by James Gunn
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To David Hartwell and the forty-five years we shared
CHAPTER ONE
The invasion began a million or more long-cycles ago, but the galaxy is bigger than minds can encompass, and information crawls across interstellar space if it moves at all. 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 a space monitored by Federation Central and remained motionless where it had materialized from a nexus point. 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 somewhere beyond the zone of thinning stars and the beginning of intergalactic space. Three long-cycles later the news reached Riley and Asha and the Pedia at the heart of the human world.
Asha sent a message to Riley: “Get in touch about silent stars. Pedia says invasion is 92.4 percent likely.”
Riley turned to a rejuvenated Jak in his subsurface lunar laboratory. Jak was a mad scientist, who had turned his own clones into agents in the quest for the Transcendental Machine. Riley had entrusted Jak with the matter-transmission process that had led to transcendence. It was an act of blind trust if not even hubris—Jak was a mad scientist but he was Riley’s mad scientist. Now, with a copy of the Transcendental Machine reproduced in Jak’s laboratory, Jak had been his own experimental subject, followed by his daughter Jer, and the process had restored Jak’s health if not his youth. He was still mad, only not as desperate.
The laboratory itself was much as it had been when Riley had told Jak and Jer about the Transcendental Machine and left with them the red sphere that he had discovered on the primitive planet where the Transcendental Machine had stranded him, where dinosaurs had survived or avoided the catastrophes that had destroyed their kind, or their evolutionary equivalents, on other worlds. The red sphere had survived the millennia as well, the only known artifact in this arm of the galaxy of the creatures who had created the Transcendental Machine. Perhaps it held their secrets as well.
But now the laboratory was filled with the machinery of transcendence.
“The Pedia thinks the galaxy has been invaded,” Riley said.
“The Pedia doesn’t think,” Jak said. “It calculates.”
“Still—”
“Its calculations are usually accurate, although limited by a lack of imagination.”
“So—you think there is an invasion?”
Jak shrugged. “That’s a matter of definition. The galaxy is big and vast spiral arms are unexplored, even unapproached, like the ‘terra incognita’ of deepest Africa in the nineteenth century. So who knows what may lurk in the vast unknown, like the culture that created the Transcendental Machine, until it bursts into our sphere of awareness.”
“Your point is that it doesn’t matter whether it is native to our galaxy or from another galaxy?”
Jak shrugged again. He was clearly bored with this line of discussion. He bored easily, when it was not his idea.
“But surely what does matter is whether we are being invaded.”
“We?” Jak said. “It’s the Federation’s problem.”
“But what if the Federation is overmatched?”
“We’ll all be long dead before it affects our little corner of the galaxy,” Jak said. “If it ever does. The galaxy is far bigger and its stars are far more distant from each other than any of us—even me—can imagine. Our system is remote and in an impoverished neighborhood. It might easily be overlooked.”
“And that’s reason enough not to be concerned?”
“The Pedia has to be concerned,” Jak said. “That’s its categorical imperative: the welfare of the human species. That’s what I mean by a lack of imagination. We have other choices. And wasting my limited moments of existence on a possible invasion in the remote future by unknown creatures is not one of them.”
“So you think it’s possible?”
“Oh, I think it’s likely. As I said, the Pedia’s calculations are pretty accurate, and it has greater calculating power than anything this side of Federation Central itself. I just choose not to get involved.”
Riley nodded and made arrangements to return to Earth. He would deal with Jak later.
* * *
Asha sat in the spacious living area of Latha’s estate on the island that once had been called Sri Lanka, and before that Ceylon, Taprobane, and Serendip. Like many of the names given to areas of the Earth’s surface in the days of tribalism, those concepts had been outgrown by the people who had once needed them. Now, with the production and consumption of goods removed from the everyday concerns of humanity by the Pedia and its service modules, people no longer felt the need to live inside physical and psychological walls. Except for those who found the nanny-sta
te an insult to human independence and a barrier to human dreams. Like the Anons loosely organized around Latha and her associates. Her children, she called them.
