by James Gunn
A woman approached him from the dusk. She was tall, slender, young, dark-haired, and almost naked. Her natural attributes may have been enhanced, but they looked good on her. “I like your looks, guy,” she said. “Would you like to join me?” She paused before she continued. “I can get other girls, if you prefer groups. Or maybe you like big, tough guys like yourself.”
“Thanks,” Riley said, “but I’m looking for a friend.”
“You won’t find anything better,” she said. “Friends are overrated.”
Riley shook his head and went down a level. Here the aroma of food and drink wafted toward him from groaning tables piled high with meats, baked breads, and pitchers of what looked like wine. Overweight men and women lounged at the tables or on couches, eating and drinking until the remains of their feasting dripped from their mouths and down their chins onto their chests. Occasionally one of them would get up and stagger to a station against the far wall where automated equipment would evacuate their stomachs and clean their bodies before they returned to their eating and drinking.
Riley shook his head and continued down the ramp.
On the fourth level men and women, fully dressed, were playing games of chance, rolling dice, placing bets against numbers that sprang up randomly on a circle of lights, or buying and selling credits in a market that changed every few seconds to record the shifts in values on worlds so far removed that their success or failure would take many cycles to reach the central accounting system.
Riley had never been interested in finances or in riches, and he continued down past the fifth level and the sixth, pausing for a moment at the seventh level to see men and occasionally women fighting each other with fists and weapons, with Pediaized medics standing by to inject, stitch, and repair. And he went on to the eighth level and finally reached the ninth level, where coffinlike tanks were ranged across a long, wide, polished dark floor. Here were the sim tanks that he remembered, when ordinary pleasures were no longer enough to ease the pains of existence and where simulated experience of ultimate fulfillment were Pedia-fashioned for each person. Riley knew what it was like because it was to this level he had descended, when none of the other levels were sufficient. It was the last dark refuge of his damaged soul, and it had plunged him into even deeper darkness from which he had been dragged back to the real world by the unseen voice that told him about the Transcendental Machine and the Prophet of Transcendentalism, and forced upon him the task of killing the Prophet and seizing the Machine, or destroying it. And that had inserted a biological pedia, his pedia, into his brain to give him an added resource and to punish him, even kill him, if he failed or refused to carry out his instructions.
Riley searched among the tanks until he found her. It was Sharn, although her body, imbedded in the thick fluid that filled the tank, was thinner than he remembered and her face, though older, more at peace. Whatever dream she was living was better than what life had offered, even though the dream was devouring her from within.
He hated to bring her back to the real world, but he knew that that was what he would have wanted if it were he lying there, as he had been. He reached down into the fluid in which she was immersed, that sustained her body while she dreamed, and pulled her up by her shoulders. The fluid ran down her body in viscous streams and out of her mouth and nose. She coughed, vomited the fluid that had filled her lungs, gagged and vomited again, stirred, and opened her eyes. After a moment they focused on him.
“Riley?” she said. “Is that you? How can it—? Let go. Let me go back. For the first time in my life I was happy.”
“I can’t,” Riley said. “I’ve got to ask you some questions. And then, if you answer them, I’ll let you go back.”
“I don’t believe it’s you,” she said. “You look different.”
“It’s been a couple of long-cycles,” Riley said. “And a lot has happened to both of us.”
“Let me see you better,” she said. The light was dim here, but that was not what she meant. She reached up and touched his face with both hands, and then slipped them behind his head. Her face hardened with suspicion. “You aren’t Riley. You’re a dream, a bad dream, and I’m still in the sim tank.”
He understood. She had been searching for the scar of his operation, the one that had opened his skull for the biological pedia, the scar that the Transcendental Machine had removed along with all the other imperfections, including the pedia.
“You were the surgeon who put that thing in my head!” he said.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Asha’s father looked old. His hair was white and thin, and his face was furrowed, as if armies of thought had waged battles across it. At the moment, it looked confused. “Asha?” he said. “You look different.”
He looked different, too. She had left him a dozen long-cycles ago, still a youngish man, vigorous, determined, filled with hopeful plans to change the minds of the Federation Council that had drawn from her father and her younger brother Kip what the Council had considered damning evidence of innate human violence. Out of that judgment had emerged ten long-cycles of war and destruction. Confirmation for the Council. Casus belli for humanity and its allies.
And yet here was her father in the heart of the Federation, in a level and an office that suggested a position of power in the Federation bureaucracy. “I left here a girl,” Asha said. “I came back a woman. With a new identity.” She gave a series of numbers that were not her identity but close enough to confuse anyone who might be listening.
“And yet more than a woman,” her father said. “There’s power in the way you stand and move, a confidence that I have seen in only a few of the people I have known, including the most effective members of the Federation. I’m proud of what you’ve become. But what happened to you?”
“I’ve gone many places and done many things,” Asha said. “But what happened to you? You’ve grown old.” She sat down, not because she was tired, but because she didn’t want to seem to challenge his authority either as a father or as an officer of the Federation.
