Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  And in that moment I recalled to memory the instructions for reinstating the cryogenic features of the sleeping compartment, performed the necessary adjustment, and turned it on, surprising my symbiote—and that had been my purpose from the beginning: to kill the bacterium that had taken control of my life and my will, even if it meant my own death in the process. The overwhelming grief—real as it was, real as it had to be—was the tool I used to deceive my symbiote long enough to let me achieve my end, and its.

  Now I learn that I failed and that Jon, in despair after my action, found a way to follow me into that long, cold sleep. But Jon will not awaken, and I am alone and afraid. In my desperation I betrayed the drive toward the transcendental that this voyage represents. My only hope is to pursue the final reward that Jak held out to us. If we found the Transcendental Machine, he told us, we could be reconstituted as a full karass, our clonemates restored from our memories and our genes.

  But, alas, my symbiote is awakening, and I am afraid that Jak lied to us again.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The captain’s barge was a complete ship except for the lack of food gardens. Instead it was equipped with a supply of dried and frozen foods adequate to keep a handful of passengers alive between planets or while navigating to rescue, and an atmosphere recycling unit. Adequate, that is, if the passengers were human or humanoid enough to be sustained by human food. The ship consisted of only two sparse cabins—a passenger compartment with attachments for full-body hammocks and a tiny control cabin. And an engine room and a tank to store liquefied hydrogen to fuel the thermonuclear engines. Although this far from civilization, no amount of food or fuel was likely to be more than a gesture at survival.

  The ship was crowded and smelled like a mixture of human sweat and alien effluvia and had no artificial gravity, but it was a ship, and a glorious escape from the claustrophobia of the Geoffrey.

  At the last moment the barge crew had been joined by the enigmatic coffin-shaped alien. It had shown up at the airlock, and Tordor said, “This person wishes to join us.” How he knew this was a mystery to Riley, who had heard nothing and neither had his pedia; but much in alien communication was beyond human capabilities to perceive, much less to understand. Perhaps Tordor was pretending or making it up, but the alien creature was there, waiting to board the barge with them.

  “It wasn’t on the list the captain approved,” Riley said.

  “The captain won’t object,” Tordor said.

  “Let it come with us,” Asha said.

  It was a good thing, too. As soon as the barge cut loose from the Geoffrey, the alien floated to the control room, extruded cable-like arms, inserted them into holes beneath the controls, and made small clicking sounds.

  “This person says that the computer program has errors, but it has fixed them,” Tordor said.

  “I’m not sure I want an alien creature I don’t know, and have no way of knowing, determining whether this ship functions the way it is supposed to,” Riley said. “Not to mention its competence to detect and fix computer errors in a system it has never seen.”

  “We all trust the mechanisms we have created to enable us to travel and survive in this unforgiving environment,” Asha said.

  “All the more reason not to have some alien thing or apparatus fooling around with them,” Riley said.

  “The computer is a thinking machine,” Tordor said. “Our fellow pilgrim is a machine that thinks. The computer doesn’t care if it survives; it will do what it is programmed to do. Our fellow pilgrim programs itself and wants to survive.”

  “It is a machine then?” Riley said.

  “What it is the creature will reveal when it is ready,” Tordor said.

  “And why does it want to survive?”

  “That, too, it will reveal when it is ready.”

  “And what makes it competent to program the computer?”

  “It is a machine that thinks very well,” Tordor said.

  “Let it take over the ship’s functions,” Riley’s pedia said.

  “Let it take over,” Asha said. “And think about this: the captain had good reason to get rid of us. We’re the troublemakers among the passengers.”

  “There’s that,” Riley admitted.

  The coffin-shaped alien continued to probe the ship’s control panel.

  “This person says that the hydrogen supply is low,” Tordor said. “The gauges read full but there is only enough hydrogen to get us to the surface of the planet, not enough to enable us to take off again.”

  “Hah!” the weasel said. “The captain takes no chances.”

  The flower child made swishing sounds.

  Riley had a hard time believing that his old comrade-in-arms would deliberately maroon him. The others, maybe. But then he reflected on the captain’s behavior during the journey and asked himself if he really knew the captain anymore. “Maybe he drained the barge’s supply to fuel the Geoffrey and the fuel gauge failed to record it properly.”

  “And maybe the computer program failed at the same time,” the weasel said.

  Riley shrugged. He didn’t believe it, either, but then he didn’t trust the coffin-shaped alien. “We’ll have to go back,” he said.

  “Too late,” Asha said. “The Geoffrey has already departed.”

  Riley looked at the control screen that showed only the fading glow of exhaust from the thermonuclear propulsion of charged hydrogen atoms.

  “This creature says that if we land near a body of water it can use the thermonuclear engine to separate hydrogen from water,” Tordor said.

  “How long will it need?” Riley asked.

  “No longer than we need to explore a nearby city,” Tordor said.

  * * *

  And it was so.

  The descent to the planet surface was smooth. Riley could not have done it as well himself. The coffin-shaped alien put the barge down without a bump on the beach of a green-frothed sea within sight of a group of buildings that resembled a city, if a city had been built by aliens with alien ideas about architecture and livability. It was curiously vertical.

