by Gunn, James
“All of that,” Asha said.
“All true,” Riley said, “but with Asha’s help I have learned how to live with my implant. I was skeptical about the Transcendental Machine when this voyage began—who wouldn’t be?—but that skepticism has been transformed into belief, in Asha and her transcendental mission.”
“How can you be sure,” Tordor asked, “that by controlling your implant Asha has not simply taken its place and is controlling your emotions and behavior?”
“You don’t understand humans,” Riley said. “Humans develop emotional attachments that are as strong as implants, maybe stronger, and more to be trusted.”
“That isn’t true,” Riley’s pedia said. “Our fates are tied together, and you must listen to me.”
“I understand attachments between males,” Tordor said, “but the relationship between males and females are controlled by hormonal cycles whose imperatives overwhelm everything and then are gone.”
“You still haven’t convinced us that killing you is not a winning strategy,” Riley said.
“As for that,” Tordor said, “I am most valuable as a source of information. You are right—I don’t understand humans but I do understand power struggles, and we are caught in the middle of one.”
“You’re willing to tell us everything you know?” Riley asked.
“The great battle has begun,” Tordor said. “Far greater than the recent war between humans and the Galactic Federation, greater even than any of the wars that preceded the formation of the federation. This struggle in which we play a small but crucial role involves this entire arm of the galaxy, whose outcome will determine whether sentient civilization survives or destroys itself for epochs, maybe for all time.”
“And all this is tied up with the Transcendental Machine?” Riley asked.
“The powers that control the federation cannot allow transcendental creatures loose to destroy the civilization that sentient creatures have spent their evolutionary pasts creating.”
“I am such a creature,” Asha said. “I have been transformed by the Transcendental Machine. Am I so threatening?”
“Ah, yes,” Tordor said.
“We must be realists,” Riley said. “Civilizations cannot survive in stasis. They must keep moving, keep changing, to remain viable.”
“Small changes, perhaps,” Tordor said. “Big changes, no. At least that is what the powers believe.”
“What they fear,” Asha said, “is losing their own positions.”
“And for them that is the same as the destruction of civilization,” Tordor said.
“Transcendence is the only answer,” Riley said. “The truce in the human–Galactic Federation war was a warning. The present system is doomed to self-destruct unless it evolves into something more stable and more rational. Transcendence is the next step in galactic evolution.”
“Then you need me,” Tordor said. “I can help you reach your goal and frustrate those powers that worship stasis. It must be difficult to reach the machine.”
“It is,” Asha said.
“You’d help us?” Riley said.
“Better that than death,” Tordor said. “I’ll help you if you let me live, and maybe I, too, can find transcendence.”
“But you’re still an agent,” Riley said.
“As are we all,” Tordor said. “All those aboard the Geoffrey—every one had another agenda and the stories they told were just that—stories.”
“We’ll let you live,” Riley said.
The flower released the fronds that bound Tordor’s legs. Tordor rubbed the spots with his proboscis. Riley looked at Xi’s head, staring up at him with blank eyes.
Asha motioned to Trey and the barge plunged into the nexus, and again the universe dissolved in exquisite agonies.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Trey landed the captain’s barge as skillfully as if it had been built as a part of the ship’s equipment, killing orbital speed through gentle dips into the atmosphere and spiraling down to a plain next to a small lake where the ship could be refueled. On the far side of the lake the jagged towers of a city thrust angry fingers against a sky with two suns.
The trip from the nexus to the system and then to the planet that Asha identified as the location of the Transcendental Machine was another experience in boredom. It seemed to take forever, even with Trey nursing every joule of energy out of the engine and raising some issues of acceleration pressures that only Trey did not experience. Riley asked himself why he had ever considered space travel romantic.
“Because you are a romantic,” his pedia said. “Like all humans. It is their greatest strength and their greatest weakness, and will end up destroying them. Like this foolish feeling you have for the hazy person you call ‘Asha.’”
The mood in the ship was like the troubled quiet before battle. Tordor kept as much to himself as possible in the cramped quarters, and Riley moved carefully near Tordor’s lethal proboscis. Asha paid no attention to Tordor, apparently unconcerned about his treachery or his potential for murder. She spent time with Riley gathering weapons and other supplies into two packs.
“What are we preparing for?” Riley asked.
“What we experienced in the runaway system,” Asha said. “Only much worse.” She turned to Tordor. “You should prepare, too.”
“I am always prepared,” Tordor said calmly.
Riley remembered what he had told himself about heavy planet natives at the beginning of this journey.
The system they approached was even more ancient, if possible, than the one they had previously visited. The larger sun was redder, though it had not yet reached its expansion stage, and its half-dozen planets were still intact.
“This arm is older than ours,” Asha said. “Or at least it has some older systems, maybe a billion orbits older. Some of them may have been members of an older galaxy that collided with this one long-cycles ago. However it happened, these creatures evolved earlier and developed technology and an interstellar civilization long before our arm even got started. They’re far ahead of us.”
“And old,” Tordor said. “And degenerate.”
“Why degenerate?” Riley asked.
