Transcendental (26 page)

“Why should we do that?” I asked, or rather my symbiote commanded me to ask.

Minutes later, Jak said, “The spaceship
Geoffrey
has been instructed to seek out the Transcendental Machine. The so-called Prophet—the person that rumors say first was transformed by the machine and let fall, carelessly or deliberately, information about it—will not be able to resist joining the passengers. Your first task will be to identify the Prophet and discover his secrets, if he has any, and, second, you must be first to discover the Transcendental Machine, if it exists, and secure its secrets for our species.”

“What can we two do among so many?” I asked.

After minutes the answer came, like all Jak’s responses impatient with the resistance of the universe. “You have been bred and trained for this. Your destiny calls.”

“Yes, Father,” we said as one, but if Jak had seen our faces he would not have believed our words.

“If you cannot be first to the Transcendental Machine, you must be sure that it does not fall into alien hands, even if that means destroying it. Then you must return with your information or find a way to get the information back to me, even if you cannot return.”

“Especially if we cannot return,” Jon whispered. “And won’t that start another war?” Jon said aloud.

After another long pause, Jak replied, “That is a risk we will have to take—for the sake of humankind.”

“A risk
we
will have to take,” I whispered.

“Now there is no more time,” Jak said. “Your ship is waiting, and you cannot delay if you are to join the
Geoffrey
at Terminal.”

And so it began.

*   *   *

The ship was small and fast, but we were a day behind. Only by a risky shortcut that skipped an intermediate nexus did we make it to Terminal before the
Geoffrey
arrived, and then, as you all know, we had to wait. And repel the attack by the barbarian Minals from the hills. And the sabotage against the climber. By the time we reached the
Geoffrey
we had almost forgotten our mission. But our symbiotes would not let us forget. They kept whispering to us, trying to undermine our instructions, trying to force us to become the inconspicuous biota-tenders that we were hired to be.

Our first task was to identify the Prophet. We had little opportunity to interact with the passengers. Jak should have bought us a place among the pilgrims, where the chief suspects were likely to be found, but maybe there wasn’t time. Jak, though, was not a man who allowed time to shape his choices, so it was likelier that he had arranged for some other agent in the passenger quarters. You can speculate among yourselves who that might be, but we caution you that Jak is subtle and clever, and so are the other forces who operate openly or secretly throughout the galaxy. In fact, Jon and I had come to believe that almost every passenger may be an agent for powerful individuals or organizations.

To fulfill our mission, then, we had to do the best we could with our observations while waiting on Terminal. Evaluating aliens is difficult at best, but the barbarian attack gave us a chance. A battle calls on everyone’s ultimate skills. We watched, depending on our symbiotes to react for us. But everyone was exceptional: the pachyderm, the weasel, the flower … everyone. Any of you could be the Prophet, including Riley, who reacted with quickness and decision.

Once aboard the ship we integrated ourselves among the crew, and with the advantage of our symbiotes managed to perform our shipboard duties while we inspected our fellow crew members; keeping the ship’s vegetation growing and the protein incubators free from contamination was simple compared to the challenges of terraforming. We knew that the Prophet could be a crew member. We considered the captain as a possibility. He was in a position to instigate, to guide, to shape, to control, and he had unusual abilities, not least the capture of the climber when it was swinging at the end of the severed beanstalk. But our symbiotes informed us of his add-ons as well as his dependence on navigational guidance from elsewhere in the ship—possibly from the Prophet. No other crew member seemed exceptional. Of course Jon and I, with our symbiotes concealed, would not have seemed exceptional to any of them, or, perhaps, to you.

Finally we reached the conclusion that we would have to search the passenger quarters. I volunteered. I had my own reasons that Jon did not guess, but then the loss of our clones and the separation from our home place was beginning to come between us rather than bring us together. Our symbiotes opposed the idea, as they had opposed much of what Jak had instructed us to do. But we had found a way to maintain a level of thought and action independent of their awareness and control. Even a karass needs some aspects of privacy and we had developed abilities our symbiotes did not suspect. They were far more susceptible to hormones to which we were accustomed and whose production we could, in part, control.

