by James Gunn
“Enough of your tricks,” Tordor said, but his confident voice seemed shaken.
“Moreover,” Riley said, “we are prepared to offer the Federation a new way of getting information instantly from one edge of the galaxy to the other.”
A ripple of increased attention went through the council. Tordor seemed as surprised as a Dorian is capable of displaying. “Such a device would be—” He hesitated. “—revolutionary.”
“It has been engineered by one of our human scientists,” Asha said. “It operates by the use of entangled particles. And when its transmitters have been installed in worlds across the galaxy, they will place the Federation into instant communication with every part of its community of worlds.”
“Indeed—” Tordor said. “Indeed.”
“Moreover,” Riley said, “this device can transmit people as well.”
“And you offer this to us because—?” Tordor said.
“It is another protection against the invasion we were describing,” Asha said. “The long delay in travel and information exchange only increases the difficulties of dealing with whatever is going on.”
A silence fell over the council hall until Tordor, looking toward one side of the council and then the other, said, “We will, of course, accept your offer, pending a study of the device by our scientists. And then—I have a consensus of the council—the Federation will authorize your exploratory mission into the area under discussion. While we consider our own actions.”
“You will not be sorry,” Asha said.
She and Riley turned and left the hall by the passage through which they had entered, found a capsule waiting for them where they had left the other, and directed it back to the reception area for the spaceport. Where they found Tordor waiting for them.
“I’m going with you,” he said.
CHAPTER THREE
Tordor explored the protean wonders of the red sphere with the impassivity of a dominant herbivore and the long experience of a Federation leader, but his lack of response was almost as revealing as emotion. “This is not a human invention,” he said.
“We never said it was,” Riley said.
“Nor did you say where you acquired it,” Tordor said.
“That, too.”
“And are you going to share that information before we depart on what may be our final voyage?” Tordor asked.
“Only if you promise not to reverse the council’s authorization to investigate the silent stars,” Asha said.
Tordor twitched his short trunk in a gesture that Asha had learned meant assent. She turned to Riley. They were standing in the control room, a space shaped for them by the red sphere, as it had reshaped its other spaces for their needs by some unexplained and possibly unexplainable analysis. Jer and Adithya stood nearby against the ruby wall, waiting like Tordor for Riley’s answer.
Riley recounted how he had discovered the red sphere on the planet of the half-civilized dinosaurs where the Transcendental Machine had transported him, how he had entered the ship when it had accepted him as a legitimate heir to the creatures who had built it and guided it to the planet, and been destroyed before they could return to it.
“And those creatures were—?” Tordor asked.
“The people of the Transcendental Machine,” Riley said. “Engineers sent to install a receiver for the Machine, a million long-cycles ago, and got massacred by the dinosaurs because of what the dinosaurs thought was sacrilege.”
“That means this ship is the only Transcendental Machine technology in Federation space,” Tordor said. “Its value is beyond calculation.”
“And yet its plasticity makes it useless as evidence about the nature of its creators,” Asha said, “and the Federation has a sample of the revolutionary material from which it is shaped. That will keep your scientists busy until we return.”
“If we return,” Tordor said.
“If we do not, the Federation is in more trouble than the ship can save it from,” Riley said. “And they have the technology of the Transcendental Machine receivers to investigate, now that they know where some of them survive.”
“And now that you are giving them your own version of the Transcendental Machine,” Tordor said.
“We expected you to recognize the technology,” Asha said, “and depended on your newfound transcendence to not reveal its origins until you could evaluate the consequences.”
“Ah yes,” Tordor said. “The consequences.”
“We would not have been so ready to share with the Federation the successful efforts of Jer’s father to replicate the Transcendental Machine,” Riley said, “if it had not been impossible for humanity to keep the technology to itself. It was certain to be discovered and efforts to keep it hidden would be considered human treachery and an invitation to revisit all of the hatred created by the human/Federation war.”
“And the Federation needs swift communication if it is going to resist whatever threatens it from the outer reaches,” Asha said. “When information may take long-cycles to reach Federation Central, the Federation can be in serious trouble when bad things happen on the periphery.”
“All of that is plausible enough,” Tordor said, “but it is not the real reason.”
“We are taking with us, maybe for good, most of those who have been processed through the Transcendental Machine,” Asha said.
“But we also leave behind,” Riley said, “the means of creating more transcendents.”
“In the process of using the technology,” Asha said, “the Federation will be creating more people of all shapes and origins who are more efficient in body and mind, who can think more clearly and behave more sanely, and can, if they use their new abilities wisely, create a better galaxy.”
“And in the process destroy the civilization Federation species have worked for two hundred thousand long-cycles to create,” Tordor said.
“One that has grown old and rigid,” Asha said, “like all organizations that start out with high goals and youthful energy.”
“You know better than we do,” Riley said, “the difficulties in getting the Federation to move or, having moved, to slow its ponderous momentum. Witness its reaction to humanity’s emergence, to the rumors of Transcendentalism, to the possibility of invasion.”