“If they were not,” Tordor said, “they would still be around and we would be their slaves or they would be our gods—maybe there is no difference. And all we have as evidence of their technological superiority is their nexus points. If, indeed, they created them.”
“And the Transcendental Machine,” Riley said
“They’re not the same as their forebears were,” Asha said. She shivered. “But they are terribly dangerous. And on their world where they have all the advantages. And the numbers.”
They had found the Geoffrey in orbit.
“I thought we were supposed to reach here first,” Riley said.
“The Geoffrey is faster than the barge,” Asha said, “and the captain is more skillful than I thought, or more desperate. He must have guessed that the coordinates would take him astray and taken a chance on another nexus.”
Asha had Trey hail the ship. After a moment she turned to the others. “Trey says that the only response comes from the ship’s computer; the ship reports that only a maintenance crew is left on board.”
“Then the captain took the passengers along,” Riley said.
“The Geoffrey reports that two landing craft left, one a half-period after the other,” Asha said. “And both after sundown last night.” She shivered again.
“Ah,” Tordor said. “Then the captain imprisoned the passengers while he began his exploration. After the passengers broke out, they followed in the second landing craft.”
“Or the other way around,” Riley said.
“Whichever way it was,” Asha said, “there are two groups, probably competing to find the machine first and use it before the other can reach it.” She shrugged. “They don’t understand the machine.”
“And you do,” Tordor said. It seemed like a statement rather than a question,
even in the pedia’s serviceable translation.
“What else would you expect of the Prophet?” Asha said. “What they also don’t understand is that these creatures are most dangerous at night where they can attack from the darkness. They can see, or sense, in the dark.”
“Which is why you insisted we land in the morning,” Riley said.
“And why I fear for the lives of the other voyagers.”
“They who seek transcendence wager their lives,” Tordor said.
“If it is transcendence they seek and not power,” Riley said.
“It is the same.”
“And it is time for us to get ready while the day still lies ahead,” Asha said.
She and Riley turned back to their stowing of weapons, ammunition, and rations. Even Tordor added a few weapons to a bag that he slung from a strap around his huge head.
The barge’s computer reported that Riley’s and Asha’s inoculations would protect them. Tordor again refused. The inner door opened and, when it had closed, the outer door opened, and the travelers marched down the ramp, 4107 riding on Trey’s flat top.
* * *
Their first moments were deceptively calm. Scrubby vegetation, like trees or bushes, surrounded the area where their ship had crushed parts of it down in landing, taller and more verdant nearest the water. The plants grew from soil that was hard and cracked, like deserted farmland returning to nature, whatever nature meant on this planet. The air, though thick and rich enough for Riley and Asha, had a curious alien odor that reminded Riley of a visit he had made as a child to a miserable zoo exhibit of small Earth creatures brought to Mars, mostly mice, frogs, small reptiles, and insects, as if to preserve a feeble connection to the ancestral Earth.
Their small party had traveled a fourth of the way around the lake when they came upon one of the Geoffrey’s landing crafts. Not far from its open ramp, they discovered the scattered pieces of alien creatures, possibly arachnoid in nature, amidst them the unidentifiable remains of a crew member, probably human, and beyond that more alien body parts.
“We’ve got to change our plans,” Asha said. She turned back toward the landing craft.
“Why?” Tordor asked.
“The captain’s contingent was discovered sooner than I thought,” Asha said. “We need to use the landing craft.” She moved cautiously up the ramp, a knife in her hand. The others followed, Riley without hesitation, the others more slowly. The landing craft was deserted, and when Trey queried the craft’s computer it found no message.
“We can’t get much closer than this,” Tordor said. “The craft isn’t built for atmospheric maneuvering.”
“Not as a flyer,” Asha said. “We’re going to use it as a boat.”
“What about the crew?” Riley said.
“They won’t be needing it,” Asha said with a conviction that Riley found unarguable. Asha turned to Trey and communicated in a form that Riley’s pedia couldn’t understand or even perceive, but 4107 swung itself down from Trey’s top using a stanchion and the coffin-shaped alien inserted a cable into the control panel. The outer doors closed.
“All this is going to get us killed,” Riley’s pedia said. “You must kill the woman and return to the barge.” Riley felt a pressure building in his skull like the beginning of a giant headache.
“Can we do that?” Riley asked. “Use it as a boat?”
“If it can hold air in space, it can hold out water,” Asha said. The craft began to slide toward the lake’s edge on small bursts of exhaust and soon was floating. Trey straightened the craft and began to accelerate toward the farther shore. “Show us the shore, Trey,” Asha said, as if allowing the others to share her silent communication with the coffin-shaped alien.
The screen above the control panel sprang alive. The shoreline appeared first and expanded to a view of the land itself that slowly got close until they could discern the vegetation and then places where it had been shattered, and finally heaps of bodies, aliens and crew members mixed.
“Is the captain among them?” Riley asked.
“No way of knowing,” Asha said, “unless we stopped and went through the clothing. The arachnoids don’t leave much.”
