Transgalactic (7 page)

Four hours and thirty-seven minutes later, he jerked awake, surprised that he had fallen asleep, and aware of movement outside the hut. He put his hand on his club and rose to his knees, ready to spring to his feet, but Rory was ahead of him, already up, already at the doorway into the night. The dinosaur-like creature roared, and from outside came the sound of heavy feet running away.

Apparently Rory's status had been compromised by his association with a creature unlike anything seen before in this village and whose only value, if it had any, was as quick food.
My meat would probably be poisonous to you,
Riley thought,
evolving as I did with alien biologies and bacteria your bodies have never encountered.
But that would be small comfort if he were being consumed by ravenous carnivores.

And then he remembered the other thing that had awakened him. He had been dreaming about the chamber into which he had been transported and his efforts to find a way out. In his dream he had emerged from the chamber into the crude corridor outside, and the doorway had closed behind him.

In that recollection was a possible way into the ancient spaceship that he had not considered.

*   *   *

“We should leave now,” Riley told Rory. “Before”—he waved at the hut's entrance, hoping that the gesture meant something in Rory's culture—“your people return.” He had no words yet for “friends,” if such a concept existed on this eat-before-you-are-eaten world.

Riley brushed past Rory into the night. The sky was clear, but there was only a little light from a few scattered stars. Rory's world, it seemed, was located far out on the spiral arm, which explained, perhaps, why it had never been visited by representatives of the Galactic Federation, or, if it had been visited, had been abandoned to its own savagery. Even the Federation could not hope to civilize these reptilian carnivores.

Perhaps the people of the Transcendental Machine had hopes for them, if, indeed, that was the purpose of the receivers that, Riley now believed, had been hidden all across his own spiral arm. But they could as easily have been the scouting party for a future invasion by an aggressive civilization that had run out of room in the spiral arm next door.

In any case, the failure of the red sphere to return with its engineers may have discouraged the Transcendental Machine people as well. Or the arachnoids had wiped out the people who had built the Machine before they could complete their transgalactic project. Riley believed that the arachnoids were the degenerate descendants of the Machine builders, not the builders themselves.

Or, the Machine builders had succeeded, and the galaxy Riley knew might be the realization of their plan. Perhaps the Machine builders were in their midst. Perhaps one of the species that made up the Federation was the Machine builders.

But all that seemed unlikely and certainly irrelevant. What was relevant was his need to get to the ruined city and the structure that housed the red sphere before he was attacked by the carnivores who lacked Rory's restraint. There was movement in the darkness, and behind him Rory roared. It was a warning to those following and waiting to attack. “I am your leader,” the roar said, “the son of a leader and the son of the son of a leader, and you will die in my teeth.”

Riley had not cared if Rory followed. He did not relish abandoning Rory in the midst of the city he feared, using the savage to fulfill Riley's need to escape this world and find Asha, and then leaving Rory to his angry tribe. But now he was glad that Rory had come along.

He walked faster. Even in the darkness he could remember every step of the path they had taken, every fallen stone along the way. If they could make it to the city, their pursuers might be too terrified to follow.

The outskirts of the ruins were only a few paces away when their pursuers attacked. They fought off the first group, Riley with his club and Rory with his fearsome head and teeth and his powerful legs. The pack retreated, leaving them bloodstained and wounded, and Riley said, “Quick. To the city before they attack again,” and he turned and ran toward the ruins, not knowing whether Rory was the source of the footfalls behind him or the carnivores who hungered after them.

As he reached the edge of the ruins, the sounds of pursuit faded, and there was only the solitary noises of his own breathing and Rory's heavy feet. When they drew near the structure Riley had come to think of as the museum of the red sphere, Riley turned. The yellow sun was coming up beyond the distant jungle tops, and Riley could see Rory's wounds and what seemed like a broken arm. “I'm going to do something bad,” Riley said in Rory's language, “and you won't want anything to do with it. I don't know what you're going to do now. Maybe your people will accept you back after I'm gone”—
if, indeed, I'm right,
he thought—“at least I hope so. But it won't do either of us any good if I stay.”

