Transgalactic

by James Gunn

  She could have accessed the shuttle’s information system, but in the shuttle she was all alone and easily identified, not one of a vast group with its multitude of inputs. The process of identification that the Pedia would automatically begin might, in time, pierce her carefully created identity, but there was no point in making it easy. She waited the half cycle for the shuttle to deliver her to the nearest beanstalk, the one built from the island community once known as Sri Lanka. There, at the top of the beanstalk, in a geosynchronous orbit, a climber waited. Asha passed through an air-tight extension from the shuttle into a small waiting room with windows from which she could view Earth below, in all its living glory—the gorgeous blues of oceans, the whites of clouds, the greens of vegetation. So starkly different from the black sterility of space that it caused one’s heart to ache with its beauty.

  And in the midst of all that splendor were the ugly reminders of old mistakes: the craters of ancient nuclear explosions, still in the process of being restored by a forgiving Earth; the shattered ruins of ancient cities, destroyed by bombs or barbarian attacks over burning issues long forgotten; the seashore farms, villas, villages, and soaring metropolises buried under rising seas and the snowy polar icecaps shrunken by the warming effect of ancient vegetation, accumulated since the beginnings of plant life itself, burned in an orgy of industrialization and released, in noxious fumes, into the atmosphere.

  The people waiting in the room were mostly human, as Asha would have expected, but there were several Federation species—a couple of weaselly Xifora, a barrel-shaped Sirian, and a feather-topped Alpha Centauran. They sat or stood apart from the humans. No Dorians. Dorians were administrators—decision makers—not merchants or emissaries. And the wounds of the war were too recent for Dorians to risk their reputation, even though, in the end, the Dorians had aligned themselves with humans and perhaps swung the pendulum of battle toward the human side. But no one was sure why the Dorians had made that choice, whether it might have been a Federation powerplay rather than a love of humanity or an admiration for reckless human defiance.

  The waiting room was equipped with pneumatic furnishings, inflated sofas and chairs and an occasional table. Asha chose a chair in the corner, where she could survey the room without being noticed, and looked around. The humans were a mixed group of males and females. They looked healthy and fit, generally better-looking than the people she had known aboard the Adastra, perhaps because they had the benefit of better nutrition and medical care or had access to cosmetic services that remedied imperfections. All of them, almost without exception, had a slightly darker complexion, as if the various differently hued races of humanity had blended their genetic codes over the past thousand revolutions of the Earth around the sun. Or perhaps this was the style of the moment and such choices were easy to make. In any case, this might be a self-selected group not typical of the general population. Surely not everybody traveled in space, not even in near-Earth orbit.

  She inspected them individually, but shifted her gaze so quickly that no one would think she was more than casually curious. There were men that she might have considered talking to, but gender politics probably were still in play, and often that evolved into questions she did not want to answer. Women, on the other hand, might also be interested in romance, but Asha thought she could tell if that was an issue, at least in part by the way in which the women grouped themselves or looked at other women. She picked out one that she thought might be a good person to get to know and managed to get into line just behind her when the door to the climber opened and the announcement came that it was time to board. The trip down the beanstalk would take several cycles, and there would be much to learn.

  * * *

  The climber was more comfortable than the cattle-car accommodations of the one on Terminal, whose beanstalk had been severed halfway to orbit. There were small rooms with berths and other conveniences for those who preferred isolation, comfortable chairs and couches and stanchions for aliens who did not sit, tables with built-in terminals and attachments for personal devices, restrooms with doors and self-cleaning service modules, a restaurant in one corner complete with menus and automated delivery, and even a bar in another corner providing drinks and other mood-altering substances.

  Asha sat down in a chair near the bar and, as she had anticipated, the woman she had selected for conversation sat down in a chair next to her. The woman stowed a small bag of personal belongings under the chair. Asha had none. The woman glanced at her, but Asha looked down at the terminal in the table in front of her. She cleared the display with a touch and tapped in a command. A series of images appeared. She leaned forward as if considering her choices and tapped one to select a language, another to select a topic, and a third to choose a hearing device. An earpiece emerged from a drawer in the tabletop, and Asha placed it in her ear. The news began, in images with captions, auditory descriptions, and commentary, as the climber jarred slightly and began its long descent. Asha became absorbed in the information the terminal was giving her. It was interesting enough—the community of Earth was as foreign to her as any alien world—and there would be time for conversation before the trip was over. It would take seven cycles.

  The topic Asha had chosen was general information—what once had been called news. There was no news anymore—no accidents, no violence, no murders, no thefts, no arrests, no crime, no political disputes, no politics. The Pedia took care of all those matters. There was, of course, weather, although the Pedia exercised considerable control there, too, and its forecasts were more like schedules, although there were infrequent geological occurrences such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. The Pedia kept track of everything and made sure that anything that might create a disturbance in the tranquility of the people in its charge would be stopped before it got started. That demanded constant surveillance of ten billion people and data-gathering, analysis, and management of near-infinite capacity. In the beginning that required millions of workers to build hardware and write instructions, but eventually the Pedias developed the ability to add capacity on their own and to write their own code. People stopped worrying. Nobody asks questions when everything is going well. Nobody raised questions about privacy anymore. The benefits were too obvious.

