by James Gunn
“Even if there are no deadly gases in the air,” the Pedia said, “there are bacteria and viruses for which you have no immunities.”
“The Federation inoculates everybody against all known pathogens,” Tordor said. “Otherwise we could never tolerate contact with a new species. If you were not an immature Pedia from a primitive planet, you would know all that.”
“You may ridicule my experience and my world,” the Pedia said, “but you should not endanger the mission.”
“We need to develop a working relationship,” Tordor said. “You keep quiet until asked, and I won’t dispose of you on this alien world.”
“You will need me to get in touch with the ship,” the Pedia said. “And no matter what you think now, you may need me before our stay on this world is finished.”
“If I need your help, I will ask for it,” Tordor said. “And if I get rid of you, I can always return and dig you up if I need to contact the ship.”
The Pedia was silent, and Tordor threaded his way between the trees and the fallen trunks until he got a glimpse of the rolling grasslands beyond.
“Danger! Danger!” the Pedia shouted.
Almost coincident with its warning the world began to shake. Tordor was thrown to the ground. It was a savage blow in these gravitational conditions, and he lay there groaning for moments until he pushed himself up to his knees and upper limbs, bracing himself against the shuddering land under him. He staggered to his hooves and looked around at the thrashing trees, trying to remain upright. A tree toppled in the distance with a sound like a clash of giants. Tordor imagined that massive growth being torn from the ground and the force that it took to bring it down.
“We should leave this location immediately,” the Pedia said. “We are experiencing a shifting of geologic plates, what we called on Earth an ‘earthquake,’ but here, I suppose—”
“A centaurquake,” Tordor said. He ran, or tried to run though it turned out to be more of a staggering trot, through the thrashing trees until he was in the grassy plains beyond. By then the ground had settled down. He had never experienced a movement of the world beneath his hooves before, and it disturbed him more than he was willing to admit, even to himself.
“Clearly,” the Pedia said, “this world, as massive as it is, has fault lines and maybe thinner plates than you experienced on Dor.”
“Clearly,” Tordor grunted, and would have said more, but just then he saw a centaur approaching, unshaken, from the far distance of the plain, and behind it came a group of centaurs like a herd.
* * *
They were not like the thin-legged quadrupeds the Pedia had illustrated on the walls of the ship. They were quadrupeds, clearly enough, but thick-bodied and thick-legged, and the torsos that grew from the shoulders of the creatures were short and thick as well, with two-jointed arms protruding from wide shoulders and a mouth and what seemed to be eyes in what seemed otherwise like a lump on top of the torso. And their skin or fur was purplish, like the vegetation.
“More like a hippopotamus than a horse,” the Pedia said. It told Tordor about the Earth animal that had once lived in rivers and ponds on Earth before it and other wild animals had been eliminated during the early twentieth centuries by overhunting, the loss of habitats to encroaching human invasions, and the climate changes that preceded Pedia supervision.
“Your world was indeed barbarous,” Tordor said.
“It went through growing pains,” the Pedia said, “like every world that survives industrialization. The transition is as difficult as that following the fall of massive meteorites. But these are the dominant species on this world?”
Indeed, they seemed more like herd animals and without the normal herd-animal wariness about potential predators. They had no tools, no weapons, no clothing or adornments. They came straight toward the edge of the forest, ignoring the bulky figure of Tordor standing in the grassy meadow just outside the forest edge, and began reaching into the lower-hanging branches for the fruit Tordor had noticed earlier. Some of it had fallen to the ground during the centaurquake and been smashed, but a good deal was still remaining and the centaurs clearly were gorging themselves, apparently undisturbed by the recent disturbance in the surface beneath their hooves.
They were not grazers, then, as Tordor’s people had been. They were fruit eaters, and it was hard to believe that creatures such as these had built a civilization and spaceships and had ever been considered for membership in the Federation. “Maybe they’re wild ones that have never been civilized,” Tordor said. “Or left untouched by civilization as test subjects or evolutionary reserves. There are such on Dor.”
