Transcendent (52 page)

When the sisters reached their home, their worst fears were confirmed.

The ship’s hull had been smashed open here, leaving only a few drifting bits of translucent ceramic. The sisters pulled themselves through the wreckage, searching. Alia felt fragile, edgy. The conjunction of all this wreckage with shards of the familiar, with bits of stuff, fragments of furniture she thought she recognized, made this whole experience seem unreal.

On one section of floor she found a splash of dried blood, not yet cleaned up. It looked exactly as if a sack of the sticky stuff had been dropped and splashed open here. A sack about the size of a baby. Her stomach clenched. Suddenly she was vomiting. She got her face mask out of the way just in time to keep it clear of the bile that spewed out of her mouth.

A voice called her. “Alia . . .” She looked around wildly.

It was her father. He was waiting for her just outside the broken hull. Drea was already with him, her face buried on his shoulder. Alia launched herself up through the murky air.

Surrounded by a constellation of debris fragments, the wreckage of his home, Ansec lifted his arm around Alia. The three of them floated together, their arms wrapped around each other.

Gently Alia disengaged herself. “My mother—”

“She’s dead,” Drea said. “Bel is
dead.
” Her voice was raw with weeping.

Suddenly all Alia could see was her mother’s face, its fading beauty, sometimes weak, always full of helpless love. “And the baby?”

“Gone, too,” said Ansec. “It happened so quickly. . . .”

More conflicting emotions swirled in Alia.
You drove me away so you could have this kid. And now you’ve lost him anyhow.
It was a hard, savage thought that deeply shocked her.
What kind of monster am I?
But as she stared at her sister and her father, the complex muddle of these emotions washed away, leaving only regret, and an elemental anguish.

Reath touched her face, his long fingers useless for climbing but gentle and sensitive. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll cry later,” she said. It was true. She clung to thoughts of Michael Poole, whose family had been ripped apart by a similar tragedy. Not for the first time in her life, she sought comfort from his endurance.

Reath said grimly, “I think you’d better tell me what you know about these Shipbuilders.”

The Shipbuilders, like Alia’s own people, were relics of the deepest past.

In those early days, even after the discovery of the earliest faster-than-light drives, generation starships had been a common way to reach for the stars. Sailing on into the dark, traveling much slower than light, these ships were worlds closed over on themselves, with whole generations living out their lives between launch and landfall. Alia knew this lore well, for it was the heritage of her own people. But it wasn’t a reliable way to travel.

Most generation ships failed en route—or so it was believed, for many of them simply vanished into the dark. It wasn’t hard to see why. Since most generation ships had been launched at a time when mankind was still better at taking ecologies apart, rather than building and managing them, it wasn’t a surprise that so many expired long before their intended journeys were complete.

There were other hazards. Alia’s own ship had been overtaken by a friendly bunch of FTL travelers, and reconnected to the worlds of mankind. Other ships were not so lucky. Fat, helpless, resource-rich, they had fallen foul of pirates and bandits; there had been terrible tragedies, massacres in the silence between the stars.

But there were other sorts of survivor.

Sometimes, by accident or design, a ship would simply plough on into the dark, never making landfall. Things might go well for centuries—even after the deaths of the original crew, when nobody was left alive who could remember the point of the mission. Much longer than that, though, and things started to drift.

Over millennia languages changed, ethnic compositions drifted. Those few ships that lasted so long became like monasteries, with cowed, constrained crews laboring endlessly over tasks they barely understood, seeking to preserve a purpose set down by unimaginably remote ancestors, all for the benefit of descendants who would not be born for millennia more.

And some ships went on even longer.

Given enough time the brutal scalpel of natural selection cut and shaped the ships’ hapless populations, as always working to make its subject populations fit for their environment. And in the closed spaces of a generation starship there was always one common sacrifice, cut away by that pitiless scalpel: mind.

