The Eleventh Gate

by Nancy Kress

  He said, “This project is not ridiculous. The villagers—” he waved in the direction of the settlement of Adarsh and its mostly Punjabi descendants—“are making money by selling the jeebees’ nectar, and the jeebees are keeping away the lions.” Another ridiculous name—the predators native to Polyglot looked nothing like lions. Smaller, smellier, and far more dangerous to humans, they hunted in deadly packs and had killed children herding the genemod Terran goats that this relatively poor area depended on.

  Tara said nothing, just stared at him with that sexual intensity that made Philip so uncomfortable—but was that because his body responded to it? So far, he had resisted her, although she invaded his dreams. Those green eyes, husky voice, body… Not for the first time, he cursed her beauty, and his own that had attracted her. He couldn’t help the way he looked. Also, while he was at it, he cursed the Libertarian Landrys that did not control where their offspring went or what they did there. If Tara had been a Peregoy, he never would have met her.

  She still watched him without speaking. The sun beat down; Polyglot had only a one percent axial tilt and most places were grassland or, near water, forest. Sweat formed at the back of Philip’s neck. To relieve the tension, he raised his wrister and brought up a holo image. “This set-up—using pollinators to keep away predators and also produce income—was tried on Earth, only there the bees were real, the protectees were big animals called elephants, and the predators were us. See—this is an elephant.”

  Tara didn’t move her gaze from Philip’s face. “Did it work?”

  “No. Poachers still wiped out elephants before the Catastrophe did. But this might work here.”

  “It won’t. Human nature doesn’t change. The best you can hope for is a temporary, carefully constructed truce that will fall apart eventually. The predators always win. Phil—”

  “No, Tara,” he said, somewhere between gently and irritated. “I’ve told you over and over again. No.”

  “But I love you.”

  “I don’t love you. I’m sorry, but I don’t.”

  “Do you love somebody else?”

  This was what he dreaded. She was unbalanced, she commanded huge resources, she had the ruthlessness of Polyglot “lions” taking down unprotected prey. If Philip did fall in love with someone else, what might Tara Landry do to her, or to him? He considered Tara dangerous.

  “No,” he said. “Tara, leave me alone!”

  “I can’t,” she said. “I won’t. I know you want me—do you think I can’t tell?”

  Philip stepped back; when past conversations had gone like this, Tara had not hesitated to stroke his crotch, which had instantly responded. This time, however, she merely said, “Would it make a difference to you if I did something so wonderful that it saved millions more lives than your jeebee plan ever could?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t tell you now. Not yet. Phil, you don’t know me. I’m as idealistic as you are. I am. We want the same good things for the Eight Worlds. With my money—and don’t try to tell me your parents left you enough money because I know exactly what you inherited—you could do such great things for everybody! I would help you, not to do these fucking little experiments but real, large improvements and creations! I would—”

  “No. Tara, I’m sorry, but no. Not now, not ever. I’m sorry.”

  He braced for the explosion, but it didn’t come. She smiled sadly and said, “All right. I can wait.”

  “Don’t.” He turned away and strode around her toward the temple, the one place she would never follow. He expected a tantrum, but she said nothing.

  The temple was empty, its coolness welcome. Philip’s parents had lavished augments on their only child, spending most of their money on his genemods. In the temple’s dimness, his infrared vision spotted the lion behind the altar. It had slunk in to grab bread left as an offering. Philip froze.

  The lion crept around the stone altar, and he and it stared at each other.

  Philip’s muscle augments made him fast, but not as fast as a Polyglot lion. But these animals hunted in packs, not alone. This one might be an outcast. Gray and very thin, it had been reduced to eating bread. Possibly it was being hunted by its own kind, as the old often were. Slowly Philip moved away from the door and, just as slowly, reached for the gun at his waist.

  He didn’t need it. As soon as the doorway was clear, the lion streaked through it, carrying away the bread. Philip darted back outside to watch it disappear into tall grass.