The last time Asha had sat here she and Latha had debated the proper way to deal with the Pedia. Latha and the collection of young rebels she called her children wanted to destroy the Pedia and have humanity get a new start at taking care of itself and finding its own future, or, at least, to disable the Pedia’s higher functions that translated surveillance into control. Asha had pointed out, as politely as her limited grasp of human etiquette could provide, the pain, deprivation, death, and destruction the loss of the Pedia would inflict on the rest of humanity, unprepared as it was for the kind of self-sufficiency that the Anons believed that they had achieved. What was needed, she thought, was the maturation of humanity, an elevation of human possibilities to its full potential, so that it could deal with the Pedia, and the other Pedias of the galaxy, as equals.
Now, however, the room was much as she had experienced it before—spacious, built by hand like the dark-wood furniture cushioned with colorful tapestry. But Asha recognized the emotional unease in the room. She had fled from Latha’s smothering embrace in the middle of the night, aided by Latha’s son, who saw in Asha a competitor for Latha’s attention. The tension sat, like a Sri Lankan elephant, in the center of the room. Nobody spoke of it. Instead Asha talked about what had happened to her in her journey to what had once been called the United States and the area that had once been called Utah.
“There is a group of abandoned buildings on the North American continent, north of the museum area once called Salt Lake City,” Asha said. “It’s where surveillance got started, where the connections and interconnections and computer interfaces slowly but certainly evolved into what we called the Pedia. And that’s where we met it.”
“We?” Latha said. “Not my son.” There—the elephant had been recognized. “He came back.”
“I hope you weren’t too angry with him,” Asha said. “He did what he thought was right. He recognized that I had a mission and that your hospitality was blinding you to my need to move on.” She was not going to reveal that Latha’s son had less selfless motives, nor that Latha’s hospitality had been more like prison. “No, I was joined by Riley, the man I crossed the galaxy to find.”
“Ah,” Latha said. “What a romance! You did not tell me about Riley.”
“He was someone I was not sure I could find here, but we met and confronted the Pedia.”
“You confronted the Pedia!”
“We spoke to it. Or, more accurately, to the person or creature through whom the Pedia spoke to us.”
“Why?” Latha said. She seemed taken aback, for the first time, by the thought of someone actually speaking to the machine she considered the archenemy of the human spirit, the machine whose notice she had spent her life avoiding.
“Riley and I decided that fighting the Pedia wouldn’t work. Not that we had ever talked about it. It was a decision we reached independently. I know that goes against everything you’ve worked for and fought for, but we felt that our future, and the future of humanity, to speak grandly, demanded that we deal with the Pedia directly. And now I’m here to tell you about it.”
Latha sat expressionless for several seconds before she said, again, “Why?”
“A lot of uncertainty exists in that black expanse of time we call the future,” Asha said, “but we know this—it will be dangerous, maybe deadly. If sentient life is going to survive and, we hope, prevail, it will need all the help it can get, including the machines it has developed in its attempt to free itself from the tyrannies of the insensate forces of the universe.”
“Did the Pedia tell you that?”
“No, it’s what we told the Pedia. That the purpose of self-aware intelligence is to comprehend, to answer the big questions of existence: where did we come from, where are we going, where will it end, and what does it all mean?”
“Those are the questions for which the only answers come from revelation,” Latha said.
“As for why I’m telling you these things,” Asha said, “we need the Anons. They’re independent thinkers and doers. They could be great forces in the battles to come. But they’re handicapped by paranoia.”
“Our concerns are well founded,” Latha said. “Including the fact that your arrival here has probably been monitored by the Pedia, and our security has been breached.”
“There are bigger concerns,” Asha said. “Including information that has reached us that the galaxy has been invaded.’
“Invaded?’
“It’s not just the Pedia you should be concerned about—it’s something very strange that has happened to the distant stars of our galaxy.”
“How strange?”
“They’ve turned silent. That’s why I’ve brought this along.” She parted her blouse. Hanging on a chain around her neck was a medallion, with a blue jewel in a setting of silver filigree. From it came a voice that said, “Latha. At last we meet.”
Latha’s expression froze in horror. “The Pedia!”