After all, on such a ship, what did you need a mind
for
? The ship would manage itself, more or less, or it wouldn’t have made it so far anyhow. With mind, the crew would only get restless, start to wonder what was beyond the walls—or, worse, start to tinker with the plumbing. In the first generation such activity would be against ship’s rules. In the hundredth it would be a sin, a taboo. By the thousandth generation it would be a selection pressure.

This was the origin of the Shipbuilders. Their ships had sailed on, even though the descendants of the first crew had long lost the intelligence that had enabled the ship to be launched in the first place. They maintained their ships’ essential systems, if only by rote. They even grew inventive over such fripperies as external superstructure. Their ships became gaudy, impossibly impractical creations, their purpose being to attract other such crews—and to mate.

And they remembered how to make weapons, for piracy—or rather, since piracy implies a conscious purpose, parasitism. It was necessary. No closed ecology was perfect; any starship required some replenishment. The Shipbuilders simply took what they needed.

“They are brutal,” Alia said to Reath, “because they are mindless. They launch themselves on missiles that just rip through the fabric of their targets, scooping up stuff indiscriminately.”

“And so they shot up your
Nord,
” Reath said.

Alia said, “The Shipbuilders are the stuff of nightmares to us.”

“Because they might come out of the dark to attack you at any time. An arbitrary horror.”

“Not just that. The Shipbuilders come from the same place as us. We could have fallen, as they did.
They are like us.
”

Unexpectedly Reath folded Alia in his arms. “No,” he said. “They are not like you. Never think that.”

For a heartbeat she was rigid with shock. Then she softened against his musty robe, and the tears came at last.

She spent the night with Drea, in a small compartment in Reath’s shuttle, orbiting the wreck of the
Nord.
They shared a bunk. Sometimes they held each other, and sometimes they just lay together, back to back, or nestling.

Alia wasn’t sure if she slept at all. Her head was full of pain, of inchoate longing and guilt and regret. She was still working through her muddled feelings about her mother and brother, the pain of the loss, her guilt over not being able to resolve their final argument. Underlying it all, though, was the simple flesh and blood reality of the loss. A family was never a fixed thing, she thought, but a process. Now that process had been cut short, leaving nothing but a bloody splash on the floor. It wasn’t just her mother who had died, not just a brother, but her family, too.

It seemed strange that such things could happen in a Galaxy governed by a superior form of consciousness. And while the Transcendence agonized over the loss of
all
the ancestors of mankind, here she was trying to grieve over her own mother. Perhaps, in her anguish and muddled pain, she felt some ghost of the higher, more exquisite regret that had impelled the Transcendence to attempt the Redemption.

And of course, she thought reluctantly, the Transcendence must be cognizant of the disaster, as it was of all of the past. The Transcendence must already, in principle, be seeking to redeem the suffering inflicted on her, as they did every scrap of pain and anguish right back to the dawn of human consciousness.

If she wished, Alia could Witness the
Nord
’s disaster. She could, through Hypostatic Union, live through it. She could even ride around inside her own mother’s head, for instance, and live out her death. But this was her family, her own mother. Even the idea of delving into the Transcendence and using its superhuman powers to
inspect
their suffering made her recoil.

And it wouldn’t be enough, she saw immediately. It could never be a true atonement for her, no matter how many times she lived through her mother’s life. For her mother’s suffering would still exist, for all Alia’s minute inspection of it.

This must be the heart of the Transcendence’s dilemma over Redemption, she realized. But if it was not enough to watch the past, not even to live it out through Hypostatic Union, not even if that process were driven to infinity—
then something more must be sought.
And the Transcendence must know it, too. But what more could there be? Curiosity burned in her, and a vast longing for a relief from her own pain.

Drea stirred in her half-sleep. Shame laced through Alia. In her Transcendental scheming she had once again forgotten her simple humanity. She held her sister, until Drea was still.

At the start of the next day the six of them—the three Campocs, Reath, Alia, and Drea, gathered in Reath’s shuttle, and shared hot drinks.

“Just like old times,” Seer ventured. Nobody responded.

