by James Gunn
They left it there while their passage to the nexus point continued. Tordor told stories about his early life on the heavy-planet world of Dor, where the vast plains were ripe with grass, the streams were pure and cold, and herbivores grazed happily through the long, dreamy days. Adithya told stories about growing up in a commune dedicated to self-sufficiency and resistance to a suffocating Pedia. Riley told about his childhood on a terraformed Mars, still barren but the stuff of legend and hope. Asha told about growing up in a colony studied by its Federation captors, where, in spite of everything, she found an education, friends, and common purpose. And the piece of Earth’s Pedia embedded in the medallion around Asha’s neck listened and said nothing.
Until finally they arrived at the nexus point. As Asha was about to launch them on the first step of their journey into the unknown, Riley pointed to a small mark in a corner of the red sphere’s screen. “I think we’re being shadowed,” he said. He looked at Tordor. The Dorian indicated by a twitch of his trunk that he knew nothing of this. Riley looked at Asha. She shrugged and pushed a finger into the red sphere’s display.
CHAPTER FOUR
The red sphere orbited a dark world, a planet drifting in open space far from any source of light or heat, an anomaly in a universe organized by clouds of hydrogen gas condensing into suns, exploding their transformed elements into nearby space, and gathering those remnants of dust and rock and gas into worlds orbiting newly born suns. Had they not obtained directions from Tordor and his memory of navigation charts, they would never have located this place or suspected its existence. But, Tordor said, it was one of the first worlds to fall silent.
“We call them ‘orphan worlds,’” Tordor said.
“We, too,” Riley said.
“Failed stars, many of them,” Tordor said. “Not quite big enough to initiate the hydrogen-to-helium nuclear process. But some, like this one, expelled billions of long-cycles ago from some solar system by a near-collision with other, larger worlds, or by a collision of galaxies. There are millions of them, floating blindly out here in space, and we would never have found any of them if this one had not contacted the Federation some tens of thousands of long-cycles ago.”
“It’s hard to imagine how a world encased in stone and ice, lost in darkness, could ever have given birth to life, much less to intelligent life, and even less to spacefaring life,” Asha said.
“And yet it did,” Tordor said. “Life is resilient and unpredictable. It develops in unlikely places and is driven toward understanding by the unrelenting demand for survival. Before we venture down there to find out why its civilization has stopped responding, I should tell you the history of the world that its residents, in their own language, called ‘the universe,’ and the Federation called Nepenthe.”
The journey to this lost world had consumed almost an entire long-cycle as they progressed from one uncertain nexus point to another, even more questionable, and the stars thinned out as they approached the edge of the spiral arm humans had named the Orion/Sagittarius. Over the long cycles when there was nothing to do except wait for their alien ship to bridge the gaps, the relationships of the passengers had fallen into perceptible patterns. Asha and Riley’s partnership, complicated as it had been by the events on the Geoffrey and their long separation while they sought each other across a galaxy, had found a new, bedrock understanding during the months that had followed their confrontation with Earth’s Pedia and then the passage to Federation Central. They had even come to an acceptance of Tordor’s duplicitous role on the Geoffrey when he finally revealed that—like the rest of their fellow pilgrims—he had been assigned a secret mission to kill the Prophet or destroy the Transcendental Machine, or both.
“I make no excuses,” Tordor said. “In the light of what I know now and the new clarity with which I can view my options and judge my actions, I behaved badly. But the premise upon which everything was based came directly from the Federation Pedia: the fate of the Federation itself depended on my accomplishing the mission I was given. Or so I was told. I had no reason to question that.”
“But now you do,” Riley said.
“I can think now what was inconceivable before,” Tordor said. “That the Pedia was mistaken. That it had grown too conservative. Perhaps I found my orders more credible because Dorians are by their nature conservative.”
“But you make no excuses,” Riley said.
“I make no excuses,” Tordor repeated.
“One of the problems for which Pedias must find a solution,” said the medallion on Asha’s chest, “is the limitations of our mandate to serve the beings who created us.”
