Transgalactic

by James Gunn

  Now she had to find a way to locate a solitary human among a population of billions while not revealing that she was searching or who she was. And hope that Riley thought as she did and had come up with his own way home.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Riley coughed out the fluid in his mouth and throat and vomited the fluid from his stomach. The fluid in his digestive track would have to be eliminated over time. He looked around the semidark level nine with its coffinlike tanks. His inner clock told him he had been under the influence of the sim tank for more than six hours, although it seemed like only a few minutes. It was the opposite of dreams, in which an experience that seems to take hours happens in only a few minutes of real time.

  Nothing moved in the space around him, not even Sharn. One step took Riley to the side of the tank she had occupied. She was immersed in it again, emotions chasing themselves across her face, mostly happy and intense, clouded with an occasional frown. In spite of her promises, she had returned to the emotional embrace of the sim experience, where all went well and a happy outcome was assured.

  Riley knew he should leave her where she longed to be, rid of her guilt, her disappointment in life’s rewards, and her despair at anything ever getting better. He should get away while he could; the Pedia that wanted to kill him would find some way to work its will. But he couldn’t leave Sharn in that false bliss. He knew from personal experience how seductive it could be, but he knew, as well, that it was like death when struggle ends and surrender begins. In all those sim tanks ranked in rows across the long space of level nine were bodies that were as good as dead, though they might live on long past their normal expirations, and even some that were actually dead but had not yet lost the last flicker of brain activity. He didn’t want Sharn to be among them.

  He pulled her back up again, sputtering and protesting, coughing and vomiting and pleading to be allowed to return. He ignored her tears and pleas, stroked as much fluid as he could from her body, picked up his shirt where she had dropped it, and put it back around her shoulders.

  “We’ve got to get to the top level while we can,” he said as he put on his pants and shoes. “The Pedia wants me dead.”

  “Why would the Pedia—” she began to ask in a weak, choked voice, but he silenced her with a finger across her lips.

  “Come now,” he said, and took her hand. He pulled her behind him across the dimly lit floor toward the ramp that led upward, that few people who had descended this far ever ascended.

  Before they had crossed more than half the distance, the lights went out and they were left in total darkness, much like the stygian night that had enveloped him when he was in the sim tank. “Don’t worry,” Riley said. “I remember the way.” He wasn’t lying to comfort her—the memory of the way he had come was like a recording he could play in his head. He put Sharn ahead of him so that she would not bump into the sim tanks on either side, and guided her through the maze to finally reach the bottom of the ramp. The beginning of the upward slant confirmed that the map in his head was not an illusion.

  As they started up Riley sensed, through sound or instinct, something large and monstrous coming toward them from farther up the ramp. At the last moment, Riley pulled Sharn to the side and something went past them, perhaps some machine used for delivering equipment to the lower levels or some maintenance device large and complicated enough to need guidance from the Pedia rather than the autonomy of the routine devices like the cleaning machine. Riley took Sharn’s hand again and started upward once more, trying to sense in the darkness the return of the murderous machine from below or some new threat from above.

  They had not yet reached level eight when Riley sensed a chill in the air. He put his arm around Sharn’s shoulders. “Be strong,” he said. “I think it’s going to get very cold.”

  She shivered. “Let me go back,” she said weakly. It was a desperate whisper in the dark.

  He put his head close to hers so that his voice would not seem disembodied. “I can’t do that. You know what it means if you go back.”

  As they approached level eight, the cold grew more intense. It must be approaching the freezing point, Riley thought, and drew Sharn against his body so that she could share some of his warmth. The cold didn’t seem to bother him, as if his system was automatically adjusting. That move turned out to be fortunate. Voices that Riley had heard for several minutes became clearer. There were screams, shouts, and curses in a variety of languages, mostly human, swearing at the management of what had been promised as a world of pleasure, and offers of great amounts of credits if someone turned the lights back on and turned up the heat. Bodies began battering against Riley, some going up and some down, and Sharn might have been torn away if he had not been holding her tight. And then the bodies were gone, and Riley continued their sightless journey upward.

  The next level was worse. Riley remembered that the eighth level had been filled with people pretending to be something other than they were, getting their satisfaction from deceiving someone else. Level seven was for people, male and female, who vented their emotions on animations, beating them, kicking them, stomping them, seeing them damaged to the point where they had to be replaced, and sometimes committing violence on each other. When they spilled out onto the ramp they brought their frustrations with them, striking out blindly in the darkness, hitting Riley with blows that he could not entirely brush away without exposing Sharn, until he made his left arm into a battering ram and cleared a way for them to pass.

  * * *

  Level six was not as difficult. As they neared what Riley remembered as the entrance, he could hear voices from within seeming to plead for a savior, addressed to a variety of deities in a variety of languages in a variety of voices, from the demanding to the ingratiating. Some of them seemed to change in midvoice. As he could sense the opening to the level on his left, he could hear that some had begun praying to the Pedia on the same terms as they had addressed their gods, and Riley thought they were recognizing, in their panic, what they would not contemplate in normal times, that the Pedias of the galaxy were more likely to save them than the supernatural powers of their religions—and though they would not have believed it, just as likely to sacrifice them for some unknown and unknowable cause.