  Tara was still there.

  She wouldn’t come into the temple. Both she and the lion had agitated Philip; never had he felt less like meditating. But that’s what meditation was for: to calm agitation. Although ever since that day five years ago, he had aimed at so much more.

  He knelt on a faded cushion. The temple, its walls ornamented with unskillful drawings of various gods, had been built by late-arriving settlers who’d spent all their money getting to Polyglot, which was why they now occupied such a leftover, poor island. The temple was made of foamcast, cheap and durable. The treasured golden Shiva brought from Earth had been stolen almost immediately, and a local artisan had carved one of wood brought from a distant forest. This had sat on the stone altar for a hundred years, flanked by dim, bacteria-generated electric lights instead of candles. Like the lights, Hinduism on Polyglot had evolved in ways that no pujari would recognize, although followers still left offerings of bread, berries, and flowers. The heavy, pungent odor of yellow thlek blooms filled the temple.

  Philip was not Hindu. He went to whatever place of worship existed wherever his work for the perpetually underfunded Polyglot International Environmental Service took him. As long as the place of worship was quiet, he could indulge his own peculiar religious practice, which had also evolved in the last five years.

  Most people on the Eight Worlds were Rationalist, that dry substitute for the human impulse toward the sublime. Religion, Philip had realized long ago, provided two things: comfort through the unseen and a sense of community. Denial of all “superstition” negated both. The Rationalists had sought to remedy that problem by founding a movement with “services” consisting mostly of scientific information, along with the social events, charity endeavors, and solidarity once provided by churches, temples, mosques, covens, synagogues. The Rationalists were a great success, flourishing even on Polyglot, where older forms of worship also existed.

  Philip had never liked Rationalist services. He appreciated science, of course; his training was in biology. But Rationalism lacked passion. In addition, he could never shake the idea, unproven but powerful in his mind, that there were other valid ways of perceiving and experiencing the universe. So he had tried Buddhism, Hinduism, Druidism, charismatic Catholicism—anything he could find. None of it satisfied him, although he did learn to meditate deeply.

  Then, five years ago, it had happened, and not while he was meditating.

  There were no words for “it,” and Philip had stopped trying to find them after his stumbling explanations evoked only pity, or dismissal, or scorn. He couldn’t even find words to clarify it to himself.

  He knew all the biological explanations: meditation redirected blood flow in the brain away from areas that perceived bodily boundaries, resulting in “out-of-body sensations.” Neuron-firing disturbances in the limbic produced religious hallucinations. He knew the psychological explanations: wish-fulfillment, sensory delusions, anxiety alleviation. He knew the philosophy: logic was one way of perceiving the world, but is it arrogant to assume it is the only way?

  He knew what had happened to him.

  No, he didn’t know that—he knew only that something had happened, something as real and grounded as the cushion under him now. He had been in New Chengdu on assignment for the Environmental Service, walking by the Ocean of Aromatic Waters, named by the first inhabitants of the island. The waters might have been aromatic once, but this morning they smelled of dead fish washed up by a storm. Philip, bar
efoot, had just finished meditating and was thinking vaguely about lunch. All at once ocean, fish, and his own body disappeared. He was somewhere else, somewhere without form and possibly without substance, and in the presence of something calm, majestic, and so multiple that he could discern nothing individual, only a great whole of which he was now a part, as vast number of colors make up white light. He was somewhere definite in the universe, but he didn’t know where. Time did not exist, yet when Philip returned to his body, dusk had fallen and Polyglot’s two moons cast silvery paths on a calm, dark sea.

  He’d sunk down to the sand and tried to go back to wherever he’d just been. He couldn’t. Ever since that day, he’d been trying to go back, so that he could understand what he’d touched. He’d never succeeded, and the master meditators he’d talked to had all tried to correct him: If he’d attained satori, there wouldn’t have been other presences, nor a sense of physical place.

