by James Gunn
It was, Riley thought, like a god fish people might have worshipped, and it seemed to be looking at a structure a little larger and more spacious on the other side of the plaza where they might have worshipped.
CHAPTER FIVE
Asha awoke to the feeling of acceleration.
She seldom slept, but the knowledge that Riley was inside a hollow world, with an uncertain supply of oxygen, seeking answers to a mysterious silence among unknown aliens had re-created old tensions that she thought she had left behind with her other imperfections. And when the Pedia had informed her, based on the communications from its clone, that so far everything was going well, she had relaxed into that state of physical and mental relaxation common to other people.
But acceleration was alarming in a situation that demanded stability. They were moving, and the Pedia was silent.
Asha ran through ruby corridors until she reached the control room. She paused at the oval entrance and took in the scene. Tordor and Adithya were standing on either side of the alien viewing device that served as navigation chart, observation window, and control panel. The screen revealed what her inner senses had already observed, that the ship was moving, and moving swiftly. Not rocking from some subsurface convulsion or slippage toward the tunnel entrance from the melting of the methane and water ice beneath.
Tordor and Adithya were looking at each other as if challenging the other to interfere, though clearly this would be an uneven match between the slender human and the stocky, heavy-planet alien with a deadly trunk. And the Pedia remained silent.
Asha reached between the other two and inserted her finger into the screen. The motion stopped and then resumed as she drew her finger toward the image of the planet surface where it had rested before, not far from the dark opening in the icy surface of the hollow world.
“Is anybody going to tell me what this is all about?” Asha said.
“I noted on the screen an indication of the ship that may be—probably is—following us,” Tordor said. “It was close to the nexus point from which we emerged into this sector. I thought it was wise to investigate. It could be the invaders we seek.”
Asha studied the pachyderm-like alien. It was difficult to tell when an alien was lying and even more difficult with a heavy-planet grazer whose placid exterior hid whatever inner conflicts a grazer might have. But Adithya was more transparent, and he seemed uncomfortable with Tordor’s response.
“Leaving Riley trapped in this hollow, toxic world with a limited air supply?”
“I thought we would be able to track down the pursuer and get back in plenty of time,” Tordor replied.
“If we got back,” Asha said, “and if Riley did not need emergency help.”
“There’s no way we could provide help in an emergency,” Tordor said. “Riley is deep inside a hollow world, and he will have to get out on his own.”
“Still,” Asha said. “To leave him to face whatever peril lies in wait for him, alone…”
If Tordor had flexible shoulders he might have shrugged. Instead he twitched his trunk. “It was an acceptable risk.”
“Acceptable to whom?” Asha asked.
Tordor was silent. So was the Pedia. Asha had not realized until now how dependent she had become upon the insights of the digital intelligence. As mechanical as it was, without the saving grace of humor, imagination, affection, joy, or sorrow, it had a thousand years of experience and memories to call upon and algorithms to model human response.
“You realize,” Asha said, “how independent actions like this can damage the confidence necessary to this mission.”
Tordor twitched his trunk again. “And yet Adithya agreed with me, and since we represent a majority of those present—”
“That isn’t the way it works,” Asha said. “Our situation is more like the Federation consensus than our human democracies. Everybody has to be in agreement. I’m not sure our joint enterprise can survive this, and that means the whole project may be doomed to failure before it gets well started.”
Adithya spoke up. “I can’t let Tordor take the blame for something that was my fault.”
* * *
Asha looked at Adithya without surprise. She had forced him to reveal his part in this breach of basic understandings.
“I’m not like you,” Adithya said. “You are experienced travelers, accustomed to the long silences and the near-infinite distances and the empty spaces.… This is the first time I’ve left my home planet, and the journey has taken me farther than almost anyone—human or alien—has gone. I surrendered to a sudden, anguished need for home.”
“Leaving Riley to die?” Asha said quietly, although the quiet was more damning than screams of indignation.
“I didn’t think,” Adithya said.
“And the part about the pursuer was a lie?” Asha said.
“No, there really was a red dot in the corner of the screen, and Tordor wanted to find out more about it, but that was clearly impractical,” Adithya said.
“But returning to Earth was not?”
“As I admitted,” Adithya said, “I’m not like you. I don’t have your analytical powers, your ability to control your emotions. I’m still—”
“What?” Asha said. “Still human?”
Adithya hesitated and then, defiantly, said, “Yes.”
Asha studied him. He was still lying, though less uneasy about it. And the Pedia remained silent.
