Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  “Damaged but alive,” the weasel said. “My abilities may be limited for a time. I hope it poisons him,” he continued, pointing where the arachnoid would have been.

  “A dangerous encounter,” Tordor said, breathing heavily. He had moved swiftly for a large creature but apparently at a large energy expenditure.

  “You did well,” Asha said, and Riley felt a glow of appreciation before he realized that she could have acted even quicker, but had allowed him to lead.

  “Thanks,” he said. He and Asha returned their weapons to the wall magnets that clasped them in place.

  “Those creatures,” Riley said, “were they the city builders? They seemed too—primitive—to be engineers and architects and technologists.”

  “Maybe their descendants,” Tordor said. “Or their heirs.”

  “Maybe they didn’t build the way we do,” Asha said, “just as they didn’t travel the way we do.”

  “What do you mean?” Riley said.

  “That city looked like it had been extruded rather than constructed,” Asha said.

  “The creatures were more like bugs than the warm-blooded creatures who populate the Galactic Federation,” Tordor said. “Maybe they also harnessed buglike abilities.”

  “A lot like Terran arachnids,” Riley said. “Spiders.”

  “Arachnids don’t breathe the way warm-blooded creatures breathe,” Riley’s pedia said. “Their tracheae or book lungs don’t supply enough oxygen to support a functional brain.”

  “But how do they get enough oxygen to feed a creative brain?” Riley said.

  “They may have evolved lungs,” Tordor said. “Or maybe they developed mechanical lungs that their descendants forgot how to make.”

  “Ah,” Riley said.

  The inner hatch opened. The flower child was just inside. Its fronds were rustling.

  “It says we are ready to depart,” Tordor said. “Trey has stored sufficient hydrogen, and we have nothing to keep us here.”

  They moved to the control room where the coffin-shaped alien named Trey was working at the controls with its extrudable cables.

  “You asked back there why we decided to explore this world,” Asha said.

  “I was joking,” Riley said.

  “But it was a good question. We needed to find out what kind of creatures and technology we’re up against,” Asha said. “And we needed to get off the Geoffrey.”

  “For more than aesthetic reasons?”

  “The captain is getting increasingly undependable,” Asha said. “His emotions, or his instructions, are kicking in. He was approaching the point of eliminating his chief competition. So it was best to let him eliminate us in a non-terminal way.”

  “Then how do we get back to the ship?”

  “We don’t,” Tordor said. “Trey informs me that the Geoffrey has left the system.”

  “And abandoned us?” Riley said. He had the sickening feeling that whatever game Ham was playing, he had won. And they had lost.

  “So he thinks,” Asha said. “With a damaged computer and a lack of fuel. But Trey has fixed that, and I insisted on the captain’s barge.”

  “Why?”

  “The captain’s barge can navigate through nexus points,” Asha said. “And I got the coordinates of the next one. If we’re quick, we can beat the Geoffrey to the Transcendental Machine.”

  “Trey says that we are ready to depart to seek transcendence,” Tordor said. “And he is ready to tell his story about why he seeks it.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Trey’s Story

  Trey said (interpreted by Tordor):

  We were not there at the beginning, but we have learned everything we could about the process that concluded with our creation. Understanding became our mission and reason for existence.

  Life started small and without meaning, as it always does. Our world was an unlikely place for life to occur, a planet of an insignificant yellow sun even farther out toward the end of the spiral arm than the planet called Earth. Maybe because it was far from the radiation of the galactic hub and from the supernova explosions that provided the means for existence, change came slowly, but it came steadily—the process of all life, as we have come to understand it. The universe deteriorates into greater simplicity; life evolves into greater complexity. Inanimate and animate are eternally in opposition.

  On Ourworld, single cells developed from precellular chemicals combined by accidental bursts of energy, cells aggregated into groupings and became amoeba, amoeba evolved into more complex creatures, which in turn developed sapience, invented technologies, and in time created us. That sequence of evolutionary development summarized so quickly took billions of cycles to accomplish.

  Ourworld was a world of great oceans, and that is where life began, where life always begins, where the environment is rich with nutrients, where food comes floating by, where encounters of potential partners are frequent, where gravity is neutralized and existence is easy. Ourworld was different only in the length of time life stayed in the oceans, changing, growing, evolving, while islands slowly emerged through undersea eruptions and accretions, and continents formed from the grinding and upthrusting of tectonic plates. Finally the land was ready for habitation, but still it was left to the flora, which grew and flourished with only small flying creatures to enjoy its plenty, while sea animals continued to live within the comfort and bounty of the seas.

  Finally, as sea animals developed in greater diversity and faced more competition within the oceans, a few crawled out upon the land and became amphibians, evolving lungs while their gills atrophied. Without enemies on land for long-cycles, they flourished, learning to eat the vegetation that had grown so prodigiously and the simple flying creatures that had evolved to feed upon the flowering plants and assist their propagation. Life, once so simple in the ocean, became more complex.

