by James Gunn
Riley stood up. A few paces away was another blank wall, but this, he knew, was his pathway out of this massive structure into whatever lay beyond. It took him one hour, six minutes, and forty-two seconds to find the combination of pressure points around the circumference of the wall that made a segment of the wall swing inward and allowed light to enter and a breeze redolent with the distinctive scent of alien life and vegetation and their decay.
Riley stepped to the opening and looked down at a flat, rugged surface of stone as far as he could see, sloping away from him toward the canopy of a tropical jungle, and above to a sky that was drifting with clouds turned reddish by an alien sun.
He took a deep breath and started the long climb down to a world that he had to learn about very quickly before he could find a way to leave it.
CHAPTER TWO
Asha woke up.
Light was streaming down from above and a spray of liquid was hitting her face and naked body as she opened her eyes. She was standing in the familiar structure of a simplified Machine, but there was nothing familiar about its location. When she had been transported before, she had awakened in the walled-in section of a cave remote from civilization. Here, she realized, the Machine that had received her was the centerpiece of a fountain that was spraying what seemed to be water. The fountain was in the middle of what appeared to be a public square or a plaza surrounded by structures that seemed just a little weird but clearly intended for habitation or business. The air was breathable with just a hint of an alien odor, a bit pungent, like sandalwood. The square was occupied by several hundred aliens, somewhat humanoid in appearance, and without clothing. And they were all looking at her.
Sometimes, she realized, the Machines left around the galaxy by the Transcendental Machine aliens would have been destroyed by geologic accident or by superstitious natives over the past million long-cycles. But sometimes, if they had been discovered, they might have been admired or even venerated and placed in positions of honor. That, apparently, was what had happened here.
Clearly, too, she and Riley, if he had followed her into the Transcendental Machine, had been transported to different places, perhaps to different parts of the galaxy, and Riley would have awakened, as she did, wondering what had happened, though perhaps, if he had observed what had happened to her, more aware of what the process involved. He would be in a position, and with newly acute faculties, to figure it out, as she had in her first experience through the Machine. And he would have her account for guidance. Now, though, she knew what to expect and what she would have to do. Before, she had found herself among truly alien quadrupeds, whose barklike language had been difficult to learn, but who had worshipped her with doglike devotion and, fortunately, had achieved spaceflight a thousand long-cycles earlier and Federation status only a few hundred long-cycles later. So she had been able to find her way back into Federation space and begin the journey that had started with the rumors of Transcendentalism and the Transcendental Machine, and ended with the pilgrimage on the spaceship Geoffrey from Terminal to the planet of the Transcendental Machine in the adjacent spiral arm.
Here it might well be different. First she would have to calm the apprehensions of the natives of this world, win their trust or maybe their worship (how would they have responded, she thought, if one of the arachnoids had appeared in the Machine?), and find a ship that would take her off this world and into the galactic civilization of nexus point travel and the Galactic Federation that controlled this spiral arm, where there were powerful forces that would rather see her dead and forgotten. She was the unintentional prophet of the new religion of Transcendentalism, a religion of evolutionary fulfillment that threatened the stability hard-won through thousands of long-cycles of wars and internecine struggles, most recently with humans newly emerged from their solar system into the galaxy.
That was the simple part. The second was more difficult. She had to find Riley, for personal reasons and for the help she needed in order to save the galaxy from itself, to fulfill the promise born into its first living creatures, not only to survive but to prevail. To improve. To be the best they could be. To do that, the galaxy needed a more nourishing system of governance, of art, of literature, of discourse. And to make that happen she needed Riley. But where would he consider a logical meeting place in this vast galaxy? It was something they should have talked about, something she should have considered, since she had already been through the Transcendental Machine. But she had not envisioned the variability of destinations. Even transcendence has its limitations.
She would think of something. But now she had to meet her new companions.
She gathered up her clothing scattered on the floor of the Machine, too damp to put on even if she had wanted to. She stepped out of the Machine, into the full spray of the fountain, as naked as the humanoids who stared at her from the plaza.
* * *
As soon as she stepped out of the fountain, humanoids who had emerged from a nearby building rushed toward her with some kind of cloth over their arms and a stronger odor of sandalwood from their bodies. Before she could react, humanoids closest to her had taken hold of her arms. She did not struggle. The touch of their four-fingered hands was firm, warm, and dry but not painful or unpleasant—almost reverent—and she stood still while the humanoids with the cloths shook them out into garments and draped them on her body: a sheer, royal-blue wrap-around gown, a silvery sash, a matching scarf that went over her hair and shoulders. Then they stood back and looked at her as if admiring their handiwork.