  The masters were wrong. What Philip had experienced was just as real as this shabby Hindu temple, as the ache developing in his neck, as the planet turning under him. He would reach it again, maybe today.

  And if he couldn’t, he could at least stay here until Tara gave up and went home.

  3

  * * *

  DEEP SPACE

  The Peregoy cruiser approached the uncharted eleventh gate. There—it showed on the viewscreen, a gorgeous lacy shimmer against the blackness of space, its sensory data creating the same incomprehensible pattern as the other gates. David Gordon’s fists balled in excitement.

  David wasn’t captain on the Samuel Peregoy; Sloan hadn’t agreed to that. Well, much as David had wanted to captain her, the decision made sense. He’d never had the conn on something as big as this; the ship was undoubtedly armed in ways David wasn’t familiar with; Sloan wanted to control, if only by proxy, whatever action might lie on the other side of this new gate. Peregoys were big on control.

  At the command console on the spacious bridge sat Captain Magda Peregoy, some distant relative of Sloan’s. Keep it all in the family. David had always thought it was weird the way all Peregoy kin had that same last name no matter who their other parent was. So did the Landrys. Arrogant—not that arrogance was always a bad thing.

  He sat beside the captain, watching the gate grow from an instrument detection to that mysterious shimmer an irregular kilometer across. Unlike many spacers, David had never tried to understand how or why the gates existed. The best guess was something to do with plasma cosmology and the quantum flux, whatever that meant. It didn’t matter. The only things that mattered were that the gate existed, he had found it, and it was going to make him some degree of rich, depending on the planet that lay on the other side. It might be lush and fertile, a new part of the Peregoy empire, with David receiving a percentage of all immigration fees. It might be useful for mining. It might—worst case—be fit only for tourist viewing from orbit if, say, it was in such early formation that it was geologically violent. David would still get a percentage of fees. But he expected better than that; all planets beside gates had, so far, been habitable by humans even if, like the Landry mining planet New Hell, only barely.

  “Thar she blows,” David said. The captain and her crew ignored him. Maybe they didn’t get the reference, or maybe they were just as much uptight pricks as Sloan Peregoy. No matter.

  Sloan knew his business. David, accustomed to the bureaucratic licensing delays and credit problems that were the inevitable fate of his small-time expeditions from Polyglot, had been astonished at how fast Sloan had been able to create this enterprise. Less than a week to equip the ship with personnel and supplies. Then a few days on conventional drive through the New California-Polyglot gate. A week to the Polyglot-Prometheus gate, farther away from Polyglot than any other gate from its planet. Why? No one knew. From the dwarf planet Prometheus, an entire month in deep space to this lonely shimmer much farther from Prometheus than other gates from their planets.

  The executive officer said, “Captain, there’s a ship following us.”

  “Identify?”

  “Just a minute…got it. Class 6A vessel.”

  It was a small Landry ship. But then, David already knew that. Only—the ship was supposed to be here already, waiting at the gate, not just now arriving. Certainly not behind the Samuel Peregoy. That was the plan.

  The captain said, “Full speed ahead. We can reach the gate first.”

  Disaster! The Samuel Peregoy would reach the gate first, go through, and claim the gate—depriving David of his chance to be part of history. And Tara had planned this so carefully! The Landry ship was supposed to be waiting at the gate. It was supposed to pass through simultaneously with the Peregoy ship, and both families would thus own the gate and the planet beyond. They would be forced to cooperate, which would be the opening wedge to defuse a rivalry growing steadily more dangerous. And David would be a part of that. He would be a fucking hero.

  Although, on second thought…maybe this was better. In Tara’s plan, all the money to be made from a new gate and a new planet would be split between the ruling families, with David taking his percentage from the Peregoy share. But if the Samuel Peregoy went alone through the eleventh gate, only Peregoy Corporation—which meant Sloan—would own the discovery. David’s take had just doubled. Of course, now the new gate wouldn’t help bring peace…but hadn’t the Eight Worlds managed for a hundred fifty years to avoid an actual war? A few skirmishes in space, money spent building weapons, a lot of tension…but no war. It could just go on like that. Maybe this was better.