  All of that Asha inferred from the generic information she had called up. She had to be careful not to change topics as swiftly as she was able to absorb their information. She didn’t want the Pedia to identify her difference by the way she could understand a page of information at a glance or the implications of a statement from a few spoken words, nor did she want to narrow her search in a way that the Pedia might use to deduce her real interest. Gradually, however, the focus of the information being presented to Asha narrowed, and she realized that, in spite of her caution, the Pedia was analyzing her choices and creating a profile of her. Well, it would be consistent with her assumed identity: the child born aboard the generation ship Adastra, taken by Federation ships before the war began—perhaps, although she had not included such speculations in her identity, the precipitating event, with its interrogation of the passengers and crew—and kept captive until the war ended and she and the others were released. The Pedia would find nothing unusual about her curiosity concerning the home world that she had never seen.

  And yet the evidence of the Pedia’s analysis alarmed her. If it could develop a profile from a few small choices of information, she would have to be even more careful. Evidence was accumulating that the Pedias of the galaxy were more involved in the actions against the Transcendental Machine and the Prophet than she or Riley had suspected. But she pressed on.

  The terminal began to offer travel information to historic sites and to places of beauty, some of them not reconstructions of fabled locations. When Asha switched to another topic, the terminal provided historical accounts of the past one thousand long-cycles—although it called them years—and the series of decisions and actions that led from the troubled centuries to the peace and prosperity t
hat existed today, through the automation of labor, the discovery of how to acquire antimatter from the sun, and the reduction of the cost of energy to almost nothing. With the availability of cheap energy, everything became possible, including spaceflight, travel to the planets and the beginning of terraforming, and, eventually, interstellar travel. It did not mention that the nexus-point charts stolen by Ren and sent back to Earth with the women and children had made interstellar travel practicable and evened the battle between Earth and the Federation. In fact, it did not mention the war at all, and Asha thought this significant.

  The history moved on to economics. The automation of industry led to an automation of service and from there to a disappearance of jobs. Without jobs and the income that had always been associated with work, something had to be done to provide for the billions of humans deprived of opportunity. The capital resources produced by generations of human labor that culminated in automation were divided among the people in the form of a minimum annual dividend; payment was not tied to work and no one needed to go hungry or without shelter, and people had time to devote to their families and their interests. Life changed from a struggle for existence into a choice of existences. If people wanted more income, they could choose to do tasks for which automation could not be applied. Some chose creative work and registered it with the Pedia for people to appreciate, if they chose; some indulged in hobbies that were satisfying only to themselves and their families; some dedicated themselves to physical, psychological, or spiritual development; some chased adventure, risking their lives for the wash of adrenaline and the stimulation of pleasure centers; some fell into easier routes through drugs of one kind or another. Gradually, however, people adapted to a life of choice, and the failures died out.

  The woman in the chair next to Asha, who had been involved with her own subvocal messaging, spoke up. “I couldn’t help but notice that you’re looking up a lot of general information,” she said. “Are you a visitor?”

  Asha introduced herself and related her story about being born on the Adastra, its capture by the Federation, and growing up under Federation supervision. After expressions of sympathy, the other woman introduced herself as Latha. She was a beautiful woman with dark hair, brown eyes flecked with copper, and a complexion like coffee mixed half with cream. She was, she said, a commenter.

  “What is that?” Asha asked.

  “Basic information is instantly available from the Pedia,” Latha said. “Even connections to other data and an analysis of the meaning of those interconnections can be requested by anybody. Commenters offer different interpretations and call attention to connections that other people may not notice.”

  “And the Pedia allows this?”

  “Of course,” Latha said, “and pays for it as well. We’re a valued resource, we commenters, and our additional income allows us to range more broadly and ask questions that other people might not ask.”

  “The Federation does that as well,” Asha said, choosing her words carefully. “They consider it a safety valve for blowing off steam.”

  “What is a safety valve?”

  “You know—the piece of an apparatus that releases pressure before it builds up to an explosion.”

  “There are no explosions,” Latha said. “The Pedia wouldn’t allow them.”

  “Doesn’t it concern you that this involves constant surveillance?”

  “What surveillance?”

  “Or that one day the Pedia might make a mistake?”

  Latha looked at Asha as if she were speaking nonsense syllables. “Pedias don’t make mistakes.”

  Asha could see that Latha was not only unwilling but unable to question the system. “Of course not,” she said. “But I saw some Federation Pedias malfunction, during the war. Or maybe it was the people who malfunctioned.”

