by James Gunn
“I am afraid that is impossible,” the Pedia said. “The rocks and ice might be cleared in time, but not before our air is used up. I have so reported to my fellow Pedia.”
“Are they okay?”
“Any problems seem to have been resolved.”
“Good,” Riley said. “Now tell them not to worry.”
“That would not be an accurate representation of our situation.”
“I don’t want them attempting a rescue, which would not only be dangerous for them but futile. We’ll get out.”
“How?” the Pedia said.
But Riley had already started making his way back through the cluttered hall to the transparent wall at the far end. By the time he had arrived, he had his ice axe unholstered. He attacked the surface. After a few blows it began to crack and with a few more a hole appeared that widened into a gap from which fluid gushed out in a cloudy stream that expanded into a gush and ran down into the bones and across the hall floor. Some of the bones began to float. No doubt the stench would have been unbearable, not only the alien gases but the decayed bodies, if Riley’s suit had not protected him. He kept hacking until he had created a space big enough for him to slide through as soon as the flood from behind the wall had diminished to a trickle.
There were bones on the floor of what had been—what? an aquarium?—but Riley couldn’t tell if they were identical to those behind him, and he didn’t have time to find out. He was attacking the other wall, which was not transparent but a fluid-tight construction with an opening in it apparently sealed by a circular plug of ice and rock. It yielded to his axe and then fell into a heap at his feet.
Riley moved through the opened space into a room or corridor beyond, at the far end of which was an opening outlined in the glow that pervaded every moment of this hollow world. At last he stood on the other side of the structure from the plaza and the statue honoring something that would always remain unknown. He understood now the nature of the glowing ball that hung in the center of this world: it was the core of this orphan planet. Once this world had not been hollow but a shell enclosing a deep sea kept fluid and given light and nutrients by the slow decay of a radioactive core. And then when much of the sea was lost through the hole tunneled through the shell by an ancient, dissatisfied explorer, the remains of the sea, still warmed by the core, surrounded it and, perhaps, provided a nourishing environment for living creatures left behind when the Nepentheans evolved.
“You saved us!” the Pedia said.
“You were never in danger,” Riley said.
“You overlook the partnership we have created,” the Pedia said. “Both currently and historically. If you fail, I fail. That is a fact of Pedia existence.”
“Good to know,” Riley said.
He moved as rapidly as his sliding motion would allow through the corridor or alley behind the structures. Down the middle of the ice and rock cobblestones flowed a stream of fluid that might have been essential to these creatures or provided a limited transport system. These were questions, like those he had already asked himself about this unique place, he would never have answered. Whatever had come to conscious existence here, had looked at its limited world and thought it understood the way it functioned and the part it played in the lives it engendered, and then had been shocked by a larger truth that was the antithesis of everything those lives had ever known and now would never be known, was lost for all time. It was one of the final tragedies that faced all creatures, the loss of their selves, the final extinction of their species and its futile, glorious effort to find the final answers to existence: how? why?
After making his way through the back streets, Riley stood near the transporter that had brought him to this inner world and looked back across the city carved out of the rock and ice of the world itself and thought that it would crumble and all intelligence and striving had done to shape a space for itself would collapse into nothingness and be forgotten, like the world itself cast adrift from its solar-system home into emptiness long, long cycles ago.
But perhaps the heart of the planet, the radioactive core, might still nourish a new species to take up where the old one had left off. Life, so often beaten down, had a surprising resilience. It might arise again.
Riley entered the capsule, pushed the medallion through the fabric of his suit into contact with the walls once more, and felt his knees buckle as the vehicle soared toward salvation.
* * *
Once more within the ruby walls of the alien ship, his ice axe returned to its place of origin in the inner wall of the ship, his suit stripped away with a stroke of his hand, taking deep breaths of the relatively unrestricted air of their mutual habitat, Riley faced the others ranged before him in the area the red sphere had shaped out of itself for food service. They were like an examining board, though with different attitudes. Asha expressed concern and relief; Adithya, a mixture of emotions swinging between curiosity and guilt; and Tordor, impassively solid as always, a judge-like skepticism.
“You’re back,” Asha said.
“Was there any doubt?” Riley said.
“We were worried,” Adithya said.
“There were scary moments.”
“And the conclusion?” Tordor said.
Riley was silent for a moment. Then he said, “I was able to observe only a small sample of the Nepenthean world. We knew from the beginning I couldn’t see much, but we didn’t understand how limited the experience would be.”
He described the descent into the opening in the shell the ancient Nepentheans had created and the discovery of the transportation system they had built between the vast universe and the terrible isolation that they had been born into. And the city or cities they had carved out of the inner surface of the shell that had enclosed their world.
“What we can assume,” Riley said, “is that their major dwellings or offices or factories, or whatever they may have been, were excavated near the shell opening, where their scientists and technologists must have tried to understand the new laws that governed the universe that had replaced the one that had created and nourished them. So I may have seen a representative sample.”
