* * *
Explosions and blazer fire echoed through the station from the shuttle deck. Tad worked feverishly, slicing his uniform into ribbons and tying them into a reasonable facsimile of the robes the rest of the crew had created. He gathered as much of the stolen contraband as he could in two armfuls. Then he opened the hatch. He expected to find two of Klienman’s Templars. Instead he found Klienman himself.
“Master! It’s far too dangerous! You need to stay in the tabernacle.”
Balancing the goods in one arm, Tad laid a hand on Klienman’s shoulder. In his softest, saintliest voice, he said, “The tabernacle is not safe, my son. Soon it will fall to the unbelievers.”
Klienman nodded gravely. “Then we will die to ensure they take it at a heavy price.”
“No, my son. I have seen a different path for you.” Tad gave Klienman his instructions.
The chief’s eyes went wide. “Master! Are you sure?”
“Yes, my son. Gather your Templars. It is time for me to ascend.”
* * *
Tad stood at the teleporter deck, nearly ready to faint. This was, by far, the longest chance he could have bet on. Behind him, Klienman stood bloody. A handful of his Templars stood with him, weapons in hand, ready to defend the teleporter to the death. Further up the passageway, Tad could hear shouting, blazer fire, and screams.
Teleporter Tech Trotta powered the machine up. Once the macro-converter levels all read green, she typed in the coordinates Tad had told her.
One in five hundred, he kept telling himself. One in five hundred people survive a teleporter trip.
“Master!” Trotta cried. She threw herself at Tad’s feet, clutching at his legs. “Take me with you! Let me ascend!”
Tad felt his patience wearing thin. With some effort, he kept his voice even. “You are not ready, child. I’m sorry.”
“But I have written your gospels and composed your hymns! Who would be more worthy than I?”
Tad shook her off. “Perhaps someday, child. But not now.” With that, he threw his armful of goods into the teleporter. They sizzled and snapped as the machine disintegrated them and beamed their molecular blueprints to the receiver station.
Tad took a moment. This could be it, his last breath. He thought he should say something profound.
“Let go of my foot, Trotta.”
He stepped into the teleporter then. He felt his hair stand on end, and he felt the fabric of his makeshift robes begin to unspin itself. Then he felt the same begin to happen to his flesh. He heard a sizzling, snapping sound.
He barely had time to scream as Trotta threw herself into the teleporter with him.
* * *
The newsnets on Tau-Ceti wouldn’t stop talking about that rogue Federation cruiser. Some weird extremist group, they said. Destroyed a laundry station and an Admiral’s Inspection party before going AWOL. It had been spotted in the weeks since, hailing and attacking other support stations. Attempts to bring it to justice so far had failed.
Trotta snorted. “The only justice those nonbelievers deserve is death.”
“Quiet,” Tad said.
“Of course, Master. My apologies.”
Tad did his best to enjoy the rest of his coffee in peace. But Trotta’s comments had, as usual, soured his mood. With a resigned sigh he gave up. He glanced into the mirror behind the diner’s counter. He watched his own surly, sour expression. Next to it—on a second head growing out of Tad’s shoulder—Trotta beamed her usual zealous grin.
Who the hell ever said two heads are better than one?
“Master, can we stop and pray after breakfast? I’ve composed a new hymn to commemorate your ascension.”
Tad sighed. “Fine. Just let me hit the bathroom first.”
PANDORA
C. S. Friedman
On Monday 213, McKellan’s appendix burst. Until that moment I hadn’t even known he had an appendix, and I must shamefully admit that I was so surprised I wasn’t much help. After the others carried him off to the med lab and adjusted the ship’s outer spin for surgery-friendly gravity, I checked the regulations in our archives. I discovered that while it wasn’t strictly required for crew members to have their appendixes removed before launch—as it was for tonsils, and several other bits of vestigial flesh that had a reputation for causing issues—it was strongly encouraged. Logic certainly suggested that if you were going to spend eleven years in space with limited medical facilities, you might want to get rid of everything that could cause you trouble along the way, right? But some people didn’t like the thought of being carved clean by science, like a steak being stripped of its gristle, even if it was the rational thing to do.
Go figure.
The surgery itself wasn’t a big deal—roboticized laparoscopy—but Captain Basinger gave him a dressing-down afterwards that probably hurt like hell. She was spending her most fertile years in space with her tubes tied, she reminded him, and if she could give up the very core of her fecundity and womanhood for the sake of our mission, he should damn well be willing to remove an organ that had passed its evolutionary expiration date. And with that for a eulogy, McKellan’s appendix went the way of all other biological material on the Ponce de Leon, cleansed and sterilized and broken down to its base components so it could serve as raw material for fuel, clothing, or breakfast bars. Waste not, want not.