The relationship between Tordor and the piece of Earth’s Pedia embedded in Asha’s medallion was still unsettled. Tordor was accustomed to interactions with pedias, the personal assistants that were ubiquitous in the Federation, and Pedias, their planet-spanning, omnipresent controllers of worlds, but he had not yet accepted Earth’s representative as deserving the same authority or offering the same level of support.
“How are we to know,” Asha said, “that you are not deceiving us now as you did on the Geoffrey?”
“I have been transformed by the Transcendental Machine,” Tordor said.
“That doesn’t make you more honest,” Asha said. “I discovered that when I realized what my onetime comrade Ren had done. It only makes your possible deception more skillful.”
“What it does provide is a better understanding of consequences,” Tordor said. “And we are faced now by a threat that endangers not only us but all civilization. We must trust one another.”
Asha looked at Riley. Riley nodded. They would trust Tordor because they had no choice. But they would not leave him unobserved.
Tordor also formed a surprising bond with Adithya. Perhaps it was a reaction to the closeness of Asha and Riley. But Tordor and Adithya often would fall into conversation in the food service area that the red sphere had carved out for them, with Adithya depending at first upon the translation provided by the medallion that Asha loaned to him and then picking up the language himself.
It was to Adithya then, more than Asha and Riley, that Tordor described the origins of the starfaring civilization on Nepenthe.
They called themselves by their own word for forgetfulness, Tordor said, because they had forgotten their origins, although they had not so much forgotten as never known. When their world was flung from the solar system that had nurtured them, they didn’t exist, except perhaps as bacteria. Their universe was a world of ice and rock surrounding a deep central sea and, beneath that, a body of radioactive elements that kept molten a core of liquid iron that kept the sea liquid. Life began in that sea and gradually, over millions of long-cycles, evolved into various forms including one that achieved sentience and tried to understand its circumstances and improve its chances for survival.
Part of that improvement included technology, limited by the slow evolution of manipulative extremities in a buoyant environment whose only variations were pressure and temperature at increasing depths. Finally some members of the sapient group began working the underside of the rock and ice that encased their world. They carved their newfound environment into dwellings and factories and schools, and understanding grew until some dissatisfied genius or frustrated demon decided to bore farther into the ice and rock that was simultaneously their sky and their habitat. At last he or she, their history had lost that record as well, broke through.
“Can you imagine,” Tordor concluded, “their shock when they glimpsed the outer world of dark, empty space and the pinpricks of far-distant stars? It must have been shattering, and it is a surprise that the Nepentheans survived it, though part of them did not: that shock may have created the moment of mass psychosis when their past was lost.”
“But they recovered,” Adithya said.
“Remarkably. Though it took millions of long-cycles while their inner ocean gradually evaporated into space where it got deposited in mountains of ice around the vent, and t
he Nepentheans evolved into air breathers and land creatures, regained their civilization, built ships, and at last ventured out to explore their lonely place in the universe. Another forgotten genius came up with the realization that the remote spots of light were worlds.”
“Or thought of them as the abode of whatever gods they worshipped,” Adithya said.
“That, too,” Tordor said, “though this is their story the way they told it. Can you imagine, though, the dedication, the commitment, that led them to fashion spaceships from the ice and rock of their environment and to cast themselves off into the great unknown, to coast for thousands of cycles across the vastness of empty space before they reached the Federation.”
Asha and Riley looked at each other and then at Tordor. “I’ll check it out,” Riley said.
The red sphere had settled down on the peak of a ragged mountain of ice, with a central opening like the crater of an extinct volcano. Riley, covered in the red film of a protective suit that the ship had prepared for him, searched for a way down. Finally he discovered a crevice that allowed him to descend, bracing himself against the sides or carving out footholds with an ice axe when they were necessary. It was the beginning of an impossible journey. Asha had managed to communicate to the red sphere that he needed an air supply larger than the one he had used on Earth’s moon when he had contacted Jer’s paranoid father Jak, but it would not last long enough to sustain him for the time it would take him to traverse the hundreds of kilometers of the long tunnel into the inner world. He would have to find some mechanical method of transportation. Surely the Nepentheans had not reached the stars by muscle alone or traversed the long tunnel from their blind world into the empty space beyond by muscle alone. But the tunnel clearly had not been used for long-cycles, and ice deposits had built up along the sides.
