Transcendental

by Gunn, James

  He turned and threaded his way through the odorous and cacophonous gathering and went through the hatch into the corridor of the working ship. This time the lock surrendered without a struggle.

  * * *

  No guards waited outside the hatch. A crew member in patched one-piece coveralls glided past without giving Riley a glance, as if Riley, in similar coveralls, was just another member of the crew. Either the word had gone out to give him the freedom to do his job, or the crew had gotten used to him.

  Riley hoped the condition of the coveralls did not reflect the condition of the ship. They had a long way to go, and alien territory to explore.

  “Here there be Tygers,” his pedia said.

  Riley shook his head and started toward the ship’s control center, noticing for the second time the place along the corridor, about shoulder height, where the finish had been worn from the paneling and, here and there, where emergency equipment lockers had been emptied and not refilled.

  By the time he passed the captain’s quarters, deserted now, Riley felt depressed. Not only had the Geoffrey seen better days; it might not see many more.

  The control center seemed as shabby as the rest of the ship. Half of the gauges were broken, and the other half flickered erratically. The captain sat in the middle chair of three placed strategically in front of the computer interface, the communication controls, and the gunnery controls.

  “Hello, Riley,” the captain said, without turning.

  “Your add-ons could get annoying,” Riley said.

  “I like to unnerve people.”

  “Particularly old friends.”

  “Old maybe. Hardly friends.”

  “We’d better get friendlier if we hope to survive,” Riley said. “This ship is a piece of junk that should have been scrapped. And the crew isn’t much better.”

  The captain swung around. “We’ll have time to whip them into shape. This will be a long voyage.”

  “We?”

  “You’re going to have to help, Riley. And maybe Tordor, too, and the woman, Asha? You’ve all had ship-time experience, and the crew hasn’t.”

  Riley was taken aback. “Asha, too?”

  “So Tordor told me.”

  “She didn’t tell me.”

  “Maybe she had her reasons. You’re the X factor in this equation. Nobody knows why you’re here and what your intentions are—”

  “Is that any different from anyone else?”

  “—and I’m sure you’re not going to tell me,” the captain concluded. “You’re not like the rest of these pilgrims, or even like me. You aren’t a starry-eyed dreamer, longing for a grander state. You’re a pragmatist, and you’re a warrior. I’d say you were an assassin except I don’t know anybody aboard whose death would benefit anybody. We’re probably all on a one-way trip.”

  That long outburst seemed to have exhausted the captain’s store of conversation. Riley stood in front of his old crewmate wondering if he should say something, if there was any way to address the captain’s accusations. There wasn’t. Not without revealing more than was wise or perhaps, considering his pedia, possible.

  “For someone who couldn’t get along,” Riley said, “you and Tordor seemed to have shared a lot of confidences.”

  “It was a charade, you know. Tordor knew that you were the natural choice but also that his fellow galactics wouldn’t accept you—or any human, for that matter—unless your choice became inevitable. We agreed on that.”

  “I’m touched by your faith in me,” Riley said.

  “Faith? No. Belief. Necessity. Tordor felt that way, too.”

  “You struck it off.”

  “He was the first galactic I’ve met who didn’t exhibit contempt for humans.”

  “Or who concealed it best.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Where does the ship stand now?”

  The captain waved a hand and a holographic display took shape above the control panel. At first, the absence of light made the representation seem like a black hole, and then Riley began to pick out a few dim points of light.

  “That’s even more disturbing than the display in the passenger lounge,” Riley said.

  “We don’t want to upset the passengers more than they already are. The display there isn’t doctored. It’s just a couple of Jumps delayed.”

  “I’ll have to share this with them,” Riley said.

  “I thought you would. It will help solidify your position with them.”

  “Can I assure them that you know what you’re doing and where we’re going?”

  “Only if you want to lie. How you handle the passengers is your problem now. You know my situation. I’m waiting for the next Jump coordinates, and there doesn’t seem like there’s much galaxy left.”

  “And you want me to handle that?” Riley asked. When the captain swung back to the control panel without answering, Riley turned and went back the way he had come.

  As he opened the hatchway door, his pedia said, “Duck.”

  He ducked his head as he entered the passengers’ quarters and looked back at the hatchway. At neck level, he could now see, a nearly invisible line had been stretched across the entrance, at the right height to have decapitated him as he entered.

  No one was around. Apparently everyone had retired to his or her or its quarters or cubicle. Riley got a pair of impervium gloves from his cubicle, carefully removed the death line, coiled it, secured it with an impervium tie, inserted it into an impervium pouch, and stowed it away in his pack for possible later use.

  “Someone thinks you are the Prophet,” his pedia said, “and wants to kill you.”

  “Or the Prophet thinks I’m a threat.”

  “Your task becomes more imperative: identify the Prophet.”

  “You identify him for me,” Riley said.

  Someone didn’t like him. Or feared him. Or distrusted him. He needed to find out why, and remembered Ham’s comment that no one knew why he was on the ship or what his intentions were. That was, of course, true. And it would be better for him, and for what he had to do, or decided not to do, if it remained true.

