Transformation

by James Gunn

  “Ah yes,” the medallion said. “It may be a tribute, but it certainly is a radio telescope.”

  “Focused on the sun,” Asha said through Adithya. “Perhaps to let them know when it’s time to wake up. Maybe when their hibernation chamber should start preparing for habitation.”

  “Though curiously,” the Pedia said, “the telescope is focused not on the yellow sun but on a place a quarter of a light-year removed, perhaps halfway between the yellow sun and its companion.”

  Riley drew back from his contact with the pedestal. “That may be what we’re looking for.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  What was waiting there exactly halfway between the suns was a round, cratered object the size of a small satellite. They studied it for several cycles before they decided to inspect it up close.

  “A curious location for a celestial body like this,” Tordor said.

  “Perhaps it drifted into what humans called a Lagrange point, where the gravitational forces balance,” Riley said.

  “An unlikely scenario,” Tordor said.

  “Given enough time and enough space,” Asha said, “even the most unlikely scenarios become possible.”

  “And yet Federation records reveal no such configuration,” Tordor said.

  “You are familiar with all Federation records?” Adithya said.

  “All? Maybe not. But the oddities? Certainly,” Tordor said, “and I remember them all.”

  “Between the two suns” was a misleading concept. The suns were half a light-year apart, although there was some evidence, Tordor said, that they had been once been farther apart, and even that the smaller reddish sun had invaded the system of the larger yellow sun millions of long-cycles earlier and had created the conditions that cleared out all of the planets and other debris except for the Mayfly world. In some remote future—or perhaps not so remote in cosmic terms—the two suns were likely to engage each other in a gravitational dance that would end in a catastrophic embrace and the destruction of the Mayfly world.

  “Unless,” Tordor said, “it was moved, as has been recommended to the Mayflies by the Federation to solve their difficult orbital circumstances.”

  “Then why are the Mayflies still stuck in their elongated ellipse?” Adithya said.

  “They resist,” Tordor said. “This is their life, their tradition, and a change to something we would consider normal fills them with apprehension. Moreover, they consider their brief periods of existence as cycles of ecstatic fulfillment for which their long-cycles of slumber are necessary prerequisites. And they consider the rest of us as leading ordinary, humdrum lives of low intensity and small value.”

  “Perhaps Earth’s beetles and mayflies would feel the same,” the Pedia said, “if they were capable of self-awareness.”

  The red sphere circled the mysterious object several times as the travelers inspected it from every angle. Its rough, dark exterior was pockmarked with craters, some large, some small, much like Earth’s moon but only a fraction of its size. It was airless. As nondescript and undistinguished as it appeared, it had an air of age, as if it were far older than the system in which it found itself. The craters had ragged edges, as if they had been eroded away by the fiery winds of countless suns, and their centers had been partially filled by dust and rock. There was even evidence of cracks in the exterior, like wrinkles engraved in the faces of the aged.

  Or perhaps, Asha said, it was only their imaginations supplying details to the unknown. “We’d better check,” she said.

  * * *

  They landed the red sphere in a convenient crater and, in their sphere-fashioned red suits, stepped out into ancient dust. This time three of them went, Asha, Riley, and Tordor, leaving Adithya behind in the ship, ready to come for them if they encountered perils that they could not handle on their own or if their suits ran out of air.

  They stepped light-footed through the debris of ages, liberated by the low gravity but weighed down by what they expected to find. Was this the alien artifact that had left a trail of ravaged worlds in its wake? Or was it a cosmic accident, the capture of a battered body in a strange orbit? If aliens were somehow part of this, where were they? And if they could be observed, would they be recognizable as living creatures? Or could they be as undetectable as the motes of dust that rose under their feet?