Several hundred meters later, the screen revealed a second lander and beyond that a scene of carnage even greater than the one not far from the first lander—a vast swath of scrub vegetation blown away by explosions and heaps of body parts strewn across the empty spaces.
“What kind of creatures are we facing?” Riley asked.
“Hungry, deadly, innumerable,” Asha said. “But they don’t like water—they need it, but they don’t swim or walk on it.” Something large bumped against the landing craft. “That’s one reason.”
“Are the others all dead then?” Tordor asked.
“Probably,” Asha said.
The view on the screen shifted ahead to a brown hill that transformed itself into a shifting, moving mass of something alive. When the scene expanded, the mass turned into individual creatures with big head parts and spidery limbs moving as a body toward the scene of destruction they had just witnessed.
“They’re like the arachnoids we saw on the runaway planet—only bigger,” Riley said.
“And hungrier,” Asha said. “And meaner. They’re the alpha species, and the others? Earlier evolutionary versions, or the degenerate offspring, or another related species. They don’t expose themselves much to sunlight, but the landing of the ships and their edible contents must have overcome their natural inclinations.”
Occasionally one of the spiderlike creatures would stumble. Although their four limbs and two forward appendages gave them remarkable balances, sometimes two or more would get entangled and a creature would go down in the moving mass and would disappear as its neighbors tore pieces from it.
“Creatures like this created the Transcendental Machine?” Riley asked.
“Or their remote ancestors, or a species that they destroyed,” Asha said.
The landing craft bumped against something ahead.
“We have reached the city,” Asha said.
* * *
The landing craft shifted, apparently at Trey’s direction after unspoken instructions from Asha, the inner hatch door opened and then the outer door, and light spilled into the small cabin onto Tordor’s sturdy legs, 4107’s spindly stalk and hairy roots, and Trey’s treads. But it was a small shaft of light, partially blocked by the arc of a translucent material that they soon perceived, as the craft’s ramp descended, as the top of a dark opening in a solid wall.
“What’s that?” Tordor asked.
“The discharge of the city’s drainage system,” Asha said. “Although it doesn’t rain much anymore, if it ever did, there is an occasional downpour that must be controlled, and it feeds the lake. There hasn’t been any upkeep for thousands, maybe millions of cycles, but it still functions.”
“Whoever built this place knew how to build well,” Riley said.
“If they hadn’t, the Transcendental Machine wouldn’t work, either,” Asha said. “We’re going to make our way through that into the heart of the city, where the machine can be found.”
She seemed to listen to Trey and 4107 and turned to Riley. “Trey points out that it doesn’t climb; Four one zero seven says the same thing. And the only way out of this tunnel will be to climb.”
“Dorians aren’t built for climbing, either,” Tordor said. “And we don’t like enclosed places.”
“You’ve spent a long time in the enclosed place of the Geoffrey,” Riley said.
“That I could control.”
“It’s the only way to avoid the arachnoids,” Asha said. She turned again to Trey and 4107. “I told them that they must find their own way into the center of the city, to follow the nearest large avenue. You—” she turned to Tordor, “will have to make a choice.”
Tordor started down the ramp, followed by Trey and 4107. At the bottom he turned and let the coffin-shaped alien and the flower perched on its top p
ass him. “I must choose the best chance—and that is with you and your knowledge of where to go and how to avoid the dangers that lie ahead.”
Asha turned to Riley. “I have grown attached to a machine and a flower. I hope they are very, very lucky. They will need all the luck they can get.” And then, as if sentimentality was a flaw, she said, “Let’s go.”
She and Riley picked up their bags and set off into the drain, followed by the elephantine Tordor.
As the light behind dwindled, the walls of the drainage tunnel began to glow with a soft yellow translucence. Asha led the way, followed by Tordor and then Riley. Only Asha knew where she was going, if she did, and he trusted Asha’s ability to defend herself against an attack by the Dorian, whose intentions would never be trusted, but he didn’t want to allow Tordor behind him.
“You are going to get us killed,” Riley’s pedia wailed, as if in the grasp of desperation. The pressure in Riley’s head increased.
The tunnel forked, and without hesitation Asha took the left branch. She did know where she was going—or pretended to. Tordor followed without question.
Small sections of the tunnel wall had turned dark, as if the magic had faded from them, but new glows provided sufficient light to proceed without the use of the devices Asha and Riley carried with them. At the third branch of the tunnel, where the wall luminescence had failed, a large, amorphous shape launched itself toward them.
Asha raised her hand and in the same movement fired a missile at the creature. It fell at their feet—a creature with six finlike limbs and a huge mouth in a head without apparent eyes. Asha’s missile had gone down the creature’s throat and struck a vital organ, and it was very dead.
“We’re taking a less dangerous way into the city?” Tordor said.
“The arachnoids are far more dangerous,” Asha said, “and far more numerous. But they don’t come down into the drainage tunnels, probably from some ancestral fear of being caught in a sudden flood of rainwater. Or creatures like these would never have evolved from the lake denizens to live in the tunnels.”
“And how many more of these will we encounter?” Riley asked.