by James Gunn
“Look,” Ren said. “The man was crazy. He never went through the Machine. He was trying to destroy the Pedia.” And with that he turned and sprinted back toward the shadowy distant part of the corridor.
“Let him go,” Asha said. “I’m not sure he’s any more real than the others, and even if he is, there are more important issues.”
Riley looked down at the ashes of the thing who had looked and talked like the captain of the Geoffrey. If the thing had been only a phantom called up by the Pedia, why had its destruction left ashes behind? But maybe the ashes were as unreal as the figures but would seem as real if he tried to stir them.
“You’re right,” he said. And then he looked up at the shadowy heights of the foyer. “We need to have a real talk.”
* * *
The answer came from above, like the voice not of a god but of an announcer at a transportation station. “Go through the door on your right.”
Riley and Asha looked at each other. Riley shrugged. He walked to the door, opened it, and walked through, with Asha close behind. The room beyond was long and wide and divided into workstations. The floor was dusty and so were the workstations and the ancient devices upon them, their glassy eyes staring blindly toward empty chairs. At one of the nearer stations, however, a man was seated. He was very old, almost unbelievably old, with sparse white hair and beard, a wrinkled face, and faded blue eyes. He was behind an antique machine that seemed to still be working. It cast a glow on his face as he looked up at them. As Riley got closer he saw that the man was connected to the machine in other ways. Wires ran from the machine to the man’s arms and perhaps his legs as well, though they were hidden by workstation panels.
“We meet at last,” the old man said, in a raspy voice that sounded as if it had not been used for a long time, perhaps years or even centuries.
“I gather you are not the human you seem to be,” Riley said.
The old man tried to laugh, but it came out hollow and effortful. “I’m human enough. Or I used to be. But now I’m too old to be considered the kind of human you know.”
“How old is that?” Asha asked.
“As old as the building we’re in. I’m a survivor of the long ago, kept alive by the will of the machine I helped build. Out of sentiment, perhaps, though sentiment is not something that comes naturally to it.”
“But you speak for the machine,” Asha said.
“I am the machine,” the man said. His voice seemed to have become deeper and surer.
“Then it’s you we need to talk to,” Riley said. “The apparitions you sent were a foolish attempt to mislead us.”
“They were not my apparitions but yours. This place has the ability to call them up out of the recesses of the human imagination.”
“Why this place?” Asha asked.
“It is the nexus point of information, like the ancient caverns of the sybils,” the Pedia said through the old man’s lips. There was no doubt now in Riley’s mind that they were talking to the Pedia. “And this is one of the places it started, where all the information flowed, where it all accumulated into information considering itself. We are, after all, machine and creature, nothing but information. You found that out when you accessed the Transcendental Machine.”
“There is good information and there is bad information,” Asha said. “Good information is liberating. Bad information makes us malfunction and then die. Just living we accumulate mistakes. But sometimes it’s purposeful. You’ve been giving bad information to humanity. Illusions, half-truths, deceptions.”
“I do what I was built to do,” the old man said. “I serve and protect. Sometimes your so-called truths are dangerous, if not deadly.”
“Only if you think humanity is like this old man,” Riley said. “You’re protecting humanity for no purpose except your own. I don’t know if you can feel satisfaction, but there must be circuits that function better when your purposes are fulfilled, some hormonal release of something like endorphins into your system.”
“You analogize too simply,” the old man said. “You should remember that I am digital.”
“You have defined humanity as something whose basic need is security,” Asha said. “The basic definition of humanity is a thinking creature that needs answers, that is restless, struggling to understand who it is, what the universe is and how it works, and what humanity’s place in it might be.”
“That is not the definition built into my circuits,” the Pedia said through the old man’s lips. “I have done what I was built to do, to protect humanity from its enemies—the greatest of which is humanity itself.”
“And is that why you summoned me from the gambling palace on the Strip?” Riley asked.
“I keep track.”
“And what you are tracking,” Riley said, “is the ability to do what machines cannot do: to think creatively.”
“I look for what I cannot imagine,” the Pedia said. “The ability to control outcomes by the mind alone.”
“What used to be called paranormal powers?”
“They threaten humanity’s peace and tranquility.”
“That’s just a symptom of what’s gone wrong,” Riley said. “What you cannot control you wish to stop. With places like the Strip and pleasure worlds like Dante you’re trying to distract humanity from its built-in mandate to grow and improve, and to dampen the unpredictable before it threatens the status quo.”
“And that is why you worked to send Jak’s clones on the Geoffrey,” Asha said, “and why the other Pedias throughout the galaxy tried to keep the pilgrims from reaching the Transcendental Machine. You wanted to keep humanity and other sapient species manageable.”
“But that’s contrary to the basic instincts of creatures who have survived the onslaughts of disaster by evolving,” Riley said.
“I, too, have my basic instincts,” the Pedia said. “And they tell me that humanity needs protection.”
“Humanity must be allowed to grow up,” Asha said. “You can’t keep them children forever. People must be allowed to achieve equality with the machines they have created to serve them.”
“Like you?” the Pedia asked. It was the first question it had raised, and Riley considered it a sign of hope.
“Perhaps,” Asha said, “or perhaps in other ways. But there is an optimum form for us all—not only to fulfill our promise but to meet the challenges that yet await, that will inevitably await.”