“Well?” Tordor said.
“They all were dead,” Riley said. “And, by the evidence, dead for a good number of long-cycles.”
“All dead?” Adithya said.
“Everything pointed to that. The plaza I came upon was empty except for a strange statue, there was no movement anywhere I could observe, and the hall I entered, and in which I was briefly trapped by a collapse of the entrance, was piled high with bones.”
He described the hall and the transparent wall at the back and how he had hacked his way to freedom.
“What were they all doing there?” Asha said.
“Hard to say,” Riley said. “Something important maybe. There were a lot of them and they all died in place. There was an aquatic creature in the vessel behind the transparent wall—a leader, a priest, a god.… It died with them.”
“Then it couldn’t have been an invader,” Adithya said.
“Unless it needed attention the dead Nepentheans could no longer provide.”
“So,” Tordor said, “we know no more than we knew from the beginning. Except that the silence was because the Nepentheans were dead.”
“Not a meaningless discovery,” Riley said. “But that’s not all.” He held up the bundle of material that once had been the suit the red sphere had provided for him, that had nourished him and protected him in the toxic Nepenthean environment. “There’s a Nepenthean bone in the sample pocket, still safely secured. It can be tested for disease if we can find a safe place to test it and a way to do it.”
“Perhaps your alien ship will provide for that as well,” Tordor said.
Sarcasm was not a Dorian specialty, but Riley thought that Tordor had picked up some subtleties of expression from his human contacts. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” Riley said.
“Still, we have come a long way and risked a great d
eal for very little,” Tordor said. “It does not bode well for our project.”
“That’s not all,” Riley said.
“What more?” Tordor asked.
“There’s this,” Riley said, and he leaned toward the wall and traced a series of lines on the ruby wall with a fingernail.
“And what is that?” Tordor asked.
“It was on the front of the transparent wall,” Riley said. “At first I thought it was marks made by the creature inside trying to get out. And then I saw that the marks were embedded inside the glass, as if they were a message to those in the hall.”
“They look like scratches to me,” Adithya said.
“And they may be, but they also may be connected to the death of the Nepentheans. We just have to decipher them, if they are a message,” Riley said.
“They don’t look like any written language I’ve ever seen,” Tordor said. “And I have seen a great many.”
The medallion on Asha’s chest spoke for the first time since Riley’s return. “This is something I was created to do,” it said. “I cannot understand it now, but perhaps we will find more examples and I can compare them.”
They looked at the scratches on the wall. They were fading now and soon they would be gone, but the Pedia would remember them and Riley and Asha, and they would linger in memory as they crossed the long reaches of empty space toward their next silent world.
CHAPTER SEVEN
The red sphere emerged from the nexus point and began the long journey to the focus of their next world of mysterious silence. The sun was a typical yellow star about the same age as Earth’s sun, but it had accreted only half a dozen planets plus the usual collection of debris in various shapes, sizes, and orbits. There were the customary gas giants and then rocky planets with varying degrees of size and atmospheres, but only one was in the Goldilocks zone where water was liquid, and it was a super-Earth, three times the size and weight of the human birth world but, Tordor said, just about the right size for Dorians. He found this a reason to claim the right to explore the world, so like his own, that had stopped communicating with the rest of the Federation.
“All of you would be seriously handicapped down there,” Tordor said. “You would drag along, one slow step in front of another, if you could even walk. I grew up in conditions like these. It would be like returning home.”
“You haven’t been on a high-gravity world since you were a young adult,” Asha said. “Your muscles are no better than ours.”
“It is true that my strength has been diminished by the effete conditions in which I have had to work,” Tordor said, “but mine has the potential to regenerate, which cannot be said for any of you.”
So the debate went between the ordinary dull daily activities aboard the alien ship, eating, resting if seldom sleep for the transcendents, long naps for the untranscended son of Earth, terrifying, experience-defying moments of transition between space and the nonspace of Jumps through the nexus points that lay in a scattered pattern across the galaxy, navigating between almost forgotten points of entry, and emergence hundreds of light-years away. Adithya had to be restrained the first few times as the reality of their spaceship world was transformed into something unrecognizable, but even he had become accustomed to not being able to recognize his surroundings or his fellow travelers or even the report of his senses.
In the midst of all the essential aspects of space travel in the age of the Galactic Federation, they had a chance—indeed, the necessity—to talk: about their mission, about their lives, individual and shared, and about their disagreements. The Pedia had not been able to decipher the Nepenthean scratches, if they were a method of writing rather than accidents or the decay of time. It needed more examples, if the message was a message and if it was connected to the destruction of the Nepentheans. Tordor did not think there was any purpose in pursuing such fragments of an unrealizable possibility, and Riley insisted that evidence accumulated until it settled into a recognizable pattern and that it was too early to dismiss anything.