They were small people, the tallest among them reaching just a bit above her shoulders. They seemed to lack external gender distinctions. Their smooth, brown bodies were not mammalian; they had no breasts or nipples or genitalia, and she wondered if they were all one gender and how they reproduced and how they nourished their offspring. But they were tugging at her arms, pulling her toward an ornate structure nearby from which the humanoids with the clothing had emerged. She did not resist. She had more pressing concerns. Why had she been clothed when the rest were naked, where were they taking her, and what were their plans for her?
The building resembled the pictures she had once seen of oriental palaces, with smooth rock walls painted with ocher—or perhaps constructed with colored rock—and projections on the roof and the entranceway topped with silver spheres or irregular objects that the humanoids might consider art or ways to ward off evil. As they got closer, the short flight of stairs in front of them flattened into a silvery ramp, perhaps a carpet. It was soft under her bare feet as they pulled her toward a pair of massive silver doors that opened automatically in front of her.
The little people were squealing and hissing now as they tugged her into a large anteroom just beyond the door, its floor paved with marblelike stone and a large vase or urn in the center with blue, raised figures on it, apparently depicting various actions that might have religious or ceremonial significance. She would have to examine and decipher them when she had the chance. But that chance was not now. The little people tugged her across the room and through a door on the opposite wall and into more intimate quarters, with a pallet on a pedestal against the far wall, a pool filled with a clear liquid in the center, something resembling a table—a flat surface with legs—against another wall, and above it a silvery mirror.
She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror, not haggard from her recent experiences as she would have expected, but radiant, restored—perhaps by the Transcendental Machine—and adorned like pictures she had seen of ancient ceremonies where women were united with men in lifelong relationships. She would have to think about that. Perhaps she was the guest of a hospitable people, treating her with the special privileges and status befitting guests in this culture, particularly those that emerged through the Machine. If there was a tradition of creatures emerging from the Machine. Maybe there were only myths. They would have to be powerful myths to survive a million long-cycles. On the other hand, they might have been nurtured by charl
atans secreting themselves in the Machine and emerging as visitors.
Another possibility was that visitors from the Machine were considered by this culture to be gods or the offspring of gods or those chosen by the gods to reign over these creatures. That would create problems for her need to get off this planet and back into the interstellar community of the Federation. It might not be easy to abdicate and even more difficult to escape without abdication, and almost impossible if she were the scapegoat queen, chosen to rule in splendor for a long-cycle and then be sacrificed for the welfare and good fortune of the people, assuming all their sins and guilt and bad luck in the process.
All that would have to be sorted out. At the moment the cluster of little people had brought her to the middle of the room, squeaking and whistling, and then all but two had retreated in postures that she interpreted as showing deference and perhaps worship as well as twitches of the head and arms that somehow suggested bowing and scraping. The doors closed behind them. Asha heard a click that she understood to be a lock being closed. Her room was a prison. Well, she had been in far less comfortable prisons, and locks were meant to be opened.
Meanwhile her two guards or attendants or fellow prisoners were removing the finery with which she had just been adorned and gently tugging her into the bath in the middle of the room where they proceeded to rub her body with gentle, warm hands and liquids that emerged automatically from spigots on each side of the bath. At first she stiffened at these personal touches from her—what? handmaidens? serving men? Perhaps the question of gender didn’t matter to these creatures, or mattered to them only on special occasions, and if so it shouldn’t matter to her. She relaxed. They kept squeaking and whistling while they worked, but in a gentler, more soothing pattern. Clearly it was a language, and she would figure it out. Already she was beginning to notice a difference in squeals that her brain, without any conscious direction, was beginning to connect with actions.
Soon they were finished and they helped her out of the floor-level bath and dried her with absorbent cloths taken from a cabinet that opened, at their touch, in a wall. They seemed to marvel a bit at the differences in her body from their own but without alarm or distaste. They did not use the towels on themselves, instead allowing themselves to drip dry and then mopping up the moisture on the floor with additional towels. Finally, finished to their own satisfaction, they tugged Asha, each to an arm, toward the bed and pushed her gently down.
Asha sat upright. “Sorry, kids,” she said. “I know you don’t understand what I’m saying, but I don’t feel like sleeping right now.”
Her handmaidens or serving men—she didn’t know what to call them, and it wasn’t simply a matter of pronouns but a kind of fundamental unease at her inability to place them in a familiar gender context. The problem was common when dealing with humanoid aliens who seemed like humans but differed in some significant way, particularly sexual. Well, she would let that sort itself out, she thought, and before she had finished with it, her attendants had made some invisible signal and the doors opened for two more humanoids bearing platters that they placed in front of her on legs that magically sprang open as they descended to her level.