Our symbiotes were able to determine when the passenger quarters were quiet enough for me to slip in unobserved. If detected I was prepared with a cover story of a necessary repair, but no one challenged me. I found nothing to pin any suspicions upon and resolved to investigate one of the sleeping compartments—Riley’s, whom I still suspected. Again, nothing.

At that moment the tragedy of my existence fell over me like a black tent. My task was impossible, my father had turned into an uncaring manipulator, my body and part of my mind were under the control of a soulless bacterium, Jer was separated by light years beyond measure and intended for purposes that Jon and I felt would end in vileness and probably death, and Jon and I were all that was left of our karass. The sorrow of all this was overwhelming.

And in that moment I recalled to memory the instructions for reinstating the cryogenic features of the sleeping compartment, performed the necessary adjustment, and turned it on, surprising my symbiote—and that had been my purpose from the beginning: to kill the bacterium that had taken control of my life and my will, even if it meant my own death in the process. The overwhelming grief—real as it was, real as it had to be—was the tool I used to deceive my symbiote long enough to let me achieve my end, and its.

Now I learn that I failed and that Jon, in despair after my action, found a way to follow me into that long, cold sleep. But Jon will not awaken, and I am alone and afraid. In my desperation I betrayed the drive toward the transcendental that this voyage represents. My only hope is to pursue the final reward that Jak held out to us. If we found the Transcendental Machine, he told us, we could be reconstituted as a full karass, our clonemates restored from our memories and our genes.

But, alas, my symbiote is awakening, and I am afraid that Jak lied to us again.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The captain’s barge was a complete ship except for the lack of food gardens. Instead it was equipped with a supply of dried and frozen foods adequate to keep a handful of passengers alive between planets or while navigating to rescue, and an atmosphere recycling unit. Adequate, that is, if the passengers were human or humanoid enough to be sustained by human food. The ship consisted of only two sparse cabins—a passenger compartment with attachments for full-body hammocks and a tiny control cabin. And an engine room and a tank to store liquefied hydrogen to fuel the thermonuclear engines. Although this far from civilization, no amount of food or fuel was likely to be more than a gesture at survival.

The ship was crowded and smelled like a mixture of human sweat and alien effluvia and had no artificial gravity, but it was a ship, and a glorious escape from the claustrophobia of the
Geoffrey.

At the last moment the barge crew had been joined by the enigmatic coffin-shaped alien. It had shown up at the airlock, and Tordor said, “This person wishes to join us.” How he knew this was a mystery to Riley, who had heard nothing and neither had his pedia; but much in alien communication was beyond human capabilities to perceive, much less to understand. Perhaps Tordor was pretending or making it up, but the alien creature was there, waiting to board the barge with them.

“It wasn’t on the list the captain approved,” Riley said.

“The captain won’t object,” Tordor said.

“Let it come with us,” Asha said.

It was a good thing, too. As soon as the barge cut loose from the
Geoffrey,
the alien floated to the control room, extruded cable-like arms, inserted them into holes beneath the controls, and made small clicking sounds.

“This person says that the computer program has errors, but it has fixed them,” Tordor said.

“I’m not sure I want an alien creature I don’t know, and have no way of knowing, determining whether this ship functions the way it is supposed to,” Riley said. “Not to mention its competence to detect and fix computer errors in a system it has never seen.”

“We all trust the mechanisms we have created to enable us to travel and survive in this unforgiving environment,” Asha said.

“All the more reason not to have some alien thing or apparatus fooling around with them,” Riley said.

“The computer is a thinking machine,” Tordor said. “Our fellow pilgrim is a machine that thinks. The computer doesn’t care if it survives; it will do what it is programmed to do. Our fellow pilgrim programs itself and wants to survive.”

“It is a machine then?” Riley said.