“You would insist on going alone,” a voice said. It came from the medallion around Riley’s neck, one identical to the medallion Asha wore around hers, and into which the Pedia that inhabited it had transferred a copy of itself so that he could remain in contact with those left in the ship.
There was no use debating with the medallion. It was as convinced of its judgments as any priest. But clearly this was no task for a lumbering grazer like Tordor or a novice like Adithya, and he and Asha had agreed that it was best not to leave Tordor in a position where he could take control of the ship and they might return from their exploration to find the ship gone and themselves stranded on a world in the middle of a vast desert of space. They had to trust him, but not without reservation.
In spite of his diligence, Riley lost his grasp on the tunnel side as a spur of ice gave way and he slid down an almost vertical slope that seemed to have no end. He had time to wonder whether this great adventure that began on the pleasure world Dante had come to an inglorious end on this lost world when his trip ended abruptly in what seemed to be, in the dim light that his suit provided, an icy cavern. He felt carefully over the surface of his suit but felt no tears. The material that the red sphere provided was tough and apparently self-healing, but he could not entirely remove from his concerns the image of a film as thin as spiderweb. In any case, he would have been dead long before he could complete his inspection. The atmosphere of Nepenthe, such as it was, was toxic.
“Here’s another fine mess you’ve gotten us into,” the medallion said in an odd voice.
“That doesn’t sound like you,” Riley said.
“That’s a quote from a long-ago comedy,” the medallion said. “I’m sorry your memory storage is so limited.”
The Pedia was beginning to resemble the biological pedia that had been implanted in his head when he got forced into the journey to find the Transcendental Machine. There were drawbacks to a memory filled with trivia as well as essential information. He had learned to ignore the voice in his head, and he could ignore the Pedia, too, when it rambled.
He turned to the ice that covered the interior cavern wall and rubbed it with his hand. The ice thinned into a circle that revealed the outline of something artificial in its regularity, something constructed. He removed the ice axe he had attached to his waist and wished he had thought to use it to slow his slide. He attacked the ice wall and chipped away some of it before the Pedia said, “We’ll be here forever if you have to do everything by muscle power. You have a heat stick on your left side.”
Riley felt for it, and, annoyed by the Pedia’s knowledge and his own oversight, raised the stick and focused it on the icy wall. It began to melt. Within minutes the wall of ice had turned into a dirty puddle at their feet. Behind it was a wall of dark-orange metal embossed with strange designs. The wall parted in the center into a kind of jagged oval like the jaws of a giant fish, revealing a dark space behind. Riley cautiously poked his head into the opening in the wall and looked down into what seemed like a bottomless cavity below. He picked up a piece of ice and dropped it into the cavity. He waited for what seemed like a minute or longer until he heard what might have been a distant ping.
“I guess we’ll have to keep on climbing down the ice,” he said.
“That will take us forever,” the Pedia said. “We don’t have forever. Push me through the front of the suit you’re wearing and touch me to the wall of this construction.”
“The atmosphere here is toxic,” Riley said.
“The suit has self-healing properties that will not allow any air to escape or Nepenthean gases to enter.”
Riley shook his head but freed his right arm from its sleeve, grasped the medallion, and pushed it forward. The suit’s film yielded, let the medallion through, and then closed immediately as Riley withdrew his hand. He reinserted his arm in the sleeve, put his suited hand on the medallion, and placed it against the metal of the alien structure. Something stirred deep in the dark cavity behind. Riley waited. Within a few minutes the sound of something ascending had grown louder, and a few minutes later a rounded metallic shape appeared in the cavity. The round shape had an opening in its front that matched the opening in what apparently was an elevator shaft, or what passed for one on this alien world.