“It is difficult to imagine any creatures like these coexisting with scientists and engineers,” the Pedia said.
“We are searching for the consequences of a catastrophe that has engulfed this part of the galaxy,” Tordor said. “Maybe this is one of them.”
He approached a nearby centaur and spoke to it in Galactic Standard. The creature seemed to glance at him, though it was difficult to tell where its eyes were looking, and then continued eating the fruit in its hand.
“We do not seem to be making any progress,” the Pedia said.
“For a Pedia you are remarkably impatient,” Tordor said.
“On an expedition like this,” the Pedia said, “speed and quick decisions are essential. You have failed to notice, for instance, the approach of another species.”
Indeed, Tordor had not seen the creature approach from the rear of the herd. It was thick, like all the other creatures on Centaur, but lithe and colorful, with a brown coat or skin and gold stripes, a massive head with a large mouth from which two long teeth projected from the top of its jaw over a lower lip. And it moved with the slow, tense movements of a predator, its head rigidly focused toward a smaller centaur at the back of the herd, perhaps an immature member of the group.
“That creature resembles an Earth-born predator called a saber-toothed tiger, of which there were at least two different evolutionary types,” the Pedia said. “They both became extinct long before humans swung down from the trees to walk the savannas. Other predators evolved, other tigers, panthers, lions, wolves, but they all disappeared in the great—”
“Now is no time for lessons in pointless human evolutionary history,” Tordor said.
The tiger-creature had broken its stealthy, paw-after-paw approach with a sudden dash that dropped the trailing centaur with a single savage thrust of long front teeth into the rear of the centaur’s spine and then a quick shift to the head of the torso that left the victim bleeding, lifeless on the meadow next to the forest. The tiger-creature looked around. The other centaurs continued to pluck fruit from the trees, undisturbed. The tiger-creature sank its teeth into the haunch of the centaur and began pulling it away.
For a moment Tordor was silent, as if stunned by the savagery of the world and the apparent lack of response from its once-dominant species. Then he said, “If these centaurs were once civilized spacegoers, they aren’t any longer. If we have any chance of finding some who are, we will have to look elsewhere.”
But before he could turn away, he saw another tiger-creature stalking from the far end of the meadow toward the heedless herd. He looked around, picked up a fallen branch in his trunk, and moved as quickly toward the predator as the gravity allowed.
“This is folly!” the Pedia said. “You are not the kind person who risks his life for another creature.”
“I feel strange stirrings of compassion,” Tordor said. He did not stop.
“Transcendence,” the Pedia said, “means becoming more rational. Not more emotional.”
But Tordor could not be stopped, and he brought the improvised club down on the head of the tiger-creature at the moment it crouched to begin its charge toward a centaur. Like the centaurs, it had grown unconcerned about dangers but perhaps for different reasons. After a moment the creature staggered to its feet and slunk away, looking back once over its shoulder to see if it was bein
g followed.
“Now,” Tordor said, “we can go on. The city is that way. If there is any remnant of centaur civilization, it will be there.”
“You are going in the wrong direction,” the Pedia said.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The red sphere was not the same without Tordor’s substantial presence. Not much taller than Riley but several times heavier, he occupied space with his body as well as his experience of command. Asha was always conscious of where he was and what he was thinking, and when he was not there she felt liberated. She did not tell Riley that, but she knew, with the unspoken communion that had only grown stronger between them since they first met in the waiting room on Terminal, that he felt the same way, only in a more masculine, competitive fashion.
Adithya, on the other hand, seemed to miss the big, pachyderm-like alien.
They had ascended to a stationary orbit some thousands of meters above the spot where Tordor had pushed through the red sphere’s yielding surface onto the Centaur hill. They were still in the control room and the Pedia embedded in the medallion around Asha’s neck had kept them updated on Tordor’s exploration, including alarm when Tordor had sampled the Centaur air and even greater alarm when he had removed the protective suit the red sphere had fashioned for him.
