Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  “You’re here,” she said. “It didn’t intend to kill you.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It had the opportunity before you awoke.”

  “That’s what it said. It said it was protecting me.”

  “It was the only creature that approached you.”

  “Thanks,” Riley said. He didn’t want her to think he needed help in figuring out what the weasel wanted. Neither did he tell her that his pedia had awakened him as the weasel approached and that he had pretended sleep until the last moment.

  But he didn’t know what the weasel wanted. He thought about it as he and Jon tried to revive Jan. Whoever had put Jan to sleep also may have had something similar for the flower child, but that implied a level of preparation that challenged belief. Of course the flower child could be part of the conspiracy, and could have administered the knockout chemical to Jan and only pretended to be asleep.

  When Jan stirred, stretching and yawning and apparently feeling no aftereffects of the drug except guilt, he/she/it had no memory of anyone approaching or any sting of injection or an odor other than the universal stink. “I’m sorry,” it said.

  “They were ready for us,” Riley replied.

  “They?”

  “Whoever they are.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Jan said, and Jon nodded in agreement. “We’ll be ready for them.”

  “Get some sleep,” Riley said.

  “It’s still my watch,” Jan said.

  “I don’t feel sleepy,” Riley said.

  When he sat down on the bench Jan had vacated, Tordor was rocking back on its tail a meter or so away, but its eyes were open, looking at Riley.

  “What did you mean,” Riley asked, “‘So it begins.’”

  “Long journey,” Tordor grunted. “Many perils. Many die. Many wish pilgrimage to fail.”

  “Many forces,” Riley said. “Many motives.” His pedia processed the words as a series of Tordor-like grunts, which led Riley to respond in the same sort of clipped syntax as Tordor. The pedia needed time to translate languages with which it was unfamiliar.

  Tordor waved his proboscis in a gesture that swept the room.

  “Right,” Riley said. “Who are pilgrims? Who are anti-pilgrims?” Maybe, he thought, there are no legitimate pilgrims at all. Maybe they were all attempting to sabotage the pilgrimage. That would be an irony even the transcendental gods could enjoy.

  They conversed for another hour, partly keeping awake, partly feeling each other out. As best they could in their limited common vocabulary, they discussed the reasons why this new religion might create universal fear.

  “Surely,” Riley said, “every creature, every species, wants to be more than it is.”

  “Not so,” said Tordor, “since only a few could transcend—if transcend possible at all—and leave other species behind.”

  “We have a myth,” Riley said, “of the hero who ventures into a region of supernatural wonder, encounters fabulous forces, wins a decisive victory, and comes back with the power to bestow boons.”

  Tordor replied, “We have story like that but ours is leader blessed by the gods who pass their god-gifts to leader’s tribe.”

  Riley studied the elephantine alien. “And yet you venture forth.”

  “My elder commands,” Tordor grunted.

  They fell silent, and soon Tordor had rocked back upon its tail and closed its eyes. Riley looked around. The flower child was standing straighter now. Perhaps it was conscious again, if it ever had been unconscious. Jan and Jon were asleep at his feet. The weasel-like alien was huddled in the far corner, his abandoned arm at his feet, apparently unmissed, but the knife the arm had held was gone. The coffin-shaped alien had moved a meter or so during all the activity. Riley had not seen it in motion. The woman sat on a bench a few meters away, her legs drawn up against her body with her arms folded across them and her eyes looking at Riley. When their gazes met she didn’t look away.

  And Riley knew that in his bag was an innocent object he had not placed there. The weasel had put it there before the attack, and the attack, if that was what it was, had been a diversion.

  * * *

  Riley awakened to a sense of danger. He had fallen asleep sitting up, in a chair, his bag under his feet. He hadn’t intended it, but three days of alert readiness, except for that brief hour or so before the weasel approached, had caught up with him. Or maybe he had succumbed to the same strange soporific that had affected Jan. Now his pedia had awakened him again. Jon and Jan were asleep nearby. The flower child’s head was drooping once more, and the Alpha Centauran was crouched beside the frame, his top feathers alert. Tordor was still asleep, rocked back on its tail. The woman sat in the same position, her knees drawn up. She still looked in his direction.

