Transformation

by James Gunn

  Once more they stood just inside the red sphere’s outer skin, their wings now retracted, the Aeriean flushed and triumphant and yet unhappy to have its newfound aerial freedom cut short. “Now you have another decision to make,” Asha said. “In a moment we’re going to let you go. You can take your new wings and fly anywhere in your world you choose to go. You would not be welcomed by the Aerieans with wings because you will still not be like them. You can support yourself in the air but you cannot fly the way they do.

  “Or,” she continued, “you can use your wings to return to your city, and you can use your newfound knowledge to help your wingless comrades understand that the creatures they serve are no better or wiser than they and a good deal worse in what they do, depriving their fellow Aerieans of their wings and their right to fly and consigning them to a life of servitude.

  “And you can take back the knowledge that your city and the other cities of your world are failing and will fall unless you maintain them, unless you conquer your fear of the place beneath yours, master again the machines that keep your world aloft, and, most of all, deny those with wings their dominance over you. Without you their world will fail. You are stronger than they are, and wiser for being who you are, and you can save your world.

  “The choice is yours,” she said, and shoved it through the skin of the red sphere.

  For a moment the others were silent. They had watched Asha and the Aeriean, waiting to see what Asha intended and then considering their response.

  “What do you think the creature will do?” Adithya said.

  “I don’t know,” Asha said, “but there comes a time of decision for each of us—for our own lives and hopes, for our families and friends, for our community, and sometimes even for our species. We may never know what this Aeriean will decide or how its decision will work out, but that is true of most of us.”

  “Now we must get on about the business that brought us here,” Riley said. “Although we did not add to our base of information about the alien invasion.”

  “That isn’t exactly correct,” the Pedia said.

  “What do you mean?” Tordor asked.

  “When I was interrogating the gas-extraction machine I discovered a message that had been received by the Aerieans.”

  “Well?” Adithya said.

  “It is just as cryptic as the earlier messages,” the Pedia said, and a string of symbols appeared on the red sphere wall:

  Accept dwarf from cosmic old beings all created space but eons without meaning

  “More wasted time and effort,” Tordor said.

  “We will never be able to understand the invaders until we have solved the riddle of their attack,” the Pedia said.

  “All our investigations have come up with these meaningless fragments and a series of species collapses,” Tordor said. “We have learned nothing from our long and dangerous mission worth the effort and risk.”

  “But there is one thing we have learned in our expedition that we have not yet considered,” Riley said. He spoke to the medallion on Asha’s chest. “Lay out the star chart of the worlds we have visited,” he said.

  A star chart appeared on the wall of the red sphere.

  “Now highlight the worlds,” Riley said.

  The orphan world Nepenthe appeared in yellow and then the suns of the worlds of Centaur, Lemnia, Oceanus, and Aerie.

  “Do you notice something odd?” Riley said.

  Asha, Tordor, and Adithya studied the star map for a moment. “Given the distortions of a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional reality,” Asha said, “they seem to line up.”

  “Due to my navigation,” Tordor said. “If you will remember, I directed you to these worlds that have fallen silent.”

  “But without noting that they represent a straight path through the galaxy,” Riley said. “Connect the dots,” he said to the medallion. On the wall of the red sphere appeared a straight white line running through the yellow dots.

  “That was not obvious from the pattern perceived in Federation Central,” Tordor said.

  “But it is now,” Riley said.

  “But which direction does the path go?” Tordor said. “There is no way to tell from this sequence.”

  “We can estimate that from the relative stages of deterioration the worlds exhibited,” Asha said.

  “Nepenthe’s fate was more final and probably more ancient,” Riley said. “The Nepentheans all were dead.”

  “And then perhaps the water dwellers of Oceanus,” Tordor said.

  “Followed by the four-legged centaurs,” Adithya said.

  “The male-killers of Lemnia,” Asha added.

  “And finally the bird people of Aerie,” Adithya said.

  The intensity of the markers on the star chart changed as they spoke, from the pale yellow of Nepenthe to the bright yellow of Aerie. “It looks like Nepenthe is on the outer edge of the arm of the galaxy that humans call Orion,” Riley said. “Which makes sense if the invasion came from what humans call the Cygnet Arm, or beyond that from the Norma Arm.”

  “Or beyond that from another galaxy altogether,” Asha said.

  “If we were able to track it back across unexplored spiral arms,” Tordor said, “we might find a string of ruined worlds leading clear to the edge of the galaxy.”

  “And,” Riley said, “a string of ruined worlds whose path may have crossed the Cygnet Arm a million long-cycles ago. And the Cygnet Arm was the home of the creatures who created the Transcendental Machine. And that may explain why they were trying to set up stations in our spiral arm.”

  “That assumes the invaders were traveling by momentum. They might have been using nexus points,” Adithya said.

  “It’s unlikely they would have any knowledge of shortcuts created by the Transcendental Machine people,” Asha said.

  “All that is speculation,” Tordor said. “What is clear is that the movement was from outer to inner, on a straight line. Why it was on a straight line remains to be discovered. But from the line we have we should be able to anticipate where it will attack next.”