“I would have thought his transcendence would have given him better judgment,” Riley said.
“He has been confined with us in this colorful prison for a long-cycle,” Adithya said. “He could not resist the opportunity to breathe air that has not been recycled millions of times and contaminated with the body odors of humans and the odd scents of unfamiliar food. Besides, if his stay is extended, his air supply might not last.”
“I went through the same experience on Nepenthe,” Riley said.
“But you didn’t have the option of removing your suit,” Adithya said. “The air was poisonous. And Tordor had the further temptation of a world much like the one on which he was born. It must have been like coming home.”
“Let’s not get sentimental about Tordor,” Asha said. “He wouldn’t appreciate that.”
“The centaur world seems to be unstable,” the Pedia said. “The ground is shaking and Tordor has been thrown down.”
“Has he been hurt?” Adithya said. “At that gravity—”
“He is not hurt, but he is moving more carefully.”
A few moments later, the Pedia said, “Tordor has seen his first centaurs, and they do not appear to be concerned about his appearance. In fact, they have ignored him and are going about their regular eating practices. They are fruit eaters.”
“Has he tried to communicate with them?” Adithya asked.
“He does not know their language,” the Pedia said, “so he has tried Galactic Standard without success. In any case they are not paying attention to him or to anything else, including a predator that is approaching them.”
“I hope Tordor has seen the predator and is staying out of its way,” Adithya said.
“He is a Dorian warrior,” Asha said, “with experience as a commander and the advantage of transcendence as well.”
“The predator has attacked and killed one of the centaurs,” the Pedia said, “and a second predator is approaching. Tordor is reacting peculiarly. He has attacked the second predator. Successfully, it seems. The centaurs seem unconcerned by all this. There is some doubt about their intelligence or the absence of instinctive awareness of danger.”
“They are not dead like the Nepentheans,” Riley said, “but maybe something inside their brains has died.”
“Tordor is heading toward the nearest city,” the Pedia said. “He should have more information soon.”
With no updates likely to be forthcoming for some time, Adithya left the control room to get something to drink from the dining wall the red sphere had provided, leaving Asha and Riley alone. They were not alone much in the limited spaces provided by the red sphere, even though Asha had communicated with it, in the peculiar, imperfect connection they had developed, that their sleeping quarters should be sealed off when both of them were inside.
“Have you thought about the transcendental process?” Riley asked.
“What do you mean?” She knew what he meant, but she knew from experience that it was better if he said it.
“Tordor has been through the Transcendental Machine,” Riley said, “but he seems little changed.”
“He is a Dorian, and a very confident Dorian at that,” Asha said, “but he seems more open about his past and less devious about his motivations.”
“‘Seems’ is the operative word.”
“And yet he attempted to protect Adithya,” Asha said.
“If it was not his deviousness reasserting itself.”
“And, apparently, he has been moved, quixotically, to protect the centaurs.”
“Which speaks to the appearance of a new emotion, compassion, if not to an old one, rationality.”
“And yet?” Asha prompted.
“It makes one wonder about the transcendental process itself,” Riley said. “Is the person who gets reconstituted in the receiver the same person who gets analyzed and transmitted in the Transcendental Machine?”
“Clearly not,” Asha said. “The imperfections are left behind.”
“And what else?”
Asha nodded. “Are we the same people, minus the flaws that keep us from the ideal version of ourselves? Or are we new creatures with the memories of our old selves attached?”
“Yes,” Riley said. “My transcendental version shouldn’t have such debilitating concerns.”
“Do they keep you from acting when action is necessary?”
“No. At least I don’t think so.”
“Are your feelings any less real? Are they like someone else’s memories or do they still cause physiological reactions? Do you remember your life growing up on Mars, your mother, your father, your first love.”