  On the way down they had observed the condition of the planet, which was in an ice age, with ice caps extending far into what might once have been temperate zones and glaciers probing farther toward the equator, whose seas still had liquid water. The coffin-shaped alien had detected no electronic emissions or unusual thermal concentrations.

  “The sun has reddened,” Asha said. “It no longer supplies the energy it once did.”

  “Maybe that’s why the city builders abandoned the planet,” Riley said.

  “If they abandoned it,” Tordor said.

  “There’s no sign of technology in operation,” Riley said.

  “There’s no sign of a technology we recognize,” Tordor replied.

  The ship’s computer had a rusty voice like a hermit who hadn’t talked for most of a lifetime. “The planet’s atmosphere has been checked and is breathable for oxygen-breathing creatures, though cool according to human standards. The soil has been checked for biota and injections have been prepared to immunize against potentially dangerous bacteria and unusual elements and molecules. For humans, of course.”

  “This creature says that the ship’s computer is trustworthy and capable,” Tordor said.

  “I wish you would call it something besides ‘this creature,’” Riley said.

  “This creature says it can be called ‘Trey,’” Tordor said.

  “‘Trey,’” Riley repeated. “I had a dog named Trey.”

  “Trey means three,” his pedia said. “That may have some significance.”

  Riley and Asha submitted themselves to air-blown injections inside the airlock. Tordor and the weasel refused them, and the coffin-shaped alien not only didn’t need them, it was going to stay in the ship along with the flower child, who couldn’t move fast enough to keep up. The four explorers chose hand-weapons from the lockers, Riley and Asha put on jackets, and they stepped onto the alien planet
.

  It was a bracing moment, as the first steps on an unfamiliar world always are. Partly it was the experience of emerging onto solid ground with real gravity and real air after the long artificial life-support of a spaceship. Mostly, though, it smelled different—not only fresh after the recirculation of air used and reused uncountable times by humans and aliens, but differently fresh when it was an alien planet, like the scents of a foreign restaurant multiplied a thousand times.

  The look of it was different, too. The hills and valleys and mountains were different shapes, the sea was a different color, and the sands and soil had different textures and no doubt different compositions. The sounds were different, as well: the wind made an odd, keening sound in the ear, and somewhere alien creatures spoke or complained or wailed—it was hard to tell if they were manufactured by living creatures or the planet itself.

  It all took a great deal of getting used to. But they didn’t have time. Strange animals appeared fleetingly behind hillocks or splashed in the alien sea. The exploring party pointed them out to each other and compared them to creatures they had known. But they were all subtly different. The land animals often had eight spindly legs or maybe six and two manipulating limbs in front, and the sea animals they could glimpse were oddly shaped, compressed in places familiar creatures were not, and expanded in others.

  “They’re like wolves and rabbits and dolphins,” Asha said.

  “Yeah,” Riley said, though he had never seen a wolf or a dolphin and realized that Asha hadn’t, either.

  “Creatures evolve to occupy environmental niches, but from different beginning points,” Asha said.

  “Evolution is a force that acts upon us all,” Tordor said. “The question is: what has it produced in this arm of the galaxy, and how will that affect us?”

  “Or: how has it already affected us?” Asha said.

  “You think this arm has influenced our own?” Tordor asked.

  “Someone discovered or created the nexus points,” Asha said, “and someone moved this system or built cities on this planet before the system drifted out of the local arm—cities that have not yet crumbled.”

  “The Dorians claim we discovered the nexus points,” Tordor said.

  “And the Sirians claim they discovered them,” the weasel said, “and so did every other civilization we have encountered.”

  “Except humans,” Asha said.

  “It’s a good bet that creatures from this arm were more advanced than any in ours,” Riley said. “Look at that city!” He gestured toward the buildings that loomed in odd outline a kilometer or so away beyond the coastal hills. “It must have been abandoned a million cycles ago, and yet it still stands, with no apparent signs of deterioration.”

  They had started toward the city when Tordor whirled back toward the barge. The flower child was standing in the open hatch swinging its fronds frantically.

  “It says we are under attack,” Tordor said.

  * * *

  And it was so. The doglike creatures with eight legs were running toward them from the hillocks and over the sands, and strange creatures with tentacles were rising from the sea. They drew their weapons.

  “There’s too many of them,” Riley said. “Tell the flower child to get back inside and protect the ship while we retreat to the city.”

  Tordor gestured at the distant ship, and the flower child retreated and closed the hatch. Tordor turned and led the rest of them toward a gap in the hills that opened from the beach toward the city. They moved rapidly. The doglike creatures were quick, scuttling more than running, but they fell behind. Then the city was in front of them, clustered in the valley below, even stranger up close.

  The city was well preserved, as if it were a museum exhibit protected under glass. Slender translucent towers with jagged offsets and twists were scattered without apparent order across glassy surfaces. There were no streets, just crooked spaces between buildings where nothing grew and not even dust particles could find traction.