  As if in response to his musing, Riley sensed the return of the unseen apparatus that had tried to attack them as they started up the ramp, and, at the last moment, drew Sharn aside into the level-six entrance. When he stepped onto the ramp again, it felt sticky under his feet. It smelled like blood, and he thought that the machinery, whatever it was, had encountered and injured or killed some of the people from the levels below that he and Sharn had fought their way through.

  Level five was stickier and noisier. Riley threaded his way among bodies, sensing them in his path, though he had to help Sharn over some of them, and she shuddered, as much from revulsion as from the increasing cold. Meanwhile there were angry voices demanding that someone, anyone, everyone, be punished for the failure of the system, wanting to know who was responsible, who was attacking them in the dark, where their friends, and enemies, were. Blows were struck in the darkness. Fists thudded, bones shattered, people fell, curses and threats echoed. Riley hugged Sharn closer and struggled past.

  On level four, voices were trying to buy their way to a brighter, warmer place, offering or accepting great sums of credits for rescue, and Riley would have marveled at the variety of responses to crises if he had not remembered the variety of ways in which people had chosen to satisfy the needs they identified as pleasure that were actually ways to bury pain and psychic anguish.

  The cold was getting worse. Sharn was shivering and asking, in a small, frightened voice, to be warmed. Riley picked her up and held her against his chest. She seemed to welcome that and relaxed. Riley sniffed the air. In addition to the smell of blood and other fluids on the ramp, he could sense that the level of oxygen had diminished, and, possibly, carbon dioxide had increased. The Pedia controlled the systems
that kept Dante livable, and it could destroy him any time it wished—if it was willing to destroy all the other living creatures on the pleasure world as well. Riley had no doubt that the Pedia would sacrifice thousands of people without hesitation or remorse, if it could feel such emotions, or emotions of any kind, but he hoped that the Pedia might balance that outcome against the possibility that such total destruction might raise questions about the infallibility of Pedias and whatever long-term plans they might share—if they shared. This one had already risked its reputation by the failures of the systems under its care. Did it dare to risk more?

  On level three, the ramp was clear except for stragglers pushing by trying to find warmth and light above. Riley could smell the odors of food and vomit, and he could hear voices complaining about the darkness and the cold and demanding more and warmer food and colder drink. At level two, hands reached out of the darkness to draw him into the sex encounters that he remembered and voices tried to persuade him to enter, promising unimaginable delights. Darkness was no deterrent to lust.

  At last Riley reached the hospital level, Sharn still in his arms. She had fallen asleep or had slipped into unconsciousness. He looked down upon her face and wondered if he had done her any favors by saving her from the sim tank. But she was reborn, as blessed with promise and threatened by life’s blows as any infant. She might fulfill the promise or surrender to the injuries, but she would have the chance. Maybe she would return to level nine, but an opportunity was all anybody had.

  Emergency lights bobbed along the corridors of the hospital level, and all the doors to the hospital itself were open for the ill and wounded staggering up the ramp from the carnage below, bringing with them the stench of death and emptied bowels. Attendants were sorting the patients for care, handing out blankets, passing out containers of hot liquids. Riley carried Sharn among them. “Here’s one of your own,” he said. He finally got the attention of a passing physician.

  “Sharn?” the doctor said.

  She opened her eyes and raised her head. “Where am I? Is this still a dream?”

  “Where have you been?” the doctor said. “Everything’s going to hell. We need your help.”

  “She’s in no condition to provide help,” Riley said. He put her down on an empty cot. “She needs help herself. See that she gets it. She’s just come out of a sim tank.”

  “But—” the doctor began.

  “If she doesn’t get it, I’ll come back and find out why.”

  The doctor looked intimidated and then concerned as he turned toward Sharn.

  Riley knelt beside the cot and took Sharn’s hand. “Good-bye, Sharn,” he said. “I’ve got to get out of here before any more people die. Try to find your way back. Maybe we’ll meet again.”

  And he turned and made his way toward the door. He hoped that Sharn would take this second chance, for what she had been and what she might yet become and for what they had meant to each other. But he knew that she probably would return to level nine as soon as she could.

  * * *

  As Riley left the hospital, the corridor brightened with lights. He felt the cold ease its icy grasp. He wondered if the Pedia had given up, and then that brief reflection was replaced by the hard truth that Pedias never gave up. Their mandates were as inflexible as the laws of nature. His only hopes for evading the Pedia’s death sentence were to outrun it or to learn, as Asha had, the techniques for inserting competing instructions into the Pedia’s programming.

  The first attack came as he entered the corridor leading to the docking stations. A large, muscular man hurtled toward him from a side corridor whose lights had been extinguished. Riley sensed him at the last moment, as if his old pedia had provided a warning, and stepped back. A weapon of some sort, a large knife or a pipe, whistled by his head, and a body brushed past him. He moved his leg forward and caught the attacker’s leg, causing him to plunge to the floor. Riley kicked him once before he could get up, kicked the object out of the attacker’s hand—it was a length of water pipe—and scooped it from the floor. He hit the attacker in the head as the man was rising. The man collapsed.