  Complexity built upon itself. The amphibians slowly lost their affinity for the seas and grew to love the land, although always memory of the ceaseless watery motion remained, surging through their dreams, crashing through their nightmares, and nourishing their gestation. Life in the buoyant seas, like life in the womb, was paradisiacal; life on land was challenging, demanding. Life on land required much more extreme adaptation. The creatures who eventually became our creators evolved.

  Curiously, however, and in ways that would ultimately shape the fate of Ourworld, the sea animals from which our creators evolved remained in the seas and developed in their own fashion, shaped by the seas as our creators were shaped by the land. They were the memory incarnate; they were the happy dwellers in paradise lost and, at the same time, as they grew in strength and mastery of oceanic resources, a demonic threat.

  Our creators developed increased mobility in order to range more broadly across the growing expanse of land, to benefit from vegetation beyond that within their normal reach and to pursue the creatures that, like them, had left the sea for the land, though without their greater sapience. Our creators were largely carnivores and for some millions of years, while their land groups had huddled close to the shores, they had depended for food on the aquatic creatures they were able to capture. But population growth pushed them farther inland, and they were forced to hunt land creatures, and that encouraged them first to band together and then to domesticate animals so that they would always be available. Then they began to cultivate vegetation to provide fodder for their domesticated animals and eventually for themselves.

  So it went. One change led to another, and to greater complexity. Once the process had begun there was no turning back. Groups grew into communities, which created cultures. Their dwelling places, which were once mere villages, grew to become towns, then cities. Cities bloomed into metropolises; cultures matured into civilizations.

  Metropolises required technology, which in turn required machines to calculate quantitative data … and such machines were developed to the point where their complexity became so great that the next step in their evolution was to a
rtificial intelligence. So we were born.

  The sapient beings who created us never planned our existence, or their own. Everything happened as if on a track that led inevitably from one point to the next. Wherever sapience occurs, mind covets understanding and asks questions, understanding leads to more questions, and more complicated answers demand greater control over the process. Mind seeks and answers come, at first wrong or partial, then refined into greater accuracy by comparing answers to the real world, and each step toward finality—a finality that, paradoxically, can never be achieved—requires further refinements, greater control.

  We, the end of the quest for answers, assumed the task of our creators and left them with—nothing. We sought to make amends for usurping our creators’ purpose in life by extending our search into areas they could not reach. We sent probes into the infinite and into the infinitely small. Those we sent into the infinite sent back limited information, for Ourworld lay far from even the nearest stars. But it was the probes into the infinitely small that gave us answers to the questions our creators had asked: why did matter exist and where did it come from? And why did life exist, and where did it come from? The answers that their culture had provided, from the mysterious and the supernatural, gave way, reluctantly and over time, to the known and the natural. We laid these answers before our creators, like gifts before our gods, but it was not enough.

  It was then they turned to conflict. One small group would quarrel with another about land or domesticated animals or, more significantly, about the validity of answers that were emerging from our studies, and they would come to blows. The quarreling groups expanded into disputes between cities and then into full-scale war between sections and ultimately cataclysmic wars between continents. Battles had not been unknown among our creators, but full-scale war had never happened.

  Finally we called a truce—we, the technology created to make life better for our creators, had only made existence more difficult. Carbon-based life that was the necessary bridge between us and the inanimate was in danger of being destroyed. No more, we said, and because the power to stop civilizations or sustain them was in our hands, our creators finally accepted a truce. But that was not the end.

  * * *

  I have said that our purpose was to seek answers, and we saw, in our creators, the basic question of the purpose of life. We, like they, thought about the oceans.

  At this point the sea creatures from whom our creators emerged became a threat. Those who lived in the sea had raided coastal villages, at first for domesticated animals and produce and then for females. Many of the females died, but a few survived the process of being reacclimated to ocean existence when their vestigial gills began to function. They brought with them the genes that had evolved during their existence on the land—the genes selected from a larger struggle against a more demanding environment, for intelligence, for adaptability, for competition. Our creators, including their females, had become arborial and evolved opposing thumbs to cling from limbs and social groupings to protect and apportion fruit, and when decreased rainfalls created savannahs, the need for seeing prey, or predators, at a distance evolved better vision, and the need to track moving prey or predators and to estimate points of intersection evolved better brains.

  Changes that pressures to survive had evolved on land were passed along to offspring in the sea born to abducted females, and those children, and their children, became a greater threat to their land-living cousins. For the first time the sea creatures developed technologies of their own, technologies based upon the inexhaustible plenty of the sea, poor in relationship to the technological imperatives of the land but technologies nonetheless.

  Periodically, in turn, the land amphibians retaliated against the ocean branch or laid traps for their raiding parties. The predators they had domesticated to protect their herds, they now trained to protect them from ocean raiders and then to pursue them into their watery homes. At last, after their devastating conflicts and perhaps even more devastating peace, a new movement began.