One platter had an assortment of what seemed to be fruit—purple balls, clusters of what looked like green grapes but were wrinkled like berries, larger globes of a red fruit that had been sliced into sections with moist, red insides. The other platter contained flat yellow pieces of what looked like bread or cake in ornate shapes. She looked them over carefully before selecting a piece of the breadlike substance and sampling it. She tried nothing else. The improvements in her body meant that it could cope with many substances that might have been poisonous to her earlier self, but it made sense to try one at a time, and something that had been cooked had less chance of being deadly. She could try other substances at her next opportunity and then something different until she had established a cuisine of alien foods that she could tolerate. And if anything made her sick, her body would reject it without, she hoped, permanent harm.
Meanwhile, though, the bread, if that was what it was, seemed not only tolerable but tasty, if a bit spicy, like the odor of the world itself and the little people who inhabited it.
“That’s enough, kids,” she said, putting down the remnants of the bread and waving her hand at the rest, hoping that the gesture, if not the words, were universal. The attendants who had brought in the platters picked them up. The one with the fruit placed it in a far corner of the room, as if leaving it for her later use, and then retreated with the other humanoid through the doors that opened automatically in front of them and closed just as automatically behind, with the same clicking sound.
“Now what, kids?” she said.
She stood up, beginning to feel like a giant among Lilliputians. The attendants looked at each other and then one moved to a different portion of the wall. When the attendant touched a spot, the wall opened like a door to reveal fixtures that seemed intended for the elimination of bodily wastes.
“Not now, kids,” she said, and did not move.
The one who had touched the wall—she could not yet distinguish between them—returned to her side. They each took an arm and tugged her gently toward the mirror, squealing and whistling. Their chatter almost seemed to make sense to her, as if she could feel the translation machine in her head whirring as, one by one, words dropped into place.
“I get it,” she said. “You want to show me something.”
She stared at her image again, this time looking a little gross beside the childlike bodies and faces beside her. But before she had time to ponder that issue her attendants had waved their hands in front of the mirror and it turned transparent. She was looking through a window into a world outside.
* * *
Later she lay in what the little people used for a bed. It was firm but not uncomfortable, except for the two attendants who were curled up at her feet. They were asleep, but she was only resting. She didn’t need much sleep anymore—maybe an hour or two of relaxing all the muscles in her body and calming the swift precision of her thoughts. Now, though, she had much to think about.
The mirror, she understood, had become a screen for scenes from the outer world into which she had been thrust, showing views that were either recorded or live. After observing only a single gesture by one of the attendants, she was able to control what was being offered, from landscape to close-up and from what seemed like the town or city in which she had appeared to more varied scenes and more distant vistas, all accompanied by the squeaks and whistles that served the little people as language, or, occasionally, by a cacophony of sound that may have represented music.
This world—she wanted to give it a squeak-and-whistle name—was a planet favored by size, geography, and geology, a bit on the small side but with flat, productive farmland and occasional rolling hills over most of its temperate zone, a few mountains at the equator, and icy poles. The mirror had shown nothing astronomical, so she had no way of judging the planet’s position in its system, only that it had a benevolent G-2 sun. She had noticed that when she’d emerged from the Machine.
There were cities, rivers with boats, oceans with ships, landscapes with some kind of vehicles that traveled on single rails. But she did not see any vehicles that moved through the air. And most important of all, she saw no spaceports. That was going to create problems. Getting a world into the space-travel era would take tens of long-cycles, at best, and she didn’t have tens of long-cycles, maybe not even a single long-cycle if her worst fears about this culture were confirmed.
Unexpectedly, as if in response to some inner timer or a signal that passed between the attendants unseen, one had stepped in front of Asha and waved its hand at the screen once more. The view of the outside world disappeared and was replaced by a darkened space. A single monstrous figure, but stylized like a line drawing, appeared in a corner of the space before fading away into blackness. Then, in another corner, appeared the figure of a humanoid alien,
one of the little people, before it, too, disappeared. A sequence of appearances and disappearances followed, with the two figures showing up in different places each time, but never close to each other.
One of the attendants moved its hand again in front of the screen. Each time the figures moved to different places.
“I get it, kids,” Asha said. “It’s a search game, like the Monster and the Princess, and I’m supposed to solve it. And that will get me a prize. Or maybe not.”
She had heard about such games. Ren had liked to hone his skills on them in the long, dull stretches of travel between nexus points, and she had even toyed with them herself, though never with Ren’s success. But her brain worked better now, and she ran over in her mind various strategies that she might bring to bear upon the solution. If she wanted to solve it. Maybe the problem was one these humanoids knew how to solve and solving it would prove her right to membership in the group of aliens intelligent enough to be granted membership in the civilized community. Or maybe it was a problem they had never been able to solve, and solving it would mean her qualification to rule over them. But she did not know, yet, what they did with rulers.
She closed her eyes and let herself relax, sensing the bodies of the little people at her feet and feeling that peculiarly comforting. She hoped that when she stopped thinking about her situation, the answer would come to her.
