by James Gunn
Riley says that we fear this strange vessel that glows with a strange light because our ancestors killed the people who came in it, because we feel something he calls “guilt.” But how can this be true? We do not feel anything when we kill, except the pleasure of killing and the satisfaction of eating. Riley says we are afraid that the people who came were gods, but how can gods be killed? And Riley says we are afraid other gods will come to punish us. Riley says many things I do not understand.
I do not understand, either, why I followed Riley through the wall that was not a wall, into the object that I fear when I fear nothing, not even death itself. I cannot explain it, the terror that took over my head and made my limbs unable to move, and the strange power that seized me and drove me forward as I tried to stop and could not. Riley says that it was a struggle within me. I felt, he says, a need to explore and to learn things none of my people have ever known and to bring back to my people the benefits of something he calls “knowledge” and its putting into use that he calls “science,” and this need was stronger than my fears and my transgressions into forbidden places. But I think I was overcome by some demon, as sometimes happens with our people, who go mad and kill and eat others and sometimes run through the jungle until they come upon something bigger and hungrier than themselves.
Or maybe, I think when I am feeling less disturbed by the strangeness of it all, I was taken over by the spirit of my ancestor who built the pyramid.
Riley does not speak my language well. He says that his throat was not made for the roaring sounds that he says my people make. It is surprising that he speaks it at all. When he speaks in his own language, it is a soft and muffled sound that I could never make, that does not sound like language at all. He is a weak animal with a flat face and hardly any jaw or teeth, and I could destroy him with a single bite or a blow from one of my legs. It is hard to believe that he even exists or was able to grow to become an adult without being eaten. But he says that on his world—that word again—the parents of his kind protect their young until they grow large enough to protect themselves. And, he says, on his world there are no hunters and feeders like my people.
He was born and raised, he says, on a world different from the one on which his kind were born. The dry, cold world on which he grew was made livable by water and air brought to it by science and by machines like the one in which we find ourselves. That world never had anything but the smallest bits of life, even smaller than the bugs that swarm around our streams and pools and dead things. But the world from which his people came was once like the world of my people, full of plants and animals and dinosaurs, as he calls us. But then, in the long ago, objects rained down from the sky, exploding against the rocks and soil and destroying the plants and the creatures who ate them and then the creatures who ate the creatures who ate the plants. And their dying allowed Riley’s ancestors to become bigger and stronger and smarter and the masters of their world.
On my world, Riley says, the objects did not come down, or they came down at a different time, and my people survived and developed better brains and language and civilization, and did not make room for the weak creatures who give birth rather than laying eggs, and who kill their prey with stones and sticks rather than the jaws and teeth with which they are born. Perhaps, Riley says, our world did not have what he calls “an asteroid belt” or objects left over from the gathering of such objects that came together to form our worlds. But he will never know and I cannot tell him because these things happened long ago if they happened at all. Riley likes to think about things that he can never know. We are born knowing what we know, how to survive, and as we survive we learn whatever we need to know to continue to survive. Riley says that there are no creatures like us in what he calls “the galaxy,” that we may be the only dinosaurs who survived to become intelligent and to build cities and things like the pyramid. But we have forgotten how to do things like these, and we think the people who built them were like gods and have gone away, though maybe they will return and bring us plenty to eat.
Riley says that there are many stars, suns like ours but far away so that they seem like tiny bits of light. These suns give birth to worlds like ours, some fit for life and most not, and on these worlds sometimes creatures live. They are not like us in shape or history, but they are like us in growing over the long ages from tiny bits of unseeable things into creatures, like seeds that grow into trees. Sometimes they learn to think and how to make things like our knives and huts and cities, and even like the sacred pyramid.
He says that these creatures learned about their world and other worlds, built boats that fly through the air and then boats that fly above the air and they got to other worlds, where sometimes people like themselves live, and they make war, which I understand, or learn how to live in peace, and they learn how to live together without killing or eating each other, by agreeing how to do so. Riley calls that “politics,” and it is a sign of civilized people. I do not understand “politics.” But these agreements that once made people able to live with each other have decayed, like meat that is so old it can no longer be eaten, and people like Riley, of which there are only two, he says, must put the agreements back the way they were, or make them better. This I believe. Riley is a god, and gods can do anything. Though why he should care about these lesser creatures or spend time making their lives better I do not understand.
And yet these lesser creatures fly through the places between the stars like we do, and guide their air-boats like Riley does with his magical hands, those extensions of flexible arms with what he calls “fingers” that can do magical things. He says that I can learn to do such things, but my arms are not like his and my “fingers” can hold food and weapons but cannot pick up and turn small objects. And they cannot do magic.