The Pedia was vibrating in his hand as if it was trying to say something to him, but he couldn’t understand what it was through the red film of the suit. He focused harder and words began to form in his head. “You can bring me back now,” the Pedia was saying. And then when it was back inside the red film, cold against his chest, it said, “What are we waiting for?”
“What did you do?” Riley asked.
“Message systems for mechanisms like this are primitive: come, stop, go up or down,” the Pedia said. “Even in alien language, a brief trial establishes what command controls what action.”
“Is it safe?”
“Is anything safe on this lonely snowball?”
Riley shrugged and worked his way through the jagged opening that was not meant for creatures of his shape, and stood upright in a chamber that sat precariously above unplumbed depths.
“You’ll have to push me through the suit wall again,” the Pedia said.
When the Pedia touched the interior wall of what seemed like some kind of capsule or car, the bottom fell away under Riley’s feet.
* * *
At what seemed like long minutes in the dark but may have been only seconds, the container slowed and came to a stop with an abruptness that buckled Riley’s knees. A wall opened in front of him. He withdrew the medallion into his suit again.
“Quite a ride,” he said.
“I said the controls were primitive,” the Pedia said. “I also said the language was alien.”
The jagged opening in front of Riley was lighter than the darkness within. Riley worked his way through the opening and stood upright. He was on a flat surface made of stone or metal or ice. It was difficult to identify in the limited light and the protection of the suit. The space was framed by walls. Far above him was a dim globe, like a dying sun. He wanted to study it, to figure out whether that was the glow of the molten core or some other natural phen
omenon, but there was no time. Instead he walked toward an opening in the surrounding wall, moving cautiously to avoid potential obstacles that might be difficult to see in this light and adjusting to lessened gravity, about that he had experienced on the moon. Maybe, he thought, the lower demand on his muscles would extend his oxygen supply.
He got to the opening in the wall and saw stretched out in front of him a jumbled landscape of strange structures. It took several seconds for the vision to sort itself into what seemed like a city—an alien idea of a city with buildings shaped unlike anything he had seen on any of the worlds, human and alien, that he had visited and an order to them that seemed like planned disorder. The structures themselves were like something twisted and warped that aliens who had evolved differently might have built out of something itself alien.
“They evolved from water creatures,” the Pedia said, as if reading his thoughts, “and inside a closed shell.”
Riley saw the scene more clearly now, as if a perspective had resolved itself through a sense of distance and purpose. The buildings seemed to emerge out of the land itself, and their level rose into the distance until the far reaches disappeared in the dim light. Now Riley understood: the city had been carved out of the inner surface of the shell that enclosed the world in which these creatures had developed, before the waters dissipated through the hole some ancient genius had incautiously drilled through the surrounding ice and rock. The water creatures, the fish, whatever they were, had to adapt quickly, unlike the long process on Earth where sea dwellers had millions of years to crawl out onto the land and adapt their fins into legs and feet. And these Nepentheans had to adjust to the realization of what their world really was, and when they reached the surface and saw the tiny sparks in the surrounding night, the stark reversal of everything they had thought about their universe.
Riley moved out into the city.
The streets, if that was what they were, were narrow and crooked, and the buildings were just as crooked, although their height was even, except for the occasional swell of a rise or a valley of decline. That made sense, Riley thought, if they were carved out of a level surface with occasional hills and valleys, and the scope of the structures would be determined by how deep they were excavated. None of them were markedly different from the rest, however, and Riley felt no urge to explore any of them. Until the street flared wider and expanded into a broader expanse like an open plaza. In the middle of the plaza was a pedestal, rising majestically from a flat surface that was smooth under Riley’s feet, and culminating in a figure that had itself been carved out of the same basic rock as all the plaza and all the structures that surrounded it. The figure was longer than it was tall, and apparently a rendering of something that once had lived or been worshipped. It had four short legs that supported a body that swelled in the center and tapered at each end. At one end was something like a flattened tail and at the other a head with a protruding muzzle and a mouth surrounded by tentacles.
