Transcendental (18 page)

I opened the chamber and set about reviving its occupant, elevating its temperature fraction by fraction, easing the transition from cell to cell, from external to internal, over a period of almost a cycle. Finally the occupant made a sound and shortly thereafter opened what I later learned were its viewing organs.

It made organized sounds that I later learned was something like, “What in the hell are you!”

But we got on and within a cycle, we were able to converse with the aid of my pedia. This human, a male, was part of an expedition to decipher a nexus chart that had been bought from galactic traders or sold by traitors—he never knew which—and all had gone well until flaws in the coordinates destroyed the ship and all his shipmates, and launched his escape module through the nexus into the Companion’s system. That I should have discovered the module was a chance beyond calculation, depending as it did upon my fleeing Romi and setting my course for the Companion.

The human told me his designation was “Sam.” He told me many things about Earth and about humans and their history and literature and art. We had nothing to do but communicate, and Sam loved to talk. He was, he said, making up for his long, silent, frozen cycles. He never realized that his stories about Earth horrified me: the struggles, the competition, the battles, the wars. Even in literature and art these bloody activities were celebrated. I realized that I had to get this information to our leaders, and he—unaware that he had revealed humanity’s blood thirst and its inability to live in a civilized fashion with others—wanted to get back to his leaders with the information gathered about our precious navigation maps.

Of course he had no chance to get back. I did not tell him that when we left the Companion we would return to Sirius and Komran where he would be interrogated at far greater length and in far less pleasant conditions than on my vessel, cramped as it was. I could not let him return with his information, and I had to return with mine. And then, when he was well enough to travel and we were on our way to the nexus point, he sickened and died. The last words he spoke were, “You are an ugly son-of-a-bitch, Kom, but you’ve been a good friend way out here next to nowhere. It’s been great knowing you.”

I felt much the same way as when my mother ate my father.

When I got back to Sirian space, I discovered that my information had arrived too late. I had been gone for a dozen cycles, and the war was over. But the rumors of the Transcendental Machine were traveling fast. My leaders were concerned. Because I had spent so many cycles with an alien, and especially because that alien was a human, I was urged to volunteer for this pilgrimage.

I agreed, of course. My experience with the Companion had changed me forever. I was no longer a simple Sirian, bound by myths and biological imperatives. I had experienced both the reality and the unreality of others. I was prepared. And, more important, Romi had chosen another, who already had nurtured her larvae to maturity and suffered the consequences.

Why, you may wonder, did I spend such time and thought with Sam? I wondered myself. And then I began to see that when I reached the Companion I lost the reality of my father’s spirit and found Sam. I had begun to think of Sam as my father, and his loss affected me as much.

And he told me, during our long conversations, about the human family and its process of procreation. What if Sirians could procreate as partners, like humans? Could we transcend our biology?

CHAPTER TWELVE

Riley woke feeling relaxed and pleased with himself, the way he had felt when the world was new and he had not yet been wounded by its indifference, the way he felt after he had been with a woman. The cubicle even seemed to hint of passion and pheromones.

But that was all illusion. He knew now that the universe offered nothing for rational existence but heartache and pain, and he had not been with a woman for more than a year. The cubicle did not smell of a woman, it smelled of sweat and dirt and stale emissions, human and alien. And he had no reason to feel relaxed, here halfway between the known and the unknown, confined with enigmatic aliens in a tin can traveling toward holes in space at one-tenth light speed, protected from the universe’s hungry void by a fragile metal shell. And his pedia was silent. Not that this was unusual. It was often silent when he needed it the most, as if it were programmed not to comfort.

He slipped into his simple space coveralls, opened the cubicle door, slid himself out feetfirst, and climbed down the ladder. Asha and Kom were waiting for him.

“Kom wants to thaw Jon and Jan,” Asha said.

Riley turned to Kom. “Why?”

Riley’s pedia translated Kom’s rumble, “I thought you understood.”

“I understood your story,” Riley said. “You lost the human you had tried to save, and now you want another chance.”