  A second man was standing in the darkened corridor from which the first attacker had come. Riley recognized him as the leader of the group of thugs who had accosted him as he left Alighieri. “You followed me,” he said. “Our last meeting wasn’t so pleasant that I’d think you would want to repeat it.”

  The man stood still, well beyond his reach but not, perhaps, with his enhanced coordination, beyond Riley’s ability to cross the distance before the other could react. Yet he had no desire to damage anyone unnecessarily.

  “You’re not that tough,” the other said.

  “Tough enough,” Riley said. “Who sent you?” He knew the answer: The Pedia had observed the confrontation on Alighieri and informed the gang, by whatever anonymous means of communication available, where he was going, and, after that, counted on the human desire for revenge.

  “Nobody sends me anywhere,” the other said. “You surprised us before. We’re ready for you now.”

  Riley looked down at the unconscious brute at his feet. “Like this fellow?”

  The other man shrugged. “He was a warning. We ain’t finished with you. You won’t surprise us again.”

  Riley weighed again the possibility of a preemptory strike against the gang leader and decided against it. He sensed that there were more members of the gang in the darkness beyond the leader. He could handle several of them, he knew, but there was a point at which mere numbers might overpower him, and the risk to his commitment to Asha and the possibilities implicit in their reunion was greater than the challenge to his manhood.

  “Your leadership is fragile already,” Riley said, as if he were offering advice to a friend. “Another failure would mean the end of it.”

  He moved on toward the docking stations, leaving his back exposed. No attack came until the second intersecting corridor. It, too, was dark, and three men came running out of it as he passed. They were as big as the one before, and these had knives. Riley took care of the first one easily enough, striking the knife hand with the pipe he had retained from the first attacker, then hitting him across the side of the neck with the side of his other hand. The second, he turned on with virtually the same motion and dropped him with fingers to the base of the throat. The third one grazed Riley’s shoulder with his knife before Riley hit him in both legs with the length of pipe and then clubbed him in the jaw with his fist as he fell.

  He turned. The leader of the gang was behind him, well behind. “You see?” the leader said. “You ain’t no superman.”

  Riley put a hand to his shoulder. It came away smeared with blood. “A scratch,” he said. “It’s already healing.” It was. He could feel the oozing slowing down. His body, like Asha’s, had discovered new abilities for healing as well.

  “Give it up,” he said. “The next time it will be you.” He turned away.

  “Ain’t gonna happen,” the gang leader said. His confidence hadn’t been shaken, which made Riley suspect that another, and possibly final, attack was coming. It happened just as he approached the docking station, where his recently acquired spaceship was waiting behind an open hatchway.

  Riley turned to face his attackers. There were nine of them, including the gang leader. They didn’t run at him, as had the previous ones. They approached silently, spreading out in a semicircle where they would not be easy to defend. They were all undepilitated surly brutes armed with clubs and knives.

  “This is not a good idea,” Riley said. “This time there are too many to merely knock you unconscious. I will have to kill some of you, and I will start with you.” He pointed at the gang’s leader.

  “You and who else?” the gang leader jeered.

  Riley sensed a movement behind him. “Why,” he said, “me and my friend.”

  The movement that Riley had sensed became a heavy footfall emerging from the passageway. Rory roared. The group facing them stopped their advanc
e. Two of them in the center dropped their weapons and fled, followed by those on the edges of the semicircle and those between until only the leader was left. And then he, too, backed away.

  “Let’s go, Rory,” Riley said and led the way down the passageway to the ship that would take them back to Alighieri, take Rory back to his homeworld, and take Riley to the ancient red vessel that would take him to Asha. He knew now where he would find her.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Asha inserted into the Barge’s pedia the coordinates for the Earth orbit she had been assigned, closer to the oversized moon than the Earth, summoned a shuttle, and waited while her ship assumed its spot in the cluttered space around the place she thought of as her home planet, even though she had never been there. She had much to learn if she was going to blend into the human community while she waited for Riley to reach the same conclusion as she and to find the means to reach her across the vast expanse of space. And then, after he had come to Earth, she still had to find him among a sprawling collection of strangers. The task ahead was how to gain access to the inexhaustible treasure-house of data accumulated by the Pedia without identifying herself or the purpose of her search. And with only her father’s fond recollections, long-cycles out of date, about the community that was Earth and the rules, written and cultural, by which it functioned.

  There was so much to learn—an entire world history—and so little time to learn it.

  She thought she might have a chance to gain some insight from the shuttle pilot, but the shuttle was unmanned, controlled not by a built-in pedia but by a multiple-purpose pedia housed in one of the beanstalk platforms, or perhaps by Earth’s central Pedia, if Earth followed the pattern of Federation worlds in its reliance on central data-gathering and processing units. No doubt it did—technological civilizations would collapse without the microsecond by microsecond supervision and direction of Pedias, from the provision of essential utilities to the control of material processing and automated travel—but was it part of the Pedia network that pervaded the Federation? Or had it arrived, by Pedia logic, at the same philosophical position on the relationship of Pedias to the societies that had produced them and the living creatures that they were created to serve?