  “Of course,” Latha said with a nod of relief.

  “Aren’t there people here who don’t go along?”

  “A few,” Latha said. “There are always a few. They call themselves ‘Anons.’ They refuse their dividends and live off the things that other people throw away, before they are disposed of properly by the Pedia. And they try to make trouble, raising questions—not like the commenters—but questions that have no answers, like why the Pedia does what it does. They even try to interfere with the Pedia’s operation.”

  “Why doesn’t the Pedia stop them? I’d think they’d be a public nuisance.”

  “It has to find them first,” Latha said. “And that’s hard to do. Because they’re ‘Anon,’ you know. They don’t take their dividends and they don’t interact with normal people or events, so they have no identities.”

  “But surely the Pedia—”

  “They all get identified, eventually,” Latha said firmly. “The Pedia tends to that.”

  “And then what happens?”

  “They stop making problems,” Latha said.

  “They disappear?” Asha said.

  “They weren’t there in the first place,” Latha said. “They’re ‘Anon.’”

  “Of course,” Asha said. “How do you get to be a commenter?”

  “Why, you just submit a comment. It’s as easy as that.”

  “You’d think more people would do it,” Asha said.

  “Commenting is hard work,” Latha said. “You have to be curious about things. The Pedia isn’t, of course. It’s just a machine. It can give you a lot of answers, but you have to ask the right questions, or go where the answers are.”

  “And where have you been?”

  “I just came back from the moon. There’re a lot of new things going on there. Science. Experiments. The sort of things people don’t care about, and so the Pedia doesn’t have much information about it. But it’s important.”

  “How?”

  “Because it’s—” Latha stopped. “Because it tells us things nobody has thought of before.”

  “I think I’d like to be a commenter,” Asha said. But she thought she’d rather be an Anon.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Riley brought the spaceship into a landing beside the red sphere concealed in the twilight zone of Alighieri. He released himself from the seat in front of the control panel and turned to Rory, who was freeing himself from the harness that Riley had rigged for him where the copilot’s seat would have been, and had him practice how to use it.

  Riley looked at Rory with some concern. “Rory,” he said, “I must go on a voyage that you can’t go on with me.”

  Rory roared a protest.

  “I know,” Riley said. “We’ve been through a lot together. Like brothers. But you’ve got to go back home and show your real brothers and sisters how—”

  Rory roared again. “You have shown me great things,” he said. “Worlds beyond worlds. I can’t go back to being a savage when I have lived with a god.”

  “That’s the fate of the hero,” Riley said. “To go far. To get the gifts of the gods. And to bring them back to his people.”

  “What gifts?”

  “This ship. All it contains. And all it means. And all that you have learned about the great world outside and all it offers in freedom from nature’s tyranny.” He did not mention the sacrifices along the almost endless pathway to knowledge, understanding, and liberation. Nor did he mention the new tyrannies that would come with civilization. Time enough for Rory’s people to discover these for themselves.

  “They will not see this machine as a gift,” Rory said. “They can’t eat it. They can’t use it as a weapon.”

  “You can show them the food dispenser and how to use it, as I showed you,” Riley said, “and when they have exhausted its supplies they will have grown used to these metal walls and equipment and will have lost their fear of it, as they would never have lost their fear of the red sphere. You will tell them of the stars and the magic of traveling among them. You will be like a god returned to live among the people and to guide them to the promised land, and make them even greater than your ancestors who built the grea
t pyramids.”

  Rory’s red eyes did not seem quite so angry.

  “This is what the gods chose you to do when you followed me into the red sphere,” Riley said. “To show you the future so that you can lead your people into it. You will take many wives and father many children, and you will teach them to reach for the stars.”

  Rory seemed to consider the prospect.

  “I have instructed the ship how to take you back to your home world, and how to land with you there, close to where we left. All you have to do is press this button. I have shown you how to operate the other pieces of equipment. It will be a long journey, as long as the journey here, but you must be patient. Use your time to learn how the ship works. Think about what has happened and what you want to happen and what you need to do to help it happen.”

  Rory roared once more, this time with notes of sadness, regret, and, finally, acceptance. Even his odor, which had moderated since his diet of raw meat had been replaced by synthetic substitutes, no longer reflected his hormonal state of aggravated readiness.

  “Good-bye, my brother,” Riley said, and passed through the extended passageway into the red sphere and closed the pathway behind him. He got the red sphere into the toxic air and outward from Rigel’s system before he could think any more about the dinosaur he had left behind and the curious bond of friendship he had forged with the creature he had found on a primeval world.

  He had a reunion to attend, with the woman he had come to love, with whom he had joined in an unspoken pledge to make a better galaxy, and who an uncaring universe had flung to a far corner of the galaxy. But he was going to see her again, and he knew now where that would be: the one place in the galaxy they shared, Earth.