrable darkness, the diamonds connected by almost invisible traceries like a gigantic spiderweb.
He floated in their midst for a moment before he realized that he was the universe, or rather that he had expanded to fill the universe, and that the diamonds were the neurons in his head, each one filled with pain like exploding stars, and the web that connected them burned its intricate connections into his mind, and he was being torn apart by tides of gravity, by some internal black energy that scattered him everywhere and he could no longer keep himself together. And then a voice, like the voice of some ancient god, said, “Hang in there. This will be over soon.”