Later I asked McKellan why he had made the choice he did, back on Earth, and he told me that at the time he had believed the human body was a sacred thing, and you shouldn’t remove any parts of it unless you absolutely had to. That really surprised me. The traditional qualifiers for a Bellasi mission were a list of minimalisms: low sex drive, low political passion, low religious commitment…low anything that might cause human conflict when you were sealed in a tin can with seven other people for the better part of eleven years. I did a two year mission once, and trust me, the smallest interpersonal tensions could evolve into raging emotional firestorms when you were stuck sharing quarters with the source for that long. Hence the reason the folks on the first Mars expedition needed so much therapy after they came home, one of them later committing suicide. If McKellan had told our vetting officers that religious beliefs prevented him from agreeing to a basic safety precaution, he’d have been dropped from the mission faster than a head of iceberg lettuce in a donut shop.
But that was water under the bridge now. Soon the captain’s ire would be water under the bridge as well. You only had two choices on a mission like ours: learn to let go of things or go crazy. Thus far, no one had chosen to go crazy.
McKellan was an atheist now. Which was not as odd as it might sound. Out here in the vast emptiness of interstellar space, cut off from the planet that was humanity’s spiritual center, some men found God. Others lost sight of Him.
It was all in the handbook.
* * *
Ten thousand years ago the human race was huddling for warmth on an ice-sheathed planet, fashioning crude knives and arrows from chips of stone, wondering where all the nice meaty mammoths had gone.
Ten thousand years ago an alien race was colonizing the far reaches of the galaxy, harvesting energy from the stars, living in harmony with nature and with themselves. They had no poverty. They had no war. They had evolved past the need for societal suffering, and they spread across the galaxy peacefully, optimistically, establishing cities that were sleek, clean, and self-maintaining. If they happened across a planet that was already inhabited by intelligent beings, they didn’t try to colonize it, or steal its resources, or interfere with it in any way. They just left it alone to decide its own fate, and if and when it reached the stars, the aliens welcomed it as an equal, sharing the knowledge that would allow it to rise above its own primitive origins and become part of the galactic community.
We named them the Bellasi because we didn’t know what they called themselves. It seemed appropriate: The Beautiful Ones.
Five thousand years ago, humankind raised pyramids on the shores of the Nile, b
uilt storehouses of grain to guard against famine, and learned how to write, forge metal, and brew beer. Millenia would pass before the first men would break free of Earth’s grip and travel to the stars, but already they were mapping the heavens, paving the way. Meanwhile there were wars to fight, wealth to hoard, people to oppress, territory to conquer. Traditional human pastimes.
Five thousand years ago, the Bellasi vanished. Their gleaming cities were left empty on a thousand worlds, inhabitants gone without a trace. All that the Beautiful Ones had accomplished—all that they had dreamed of—disappeared into the galactic darkness without a ripple. And the many races that had gathered beneath their banner followed them into oblivion. As they had shared in the Bellasi’s prosperity, so they shared in their fate. All gone.
No one knew why.
* * *
I was eight years old when our scouts returned home with news of an alien city they had discovered. Our school held a grand assembly to celebrate the event, twelve hundred students crowded into a humid auditorium to watch the 3-D images as they streamed in: the first alien civilization ever discovered. How sleek their buildings seemed, how graceful, how eerily empty! Even as children we could sense the wrongness of it, and we yearned for something to explain that emptiness. Half-eaten food on a table, maybe. Clothing strewn across the floor, because someone had packed in haste before fleeing the galaxy. Even bodies struck down by a rogue bacteria, War-of-the-Worlds style. Anything that we could comprehend. But the aliens had left their city in perfect order, with no sign of foul play. The ultimate mystery.
More and more cities were discovered after that, always empty. Sometimes we found images of the Bellasi themselves, featured in relief carvings that revealed their history. From these we learned that they had welcomed other species into the galactic community by sharing the knowledge that allowed them to transcend their primitive instincts. This was first done on the Bellasi homeworld, later on their colony planets, in ritual chambers designed for that purpose. We learned that they had developed technology that could transfer knowledge directly from one mind to another; later we found a few recorded messages that were still active, so we could experience how it worked. And we found images of a box-shaped object covered in strange designs, which supposedly contained the device the Bellasi used to share the secret of their enlightenment with other species. The device itself was never depicted.
Some called it a delusion, a Bellasi legend. Others called it a God Box. Scientists called it a Neurological Transfer Interface and they wrote long and elegant papers speculating about its nature. Perhaps it would reveal a secret technology to make clean, low-cost energy universally available. Or a method of conditioning that could channel a species’ violent and primitive urges into a more constructive mode. Or a religious revelation so profound that it altered the very nature of the soul.
Some called it the Holy Grail.
Our job was to find it.
* * *
“It’s out there,” Vince Caswell muttered for the fiftieth time that day. “I know it’s out there!”
He had his charts displayed on every screen of the control room, preempting our normal visuals. To me they looked like the scribblings of a deranged child, but he kept insisting they were starcharts, so okay, call them starcharts. To be fair, his calculations had helped us locate more than a dozen Bellasi worlds, so it was hard to argue about his methods. Then again, the Bellasi had colonized every human-inhabitable planet in this part of the galaxy, so their cities weren’t exactly hard to find.