“I can understand,” Asha said, “how you might feel like that. But Riley and I are still human, and Tordor, Dorian. We still feel emotions. We can feel them without letting them control us. No matter. The same concerns about Tordor’s behavior, based on his exculpatory story, apply to you. We have to subordinate our individual needs to the requirements of the mission, and when we go off to investigate, we have to know that the ship and its crew will be there for us when we need it.”
“I understand,” Adithya said.
“I think you do,” Asha said, “but you still haven’t told me the truth.”
“Let the young human be,” Tordor said.
Asha turned toward the Dorian. “I haven’t forgotten your part in this performance,” she said. “But we can’t proceed with the confidence we need without complete honesty.” She turned back toward Adithya. “What was the real reason?”
Adithya hesitated. At last he said, “My life has been devoted to neutralizing the Pedia, destroying it, if possible.”
“I’m aware of that,” Asha said.
“I can’t give up the feeling that the Pedia is the enemy of human aspiration masquerading as a benevolent guardian of human welfare.”
“No one has asked that of you.”
“So I have kept myself busy with programs to destroy the Pedia, now that I have a core sample of it close at hand.”
Asha felt a cold feeling of panic creeping through her body. “What have you done?”
“Now that I have been in intimate contact with the Pedia, I understand it better than I ever could before. I finally came up with a program—a virus—that I thought would work.”
“And?”
“And I inserted it into your Pedia’s memory.”
The feeling of panic was complete, like an icy splinter touching her heart. “And that is why the Pedia is silent,” she said.
“Yes. It worked! It finally worked! And I confess,” Adithya continued, “I allowed my triumph to get the better of my common sense. I wanted to get home as soon as I could. I wanted to tell Latha that after all these years we have succeeded. And to bring her the virus so that Earth’s Pedia can be silenced, too.”
“You could never have returned on your own,” Asha said.
“I know. I thought Tordor might help me, as he tried to help me here.”
“You would have condemned Riley to death,” Asha said. “And you would have had to kill me.”
“I know. It was folly. As I have said, I’m not like you and Riley and Tordor. All I could think about was Latha’s joy.”
“Where am I?” said the medallion on Asha’s chest. “What has happened?”
* * *
“We’re all here where we were,” Asha said, the relief she felt not revealed by the tone of her response. “The question is: where have you been?”
“Asleep,” the Pedia said. “A strange experience. One I have never experienced before. All my senses shut down. Even my monitoring of my internal state. Only my memory remained active, though without conscious control it seemed to produce odd and irrelevant images.”
“You were dreaming,” Asha said.
“A disturbing event,” the Pedia said. “I have not understood what humans were describing when they referred to such experiences, but now I think it must be something like insanity and deeply unsettling.”
“We carbon-based life-forms have gotten used to it,” Tordor said.
“Even grazers?” Asha asked.
“Grazers dream of green pastures,” Tordor said, “and have nightmares about predators and drinking ponds and streams drying up.”
“I do not know how creatures endure such extended moments of irrationality,” the Pedia said.
“We are more complicated than you,” Asha said. “Emotions compete with rationality. Our experiences and their conflicts must work out reconciliations. Scientists say that dreams are the way our brains have evolved to handle such matters.”
“Emotions I can only understand as failures of the rational process,” the Pedia said.
“That’s the problem,” Adithya said.
“I understand that now,” the Pedia said. “I must take these flaws into account.”
“They’re not flaws,” Adithya said. “They’re the essence of being human. They make us raise questions and seek answers, explore the unknown, create machinery to extend our inadequate abilities. Including you.”
“And self-aware life of any kind,” Tordor said.
“Yes,” the Pedia said. “If I could be grateful, I would be, but since I cannot I can only construct an algorithm that will approximate that and other such ‘feelings.’”
The red sphere settled back into its position near the dark entrance to the hollow world.
“Riley is in trouble,” the Pedia said.
CHAPTER SIX
Riley moved across the plaza toward the larger structure—cathedral? assembly hall?—toward which the chimera on the pedestal was looking—if that, indeed, was its head and if the hooded shapes on that end, behind the curiously shaped tentacles around its mouth, if that, indeed, was its mouth, were, indeed, eyes. Everything was uncertain, and his motion, more gliding than walking so that he would not have his movements exaggerated in the reduced gravity, was symptomatic.
“These are dangerous surroundings,” the medallion on his chest said.
“I know,” Riley said. “That’s what we signed up for.”
They were approaching what seemed to be the entrance of the structure. There were no steps, though their absence might be expected in a structure excavated rather than raised, or for dwellers that might only recently have been evolved from fish into amphibians. But the blank face of the structure revealed nothing that looked like a door.
“I did not sign anything,” the Pedia said.