  “Expand the star map,” Riley said to the medallion.

  The map spread left. Another multitude of stars appeared.

  “Extend the line.”

  The line stretched left. It passed through several groups of stars without touching any until it intersected two spots close together, almost touching.

  “I know that area,” Tordor said. “A double-star system with a planet that orbits between them. We call it the ‘Extreme’ planet because its inhabitants have only a few long-cycles between freezing solid and roasting.”

  “Mayflies,” the Pedia said.

  “What are ‘mayflies’?” Tordor said.

  “Insects on Earth that live only a single day,” the Pedia said.

  “Mayfly. That will do. More important,” Tordor said, “it does not appear on your star map, or on any star map, but if the path of the alien invasion is extended a hundred light-years beyond the Mayfly planet, it will touch Federation Central.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The tedious travel to the nexus point was interrupted only by the out-of-this-world transition of the nexus point itself. The nonreality of the space-time anomaly had become as familiar to Asha, Riley, and Tordor as a bad dream, and even Adithya had adapted to it during the long voyage and the frequent Jumps between distant places. The edge to their concerns about the alien invasion and what was happening at Federation Central during their long absence had been blunted by the realization that their long voyage might be nearing its destination. But nobody talked about what arrival might bring until Adithya brought it up.

  “This alien invasion,” he said. “What happens when we catch up to it?”

  “We discover what it is,” Tordor said. “And maybe how to deal with it. Or if it is too powerful for us to handle, what to report back to Federation Central.”

  “It has ruined the five worlds we have visited,” Adithya said. “And who
knows how many more that we have not had a chance to visit. What will happen to us when we encounter whatever it is?”

  “We will come up with a strategy when we know what we’re facing,” Asha said. “And it will be appropriate to the circumstances.”

  “Five different species with the resources of a planet and a place in the Federation were helpless before it,” Adithya said. “And trained Federation space crews were destroyed or turned into homicidal maniacs. How will our little ship without weapons hope to make a difference?”

  “The difference,” Riley said, “is that we know the danger.”

  “And we are better prepared for whatever attack the aliens might throw at us,” Asha said.

  “Even a flotilla of alien ships?” Adithya said. “With superior technology?”

  “There is no evidence,” Tordor said, “that the invaders have used physical attacks. Instead, as Riley has pointed out, the attacks have all been mental or psychological.”

  “And that is what I fear the most,” Adithya said. “You three may be resistant to attacks like that. But I may not.”

  “A reasonable concern,” Tordor said.

  “We will help,” Asha said.

  “And we have an advantage,” Riley said. “The Pedia is unlikely to have people-like susceptibility to mental attacks and certainly not to those that are psychological. And it is aware of the danger.”

  “The Pedia!” Adithya said. Clearly he had not yet shed the fear and hatred that had occupied his life since he was able to talk.

  “I will protect you,” the Pedia said. “As I have always protected you, even when you didn’t know.”

  And finally they arrived at the system of the Mayfly world. The larger sun was orange, slightly larger than Earth’s sun, and ten percent brighter. The smaller red-dwarf sun was half that size and less than half its brightness. Between them they had shaped the elongated orbit of the Mayfly world.

  “The orbit of the Mayfly world takes it from the frigid regions far from its primaries to a close swing around its larger sun,” Tordor said. “Its orbit passes through the habitable zone in about a hundred long-cycles, a period when its oceans thaw, air becomes breathable, and the Mayfly people emerge from their millennia-long hibernation. Then the planet becomes unlivable again because of the intense heat from its approach to the sun, the people huddle in their underground hibernation chambers, and the planet whips around the sun. Almost all the oceans evaporate into the atmosphere forming dense clouds that shield Mayfly from the worst of the heat until it passes through the habitable zone once more for only fifty long-cycles before it once again begins to freeze, and the cycle starts over.”

  “It is incredible,” Asha said, “that a people with handicaps like these could create a civilization and even reach the stars.”

  “A testament to the resilience of life and the power of sentience in the universe,” Tordor said.

  “Their story is not unlike the experience of insect life on Earth,” the Pedia said. “Some have had long-cycles of existence as eggs or larvae underground to come forth for a season to procreate and begin the process anew. Some creatures exist in hot springs or in deserts, where they come to life only in a shower that occurs once in many long-cycles, or remain frozen in arctic regions for even longer and yet return to life when thawed.”

  “The Mayfly people are said to have evolved from insects,” Tordor said.

  The red sphere took its long, slow approach to the Mayfly system, which consisted of a meager belt of rock and ice remnants, the Mayfly planet, and the twin suns. Tordor suggested that the suns, with their competing gravitational influences. might have swallowed up or ejected the other planets and thinned the meteor belt, leaving only the Mayfly planet, by cosmic accident, as the sole survivor of planetary creation.

  “The likely event,” Tordor said, “is that one of the suns invaded the other and they became a twin system after their planets had formed, and then, between the two, they cannabilized all the worlds except Mayfly.”