“A large part of that is due to the tools upon which an advanced civilization depends,” Tordor said.
“The Pedias of the galaxy?” Riley said. “They are a reflection of the species that created them to take care of all of the little tasks their creators no longer wanted to perform or were able to perform, because they involved menial labor or unlimited memory or calculating speeds beyond the capabilities of carbon-based life, or untiring attention to detail.”
“And the unspoken command,” Asha said, “to protect its creators. What we have come to understand is that carbon-based life must develop to the stage where it can deal with the Pedias as equals and partner with them in the goal of the thinking creatures of the galaxy to ask question, and to seek answers.”
Tordor twitched his trunk in the way that Asha understood meant that the topic was over, though not necessarily settled. “And we five are going to find the answers to the failure of our outermost members to respond?”
“Four,” Asha said. “Jer is going to remain in Federation Central to assist in the development and installation of the new interstellar transmission system.”
“And the boy?” Tordor asked.
“Adithya?” Asha said. “He is the only non-transcendent among us, to be sure, but he has devoted his life, short as it has been, to frustrating Earth’s Pedia, and he knows more than any of us the kinds of protocols and algorithms necessary to deal with advanced thinking devices.”
“Hah!” Tordor said and might have stomped off if there had been anywhere to stomp off to.
* * *
Jer had been shipped to Federation Central along with the prototype device that Jak had developed to transport material and people between the stars. She ha
dn’t wanted to leave, but Asha convinced her that everyone had a role to play and that hers was the role of facilitator who helped solve problems and guided a necessary technology through the maze of scientific frustrations and bureaucratic tangles.
“Like your father,” Asha said, “you know how to get things done, though I hope without his antisocial traits. And at the critical moment, when the time comes for someone to demonstrate that the process can work on living creatures as well, you can volunteer. Only then, and only after multiple demonstrations, will Federation officials allow themselves to be transported between transmitter and receiver.”
After she had left, Tordor said, “She looks very much like Jon and Jan.”
Riley remembered them, two crew members on the ill-fated Geoffrey, who had joined the ship from the port city on Terminal, who had been frozen only a few cycles into the journey, Jan on purpose, Jon in what might have been a self-induced act of grief, and only Jan had been restored by Kom, the barrel-shaped Sirian. Jan had told his story of being a member of a nine-member clone raised by their father to terraform Ganymede; in the process, six of them died and the survivors were infected with an intelligent, bacterial film that began to control their thoughts and actions.
“Jer was a member of Jak’s clones,” Riley said.
“And probably its last surviving member,” Asha said. “Perhaps it was best that if anyone was to survive the group, it was Jer. She has the resilience of her gender and developed the ability not only to adjust to her clones but to her brilliant, difficult, paranoid clone father as well. Still, she has had more to endure than most, and it is better that she endure it in pursuit of a difficult task and in the company of those who do not know her history.”
“I liked her,” Adithya said.
“We did, too,” Asha said, “but this is too much like a wake. Tordor,” she said, turning to the ponderous grazer, “can you get us permission to inspect the Federation ship that returned from the expedition to the frontier?”
“I’m afraid that is impossible,” Tordor said.
“Even for you?” Riley asked.
“For anybody. The ship has been destroyed.”
“The ship that intercepted it, then?” Asha said.
“Destroyed as well,” Tordor said. “Along with its crew.”
Asha looked at Riley. “That seems excessive,” she said to Tordor.
“Standard procedure,” Tordor said. “The crew knew it and accepted it. It is the price of civilization. The Federation involves trillions of lives and hundreds of thousands of long-cycles of accomplishment and sacrifice. What are a few lives compared to that?”
“It also is the price of knowledge,” Riley said. “Data is lost that might save the Federation, not to mention the lives of those who might be able to shed light on that information, or even contribute to a solution, or even reconsideration of a protocol that values protection for many over the lives of the few.”
Tordor twitched his trunk again to indicate that the discussion was over.
“It also means,” Asha said, “that we and the Adastra are likely to share the same fate when we return.”
“If we return,” Tordor said. “Which isn’t at all likely.”
“Still—?” Riley said.
“The value of this ship might protect us,” Tordor said.
“We’ll take comfort in that,” Asha said. But Dorians do not recognize irony.
* * *
Asha eased the Adastra out of orbit and into a course that took it out of the Federation Central system, increasing speed as the red sphere got beyond the range of Federation sensors. Their mission would take them beyond the range of much Federation experience as well, but they wanted to appear as ordinary as possible lest they attract the attention of tense Federation bureaucrats or, even worse, the Pedia that controlled the targeting of missiles and had been known to act before the bureaucrats could make up their minds. The voice of Earth’s Pedia, from the medallion on Asha’s chest, had already warned them about the age and decaying circuits of the Federation’s Pedia.
“Pedias are not immune from the damages of senescence,” it said.
“That is not comforting,” Riley said.