He realized that he had come to think of Rory as a companion if not a friend. Rory looked at Riley with unblinking red eyes, and Riley wasn't sure how much of his speech the other had understood in his mangled Rory-ese. In his own language, he said, “Good-bye, buddy. You've been far more of a help than I had any right to expect.” He resisted the urge to pat the monstrous creature on the head, turned, and entered the museum. The red sphere was already glowing with reflected sunlight. Riley moved around it, thinking about the exit from the place of the Machine receiver. He had not checked it; he had only assumed that the way back was permanently barred.

Riley ran his hand along the surface of the sphere until he found a place where the surface suddenly gave way, and his hand disappeared up to his wrist. He swallowed, took a deep breath, and moved forward, feeling a cool tingling over his entire body as the light changed to a rosy glow and then something like day.

 

CHAPTER SIX

Asha's handmaidens were still asleep, curled up at the foot of the bed, when Asha sat up, swung her feet to the floor, and stood. She moved quietly to the corner of the wall from which her handmaidens extracted the towels and had deposited the fancy clothing her suitors had brought. She had watched the motions with which her attendants had opened the wall, and the wall opened at her touch, like a cabinet door. She searched through the folded clothing until she found the clothing she had worn to the world of the Transcendental Machine that had been returned by the third suitor, and slipped them on. Below, on the floor, were her old sandals. She put them on her feet.

She walked to the far wall, turned on the mirror/receiver, and switched to the Monster and Princess puzzle. Quickly she redid her solution, only this time she completed it: the Monster's best search strategy always found the Princess, and the Princess's best avoidance strategy always enabled her to escape. Like all such puzzles, if both parties used their best strategies the situation was a standoff.

As she completed the last entry, the door clicked. The solution to the puzzle, apparently, was the recognition of her equality, and as a citizen she was no longer to be confined. Asha moved to the door and took one last look at her sleeping attendants. “Sorry, guys,” she mouthed, and moved silently through the open door.

The big room was empty, as she expected, and the massive doors to the plaza opened as she approached. She stopped in the entrance. Unexpectedly, the night was almost as bright as day. As she moved farther into the plaza and looked up, she understood why: the sky was ablaze with stars—not the few thousands she had been accustomed to in Federation Central and certainly not the few hundreds of Terminal or the scattered few of the Great Gulf, but tens of thousands shedding their baleful light on the planet of Squeal.

No wonder the little people of Squeal were terrified of the sky. Rather than a position farther out on the spiral arm, Squeal was close to the center of the galaxy with all its clustered suns. One of them, looking much like the rest, might be the central black hole, no more than a pinprick in the tapestry of night but surrounded by an accretion disk of dying suns and their doomed planets, and spewing deadly radiation, absorbed now by Squeal's atmosphere. But always looming over Squeal was the threat of some supernova explosion, some terrible brightness in the night sky, that would release a cascade of cosmic rays for which the atmosphere would be no protection. And going out into that hostile space beyond the atmosphere without the protection of radiation-proof ships would be suicide. Even travel through the air of Squeal would risk fatal exposure at upper levels of the air that covered the planet.

The only sounds as she crossed the plaza toward the structures on the other side were her muffled footsteps and the splashing of the central fountain. The air was mild and tinged with the characteristic sandalwood odor of Squeal itself. She looked up at the indestructible Machine in its place of honor on the fountain's peak and reflected on all it implied: ancient technology reconceived as sacred symbol, long-forgotten plans and dreams reborn as contemporary mythology. Nothing endured; everything is renewed. And yet we struggle on, she thought, hoping to make a difference, attempting to make our brief existences mean something.

The buildings on the plaza differed in size and decoration, but they were constructed up against their neighbors, with no space between, like pictures she had seen of big cities on Earth and the cities built by the people of the Transcendental Machine. The only one that stood isolated on the plaza was the palace in which she had been kept. Avenues at each corner of the plaza allowed the Squeal people to come and go, although she had never seen vehicles there. Perhaps delivery wagons came to the rear.