“And what happened to them. And the anguish that caused me. But in a way that allows me to cope with it, to make me stronger rather than weaker.”
“Then perhaps it doesn’t matter,” Asha said. “Except in theory.”
“And the way we feel and act in practice,” Riley said.
Asha knew that this was true and that Riley believed it and that, in spite of all, the doubt lingered. But it was the existential doubt that hung over all conscious life: reality or dream, flesh and blood or shadows cast on a cave wall, actuality or scenarios being enacted in some immense computer? They would have to live with uncertainty and act as if it did not exist.
When Adithya returned to the control room, he asked if the Pedia had reported anything new about Tordor and seemed relieved that nothing had happened. He looked around as if looking for answers somewhere else. Asha thought it was a symptom of his attachment to the Dorian, as if he had transferred his allegiance from Latha to the most authoritative figure nearby.
Adithya looked at the viewplate that served them in every way that connected them to the galaxy outside the ship. “Look!” he said. “There’s that unidentified object again, in the upper left-hand corner, a red dot that Tordor said might be a ship.”
“Or just an uncharted body,” Riley said. “This ship’s database—whatever it is and wherever it is located—is a million years old.”
“This is where we need Jak’s machine,” Asha said. “Our mission would be so much simpler if we could communicate instantly with Federation Central or a hundred other possible sources.”
“And additional transcendents,” Riley said.
“Do you think Jer can be successful in persuading the Federation to adopt the machine and scatter replicas across this spiral arm?” Adithya asked.
“It won’t be easy,” Asha said. “In spite of the obvious advantages of instant communication across interstellar distances, it means a major change in the way the Federation functions. And change means that people who have an investment in the status quo are in danger of losing their positions of authority and
those who might gain by it are uncertain how it will work out.”
“And there is the natural resistance of the bureaucracy,” Riley said. “And maybe the Federation Central Pedia, which dislikes change even more than the bureaucrats. And this doesn’t begin to account for the resistance of people to transmitting themselves, much less the thought of personal destruction and re-creation.”
* * *
Sometime later the Pedia reported, “Tordor has entered the centaur city.”
CHAPTER NINE
Jer inserted the capsule into the round slot in the control panel in front of her and closed and locked the door that kept it in place. Before she pressed the button that would conclude, and she hoped culminate, the work that had brought her to Federation Central, she looked around the cluttered, improvised space the Federation had assigned to her.
Her Federation Central laboratory was nothing like her father’s laboratory on the dark side of Earth’s moon. That was a fully functional and extensively equipped facility with computer coordination and computation—not a pedia, with its intrusive questions and subversive monitoring, and certainly not a Pedia—and some special instruments invented by her father.
Actually—and her father had taught her to think in the kind of precise, accurate terms that enabled humans to live independently in a Pedia-dominated world—Jak was not her father but the person from whom she and her brothers and sisters, now all dead but her, had been cloned. But it was a waste of time—and Jak had taught her that every moment in the search for truth was precious—to refer to herself as a clone and Jak as the person of whom she was a biological copy. And there was the familial relationship, strained almost beyond endurance when she and her fellow clones had been exiled at an early age to a satellite orbiting a moon of Jupiter, contaminated by an organism that they had developed to retain Ganymede’s warmth, and the only one brought back to work with Jak while Jon and Jan were sent off to join the voyage of the Geoffrey to search for the Transcendental Machine. And there were those moments under the lash of Jak’s paranoid intensity when she could appreciate how he drove himself with the same desperate urgency of his race against extinction before he had solved the universe’s riddles, and a cherished few when his long-buried humanity broke through and he could almost evidence tenderness. And there was the year after Jak’s first trial of the teleportation device he had reconstructed from Riley’s description when Jak’s first experimental subject had been Jer and his second himself, and just as she had shed the symbiotic mantle she had worn since its unwelcome partnership with Jak, his health and even his years restored, had lost his fear of death before victory and seemed almost fatherly.