He claimed to have an algorithm that could lead us to the Bellasi homeworld, provided we collected enough data to run it. Our mission was to visit colony after colony, so he could take measurements and shoot pictures and scrape paint samples from buildings, or whatever he needed to feed the monstrous appetite of that algorithm. In theory he was examining subtle trends in Bellasi architecture so that he could extrapolate backwards to their source, but since all Bellasi cities looked the same to me, I was more than a little skeptical. Then again, what did I know about groundbreaking anthropological algorithms? I was just the guy who fixed solar collectors and fine-tuned the waste management system. Handyman in space.
“You see?” he said excitedly, pointing to one of the displays. “There! There! That’s where the proportional shift started. I knew I would find it! ”
Of course I didn’t see it. In the same way that there were wavelengths of light that your average human being couldn’t detect, there were aspects of Vince’s genius that were invisible to the rest of us. In truth, I would have been happy to do my job and leave him alone to do his, but he needed everyone to be as excited about his work as he was, so he kept trying to explain it to us. Over and over and over again. And yeah, sometimes we pretended that we understood more than we did. It made him feel appreciated, and it cut down on the number of repetitions. Win-win.
“We need to go here next,” he said, and he pointed to a region of space that was far, far away from our current location. I sighed. Transportation was something I understood. Inspecting the jump engines so that we didn’t wind up stranded between here and there while the space-time continuum convulsed around us I also understood. That didn’t mean I liked it.
* * *
Yes, I understand why jumpsleep is necessary. When you fold space-time into infinite layers and shove a ship through the middle of them, the human mind just doesn’t deal with that well. Even rats go bonkers afterwards, running in circles and chewing their own tails off. And real sleep isn’t good enough to protect you. The parts of your brain that handle reason and impulse control have to be shut down completely if they’re going to survive the journey. Which means you have to submit to an artificial coma: induced, controlled, and ultimately terminated by machines whose priority is your survival, not your comfort.
The problem is that it’s not a natural sleep, but a soul-sucking, viscous unconsciousness akin to death. You panic instinctively as you sense it approach, but your motor control centers have been shut down for the duration, so you can’t move at all. Which causes you to panic even more, of course. And as the thick, suffocating blackness closes in around you, you imagine you can feel your brain dissolving cell by cell, your consciousness erased thought by thought, your soul obliterated from reality.
Someday they’ll come up with a tranquilizer that’s compatible with the process. Probably after I’ve retired.
* * *
The first time I set foot on a Bellasi world I was only twenty-three. I’ll never forget the moment the lander hatch opened and I stepped out into the heart of that glorious, star-shaped city. Granted, the buildings weren’t quite as sleek as I had expected them to be. Solar-powered bots kept the streets clean and repaired any major damage, but they could not erase the feeling of age that clung to everything. But still. I was standing in the middle of an alien city. How cool was that?
Because it was my first Bellasi experience, the crew let me wander around a bit and explore. I found apartments the Bellasi had lived in, and everything inside them was neatly arranged, as if the owners might return at any moment. Had there been bodies here once, that the ubiquitous cleaning bots had cleared away? Or had it always looked like this? I found a garden of glittering solar collectors whose panels shifted to follow the sunlight; when a cloud cast a shadow over them they rippled like a field of agitated butterflies. Eerie and beautiful.
Eventually we headed to the center of the city to find the Bellasi welcoming chamber. It was a vast, domed space, much bigger than I’d expected; ten thousand people could have gathered in it without feeling crowded. In the center was a circle of stone statues, some depicting Bellasi, others alien species. They all faced the center of the circle, where a pedestal stood. According to the historical murals, the artifact we sought should be sitting on top of that.
But it wasn’t.
I visited dozens of Bellasi worlds after that. Each star shaped city looked the same. Each had a ritual chamber at its center. A circle of statues was
always present, though the alien species that were depicted might vary.
The pedestal was always empty.
* * *
“Hey, Mike, there’s something you need to see.”
I looked up from the air filtration panel I was trying to repair and saw Kristen Belle, our med tech. “Bit busy at the moment.”
“No, you’re not.” She took the panel out of my hand and put it aside. “Trust me.”
I tried to get her to tell me what was up, but she just smiled enigmatically and gestured for me to follow her. Since it was clearly the only way I was going to get any answers, I did so.
Everyone else was already in the control room when we arrived, staring at something on the main screen. A couple of people nodded a greeting as we entered, but no one turned to look at us. It was as if their eyes were glued to the screen. My heart skipped a beat as I joined them. I was trying not to jump to any conclusions, but this far out in the galaxy, how many things were there to stare at?
On the screen was a planet, displayed in several magnifications. A global view was in the upper left corner, and at first glance I thought it was another Bellasi colony. The typical star-shaped city peeked between cloud banks, immense enough to be visible from space. That was pretty normal. But the arms of the star weren’t perfectly even, and one of them wasn’t even straight. That was odd. The Bellasi loved regularity.
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