Asha arrived at the front entrance of a building that was a bit larger and more colorful than its neighbors, with a front expanse of green paint or tile, perhaps reminiscent of verdant Dorian plains. The stairs did not turn into a welcoming ramp. In fact, there was no welcome at all. Double doors were stubbornly closed. Asha looked for some indication of a bell or knocker. Seeing none she waved her hands in front of the doors and its frame in the way she had learned to control the mirror/receiver and the cabinet-wall, but there was no response. If she was mistaken in the building, its occupants were Squeal people conditioned from birth to avoid the night.

But she was not, and she pounded on the door with her fist. The sound echoed across the empty plaza, stirring echoes that might in normal circumstances have brought a crowd of curious or alarmed spectators or uniformed guardians of the peace. No answer. She pounded again. Finally she heard a muffled voice from the other side of the door. “Go away!” it said in the squeal language.

“I can't,” Asha replied. “I need your help.”

“Go away!” the high-pitched voice repeated. “You don't exist!”

“You must let me in. I invoke my rights as a Federation citizen!” She had no squeal words for “rights,” “Federation,” or “citizen,” so she substituted words in Galactic standard.

“Go away!” the voice said once more, sounding plaintive.

Asha switched to Dorian grunts. “I invoke my rights of asylum!”

The voice was silent.

A moment later the doors swung open.

*   *   *

Inside was a small Squeal person. It might have been Eenie or Minie, but it was terrified of her or the night, shrinking back into a wood-paneled foyer on a slick stone floor. Dark corridors extended in each direction to the left and the right and a door in the farther wall was closed. In the center of the foyer stood a tall vase—what was it with these people and their vases?—and she wondered what story its inscribed figures told and if she ever would have the chance to decipher it.

As she was making those observations, she was closing the doors behind her. The Squeal person's agitation eased, as if assured that no more creatures of the night would enter after Asha. The sandalwood aroma of this world and the person in front of her was tinged with the hint of methane common among grazers, and she knew she was in the right place.

“You are the Chosen One,” the Squeal person said, with what could have been a touch of awe or reverence if Asha had been capable of making such distinctions.

“So I am told,” Asha said. “But now I am a citizen of the galaxy,” she continued, again substituting words in Dorian, which, apparently, the Squeal person could understand even if its delicate vocal chords were unable to emit Dorian grunts. “You will wake the Ambassador,” she said imperiously, hoping that the Dorian word for the Galactic Federation representative was appropriate and that her status among these little people would justify her tone. “And you will take me to a place where we can meet.”

The Squeal person looked bewildered and then, apparently deciding that it could not leave Asha standing in the entranceway, led the way to the farther door. It opened as they approached. The Squeal person stood aside as Asha entered, and then departed, to get the Ambassador, Asha hoped, and not guards who would evict her, or worse.

The room was a study or office, with a massive standing desk, suitable for a species that stands more than it sits or reclines, at the far end. It was a big room, as if the person who used it felt more comfortable in open spaces. The wood-paneled walls were adorned with paintings of long vistas of rolling grasslands dotted with clumps of trees surrounding ponds or pools, but the pictures moved as she watched, the grass waving and the leaves tossing as if blown by a gentle breeze. Asha could almost smell the grass, and then she realized that she
could
smell the grass. The room must have been of significant comfort to a creature far from its ancestral home and treasured childhood.

There were no chairs. Any creatures seeking conference with the Ambassador stood as he did and without any convenience that might provide a feeling of comfort or an excuse to linger.

Asha felt a presence behind her and then the fall of heavy feet. She stood aside as a pachyderm-like Dorian moved ponderously past her, almost pulling her into its orbit, like the satellite of a massive star. The Dorian resembled Tordor, her sometimes-traitorous companion on the pilgrimage of the
Geoffrey,
but older, grayer, and more massive. The Dorian continued across the floor until it turned, stood behind the desk, settled back against the support of its sturdy tail, and looked at Asha with what Asha, with her Dorian experience, interpreted as contempt mixed with anger at being aroused in the middle of the Squeal-world's night and perhaps with a cool, murderous intent.