“What it is the creature will reveal when it is ready,” Tordor said.

“And why does it want to survive?”

“That, too, it will reveal when it is ready.”

“And what makes it competent to program the computer?”

“It is a machine that thinks very well,” Tordor said.

“Let it take over the ship’s functions,” Riley’s pedia said.

“Let it take over,” Asha said. “And think about this: the captain had good reason to get rid of us. We’re the troublemakers among the passengers.”

“There’s that,” Riley admitted.

The coffin-shaped alien continued to probe the ship’s control panel.

“This person says that the hydrogen supply is low,” Tordor said. “The gauges read full but there is only enough hydrogen to get us to the surface of the planet, not enough to enable us to take off again.”

“Hah!” the weasel said. “The captain takes no chances.”

The flower child made swishing sounds.

Riley had a hard time believing that his old comrade-in-arms would deliberately maroon him. The others, maybe. But then he reflected on the captain’s behavior during the journey and asked himself if he really knew the captain anymore. “Maybe he drained the barge’s supply to fuel the
Geoffrey
and the fuel gauge failed to record it properly.”

“And maybe the computer program failed at the same time,” the weasel said.

Riley shrugged. He didn’t believe it, either, but then he didn’t trust the coffin-shaped alien. “We’ll have to go back,” he said.

“Too late,” Asha said. “The
Geoffrey
has already departed.”

Riley looked at the control screen that showed only the fading glow of exhaust from the thermonuclear propulsion of charged hydrogen atoms.

“This creature says that if we land near a body of water it can use the thermonuclear engine to separate hydrogen from water,” Tordor said.

“How long will it need?” Riley asked.

“No longer than we need to explore a nearby city,” Tordor said.

*   *   *

And it was so.

The descent to the planet surface was smooth. Riley could not have done it as well himself. The coffin-shaped alien put the barge down without a bump on the beach of a green-frothed sea within sight of a group of buildings that resembled a city, if a city had been built by aliens with alien ideas about architecture and livability. It was curiously vertical.

On the way down they had observed the condition of the planet, which was in an ice age, with ice caps extending far into what might once have been temperate zones and glaciers probing farther toward the equator, whose seas still had liquid water. The coffin-shaped alien had detected no electronic emissions or unusual thermal concentrations.

“The sun has reddened,” Asha said. “It no longer supplies the energy it once did.”

“Maybe that’s why the city builders abandoned the planet,” Riley said.

“If they abandoned it,” Tordor said.

“There’s no sign of technology in operation,” Riley said.

“There’s no sign of a technology we recognize,” Tordor replied.

The ship’s computer had a rusty voice like a hermit who hadn’t talked for most of a lifetime. “The planet’s atmosphere has been checked and is breathable for oxygen-breathing creatures, though cool according to human standards. The soil has been checked for biota and injections have been prepared to immunize against potentially dangerous bacteria and unusual elements and molecules. For humans, of course.”

“This creature says that the ship’s computer is trustworthy and capable,” Tordor said.

“I wish you would call it something besides ‘this creature,’” Riley said.

“This creature says it can be called ‘Trey,’” Tordor said.

“‘Trey,’” Riley repeated. “I had a dog named Trey.”

“Trey means three,” his pedia said. “That may have some significance.”

Riley and Asha submitted themselves to air-blown injections inside the airlock. Tordor and the weasel refused them, and the coffin-shaped alien not only didn’t need them, it was going to stay in the ship along with the flower child, who couldn’t move fast enough to keep up. The four explorers chose hand-weapons from the lockers, Riley and Asha put on jackets, and they stepped onto the alien planet.

It was a bracing moment, as the first steps on an unfamiliar world always are. Partly it was the experience of emerging onto solid ground with real gravity and real air after the long artificial life-support of a spaceship. Mostly, though, it smelled different—not only fresh after the recirculation of air used and reused uncountable times by humans and aliens, but differently fresh when it was an alien planet, like the scents of a foreign restaurant multiplied a thousand times.