  “How did they get around?” Riley asked, and Asha pointed at strands of transparent materials that connected the buildings near their tops and glowed in the reddened sunlight.

  It was a magical city, a fairyland that would have captured the imagination of a million dreaming children.

  “‘A rose-red city half as old as time,’” Riley’s pedia said.

  “How long has it been abandoned?” Riley asked. “A million cycles? A billion?”

  “Somewhere between those,” Tordor said.

  “And still standing,” the weasel said. Even it seemed impressed.

  “What makes you think it’s abandoned?” Tordor asked.

  “There’s no movement,” Riley said. “No hot spots.”

  “Maybe they’re night creatures,” Tordor said. “And cold-blooded.”

  “We’ll see,” Riley said.

  They moved down toward the city, Riley first, followed by Asha, Tordor, and the weasel. There were no roads or streets, as if the city builders hadn’t needed surface transportation or had outgrown it. The surface was rough and rocky underfoot until they reached the valley and the beginning of the glassy surface they had noticed from the hills.

  They moved cautiously between the buildings, which up close seemed even stranger than they looked from the hills, as if they had not been so much built as extruded. Nothing moved. The only sound was the odd swooshing of air currents as they struggled to find their way between staggered structures. Overhead the traceries of translucent strands glowed in the descending sunlight, but now they could see that in places the strands were broken; fragments remained on the surface beneath, along with accumulated dust, assorted debris, broken pieces of something that looked like wood, and an occasional plant that had taken root.

  Riley and Asha walked carefully on the glassy surface but Tordor and the weasel were more sure-footed. Tordor strode forward confidently; the weasel scuttled behind.

  The structures seemed to have no entrances and no apertures at all within reach, although they seemed open, even lacy, from about a third of the way from the surface level to their tops.

  “Curioser and curiouser,” Riley’s pedia said. “Be very careful.”

  Tordor said, “Whoever built these structures came from above.”

  “They flew?” Riley said.

  “Or they climbed,” Asha said.

  “And there they are now,” Tordor said.

  “Where?” asked the weasel.

  “There!” Tordor said, and pointed toward the strands that connected the translucent structures in front of them.

  Spider-like creatures were swarming down the traceries, which now obviously seemed much like webs.

  “I think retreat is in order,” Tordor said.

  But as they turned they noticed that the webs behind them were filled with dark scuttling creatures as well.

  “We’re trapped!” the weasel squeaked.

  “This way,” Asha said, leading the way down an alley-like passage between structures. Riley followed. Tordor came more slowly. The weasel sprinted ahead of them all until it stopped in front of another web clustered with creatures.

  “They’re acting as teams,” Asha said. “Trying to turn us back into the city. Odd behavior for arachnoids.”

  “Like pack animals,” Riley’s pedia said.

  “I think we’d better get out,” Riley said, and lifted his hand weapon. An explosive missile destroyed the bottom of the web ahead, scattering shards of translucent material and dark fragments of aliens. Those still alive scuttled back toward the top and sides and into apertures at the top of structures.

  Riley’s group moved forward rapidly under the web, slipping occasionally on the slick surface beneath, and reached the edge of the city. Dark figures had reached the surface behind and were racing toward them.

  Riley shot again at a nearby building and sent a broken slab crashing to the ground, temporarily blocking pursuit. “They’ll climb that soon enough,” he said. “Let’s get back to
the ship.”

  “This expedition has been a disaster from the beginning,” his pedia said.

  As they reached the passage through the hills, he said, “Tell me again, Asha, why we decided to explore this world.”

  * * *

  The seashore was deserted and the captain’s barge stood closed and silent beside the restless alien sea. From their side they couldn’t see whether a hose still stretched from the ship to the sea.

  As soon as they descended from the hills, the eight-legged creatures—smaller versions of the city arachnoids—reappeared and began pouring over the dunes on either side of the ship. Riley’s group raced toward the barge. As he ran, Tordor prodded his forward leg with his proboscis, signaling to the ship with a device whose function Riley had only guessed. But the ship’s hatch remained closed.

  “Faster!” Riley shouted and turned to fire an explosive bullet at the nearest group of attackers. A sport of red sand erupted like a gush of blood, and the wave hesitated. Riley fired at the group racing from the other side. It too paused before it came on again.

  Now they were only a hundred meters from the ship and Riley could see that the hose had been retracted. He turned and fired once more toward the nearest group. One of the alien creatures had pressed forward, however, and was close enough to grab the weasel by one arm, too near to shoot. Riley grabbed the weasel and pulled. The arm held by the arachnoid broke free, and they were at the ship, looking up at the unbroken flank, turning to meet the attackers, when the hatch opened and a ramp tumbled out to let them in.

  Riley turned in the hatchway as the ramp retracted, kicking away clutching mandibles, and seeing the creature that had attacked the weasel plunging an extrusion from its forward part deep into the weasel’s lost arm. And the hatch closed.

  “Are you badly hurt?” Riley asked the weasel. A purple substance was oozing from the socket where the right arm had been pulled away, but alien skin was closing over it.