There are moments when even the melting walls seem ordinary, when the enclosed boat, the sacred object, fades away, and we are in a place that is no place, where our existence becomes part of the great nothing, and we are nothing with it, and yet we are everything as well. Riley says that there are places, “nexus points” he calls them, that are shortcuts between the stars, that make going to the stars something people can do. I think it is like death and that we die and are born again, like the souls of our ancestors, and I am not afraid. I am not afraid of death or being born again. Riley thinks that is strange, but Riley is a god and I am in the hands of the gods and they will do as they will.
Riley says that he is not a god, that he came to my world through some kind of magic that is not what the gods do but what people do. But I do not believe him. He came from the sacred place built by my ancestor so that he could become a god and live forever in the god place. I saw Riley high on the side of the pyramid, and I knew he was the born-again spirit of my ancestor, the god-shape my ancestor has taken on his return to us bringing the gifts of the gods. Riley may not know this. The gods sometimes forget. Being born again is like hatching, leaving the security of the egg for the bright danger of the world. Hatchlings are born with the desire to eat and no memory of their lives before. Sometime Riley may remember his life before and bring forth the gifts that he brought from the god place. I will keep him safe until he does. This may be why I followed him into the sacred object.
Riley gets food and drink out of the walls. The drink is a kind of water. Dinosaurs drink when they are thirsty, and one kind of water is like another. Riley says that dinosaurs do not have things in their mouths that tell one kind of taste from another. We eat meat, he says, often rotting meat, and our bodies are made to take in the tiny, living things that make meat rot without harming our bodies. Weaker creatures like him, he says, need to be able to tell when things are not safe to drink or eat, so they have tiny things in their mouths that tell them when things are not safe. Gods are strange.
Food is different. The stuff that Riley gets from the wall is like the mash that comes from fruit that has been crushed and left to rot, something we sometimes eat when meat is scarce or our bodies tell us w
e should eat something different. This mash that the place of melting walls offers is miserable stuff that no dinosaur would eat if he had a choice. Riley says it is enough to keep us alive and even healthy, and he eats it several times a day. He says I must eat it, too, and I try. But I am a meat-eater, and Riley is meat. He worries that I will eat him, that I will become so hungry that I will forget everything else, that I am a civilized person, that he is a god, but I would never do that.
Unless I get very, very hungry.
CHAPTER TEN
Asha hid the ship in the cloud of debris left over from the formation of the planets billions of long-cycles ago, well outside the range of sensors that might detect her approach. It was a meager cloud like the system it orbited, but it was enough. The sun was small and cool, not much more than a red dwarf, and the planets it had accumulated were poor, scrawny places that had never given birth to any sentient life-forms, and scarcely to life of any size except bacteria and lichens.
But that is why the Galactic Federation had chosen it as the central governing location for its sprawling member worlds, and why the Federation had spent vast amounts of time, resources, and energy bringing water and air to one of the inner planets and building and maintaining the structures that housed the complex operations of its custodians. No one would come to this out-of-the-way, lifeless, worthless system by choice or chance, and no one came who wasn’t invited. And anyone who was invited was sent coordinates that self-destructed if copied and disappeared immediately after use. It wasn’t that the bureaucrats who ran the Federation, or the leaders of the legislative bodies who directed them, were paranoid—any disaffected member system, or any newly discovered civilization with interstellar capabilities, would launch its protest by cutting off the head of the organization that had oppressed it.
Nobody from outside had ever discovered Federation Central’s location except, the bureaucrats feared, the newly emerged humans toward the end of the ten-year war. That war had been the natural (to humans) resistance to assuming humanity’s appropriate junior role in the Federation until the upstart humans had earned full status, a process that sometimes took thousands of long-cycles. When Ren and Asha and the human crew escaped, after being held as subjects for experiment and interrogation for twenty long-cycles, the bureaucrats had to consider their worst fear. It was this fear as much as the ferocity of humans and their allies that led to the peace talks.
“Why are we stopping here?” Solomon asked in his Squeal language. He was able to understand Asha’s Galactic Standard and even some of her own human terms for which there were no Squeal equivalents, but he was not fluent in either.
It had been a long trip. Even with nexus shortcuts to make interstellar travel possible within normal life spans, passage between nexus points took time, lots of it, and Asha and Solomon were forced to spend much of it together. A Captain’s Barge, capable as it was in its essential function of accessing those shortcuts, had no room for privacy. Once Solomon had gotten over his outrage about the flouting of the Squeal traditions and what he considered Asha’s betrayal, he had become a tolerable companion, even, Asha thought, a welcome diversion from her concerns about Riley and the problems ahead.
She had come to think of Solomon as a person, knowledgeable, informed, curious, even wise in the tradition of his namesake, particularly as his external gender characteristics had begun to be reabsorbed, along with, she supposed, the hormonal stimulants that had produced them. In spite of his paranoia about the sky, his inexperience with space, and the superstitions of his species that he brought to all explanations of the Squeal world’s situation, he was willing to talk about them and even to discuss the possibility of alternative explanations. If he was a good representative, the Squeal people were ready for Galactic acceptance. Not that she thought that membership in the Federation was a desirable outcome, but it might save the Squeal people from destruction.