“That’s only part of it,” Asha said.

“I understand the other part, too,” Riley said. Kom’s relationship with his dead father, if it had been anything like the one between Riley and his father, was not something he would have wanted to discuss. That is, presuming Kom’s story was true and not simply a convenient half-truth hiding a deeper, darker truth. “But the captain isn’t going to like it.”

“The captain,” Kom rumbled, “can’t refuse.”

That was true. When Riley and Kom confronted the captain, he waved his hand and said, “Do what you want,” as if it didn’t matter anymore. But it did matter, Riley knew, though why it mattered he wasn’t sure.

The captain had other worries.

“What’s wrong?” Riley asked. They were in the control room, but a control room more disordered than Riley had ever seen it. Crumpled paper nearly obscured the air-return vent and handheld pedias adorned several of the flat navigator panels, as if the captain was checking every calculation to find one in which he had confidence. And half the readouts were blank, as if the captain had erased them as Riley and Kom approached. “A disordered control room,” his pedia said, “is evidence of a disordered command.”

The captain looked at him as if it was a question too obvious to answer, and as if the answer was too intimately related to the responsibilities of decision for Riley to appreciate. “We have another Jump coming up,” he said.

Riley shrugged. Space travel was one Jump after another.

“The last one was off.”

Riley shrugged again.

“The next one may be off as well.”

“And it may not,” Riley said. “Whoever is sending you coordinates wants to get to his destination as much as you do, and probably doesn’t want to die, either, or spend eternity somewhere outside of space and time.”

“But he may not be as competent as we have been led to think.”

“After so many accurate nexus points in the uncharted space between spiral arms, it suggests a certain degree of reliability.”

The captain ran his hand through the untrimmed gray-flecked stubble on his head. “Even if he knows where he’s going and knows how to get us there, he may be cutting off our avenue of retreat.”

“Do you want to retreat?” Riley asked.

“I don’t know. Yes. No. No, I don’t want to go back,” the captain said. “But I don’t want to go forward blindly or to have my decisions preempted.”

Kom spoke up, surprising them both by his existence. “The passengers would rebel if you tried to turn back.”

The captain turned on him. “Fuck the passengers!” And then changed his tone: “No, wait. I don’t mean that. The passengers are important. But they were willing to turn back a couple of Jumps ago.”

“Fear, yes,” Kom rumbled. “Decision, no.”

“In any case,” the captain said, “you can tell the passengers that the coordinates come only to my pedia, and without me they could be stranded out here.”

Kom might have shrugged if he had shoulders. “Whoever is sending the coordinates would not like to be stranded out here, either.”

Riley did shrug. “So, you see?” he said to the captain. “Like everything else, your decision may be only an after-the-fact rationalization.”

The captain looked unappeased. “I don’t have to like it.”

“We’re past the point where likes and dislikes matter.”

“Go!” the captain said to them both. “You’re no help.”

Riley turned and led Kom to the storage room near the rear of the ship.

*   *   *

The crewman in charge of the storage room took one look at Riley and Kom and stood aside. “We have the captain’s permission to move the bodies,” Riley said.

The frozen bodies looked like replicas of the real Jon and Jan carved from ice and colored by hand. Kom lifted them gently from their cabinets, first Jan, then Jon, and lowered them onto a motorized gurney. They trundled it through corridors, careful not to brush brittle limbs against passageways or compartment hatches, until they had the gurney back to the passenger quarters.

Kom had an alien cubicle already chosen—bigger even than the one he had occupied. This one allowed him to position himself between the bodies of Jon and Jan. He closed the cubicle door.

It was, Riley thought, like a cocoon from which might emerge, eventually, three butterflies. The idea of Kom as a butterfly brought a smile to his face.

“You’re smiling!” Asha said. “You should smile more often. It lights up the room.”

“You, too,” Riley said.

She smiled and the passenger quarters did seem to brighten. In fact, it transformed her face from ordinarily attractive to something special, even beautiful. He felt as if he had never seen her before. He turned his gaze away before he revealed his reaction.