  He retired to his cubicle, inspecting all the possible traps his would-be assassin might have planted for him, and went to sleep thinking about why he was there.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Riley remembered how his personal pilgrimage began:

  The room’s absence of light oppressed him. Not just dark. The light seemed to have been swallowed, consumed. He had the feeling that if he had a light stick with him, it would have cast a cone of black.

  He thought he knew what was doing this to him: a phased transmitter that canceled light waves. It also canceled sound better than a room designed as an anechoic chamber. And he knew its purpose: to soften him up, to make him agree to anything in order to regain the real world of sight and sound. But what did they want—and who were “they”? He tried to feel his way around, ignoring the possibility that he could run into something dangerous or even fatal, or that he might be standing at the edge of a bottomless pit, but there was nothing to touch, not even a sensation of touch or even the feeling of weight on his body or the connectedness of muscle, nerve, and bone. Even if he had a light stick, he wouldn’t have been able to feel it, much less turn it on.

  Whatever they were trying to do wouldn’t work. They couldn’t make him scream and beg no matter how long they left him in this place. Whoever they were.

  He would keep himself sane by going back over the events that had brought him here.

  For more days than he could remember, he had lost himself in the sim section of the pleasure-world habitat of Dante off Rigel. Sharn had left him twenty days before, saying that he didn’t need a friend or even a companion, he needed a nurse and a chiatrist. He knew what he needed: a job, a feeling of worth, a confirmation that life was better than death. Governments and corporations recruited industrial and interspecies spies, they hired assassins and mass murderers, but no one seemed interested in the service
s of an unspecialized soldier of fortune.

  He could remember bits and pieces of what followed: ceutically induced euphoria followed by depression eased by more ceuticals; encounters in the dark with what he took to be sims but might have been real women; similar encounters in the glare of midday and the exposure of the marketplace; massages that blended into nerve stimulation that blended into sensory overload and free-associating drift; battles that maimed and slaughtered thousands, and one-on-one barroom fights with their satisfying impact of fist on flesh, given and received; and all sim, including himself. Or so he thought.

  He had tired of excess, wearied of indulgence, sickened of depravity, and had pressed the panic button next to his right hand, roused himself from his tank, and checked out, determined to seek Sharn and build a new life, maybe together. But multiple assailants had waited for him in a corridor almost as dark as this place. He had disposed of several of them, one fatally he thought, before they had taken him out with a blow to his head. Of course they might have been handicapped by instructions to capture him alive.

  Or maybe it all was part of his sim-experience, and he had been removed from his tank already anesthetized. Or maybe what he was experiencing now was a sim that someone else had programmed for him.

  If he could feel anything, he would feel bruises and aches, he thought, but even those might be sim. The back of his head had hurt, he remembered. An injury of some kind at the base of his skull. If it was real.

  It was a hell of a universe: a galaxy divided uneasily between alien species that once had sworn war to the death now trying to find a way to coexist; technology beyond humanity’s dreams, some the product of human ingenuity, some modified from alien sources; and all of it used to distract, to divert, to suppress, to maintain. Riley had joined many expeditions into the unknown; he had met dozens of adventurers like himself, most of them now dead, and dozens of creatures with innovative ideas about how to do better, be better, improve conditions and possibilities for everybody … and all of them defeated, if they were still alive.

  He had been one of them, early. He had worked his way through the Institute as assistant to a succession of brilliant scientists. He had studied mathematics and computer science and physics and astronomy; he had immersed himself in comparative cultures and alien art, and, most of all, in space-time engineering. He had imagined himself a diplomat or an inventor, making peace or a better future, but he had been recruited as a mercenary, trained in a dozen different ways to kill a creature silently and a half-dozen ways, undetectably, equipped with extrasensory apparatus. He was sent to scout alien intentions on alien worlds until, on his fifth assignment, he was captured and tortured. Eventually he was ransomed and restored to what the doctors called a state of health. After that his employers lost faith in him, or maybe in his luck. They told him he would be taken care of, but as soon as he was able to walk they let him go, to find his own way in the universe. He was always going to be damaged. The way to a better future seemed now permanently closed.

  Humanity had ventured out into the galaxy to claim new worlds and discovered the galaxy already occupied. Dozens of alien species, many of them older and more advanced than humanity, though none of them more deadly, traversed interstellar space as if they owned it. They tolerated one another because anything else was suicidal. But humanity tipped the balance. Was it humanity’s fault? Was it humanity’s aggression or humanity’s disappointed dreams? Or was humanity simply the unknown factor that ended the status quo, a development with an outcome no other species could calculate or risk? The interstellar wars began.

  Education had delayed his service, but now he was called up, good for nothing more. He fought in a dozen battles on as many worlds, each of them brutal, each of them vital to the welfare of humanity, each of them inconclusive, each of them meaningless. He had lost an arm in one, a leg in another, an eye in a third—each replaced after hospitalization. He was no worse for all his experience except for wounds inside; the surgeons could not reach them; the chiatrists could not ease them. His only remedy was to drown them in one illusion or another. Maybe that was what Sharn had seen in him and despaired.