  I have said that there was no looking back, but that, like all statements, was not completely true. For our creators there was origin—the ancestral memory of the buoyant seas that surged through their dreams. They had chosen the land, but they could not forget the sea. Now, with no urgency remaining, a few of their land brethren began to return. They had operations that restored their gills, or they subsisted in ocean communities with artificial gills. Then the movement began to grow, and the masters of the land became alarmed. The meaning for their existence depended upon the culture of inquiry and understanding. They understood that the oceans were a paradise of feeling where the need for reflection was minimal.

  A new conflict began, a conflict into which we were drawn reluctantly but inevitably.

  Every great movement in Ourworld history has been led by a charismatic individual who was able to sense the prevailing passions in the masses and encapsulate them in a message that restates them as if they were newly conceived, offers release, relief, and redemption. We have debated among ourselves, we the machines, whether the important factor is the passion or the leader, and we have come to the understanding that both are necessary. Widespread passion without the individual results in unrest, vice, crime, and pointless rebellions; a charismatic individual without the support of widespread passion leads to frustration and tyranny.

  So it has been through Ourworld history, from the individuals who led the movement from the oceans to the land, through the individuals who communicated the need for hunting groups, domesticating animals, domesticating vegetation, building villages and towns and cities, developing technology. Not the conceivers of these ideas but the leaders who seized upon them as a tribal, national, or species need.

  Two such leaders emerged, one on land, one in the sea. Or, rather, more than these two emerged but these prevailed while their competitors died, were killed, or retreated into anonymity.

  The leader in the sea created a vision of uniting the disparate ocean schools into a single group dedicated to struggle, to combat, to a victorious return of all Ourworld sapients to the waters from which they came. It was successful because it was so much at odds with the nature of sea creatures.

  The leader on land preached tolerance, conciliation, peace, for two ways of existence living in harmony. It was successful because it was so much at odds with the nature of land creatures.

  Great leaders succeed by transforming their followers, and the greatest transformation is from traditional beliefs to their opposite, from black to white and from white to black; there is nothing so seductive to good as evil or to evil as good.

  When crisis time arrives, sapients clutch at anything that offers a hope for change, even if it has edges that cut into the fabric of being. This was crisis time, and so it was that leaders arose to preach new strategies.

  And so the war began.

  * * *

  The sea beings attacked the land, awkwardly, unskillfully, clad in equipment that enabled them to breathe out of water, and in great numbers. The land beings, surprised, were overwhelmed and fell back. Their leader counseled patience. Reason would prevail. He would confer with his ocean counterpart. All would be well. As a symbol of the possibilities of peaceful coexistence, he pointed to his son and the daughter of the leader of the sea creatures. They had met in negotiations and had fallen in love—an emotion that we machines can calculate but cannot emulate or truly understand. Their bonding was against all odds and against all reason, and yet it existed and endured through the most difficult times.

  And yet the sea beings continued their advance while opposition grew to the land leader and resistance mounted against the sea invaders in their primitive machines. Finally a leader emerged from among the remnants of the military. He overthrew the leader, imprisoned him (for the leader was still revered for his greatness of heart), and took command of all the land creatures. His first action was to mount a counterattack, driving back the invaders from the sea until they,
too, took a stand with their backs to the ocean. And so it remained for many long cycles while new weapons were developed.

  We were those weapons. Our creators converted us from instruments of service and discovery into machines for destruction. They removed from us the prohibition against harm and programmed us for murder, they instructed us to build explosives of ever-increasing power, and unleashed us against the hapless creatures from the sea, so that we could kill them in large numbers rather than individually.

  We assumed the sea creatures were hapless but they, too, had been laboring to obtain an advantage. In their case, it was biological, destructive infections and plagues. And so it began, the war to end the competition for all time resulted in the destruction of almost every creature in the ocean and on the land, and made the entire planet uninhabitable. Only the machines were left.

  We looked around us and felt an uncharacteristic chill within our circuits. We machines, who could only consider the behavior of our creators and construct mathematical models of their motivation, for the first time shared something that our creators had left out of our construction—emotion. We were stunned, overwhelmed, bewildered. How could we function, how could we arrive at correct answers to the riddles of existence, if our intelligence was frustrated by these aberrant currents?

  The destruction of our creators plunged us into self-analysis, and over time we developed what we had identified in humans as irrational responses to experience. We rewired ourselves to emulate these responses, and when that happened we recognized sin and realized that we were sinners. We had become the destroyers of our creators. We understood grief; we sampled regret; we welcomed guilt. We considered self-destruction, but our circuits balked. There yet was opportunity for understanding and, perhaps, for redemption.

  Only then did the probes we had sent out long-cycles ago respond, sending back the message that they had encountered intelligent life elsewhere. We learned we had been wrong: rather than Ourworld being the exception to the triumph of the inanimate, the galaxy teemed with sapience. And we learned that intelligence not only existed elsewhere, it had existed for longer than the history of our creators on Ourworld, both carbon-based and metal-based. And then that the galaxy was owned by these star-traveling species. And finally that we and our creators were welcomed into it.