  Something was wrong.

  The woman felt it, too. Her arms clasped her legs tighter. Her eyes were wider, and her expression seemed to ask, “What woke you? What is about to happen?” Or maybe she had a pedia of her own.

  Nothing had changed. No, the alien coffin had moved again. Now it was against the far wall. But that alone was not alarming.

  Then he understood. The speed of their travel had increased. Not enough to change Riley’s feeling of gravity but enough for his pedia to detect, as well as the small increase in the noise of the ancient motor powering their ascent with the aid of the focused laser beam from beneath.

  Something exploded! The climber was beyond the atmosphere, and no noise reached them, but Riley felt the impact on his feet and his buttocks. His bag rose in the air and thumped back to the floor as the climber began to gyrate and its passengers were tossed from side to side like bags of grain.

  Riley reached out to grab Jon and Jan and tugged them to the bench. “Hang on!” he said. He turned to help the woman, but she had her legs under the bench and her hands gripping the edge as she dodged flying bodies.

  The space-elevator ribbon had parted—or had been parted. But the climber wasn’t falling. It was being pulled upward like a weight on the end of a long string. The release of the ribbon’s tension had imparted a wild swing to the climber, and the counter-balancing weight on the other end was plunging them toward outer space.

  At least they were not falling. That was hopeless doom. But being flung into space in their barren box was only doom delayed.

  The flower child stood in its frame, alert and swaying. The Alpha Centauran grasped the frame for support. The weasel flew past toward the other end, followed by its arm, but it swung itself around like an acrobat so that its legs could absorb the impact. The alien coffin seemed to have anchored itself against the far wall.

  Riley dodged Tordor as the other hurtled past, and into the wall beside him. The heavy-planet alien was too big and too dense to try to stop. But Tordor braced itself on its legs and tail, facing the wall.

  The violent motion began to slow as the pull from above dampened their gyrations.

  “Something wants to stop this pilgrimage,” Tordor grunted.

  “Something seems to have succeeded,” Riley replied.

  “Who’d want us dead?” Jon asked.

  “Yeah,” Jan said.

  “Maybe it’s one of us,” Riley said. “The alien in the box over there, the woman, Tordor here, me…”

  “The ribbon was cut below,” Tordor grunted.

  “A mistake?”

  “A miscalculation?”

  “Who is to say?” Riley responded. He did not tell Tordor about the change in the rate of the climber’s ascent before the explosion. If that had not happened, the ribbon would have parted ahead of them instead of beneath. Someone knew enough about the climber’s motor and how to change its speed, and about the explosive charge and when and where it would be set off.

  “What’s going to happen to us now?” Jan asked.

  “Yeah,” Jon said.

  From his feeling of weight, Riley judged that their speed was increasing. “We’re going to fly into space with enough velocity t
o leave this system. Of course that will take a millennium or so, and by then we all will be dead. In fact, even if we brought a lot of provisions, our food won’t last for more than seven days, and air and water not much more than that.”

  “Gee,” Jon said. “I never knew one of these strings to fail.”

  “Yeah,” Jan said.

  “It didn’t fail,” Riley said. “It was blown apart.”

  “Golly,” Jan said.

  “Yeah,” Jon said.

  “We’re going to go on a pilgrimage, all right,” Riley said, “but it wasn’t the one we intended.” He looked at the woman. He knew she had heard the conversation, but she didn’t say anything. She had straightened out her legs, though. Her feet were on the floor and her hands held the edge of the bench.

  Riley continued to look around the room, to take stock of the effects of the explosion. Two aliens had been killed in the gyrations of the climber, a third had broken a leg, and a fourth had lost a tentacle. The half-dozen informal self-protection groups combined efforts to treat injuries and ration supplies and protect individuals from predation. Clothing and other materials were shared with those who suffered from the increasing cold.