“Life here has not been easy,” her father said, “after you and Ren left me behind.”
“We didn’t leave you behind. You refused to come with us. You wanted to stay, you said. You still had hopes of changing the Federation’s mind about humans. But instead we had ten long-cycles of war, dozens of worlds destroyed, hundreds of millions of people of all kinds massacred.”
Her father sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. It was padded and looked comfortable, but he didn’t look comfortable in it. “I failed,” he said. It was not so much a verdict on a plan of action as the summing up of a life.
“And now you find yourself a part of the Federation you thought you could change. The Federation that tried to destroy humanity.”
Her father sighed. “I failed because I was human, because I had violence bred into me, because I could not recognize that peace requires a surrender of rights for the good of the whole, that the Federation was right and I was wrong, that the Federation is the only force for peace and stability in the galaxy.”
He really believed what he was saying, Asha thought. “Sometimes self-evident truths are merely the fires of youth turning to ashes in the old,” Asha said. “Peace is good, and war ought to be avoided at almost any cost. But the Federation wanted war, or, rather, it wanted to bottle up humanity in its own solar system, and if that didn’t work, to wipe humanity out as a potential threat to the Federation’s stability.”
“Even that,” her father said. “But they wouldn’t have done it.”
“It isn’t as if they haven’t done it before,” Asha said. “Federation history records accounts of worlds that have been destroyed, species wiped out—”
“Stories,” her father said, holding his hands apart to indicate the distance between folklore and reality. “Myths. And anyway, that was long ago. I know them now, better than when I was trying to convince the Council of humanity’s basic goodness. They are a kind and generous collec
tion of people, with the terrible burden of preserving the framework that brought peace to a troubled galaxy while humanity was still swinging through the trees. They welcomed me once I revealed my understanding of them.”
“So,” Asha said, not unkindly, “you collaborated with the enemy and earned your place in its councils.”
“I accepted its goals,” her father said, “as you should have. Instead you and Ren sneaked away in the long night with the secrets of interstellar travel. Without those there would have been no war and its terrible destruction could have been avoided.”
“And humanity would have remained Earth-bound peasants dominated by the elite members of the Federation. It isn’t as if they came up with the nexus points themselves. They inherited their charts from a more ancient species, who may have got their charts the same way. And the early members of the Federation used that gift, and the fact that they evolved to sapience and technological civilization before anybody else, to grab power and hold on to it.”
“Humanity could have applied for membership like everyone else,” her father said.
“And spent generations as supplicants for the generosity and goodwill of the Federation,” Asha said. “Even if the Federation was wise and good, as you believe, even if it had withheld its force of arms as you think it would have done, do you think that’s possible for humanity?”
“That’s humanity’s fatal flaw,” her father said sadly. “Hubris. That was my flaw, too. I thought I could solve any problem by the force of reason, but I learned and so did Ren, and so could the rest of my fellow humans. Humility.”
“Ren?” Asha said.
“He returned a couple of long-cycles ago, but different, like you, only in another way. He was repentant, humble. Better. Younger, even. Smarter. He made his peace with the Federation, made a position for himself before he moved on.”
“Where?”
“That kind of information is confidential. No one knows except maybe the Pedia, which knows where everybody is. Except you. Until you decided to return, not like Ren, but with a false identity that was revealed only by its DNA. It was different, with some of the junk removed, but it shared enough with mine for me to know that it had to be you or Kip. Kip. What happened to Kip?”
“He was sent on the lifeboat back to Earth with the other children, with women to look after them, and with a few crewmembers to take care of the necessary navigation and maintenance. He’ll be a grown man now.”
But she could not yet process the information that Ren had survived and preceded her back into Federation space.
* * *
Ren had survived the attacks of the arachnoids and followed her into the Transcendental Machine. Like her, he had been transformed, perfected, transferred somewhere else in the galaxy. And to somewhere with better, more accessible interstellar transportation that had brought him back to Federation Central while she was making her way more circuitously into Federation space and to Terminal, where she had joined the pilgrims gathering to join the quest for the Transcendental Machine. She had wanted to come to terms with the nature of the Machine and with the rumors of its transformative powers that had sprung up around her first incautious descriptions of what had happened to her, and the realities of Transcendentalism, the pseudoreligion that had followed in her wake.
But Ren had made no effort to find her. He must have realized that she had been sent to a different part of the galaxy and, after that, rumors of the Transcendental Machine, Transcendentalism, and its Prophet must have reached Federation Central a long-cycle before the voyage of the Geoffrey had been authorized and its pilgrims had gathered. Ren must have understood what they implied. But what had he done? He had not mounted an expedition to get the Machine and put it to his own uses. Which meant that he was content with his own transformation and had no interest in conferring it upon anyone else. And it meant that he had approved the plan to send the war-worn Geoffrey on its journey, or channeled the process of approval through the Federation bureaucracy.