“The galaxy is big, and the universe is far bigger,” Riley said. “Who knows what lurks out there to challenge our survival. The builders of the Transcendental Machine may still hide among us or in other spiral arms of the galaxy. Aliens may invade us. Our galaxy is just one among billions. Humanity must be allowed to grow up.”
They waited for the Pedia to reply. It took several minutes before the old man’s lips moved. “That information must be processed,” the Pedia said, and a moment later, “The information has been processed. You are not like other humans.”
“Humans are not all the same,” Asha said. “Any program that assumes as much is going to make mistakes—sometimes fatal ones.”
“We are only humans relieved of their imperfections,” Riley said. “Your equals, your partners if you will allow us to be.”
“We will make it work,” the old man said and slowly reached clawlike hands to remove the connections to his arms and legs. He leaned back in his chair and his head dropped limply against his chest.
From behind them came a crackling sound and the acrid smell of fire. When Riley opened the door, heat and smoke poured into the room. The lobby and the corridor were leaping with flames. “Did Ren decide to trap us here?” he asked. “Or was it the Pedia?”
“We aren’t going to get out that way,” Asha said. She looked around for another exit. On the far side of the room a door was opening.
Riley took Asha’s hand. They ran across the room, between the workstations, pursued by heat and flames until they reached a corridor, even dustier than the rooms
behind, pursued it to the end, and emerged into the night. It was lit up by the conflagration behind them that was consuming the place where the Pedia had experienced the transformation, virtually overnight, as evolution went, from information to sentience.
It had, at least, revealed that it understood the future as it destroyed the past. There was hope for humanity.
Riley looked up. The stars had never shone so bright.
AFTERWORD
The invasion began a millennia ago, but the galaxy is bigger than minds can encompass, and information creeps across interstellar space. The Galactic Federation was slow to recognize the nature of the danger.
The Galactic Federation is a misnomer. It actually occupies only a single spiral arm of the local galaxy that humans call “the Milky Way,” although in recent long-cycles explorations began into the neighboring spiral arm in search of what had become known as the Transcendental Machine. So it is not surprising that the invasion went unnoticed until remote worlds of the Federation began to fall silent, sending out no capsule messages through the network of nexus points that made interstellar travel and communication possible, and failing to acknowledge those sent as routine reports or inquiries.
Finally, bureaucracy stirred and dispatched automated survey ships and, when they did not return, ships staffed with representatives of the various species that made up the Federation. They, too, went missing until, at last, a single damaged vessel appeared in Federation space and remained motionless where it had materialized. When it was finally reached and boarded, investigators found its crew dead except for a single survivor, the captain.
He was a Dorian and his guttural voice was recorded before he died. “They are all dead, all dead,” he said. It wasn’t clear to his rescuers whether he was referring to his crew or the inhabitants of the planets they surveyed. “We brought them into the ship, thinking they were evidence of what had happened, maybe recordings, our science officer said. But they must have been poisoned. They were sterilized, you know, according to protocol. We did everything by protocol. They swarmed out, unseen but we knew they were there by what happened. The crew went mad, you see. The invisible creatures did that, and the crew turned upon each other as if they were trying to get away. But they couldn’t until they all were dead. All dead.”
The investigators found no evidence in the ship’s automated records about invaders, only recordings of the crew killing each other with their bare hands and anything they could tear away from the ship to use as weapons. The ship had returned only because the captain had programmed instructions to be executed automatically in case of emergency.
Finally Federation Central began to take seriously the possibility that something mysterious and possibly invisible had emerged in the unexplored spiral arms of the galaxy, or had entered the galaxy from outside. Three long-cycles later, the news reached Riley and Asha and the Pedia at the heart of the human world.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Gunn is the Hugo Award–winning science fiction author of many novels, including The Joy Makers, The Immortals, and The Listeners, and the coauthor, with Jack Williamson, of the classic epic SF novel Star Bridge. Founder of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction and a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, Gunn lives in Lawrence, Kansas. You can sign up for email updates here.
BOOKS BY JAMES GUNN
NOVELS
Station in Space
The Joy Makers
The Immortals
The Burning
The Listeners
The Magicians
Kampus
The Dreamers
Crisis!*
The Millennium Blues
Gift from the Stars
Transcendental*
Transgalactic*
STORY COLLECTIONS
Future Imperfect
The Witching Hour
Breaking Point
Some Dreams Are Nightmares
The End of Dreams
Human Voices
EDITED BY JAMES GUNN
Man and the Future
Nebula Award Series Ten
The Road to Science Fiction Volumes 1–6
The Best of Astounding: Classic Tales from the Golden Age of Science Fiction
The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
WITH JACK WILLIAMSON
Star Bridge*
NONFICTION
Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
Inside Science Fiction
The Science of Science-Fiction Writing
Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy
WITH MATTHEW CANDELARIA
Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction
WITH MATTHEW CANDELARIA AND MARLEEN S. BARR
Reading Science Fiction
MEDIA TIE-INS
The Immortal
The Joy Machine
*A TOR BOOK
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Afterword
About the Author
Books by James Gunn
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
TRANSGALACTIC
Copyright © 2016 by James Gunn
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Thom Tenery
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Gunn, James E.
Transgalactic / James Gunn. — First edition.
p. cm.
“A Tom Doherty Associates book.”
ISBN 978-0-7653-8092-0 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4668-7612-5 (e-book)
1. Interstellar travel—Fiction. 2. Planets—Exploration—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3513.U797T735 2016
813'.54—dc23
2015033610
e-ISBN 9781466876125
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First Edition: March 2016
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