  Through all the mutual aid, Riley kept thinking it was all useless, like maintaining law and order when the wave front of a supernova was scheduled to arrive in a few days.

  Seventy-one hours of desperate fatigue and soreness later Riley felt a thump and the increased weight of deceleration. Creatures fought for a place at the windows, but only blackness, without stars, could be seen. An hour later, he heard more thumps, followed by the sound of the release of the airlock door beyond the privacy room. The fetid air inside the climber was invaded by the only slightly less fetid air of a spaceship.

  “Boys,” Riley said to Jon and Jan, “we’ve been saved.”

  They emerged, one by one, into the airlock of a ship. A party of space crew greeted them with food and drink and blankets, and received Jon and Jan with particular warmth.

  Riley recognized one of them. He wore the insignia of a spaceship captain.

  “Hello, Ham,” he said.

  “Up to your old tricks, Riley?” the captain said.

  “Thanks to you,” Riley said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Geoffrey accelerated as soon as the passengers in the elevator car had been retrieved and the car had been jettisoned to resume its interrupted journey into deep space. As he was directed down the narrow passageway into the decontamination chamber and the isolation of the passenger quarters, Riley asked a crew member what had happened to the carbon-fiber cable on which the car had climbed.

  The crew member shook his head. “That stuff don’t wear out, and you can’t cut it.”

  Riley was too tired to ask the crew member about it, and he had no more opportunity to talk to the captain before getting to the decon. Passengers’ quarantine was standard: exotic bacteria, viruses, and fungi lurked inside bodies for weeks, and some alien physiologies were always deadly to the unprepared. And passengers offered nothing to a voyage but trouble: the less the crew saw of them the better for the welfare of the crew and the vessel.

  Riley was desperate for sleep, but he knew that was something he couldn’t do at least until he got to his quarters and had a chance to check his pack for a certain item. In the meantime, he’d simply have to stay vertical and alert through the decon process … and once he and the other passengers were in the passengers’ lounge, the joys of acceleration.

  Acceleration was jerky, which spoke of old engines, the maintenance of which had been sketchy at best, or perhaps of a crew that was still learning its ship. Maybe both. There would be no JumpingOff nexus this close to a system, so acceleration, at a constant one-earthgravity, would last at least one hundred hours and give planet-acclimated passengers a chance to adjust to the environment of space and the fragile tubes that flung themselves through it.

  Riley endured acceleration, with its unexpected moments of free fall, as he always had, with grim contemplation. He took his mind off the unsettling sensations by reviewing the past seventy-two hours. His pedia helped him recall the waiting room on Terminal, and he identified an alien or two he had overlooked: a caterpillar-like creature that lifted its forward section cautiously to look around, and in the far corner an aquatic alien in a cloudy tank bubbling with gas.

  He reviewed the events in the climber, adding details to his picture of events: who was where and when and what they were doing. He could not tie any movements to the point at which the climber had accelerated, or the point at which the cable had been severed, although the coffin-shaped alien had been closest to the wall that housed the controls.

  “Insufficient information,” his pedia said. Riley sometimes hated his pedia, but he hated even more its confessions of imperfection.

  Until he found some privacy, he would have no opportunity to explore his pack and see what the weasel had left or planted on him. First he had to keep track of his fellow passengers … the pilgrims. The passenger compartment was divided into living zones adaptable to the requirements of the various kinds of creatures who sought passage. Some required special atmospheres or special diets, or special configurations of accommodations; the steward had to be a person of many parts.

  The crew was no problem. Providing similar amenities for the crew who had to work the entire ship would have been impossible. Human vessels were manned by humans, or by humanoid species that could tolerate human environment. And the Geoffrey was a human vessel.