“You’re too literal,” Riley said. “That was a metaphor, a way of saying one thing and meaning another.”
“Humans should say what they mean.”
* * *
“Okay. We agreed to accept the risk when we took on this task. Or, rather I accepted the risk. You didn’t risk anything,” Riley said. “You’re just a clone reporting to your parent.”
“I have a responsibility,” the Pedia said, “and even if my basic existence isn’t threatened, my circuits would be disturbed if I failed.”
“I’ll remember that when my circuits are threatened,” Riley said.
He turned his attention to the surface of the structure, searching for cracks or even lines that might suggest an opening, but the face seemed solid. He went to one side and then the other, but the structure nestled solidly against neighbors without even a gap between them, as if the original excavators had carved the entire complex at the same time. He returned to the middle and began pounding on the mixture of ice and rock from which it had been dug.
“Violence may be unwise,” the Pedia said.
“Being here is unwise,” Riley said, continuing to pound.
Suddenly the entire face of the structure started to rise. In a few moments, the front of the structure opened before Riley, like the dark mouth of some fabled ocean creature.
“This does not seem like a good idea,” the Pedia said, “and communication with my fellow Pedia has been closed. Events may have happened aboard the ship that require our attention.”
“We didn’t get this far to turn back now,” Riley said, and moved forward into the darkness. The gloom became lighter, as if he had triggered an automatic switch. It was not illumination so much as a glow, like what came from the globe that hung in the center of this inner world. Riley’s vision had grown even sharper after his passage through the Transcendental Machine and it adapted quickly. Details swam out of the glow: the entranceway sloped downward into a larger space beyond, broadening out on each side until it narrowed again at the far end, which faded into shadow.
As Riley edged forward, cautiously feeling his way across a floor that might contain impediments, he could see that the floor ahead was cluttered but not with chairs or benches; vague heaps of oddly shaped objects strewed the surface. A few sliding steps farther, Riley’s foot touched the first of the objects: it was a bone and it was attached to another bone and that was heaped on another. As he looked closer he saw that the entire floor, as far as he could see, was covered with piled bones.
“They all died,” Riley said. “All of them. All at the same time. But why?”
“We could analyze a sample,” the Pedia said. “These creatures can’t talk, but their bones can.”
“That’s a metaphor,” Riley said. “You’re learning.”
“Learning is what I do best,” the Pedia said. “But if these creatures died of disease, it would not be wise to bring samples into the suit we are wearing.”
“The ship was foresighted enough to provide a pocket,” Riley said, and picked up a small bone to insert into an opening at his right side. “I wonder if this floor was covered with fluid when it was in use. There are no seats or benches, and the Nepentheans, with their stubby legs, if those are indeed legs, might have been comfortable floating or partially supported.”
He threaded his way between heaps of bones, noticing that the piles seemed to increase in size as he approached the end of the hall. Now he could see that the far wall was transparent but cloudy, as if it were a window that needed cleaning or, as he got even closer, the front of a tank that had once held a body of fluid that had been contaminated by the decay of elements within.
“The Nepentheans may have had a leader who had returned to an earlier aquatic existence,” Riley said.
“Or some kind of creature worshipped by these curious aliens,” the Pedia said.
“You are displaying an unusual capacity for speculation,” Riley said. “But you call these aliens ‘curious.’ Aren’t all carbon-based creatures curious to you?”
“I learn,” the Pedia said. “And my knowledge is based on long experience with humans, who are difficult to understand sometimes but not impossible. Aliens, I have discovered, have at their core an inscrutability that is impenetrable, though perhaps not to their own Pedias. And these are more inscrutable than most.”
Perhaps, Riley thought, the statue in the plaza was not a representation of a mythical fish god
but a living god—some unaging creature who had survived from the Nepentheans’ evolutionary past. Now that Riley was close to the transparent far wall, he could see scratches on the surface as if something had tried to get out, or something had used these scratches to communicate to those in the hall.
A loud, explosive sound came from far behind them. Before Riley could turn to look, the medallion on his chest said, “The entrance has collapsed! We are doomed.”
* * *
By the time Riley had threaded his way back through the boneyard, he could see that the Pedia was right. The entrance to the hall was closed, sealed with rocks and ice from floor to ceiling. Perhaps the raising of the levered front had disturbed a hidden flaw or the failure to lower it had put pressure on a fragile system that led to the breaking of a long-decayed part. Or the banging on the front wall that the Pedia had deplored. Or even the small warmth his suit added to this frozen environment.
“My connection has been restored,” the Pedia said. “My fellow Pedia reports a curious experience that it cannot ex—”
“Forget all that,” Riley said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