“It was not intended to be comforting,” the Pedia said. Pedias also do not understand irony.
Riley was more familiar with the workings of the red sphere that Asha had named after the generation ship on which she had been born, but Asha seemed to have developed a relationship with the ship that seemed almost symbiotic, and it responded to her more readily than to anyone else. And although she did not understand the millions of tiny voices that their Pedia spoke of, they seemed to understand her.
Tordor, too, would have taken command. He was accustomed to being in charge, and he did not accept with grace a position where he was a mere fellow passenger. He grumbled a good deal. But he had experienced Asha’s leadership during the ill-fated voyage of the Geoffrey to the world of the Transcendental Machine, and he recognized, while he resented, her affinity with the ship itself.
Passage to the nexus point identified by the red sphere as the first link to the chain of such anomalies in the space-time continuum that led to the outer fringes of the Federation was the usual time-consuming process. In this instance it was complicated by the fact that the red sphere’s navigational charts, if they were charts, were a million long-cycles old, and the adjustments that Riley had made in his first attempts to guide the ancient ship to the pleasure world Dante and then to Earth had to be done again. The red sphere had the magical, holographic ability to translate primitive finger pointings into directions, but it was all trial-and-error experience only slightly improved by Asha’s intuition and only somewhat disturbed by Tordor’s grumping about delays and inefficiency and the red sphere’s adjustments for the drift of nexus points over the million-long-cycle gap.
“We should have taken a Federation ship,” Tordor said, “with up-to-date navigation charts and the ability to input data directly rather than this primitive finger-pointing guesswork.”
“No doubt the Transcendental Machine engineers had more direct ways to interact with their machines,” Riley said. “Maybe mental. They may have developed a symbiotic relationship. The ship is making adjustments for our inadequacies. That alone is proof of its superior design and so-far untapped abilities.”
“All of which we are likely to need in the long-cycles ahead,” Asha said. “Tell us all you know about the—I don’t know what to call it—the frontier crisis.”
“You have already called it ‘the silent stars,’” Tordor said, “which has almost as much poetry in Dorian as in your language. Or ‘an invasion.’ Which is as violent and dramatic as the other is poetic. But it all began with nothing. Nothing where there should have been something. Silence where there should have been response.”
Tordor told them about the absence of representatives from the outermost worlds of the Federation and reports by interstellar capsule that did not arrive, then inquiries through the normal nexus-point system that were not answered. “All of this takes time,” Tordor said, “long-cycles. And it all began a dozen long-cycles ago, when the galaxy’s attention was focused on the Federation/human war, and, when a truce was signed, rumors of Transcendentalism.”
To understand the situation, Tordor continued, one had to understand the workings of the Federation: delegates were often delayed by local problems or by political change. Sometimes the effort to maintain connections became too expensive, particularly for frontier worlds or for those newly admitted to Federation status. Finally a pattern emerged—recognized much earlier by Pedia analysis than by the council: the silences were spreading from the outermost worlds of the Federation’s spiral arm toward the center, like a creeping infection or a black cloud slowly rolling over the fringes of the galaxy until it reached Federation space. The first exploratory ships were sent out. And did not return. Until the ship came back with a psychotic captain and a crew that had turned upon and destroyed all of its
members except the captain, who had locked himself in the control room until the carnage was over.
“So,” Asha said, “it could be a disease. Bred in a remote world and brought to other worlds by interstellar commerce.”
“Possibly,” Tordor said. “But unlikely. The pattern is too regular, and a disease carried by interstellar vessels would jump worlds. Even if the disease was completely unlike anything experienced on a million different worlds and defied normal methods of treatment, somewhere a solution would have been discovered and announced.”
“The pattern, then, seems more like an invasion of hostile beings,” Riley said. “Moving from world to world and leaving devastation and silence behind them.”
“Perhaps,” Tordor said. “But where would it have come from? The Federation has not reached all the worlds of our spiral arm—humanity’s emergence is proof of that—but there are few substantial sectors unsurveyed, and our Pedias have assured us that the human surprise will not happen again. The last time the Earth system was surveyed, the only signs of civilization were a few campfires.”
“That leaves the other spiral arms,” Asha said, “particularly the outer arm, the arm of the Transcendental Machine, which humans call the Centauran arm, where technological civilizations may have developed millions of long-cycles before the Federation was even a concept. Maybe the creators of the Transcendental Machine are the invaders, and they took over their spiral arm before moving into ours.”
“Except,” Riley said, “they scattered their receivers across our spiral arm for a million long-cycles without conquest. They may have been preparing our galaxy for the invasion that they knew was coming.”
“An invasion that may have taken over their spiral arm first,” Asha said. “The Federation would never know until the invasion reached this spiral arm.”
“And that may have been what happened to the Transcendental Machine people,” Riley said. “Why they’re no longer around.”
“Maybes,” Tordor said. “What-ifs. It is all a bunch of tales for children. We will find what we will find.”