“We have to establish an identity,” she said.
In a complex organization like the Galactic Federation, she explained to Solomon, everyone had to have an identity. It had to be detailed and foolproof and appropriate to dozens of disparate creatures and their cultures, combining planet of origin, species and species norms, recognizable deviations from norms, individual identifying criteria, skills, occupation, status, credit level, and DNA, all coded into a series of numbers suitable for computer recognition and manipulation. Every Galactic Federation citizen had an identity imprinted or embedded on an appropriate part of the body at birth, and variables were updated each identity check, which occurred every time an individual made a transaction or passed a sensor. And sensors were everywhere, so that everybody was under constant surveillance—at least in Federation Central. Interstellar communication was still limited by interstellar distances, and even unmanned communication devices that shuttled through nexus points could shorten it only to hundreds of long-cycles. So the identity issue, though universal, was system specific.
Solomon, Asha told him, was not a member of a species accepted into membership by the Federation—not yet, anyway—and thus had no identity. As far as the Federation was concerned, he was a nonperson. She would have to create a temporary identity for him, or he would be seized and imprisoned, or even executed, before he could be presented as a representative of an applicant species. Computers, she said, had no nuance. Her own situation was different, she said. Passage through the magical fountain—actually, though she did not say so, the Transcendental Machine—had removed her identity along with other imperfections.
What she didn’t tell him was that she couldn’t encode her real identity. Being human was damning enough, in the view of the Federation. But being recognized as the Prophet of Transcendentalism was a death sentence and, having passed through the Transcendental Machine, would mean instantaneous execution for Riley if he were identified, as she would be if the Federation suspected what it meant.
And there were forces, private and public, determined to find and destroy them both.
* * *
Preparing an identity for Solomon was the easy part, although the Captain’s Barge was not equipped with the scanner necessary for reading DNA and she had to cobble one together from spare computer parts. Everything else came from the answers Solomon provided, and the ship’s computer, with some new programming, put all the information into a series of numbers printed on a silicon sliver that Asha inserted into the back of Solomon’s hand.
“Now you’re somebody,” she said.
He looked at her as if he wanted to say that he’d always been somebody until she appeared in the fountain, but he refrained.
Her own identity was more difficult. It had to be accurate enough to convince the sensors that she was the person described, but it could not identify who she really was: the child born on the generation ship Adastra, intercepted by Federation ships and taken to Galactic Central, where she grew up and eventually escaped, with Ren, discovered the planet of the Transcendental Machine, and became the Prophet, the accidental messenger of instant perfection that threatened the uneasy stasis that had followed the human/Federation war.
Using the memories of her talks with Riley, she put together an identity as the girl Tes that Riley had loved, growing up on Mars; the girl who had volunteered for the war as soon as she became sixteen and was killed in the first battles. She could not falsify her DNA, could only hope that the Transcendental Machine had changed that as well, removing the imperfections that had accumulated over the long generations of mutation, exposure to viruses, and evolution. As a captive nonperson, she had never been given an identity, or, she hoped, had her DNA recorded, but she had left her father behind, when he refused to join the escape, still hoping that he could persuade the Federation to make peace. His DNA might have been recorded, and any scan might reveal the relationship.
But that was a chance she would have to take, as well as the chance to find her father, if he was still alive.
Asha edged her ship out of the debris cloud and drifted i
nto range of Federation Central computer transmissions, realizing that she was also in range of the Federation’s sensors. But she hoped that before she had to announce their arrival the ship would be mistaken for icy fragments heading for an orbit of the sun. She picked up the feeds from the computers. Much of it was coded message traffic, reports, financial data, statistics, bureaucratic drivel, but some of it was information broadcast for general consumption. Using simple search parameters, she studied it for news about the Federation and its member species, disagreements, quarrels, even battles—since even in a well-ordered and closely supervised family, discord can arise—knowing that all she was seeing was what the bureaucrats and the Council that supervised them were willing to let the public know.
There were disagreements, there were quarrels, there were battles between systems and even within systems, and reprisals by Council forces. The largest number of these involved humans, who were represented as a petty, quarrelsome species whose application for admission to full membership in the Federation was unlikely to be acted upon until humans learned how to live in peace with other species and even each other. Asha knew this was propaganda, but she also knew that it was a sign that Federation resentment at the arrogance of humans and their willingness to fight for what they believed to be their rights had not ebbed with the signing of the peace agreement. For too long the Federation had been the sole arbiter of disputes, and species, members and nonmembers alike, had acquiesced to its power and righteousness, sacrificing their own interests for the good of the whole, or recognizing that resistance would be met by reprisals, perhaps even destruction. Much remained to be done before the galaxy could settle back into its accustomed state of enforced civility, and civility in foreign relations was not a human tradition.