The Jump hit them then, without warning, as if the captain was punishing them for questioning his authority. Riley staggered and almost fell, but Asha absorbed the shock without apparent effort. Squeals and cries from the commons room provided evidence that the Jump was a surprise there as well.

This was a Jump as off-center as the previous one. The real world splintered around them like a mirror shattering from within. The hand Riley had placed behind him sank into the gelatinous substance the metal wall had become. Asha sprouted tendrils like a rotting potato and then split into pieces that recombined into grotesque new shapes. He fell through the floor into a stinking pit of writhing entrails that hissed and turned into serpentine aliens. One of them had the captain’s head. It sneered at him before it bared its teeth and struck. He felt its fangs sink into his belly. The pain of its entry turned into a fiery stream that surged through his veins until it reached his brain before everything disappeared and he found himself floating in a universe filled with diamonds against a background of impenetrable darkness, the diamonds connected by almost invisible traceries like a gigantic spiderweb.

He floated in their midst for a moment before he realized that he was the universe, or rather that he had expanded to fill the universe, and that the diamonds were the neurons in his head, each one filled with pain like exploding stars, and the web that connected them burned its intricate connections into his mind, and he was being torn apart by tides of gravity, by some internal black energy that scattered him everywhere and he could no longer keep himself together. And then a voice, like the voice of some ancient god, said, “Hang in there. This will be over soon.”

And it was. He found himself back in the ship, outside the stack of alien sleeping cubicles, facing Asha. “That was a bad one,” he said, as if it had been some fleeting gas pain.

“As bad as they get,” Asha said. “I wonder how the others are taking it.”

In the commons room Tordor was solid and unmoved, as usual; Xi was jittering around the room alarming most of the others, who were already in various states of panic. The coffin-shaped creature, though, remained motionless in a corner, and the flower child stood among the terrified aliens like the central pillar of a crazed merry-go-round.

The flower child spoke. It sounded like the whispering of a breeze through a field of grain. “She says that she has felt worse,” Tordor said.

“Actually,” Riley’s pedia said, “she said that the universe had far worse fates for thinking creatures.”

“Why do you use the female pronoun?” Riley asked.

“Pronouns are an artifact of your language,” Tordor said, “but it is true that, like most evolved creatures, the flower children of Mur reproduce bisexually, and this flower child, known as Four one zero seven, produces seeds when fertilized by the male through the intermediary of a small flying creature.”

“That’s more than I needed to know,” Riley said.

“But not me,” Asha said. “Go on.”

“She suffers from separation trauma,” Tordor said. “Murans live surrounded by others, like their ancient ancestors, and she has never been far from her native bed.”

“Will we ever get back to civilization?” 4107 whispered.

“The question is: will we ever get to the other spiral arm?” Riley said.

“The real question is,” Tordor said, “will the captain allow us to get there?”

“The captain is as uncertain as we are,” Riley said. “When Kom and I confronted him about Jon and Jan, he was trying to decide what to do about the next Jump.”

“Then the captain isn’t behind these faulty coordinates?” Tordor said.

“I hope it isn’t the navigation computer,” Riley said. “If it fails we’ll never get back.”

“There are always two backups,” Tordor said.

“But who knows what condition they’re in,” Riley said. “They may be as poorly maintained as the ship itself was, before we upgraded. Or, if the navigation computer is infected, the others may be as well.”

“We will drift out here,” 4107 whispered, “for eternity, far from our native soil.”

At that moment Xi pointed to the screen that for a long time now had been nothing but black with remotely scattered spots of light, like tiny imperfections in a solid field. “Hai!” he said.

Riley saw a faint line of brightness in the far corner of the screen. If he looked at it with his peripheral vision he could see the suggestion of what might become a river of light. “The other spiral arm!” he shouted.

*   *   *

Most of the aliens turned to look at Riley and then at the corner of the screen toward which Xi pointed with his new arm. A satisfied murmur rose from among them, punctuated here and there by discordant sounds that might have involved apprehension.