But why? Perhaps to draw her into a situation where she could be killed or stranded far from Federation space, where she could do no damage to whatever plans Ren had developed. The journey itself was crowded with perils, and even if she and the ship survived them, the arachnoids on the alien planet provided a likely defense against her return. And then there were the pilgrims, several at least, whose mission was to kill the Prophet—the sly Xi and the ponderous Tordor, and perhaps others, including Riley. Maybe not Riley. Xi and Tordor were both representatives on the Federation Council and would have been easy to recruit and to subvert. Riley had been recuperating on the pleasure-world Dante, far from Federation Central.
Someone in authority had also given instructions to destroy the Transcendental Machine. Maybe Ren? Who could it have been but Ren? Ren, who knew what the Machine could do, who may have wanted to make sure that he kept its transformations to himself, who did not want to share them with others who might provide competition for power or status or wealth, or whatever else Ren valued. If Ren were the only transcendent, it might mean he could take over the Federation and move it farther down the road to domination rather than federation. And if Ren were clever enough, no one would know where the Federation was going until it was too late.
What that meant, Asha realized, was that transcendence was not the panacea that she and Riley had imagined. It was not enough to think clearly and behave rationally. Those were the basic requirements for a decent society, but they were not enough. If the basic nature of the Transcendent was flawed, transcendence only enhanced the worst in creatures it accidentally transformed rather than leading to a saner, more rational existence.
Which made it even more urgent that she find Riley.
“When did you change your mind about the Federation?” Asha asked without a pause. “Before you saw Ren again?”
“I think I’ve always felt this way,” her father said. “I just didn’t know it.” He took a deep breath. “Now I’ve got to turn you over to Federation justice. I don’t know what you’re doing here, but it can’t be anything good for you or the Federation or peace.”
“I came to find you, Father.”
“You can’t have known I was alive.”
“And what do you think the Federation will do to me, Father?” Asha asked.
“The Federation will do what’s right.”
“You are willing to turn your daughter over to the Federation to keep the peace?”
“It’s not a matter of guilt or innocence. Our talk has been recorded by the Pedia, and you have provided sufficient evidence of your antipeace sentiments and your anti-Federation intentions. I’m sorry, Asha, but surveillance is a fact of life and a necessary ingredient of a lasting peace.”
“I turned it off, Father. Like the new Ren, I can be persuasive, as I think he persuaded you while you didn’t notice. Good-bye, Father. I wish you well, but you won’t remember that you met me, or who I am. Now I have an appointment to keep.” She could, she understood, have changed him back into his old, earnest, dedicated self, just as Ren had changed him into a true believer in Federation policy and good intentions. But it would not be a kindness to confront him with his apostasy.
Her father looked up. “Who are you?”
“Just someone you used to know,” she said, and slipped behind the desk to give him a final pat on the shoulder as she passed.
* * *
There was, as she suspected, a door behind the display against the far wall, and it opened for her as she approached. The bureaucrats who inhabited the top level would not want to mix with the ordinary Federation people who used the public transportation system and the public services, nor to put up with its delays.
Behind the door was a capsule big enough to hold not only a human like her father but most of the larger Federation citizens like Tordor. The capsule’s clear plastic door was open. She got into the capsule and closed the door behind her. A seat unfolded from the far side, adjusted to accommodate her, and encircled her w
ith restraints. A schematic map of the planet-sized building appeared, in glowing red lines and numbers, in front of her face. She touched numbers until a Galactic Standard description of the destination she wanted appeared on the map. She tapped twice in the air, and the capsule began to move, slowly at first, and then picking up speed that she experienced as an increasing feeling of weight throughout her body.
The trip to this location had taken hours by monorail. It was a matter of minutes for the bureaucracy’s private transportation system, and the walls of the tube that enclosed the capsule went past with blurring speed until the capsule slowed and came to a stop. Asha rose from the seat as it unclasped her, opened the capsule door, and stepped out to face a wall identical to the one behind her father’s office. She found the latch button that opened it and stepped out into a space filled with an assortment of aliens—Xifora, Dorians, Sirians, Alpha Centaurans, and several others. But no humans. Humans were still scarce in Federation space.
The air was thick with the mixed scents of aliens from a dozen different worlds. Aliens who had heads turned them to look at Asha. Those whose heads did not turn shifted their entire bodies to see what high official had come through the exclusive transportation system. Those who had no heads shifted whatever organs of perception they possessed. Clearly anyone who arrived in this fashion was someone to be respected, and equally clearly to be human was to be suspect, and to be human and a woman was to be doubly suspicious.
Asha moved confidently to address the Dorian in charge. She knew he was in charge because he reclined on his massive tail behind a desk in which a computer screen was imbedded. Confidence can overcome a multitude of prejudices, skepticisms, and suspicions, she knew, but it came naturally.