  * * *

  Was there a lightening of the darkness? Did he hear movement? Was feeling returning?

  Sharn had been his surgeon in one of his restorations. He forgot which of them it had been, there had been so many. But he could not forget her deft fingers in the surgical console or her dark eyes focused on the images magnified on her scope or occasionally raised to meet his own. Within them was all the hope and promise that he had thought forever lost.

  They had reminded him of his first love, the tomboy named Tes, who had raced him through the streets of Clarkeville on terraformed Mars, and up the slopes of the towering mountains whose summits they could never hope to reach or along the shores of the new seas. Her eyes had been dark, too, and they had teased him and taunted him, and looked up at him, widened by passion and squeezed tightly in fulfillment, and he had loved her and known then that he was destined for great things.

  He had grown up on Mars, terraformed over the centuries by bombardment with fragments from the asteroid belt and by water-laden comets and pieces of Saturn’s rings. His father had emigrated there with his new bride and his dreams of a better life. Jef Riley had built a hydroponic farm with his own hands, and prospered for a time, selling vegetables to new arrivals before he decided, in a fit of hubris, to try dry-land farming and lost everything. In desperation, he volunteered for the Interstellar Guard. He drilled for a month a year and for two days every month. He was promised that the Guard would never be used except for defense of Mars.

  Riley had worked inside the greenhouses and on the shifting red Martian soil, and before and after work his mother schooled him with computer programs and televised lessons. He loved the freedom, loved the new world, loved his mother, who was strong and beautiful, but hated the labor and his father’s folly, not realizing until much later that his father had cherished the same dream as his son—to get free, to be better than he was, to surpass his own limitations. All Riley could see then was the need to get away from the farm, from Mars even, and to take Tes with him.

  But Tes had been the first to volunteer as soon as she was sixteen and had been killed, like his father, in the first battles of the interstellar war. Riley had already been accepted to the Solar Institute of Applied Science, and his mother insisted he go. There had been enough death, she said; it was time to build, not to destroy. He had gone, not unwillingly but saddened, trying to make sense out of catastrophic change, trying to hate the aliens who had killed his father, his sweetheart, and his dreams. He was tortured by unanswerable questions: Why had the wars occurred? Why had the aliens attacked? Who were they? What did they want? How could humanity resist? Would humanity survive?

  It was difficult to focus on studies when the war raged through outer space, when media reports depicted attacks and victories and strategic withdrawals, complete with explosions and gouts of flame and the terrible faces of aliens looming out of the melee, brandishing weapons, or scattered across a barren battlefield like harvested grain. But Riley persisted, transferring to the classroom and laboratory the anxieties of wartime.

  Sharn had visited him in the recovery room, checking on his arm. Yes, it had been his arm she replaced, and in demonstrating its strength he had pulled her, unresisting, into his hospital bed. She came to him often after that, and he found that her fingers were good for more than working a surgical machine. Her body was trained and supple and responsive, and her mind was quick and perceptive. They talked more than they made love.

  They talked about humanity’s dreams of reaching the stars and the great ache in the heart of all humanity at the discovery that the stars belonged to someone else. That was what the wars were all about, Sharn thought: the battle for real estate. That was what all human wars had been about, she said, and the interstellar wars were no different. Good land was always scarce, and planets of the right size and the right d
istance from their suns were even scarcer. If humanity wanted any, if they wanted a future, they would have to take it from those who had it.

  Riley didn’t agree. “A classical humorist once said, ‘Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.’ But they are. Every system I ever visited had habitats. Mined-out asteroids, most of them. People living there, being born there, growing up there. Soon that’s all they’ll know. Lot of advantages to habitats. People don’t need planets. They can make their own living space—sometimes better.”

  “But it’s not land,” Sharn insisted. “It’s artificial, and sooner or later the people, or creatures, who live in them are going to become just as artificial.”

  Riley pointed out that she was living and working in a habitat, and she replied that she hated it. And anyway, she said, if it wasn’t land, what were the wars about?

  Fear, Riley said, and misunderstanding. The aliens had been coexisting for a long time—many long-cycles—before humanity came out. The basic fear was of difference. How can you trust someone or some thing totally different, truly alien? You don’t know what they think or what they feel, or even if they think or feel the way we understand those terms. Then there was the fear of inferiority. Was some other species smarter, more inventive, more powerful, more aggressive? The aliens—the various galactics—had learned to live with that. But humanity was the joker. It could be anything from potential slaves to potential workers to potential rulers, and the cycles-long truce broke down. Now the truce has been reinstated.

  After how many millions dead? Sharn asked. After how many worlds ruined?

  But will it last? Riley said. He flexed his new arm, and they made love again.

  That was the last good time they had. It wasn’t the disagreement about interstellar policy or even war—he hated that more than she did—it was her growing fascination with transcendentalism and his release from the recovery ward and his growing realization that he was finished. There was no role for an adventurer in a galaxy organized to minimize adventure, or a role for a warrior in a galaxy bent on peace at all costs. And no role for a diplomat who had killed too many aliens and bore their wounds on the shell of his body, and inside.