They talked desultorily of the menace of the Shipbuilders.

“It’s hard even to resent them, hard to hate them,” Alia said dully. “Because they have no minds, no purpose. This is just what they do. But the menace is getting worse.”

“It is?”

“This is a time of peace, Reath. Once the Galaxy was full of warships; in those days the Shipbuilders were kept in their place. But now there aren’t so many weapons around.”

“They will have to be dealt with,” Bale said.

Drea said coldly, “Or welcomed into the family of mankind, to become a part of the awakening of the cosmos. Isn’t that how your friend Leropa would put it, Alia?”

Alia studied her sister, shocked. Alia had never seen such a hard expression on her sister’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

Drea stared at the Campocs; they avoided her eyes. Drea said, “I’ve been doing some thinking. Alia, doesn’t it strike you as
strange
that just as you swim off into the Transcendence, this horror should be inflicted on the
Nord
?”

“I don’t understand—”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Drea said.

Bale put down his drink and leaned forward. “Drea, you’d better say what you have to say. Are you accusing us of something?”

“You bet I am,” Drea said fervently. “You set up Alia’s election to the Transcendence so you could use her as a tool to study the Redemption. Then you kidnapped
me
and threatened my life to force her to go on. And now she wanted to come home; you knew she was thinking about abandoning the whole cosmic mess. So you acted again, in your clumsy, vicious way—”

Alia put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Drea, please.”

Drea turned to her. “Don’t you see? The Redemption is about regret, about loss. So the Campocs have engineered this whole incident. They wanted to inflict loss on you, Alia. They wanted to give you something to regret. They took away your mother and your brother, to make you go back into the Redemption.”

Alia felt bewildered. “But how—”

“
The Campocs led the Shipbuilders to the
Nord.”

It seemed unbelievable. Alia looked to Reath for support, but his face was expressionless. If it were true—

Rage exploded in Alia. She stood and loomed over Bale, her fists bunching. “Is she right? Tell me. Lethe, I took you into my bed. If you have done this for your own twisted purposes, the truth is the least you owe me.”

Bale met her gaze calmly. She thought he seemed calculating, but his thoughts were seamlessly closed to her. “Maybe we did, maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? If I tell you it’s true, you might think I’m just trying to manipulate you. And if I deny it, you won’t believe me.”

Alia turned to Reath. “Do
you
think they did it? Did they lead the Shipbuilders here?”

“I don’t know,” Reath said reluctantly. “But whether they did or not, they have worked out how to use it against you, haven’t they?”

Bale said heavily, “But, whichever way—
this is all your fault,
Alia.”

She gasped; she felt as if she had been punched. “My fault?”

“You are the Transcendent-Elect. We are mere instruments. If not for you, none of this would have happened.”

She remembered her own musings of the night before, her own deep hunger to know what might be found at the higher levels of the Redemption. Surely Bale saw this in her; all his scheming wouldn’t work unless there was something in herself that wanted this, too.

She already knew far more about the Redemption than Bale ever had. She had seen the ultimate logic of the Restoration, the madness of infinity: if Bale was concerned that the Redemption would consume the resources of mankind in a vast but futile quest, he was right to doubt the Transcendence. She doubted, too. She was driven by curiosity and doubt—and, perhaps, by a hunger to know if the Redemption was possible after all, if it could somehow be achieved. And so she knew that she would do as Bale planned; she had no choice. She hated him for it.

“You are monsters,” Drea said to the Campocs.

Seer actually grinned. “Ah, but we’re charming monsters. Don’t you think?”

Alia loomed over Bale. “Very well. If the Transcendence is what you want, let’s call it now.” He quailed, but she descended on him. With a strength fueled by anger she grabbed his shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

And she slammed her awareness into his mind. He cried out, but he could not escape. Her force of will poured along the interconnections to his relations’ consciousnesses, and they screamed and writhed. Peripherally she was aware of Reath and Drea pulling away, shocked.