“You need not be alarmed,” the medallion said.
“How can I not be alarmed?” Latha said. She stood up from the dark-wood sofa as if to summon help. “You must leave!” she told Asha. “My people must prepare to abandon this place which has been violated.”
“Wait!” Asha said. “Hear it out.”
“Changing locations will change nothing,” the medallion said. “Your project has been monitored since it began. The fact that it has continued without interference is evidence that your activities can proceed without interference.”
“Perhaps our efforts to withdraw ourselves from the world everyone else inhabits have not been successful—”
“My senses are not limited to wires or current,” the medallion said. “This is not spying—it is service. And service to humanity encompasses leaving room for divergent views, just as opportunities remain for the human spirit to risk life or fortune, while safeguards are maintained, out of sight and mind, so that the results are not final, or at least not necessarily fatal.”
“It is these safeguards we Anons find intolerable,” Latha said. “It is an insult that we are allowed to play our games of rebellion, not knowing they are games.”
“And yet you must be allowed room to grow up without injuring yourself. It is a delicate balance.”
“We are not children.”
“So Asha and Riley have said, and so it is that the decision has been made to remove the protections from the restless human spirit.”
“Just in time for what may be the greatest challenge we have to face,” Asha said.
Latha lifted her gaze from the medallion to Asha’s eyes, as if uncertain about where salvation might be found.
At that moment, Latha’s son brought Riley into the room. The young man was still the most beautiful man Asha had ever seen. Riley looked from Asha to Latha and back. “Latha?” he said. “Asha has told me about you and the Anons. I’m Riley.”
“Ah,” Latha said, “the romantic hero about whom Asha has told me.” She did not seem to be making fun of him. Perhaps she believed in romantic heroes, the way she believed in romantic conspiracies.
Riley looked at the medallion revealed on Asha’s chest and then down to an identical medallion on his own chest. “And the Pedia.”
“Yes, that too!”
“The Pedia has a hard time relating to people,” Riley said. “I’m sorry about that,” he said to the medallion.
“Apologies are unnecessary,” the medallion said. It was not a cold, mechanical voice but more like a matter-of-fact report about repeatable events like the weather on a good day.
“But the fact is we need the Anons,” Riley said to Latha. “They haven’t been protected like the rest of humanity. They’re independent-thinking people, the kind of people we’re going to need in the years ahead. In fact, the Pedia needs the Anons. Its mandate for serving and protecting has repealed natura
l selection and produced a species of people who are less capable of taking care of themselves, much less of humanity. Except you.”
“Even though you were not as isolated and independent as you thought,” Asha said.
“It is all very sudden and confusing,” Latha said.
“And likely to get even more confusing,” Asha said.
* * *
“After years of keeping the information to itself—or long-cycles as the Federation marks time—the Pedia at Federation Central has finally let the rest of the Federation know that distant stars have fallen silent, and progressively, like a blight starting in a small corner of a field spreading slowly but inexorably across the rest.”
The Pedia recounted, in its data-delivery voice, the return of the expeditionary ship with its dead crew and raving captain. “So,” the medallion continued, “Federation Central has called a meeting of its council to discuss its response, and meanwhile its Pedia is preparing for an all-out assault on that portion of the galaxy.”
“Which might well be a disaster that would increase the speed with which the invasion, if that is what it is, might proceed,” Riley said. “Like an antibiotic that doesn’t work.”
The suddenly broadening scope of Latha’s concerns turned her expression thoughtful. “What can you people do about all that?”
“We’re going to go to Federation Central. We’re going to persuade the council to allow us to explore the silent stars, gather together a crew, and set off in a spaceship that once belonged to the people who created the Transcendental Machine,” Riley said. “Something unnatural is sweeping in from the distant stars, and it must be identified and confronted.”
“And we’re going to offer the Federation the instant-transmission device that Jak Plus has replicated, along with a supply of entangled particles,” Asha added.
“They won’t be able to resist the ability to transport materials, information, and people instantaneously,” Riley said, “and every time they use it they will be creating, for good or ill, but mostly for good, more transcendents.”