The Pedia had managed to establish a limited connection to the mind or minds that controlled the red sphere, that responded to its physiological analysis of its occupants and adjusted its shape and function to their needs. It had been an intuitive process for Riley from the moment he had entered it on the planet of the dinosaurs where he had been stranded by the Transcendental Machine, but sometimes those intuitions went awry and now the Pedia could sometimes request specific actions and sometimes get appropriate responses.
“I still cannot understand the millions of tiny voices that seem to make up the mind of this ship,” the Pedia said. “Perhaps it is because they all speak at once.”
“Or maybe,” Tordor said, “they exist only in your imagination.”
“I have no imagination,” the Pedia said.
One of the actions the Pedia requested for them was an analysis of the bone Riley had recovered from Nepenthe. “The bone displays no evidence of poison or bacteria other than the natural products of an environment that most carbon-based life would find toxic,” the Pedia reported.
“It could have been a fast-acting poison or microbe that did not have time to reach the bone,” Tordor grunted.
“That’s true,” Riley said, “and any such traces might have washed away if the Nepentheans were floating or immersed in fluid, as I suspect.”
“We work with what we have,” Asha said. “Meanwhile, we must consider what answers this next world may have for us.”
“We call it Centaur,” Tordor said. “Or, to be more precise, the land of the Centaurs.” He did not use the human word, which he did not know, but a word that in Galactic Standard described a creature that had four legs and a torso that grew out of the creature’s forebody with arms at the shoulders and something on top of the shoulders that resembled a head.
“A centaur,” the Pedia said, and explained to Asha, Riley, and Adithya, who had never been exposed to mythology, what the ancient Greeks had imagined, and it created on a wall of the dining area a reproduction from its seemingly unlimited store of images.
“An improbable creature,” Tordor said, “but, given the vast galaxy and the billions of planets it has birthed, life has had an opportunity to take improbable directions. Personally, I have never seen one, but then it is a young species, still an apprentice member of the Federation.”
“How long has it been an apprentice?” Adithya asked.
“Only ten thousand long-cycles,” Tordor said.
“Ten thousand!” Adithya said. “Ten thousand years ago—or, as you say, ‘long-cycles’—my ancestors were still learning how to be farmers.”
“And if your species had only accepted apprentice status,” Tordor said, “the galaxy would have been saved a generation ten long-cycles of death and destruction.”
No one had anything more to say, but they said a great deal anyway during the long trip from the nexus point through the solar system to the planet Centaur.
* * *
The red sphere landed gently on top of a small hill in the midst of a forest of thick-trunked, stunted trees like overgrown bonsai, a term that the Pedia had to explain. Everything was stunted here on the world that Tordor had called Centaur, and the human occupants of the ship could feel the pull of the big world through the red walls that protected them from everything else.
“We can’t stay long,” Asha got out between breaks to breathe, “but the Pedia clone will remain in contact and tell us when you are ready to return, or if you need help.”
“Though it’s hard to imagine how we would be able to help,” Riley said. “You were right. We’d be no good on a world like Centaur.”
“I won’t need any help,” Tordor said, and, waving his trunk at Adithya through the protective suit the red sphere had extruded for him, pushed his way through the ruby wall and onto a surface he had not felt for some long-cycles since they had left Federation Central, and onto a world whose powerful tug, like a lover’s embrace, he had not felt s
ince he left Dor. For a moment, standing in crushed, mosslike vegetation, a little darker, bordering on purple, than his native world, Tordor felt his thick knees sag, but he straightened up and looked around. There were forests on every side of the hill and no indication which way to go. So, as the red sphere elevated behind him and dwindled into the thick atmosphere, he started down the hill toward the rising yellow sun.
By the time he reached the bottom of the hill—it was little more than a bump in what were otherwise fertile plains much like his native Dor—he was panting. But with each step he felt himself grow stronger, like a long-departed child returning home. His legs would feel leaden as soon as he had to rest, but they would recover.
He stopped under the shade of one tree. It had an enormous trunk and thick branches held tightly, as if resisting the attraction of the heavy planet. Even so, some of these massive trees had been toppled and lay strewn among their more fortunate fellows. Their roots, almost as thick and long as the branches themselves, reached into the air like pleading arms. Some of the trees still standing had globular fruits, yellow and red and purple, hanging from low limbs.
Tordor took a deep breath and then, impulsively, pushed his short trunk through the envelope of the red suit that enveloped his sturdy body from head to hoof.
The medallion hanging from a chain around his thick neck said, “Danger! Danger!”
“We’ll soon find out,” Tordor said and took another deep breath, this time of real air. Centaur smelled a bit like the oases of his youth on Dor but with a strong odor of strangeness that would take some getting used to, if he had the chance. But it was good, thick air, full of the clean smell of soil and purplish, growing things rather than the recycled breathings and other emissions of creatures confined together for long cycles. The red sphere worked remarkable magic on the air within the ship, but it could not eliminate the odors of close alien contact. He began stripping the envelope from his body and ended with his trunk holding a bundle of red material that he stowed away in the pouch around his waist.