  The aquatic alien, its writhing tentacles breaking the murk of its aquarium, disappeared shortly after boarding. Other exotic aliens followed. The rest, including the coffin-shaped alien, were gathered in the passengers’ lounge. His contemplation was interrupted by a familiar grunting.

  “Saved by higher power,” Tordor said, leaning back on his tail to brace himself against acceleration.

  “At least one closer to the controls,” Riley replied.

  “And for greater purpose,” Tordor said.

  The enigmatic woman looked scornful. Riley turned to her. “Where do you think we’re heading?”

  “Toward transcendence,” she said.

  “Where is that?” he continued.

  “Wherever you find it,” she said.

  “Better question,” Tordor said, “what direction?”

  “Only the captain knows that,” Riley said.

  “You speak like man who understands.”

  “You, too. You know your way around a ship.”

  Tordor waved his proboscis in a movement that Riley’s pedia interpreted as “of course.” “We leave Terminal,” he said.

  Riley nodded, hoping that nods were part of Dorian gesture vocabulary. To gather at Terminal for a journey inward made no sense. They were headed farther out along this arm of the galaxy, and there were few stars farther out.

  The Geoffrey was a war-surplus vessel, a cruiser much like the one aboard which Riley had served part of his service time. A lot of warships had been converted to civilian use after the Galactic War. War surplus meant the ship was armored around the flight deck and engine room, and some of its weapons array might still be operational. It also meant that passenger quarters were primitive.

  Of course all accommodations on spaceships were primitive. The romantic notion that spaceships had staterooms like surface ships, or even the modest efficiency compartments standard on overpopulated planets, misunderstood the price of space in space. Privacy was costly, and the cost was comfort. Each humanoid passenger was assigned a cubicle in a wall of cubicles, like drawers in a morgue; a built-in metal ladder allowed access to those above waist level.

  Each cubicle was two meters long, one and a half meters wide, and one and a half meters high. Each was equipped with air, temperature, and humidity controls, that sometimes worked, an adjustable mattress, a shelf for personal items, a cupboard at the far end for clothes, and a light. An overhead viewer could be positioned for viewing from a half-sitting or lying-down pos
ition. The ship’s computer offered fictional and nonfictional materials, views from the ship’s front, back, and sides, revealing the great emptiness of space, and basic information about the ship, its layout, and its operations. Riley scanned the information that would, he knew, become part of his pedia’s memory. He might have to know his way around as well as any crew member.

  The cubicles were no place for claustrophobes, but then neither was space itself.

  Before the discovery of the JumpingOff places, the cubicles had been equipped for long sleep as well; the connections and outlets had never been removed. Everybody who had been through the old ways blessed the unknown human genius who had deciphered the galactic network map. Going into long sleep was painful and waking up was even worse, but not as bad as not waking up, which happened two times out of ten. Nobody would have put up with it except that casualties in ships that saw action in the Galactic War averaged 50 percent of the crew—each time a ship went out.

  The alien compartments were different. They weren’t more spacious, but some were arranged vertically or slanted, had an adjustable mixture of atmospheres, and an adjustable wavelength of light. Everything about them was temporary, obviously thrown together in a hurry after the passenger manifest was received. Some were still under construction.

  Riley felt a fleeting moment of relief that he didn’t have to trust his comfort, much less his life, to that kind of ramshackle accommodation. His cubicle was one from the top, third from the left, in a stack of sixteen. As soon as he entered his cubicle and disabled the viewer, he opened his pack and stowed away his few belongings, piece by piece, inspecting each of them, until he was left with the empty pack. He went over it millimeter by millimeter. Finally, under one magnetic closure, he found what he was looking for: a mere metal sliver, an electronic bug of some sort, or perhaps a concentrated explosive, or a poison timed for release.

  He left it as he found it, made sure the door to the cubicle was locked, and said “sleep” to his pedia. He figured he’d have no trouble sleeping, too. After the seemingly endless hours of trying to stay alert, especially in the long period after the explosion, he might sleep forever …