  As they got farther into the system, the red sphere’s viewscreen showed only the two suns, still only spots of light separated by half a light-year, against the black backdrop of space. The rest of what might once have been a system populated by a variety of planets and lesser bodies seemed empty. And then, as they rounded the smaller of the two suns, they saw the dim reflection from a distant object, the solitary world of Mayfly, the lone remnant of a troubled past. It had made its long, slow turn from the remotest and coldest part of its orbit and had begun its gradually accelerating approach to the temperate zone that would restore it and its inhabitants and their world to life.

  “We may have reached Mayfly before the aliens,” Riley said. “Or they arrived, found the Mayfly people hibernating and unresponsive to their attacks, and moved on.”

  “Or they may be waiting for them to wake up,” Adithya said.

  “If that is the case,” Tordor said, “where are they?”

  There was no indication on the viewscreen of anything resembling an alien threat. “But what would an alien threat look like?” Adithya asked.

  Riley and Asha and Tordor looked at each other.

  “If there is nothing in this system that looks as if it has been constructed,” the Pedia said, “then it must be something that looks natural.”

  “And undetectable,” Tordor said. “For more reasons than one: maybe Riley’s extrapolation is wrong.”

  “We’ll never know,” Riley said, “until we check this system more thoroughly than a quick survey. I suggest we start with the Mayfly world itself.”

  And so it was that the red sphere settled on the frozen surface of the world that was just emerging from the deep freeze of the remote fringes of its solar system.

  * * *

  Riley and Tordor pushed their way through the ruby wall of the ship into a landscape of ice and silence. They stood shivering in the twilight, one yellow sun a small, round, glowing ball on the horizon—about the size, Riley thought, of Earth’s sun seen from Jupiter—the other not much more than a reddish dot high above them in a dark sky. The air that had been strewn like drifts of snow across the surface of solid oceans of ice had thawed, and pools of water were beginning to appear on top of lakes and ponds. The oceans would come back to life later, along, perhaps, with their freezing-immune denizens. But the cold was beyond bitter, and only the warmth of their suits kept Riley and Tordor from turning into instant icicles.

  “There’s little we can learn here,” Tordor said.

  “The Pedia detected some signs of low-level carbon-based life-forms nearby,” Riley said. “It indicated those hills. That seems like a likely place for a hibernating race to find a place to sleep for hundreds of long-cycles.”

  Riley trudged through the ice toward the hills, Tordor dragging along behind. Soon they found themselves facing sheer faces of ice-covered rock, as if a torrent of water had poured down from the top of the hill to form a frozen waterfall. Tordor looked at the barrier to further exploration and put a hand on the curtain of ice as if testing its thickness.

  “Even if we could chip or melt our way through the ice,” Tordor said, “we would find some kind of metal doors thick enough to stop the process of heat loss during the long night.”

  “We’ve come this far,” Riley said, “too far to turn back now.”

  “There are signs of limited life inside this hill,” the medallion on Riley’s chest said.

  “Even if we could find a way inside,” Tordor said, “the Mayflies will still be hibernating, and waking them prematurely might be fatal. Or exposing them to the elements of this wayward world before it is ready for their brief wakefulness. And what could we learn from them? They will be unaware of anything that has happened in the last hundred long-cycles.”

  “Leaving them to wake up to an alien attack would be little better,” Riley said.

  They stood there, singularly irresolute in the ice.

  “I sense an energy drain from inside this hill to its top
,” the Pedia said. “There may be something there that requires power.”

  Riley and Tordor looked up the sheer face of ice and rock. From the base of the hill, through the red hoods that covered their heads, they could see nothing.

  “How are we going to get up there?” Tordor asked. “Maybe you could climb up the ice, but I could never make it. Or we could go around until we find a slope, though that might take longer than our air or heat supply would last.”

  “If I may suggest,” the Pedia said, “there is a ship nearby.”

  A few minutes later the ship had picked them up and deposited them again on top of the ice-covered hill. It was slick under their feet, but the sight of a structure on top of a pedestal at the edge of the abrupt drop beyond sent them running toward it. They touched the solid metal pedestal, already free of ice if it had ever been covered.

  “I can detect a level of warmth in the object a hundred times greater than the surrounding rock,” the Pedia said. “A flow of energy seems to keep it warm and functioning, perhaps through the long winter.”

  Riley and Tordor circled the structure. On top of the pedestal, some thirty meters above the hilltop, was something like a yellow sheet of metal, perhaps made of strands woven into a ragged square through which, at the right angle, Riley could see a broken image of the distant yellow sun. From the red sphere, hovering above, Adithya reported, “It looks like some kind of shrine.”

  “Maybe the Mayfly tribute to the fading and returning sun,” Asha said, and Adithya relayed the comment.

  “That makes sense,” Riley said.

  “But it tells us nothing,” Tordor said.

  “If you will touch me to the base,” the medallion on Riley’s chest said, “I may be able to add to our stock of information.”

  “It’s really cold out there,” Riley said. “My hand will freeze off.”

  “Perhaps just putting your chest against the pedestal,” the Pedia said.

  Riley pressed himself forward until his chest made contact. He thought he could feel the warmth inside his suit seeping away.