  The exec said, “Gate perimeter imminent.”

  The captain said, “Proceed through.”

  The passage felt like nothing much: a shimmer on the screen, a nanosecond blip on the sensors, no different from any other gate. As a citizen of neutral Polyglot, David had gone through Peregoy gates and Landry gates. He hadn’t yet gone through this one, nor even approached it ever before—despite the lies he’d told Sloan. Only Tara had gone through, when she had first found this gate. She could have claimed it for the Landrys but instead had chosen to set in motion this idealistic plot. When she hired David to approach Sloan, he’d been a little surprised at her scheme; when he’d known her on Polyglot, she hadn’t seemed like the idealistic type. They’d had some good evenings in bars, some athletic sex, but then she’d fallen hard for some visiting lecturer at the university and tossed him out of her bed. Still, they’d kept in touch, and she’d always been interested in David’s spacer exploits, especially the ones a bit outside the law.

  “We’re through, Captain,” the exec said. And then, unable to keep surprise out of his voice, “Object just ahead!”

  David felt his mouth form an O. Not possible.

  No human had been through this gate except Tara, once and very briefly. That’s what she’d told him. That meant this object was…had to be…

  “Tracking now!”

  The object, magnified, skimmed across a viewscreen. David couldn’t get a clear idea of its size. But it was clearly in orbit around the planet ahead, which showed heavy cloud cover. The orbital was cylindrical, featureless except for a short projection that was—had to be—a landing dock.

  An alien landing dock. How had Tara not seen this? But she’d said she only stayed a moment beyond the gate, and the orbital might have been on the other side of the planet. But an orbital this close to the gate meant that the aliens—unthinkable word!—knew about the gate. Why hadn’t they ever gone through it? Why were they unknown to the human universe?

  It didn’t make sense.

  Captain Peregoy’s voice held the undertones of someone exerting control to keep herself steady. “If we see them, they see us. Initiate contact.”

  The exec started a prerecorded message. Someone had planned for the improbable. The message sounded on the bridge and, David guessed, went out to the orbital on all possible wavelengths. First were tones giving a sequence of prime numbers, repeated twice, and then, “This is the Peregoy Corporat
ion Space Service ship Samuel Peregoy, Captain Magda Peregoy commanding. We come in peace. Please answer.”

  On the bridge, tension prickled like heat.

  Nothing.

  The exec said, “No other objects detected in orbit, ma’am.”

  The orbital disappeared behind the planet, then reappeared. The exec said, “Length is ten meters, diameter four meters.”

  The thing was small—smaller than Sloan’s office. The message from the Samuel Peregoy repeated constantly for an hour. Were they conferring, down there on the planet? As it turned, David glimpsed the blue of ocean, plus a brown tip of land mostly still under cloud cover. Was anyone there? Maybe this was the sole orbital still in the sky after the civilization that put it there had decayed or perished. After all, that had happened on Earth. Only semi-savages were left on Earth, people whose culture had degenerated to practically iron age. David had read once, or maybe been told, that all sentient civilizations unable to spread to other planets would eventually destroy their own. Too many beings using up too many resources.

  Captain Peregoy said, “Prepare to launch a scout to rendezvous with orbital.”

  A bubble of excitement rose in David’s throat, heady as champagne. “Captain, you have four scouts aboard and you’ll need one to streak back through the gate and file the Peregoy claim. You should reserve the others, in case anything happens to the first one going back—after all, the Landry ship is so close, just the other side of the gate. And I fly scouts, so I know that nothing you have aboard will be able to dock on that small platform. We don’t even know how to secure the scout alongside—look, there’s no apparent mechanism. But I can put on a suit and get over there on a vacuum sled. I can see if there’s any way to open any door. You’d be risking only me, not a scout and not anyone from your crew.”