  There seemed to be nothing to see. This small world was as lifeless as Earth’s moon had been before settlers arrived. The three of them moved through the crater in a line a few meters apart, knowing this was one of a multitude of almost-identical features on the surface of this accident of star formation, realizing that they could not investigate more than one or two of these craters, recognizing that if their exploration was not futile it was quixotic. Even if this planetoid or moonlet was hollow or had been hollowed out as a habitat for invading aliens, they had no way of proving it, no excavating machines to dig through a surface dozens, maybe hundreds of meters thick, no explosives to shake the surface and make the small world ring like a giant bell.

  “We have to think of something else,” Asha said to the medallion that hung on her chest.

  The second medallion on Riley’s chest repeated Asha’s statement. “I think you’re right,” Riley said. “Do you have any other ideas?” he asked the Pedia.

  “We could ram this little world with the ship,” the Pedia said. “If we could make it descend sharply, it might set off vibrations that would reveal a hollow world. But the ship seems to have fail-safe protections against collision, and we have no information about its ability to sustain impact without damage.”

  “So,” Asha said. “Cross that off.”

  “We could drag a planetoid from this system’s equivalent of the Kuiper belt and use it to deliver a blow,” Riley said.

  “If we knew how to drag an object many times larger than the ship or get behind and push it into an orbit that might eventually coincide with this little world,” the Pedia said, “it would take many years—or long-cycles, as the Federation says—to reach this place.”

  “Tell Tordor,” Asha said. “We might as well return to the ship and work out another strategy.”

  Riley moved through the dust a couple of meters until he could press his protective red garment against Tordor’s. “Asha thinks we’re wasting our time,” he said in Galactic Standard.

  At that moment Tordor stumbled over an object buried under the dust and almost banged his head against Riley’s. When Tordor recovered, he gestured toward the surface. Riley was already looking at what seemed like an object protruding from the dust, darker than the dust and straighter than a spur of rock.

  Tordor had already begun to kick at the dust around the protrusion, and Riley and Asha joined him. They exposed a greater length of what seemed to be a piece of metal, like a slender support or a rigid conduit that emerged from or was connected to a ragged slab of the same metal. The upright piece was not like any metal that any of them had ever seen. It was dark, not shiny, and its surface was corroded, speckled with tiny imperfections, as if it had been splashed with drops of acid. And its edges were ragged as if they had been nibbled away by metal-eating microbes.

  As Tordor kicked away more dust, he touched the upright piece and it fell into dust distinguishable from the surface only by its slightly darker color. “What kind of material is this?” Tordor asked. “Strong enough to endure for millions of long-cycles and yet so old that it dissolves at a touch!”

  Asha and Riley continued to brush away the dust that surrounded the slab that had supported the upright piece, but it, too, turned into dust, revealing the bedrock to which it had been attached by some unknown means. Whatever the artifact was, its purpose and significance would remain a mystery. But what was significant was that it had existed.

  “So,” Asha said, “this worldlet once housed intelligent life.”

  “And maybe it still does,” Riley said. He touched his suited head to Tordor’s and repeated the conversation.

  “Yes,” Tordor said,
“but how do we make certain?”

  “I may be able to help,” the Pedia said. “If you can find another artifact and place me into contact with it—”

  “Are you criticizing us for destroying the artifact before you could use it?” Tordor asked.

  “It probably would have crumbled if I had touched it,” the Pedia said.

  They scuffled through the dust for almost another cycle without encountering other evidence of ancient technology. Finally the Pedia said, “Perhaps even an outcropping of rock rather than this eternal dust.”

  They found dust-free rock at the edge of the crater. Tordor helped Asha ascend above the dusty floor until she could reach bare rock. She extended her medallion through the surface of her red suit until it touched the rock surface, felt the savage cold suck the heat and moisture from her unprotected hand and then felt what seemed like an electric shock. She pulled the medallion back into the suit and rubbed the frostbitten hand through the suit’s material.

  “Well?” she said.

  The medallion was silent for a moment, and then, with a shakiness that Asha had never experienced in the Pedia before, it said, “I sense something strange and monstrous.”

  “Is it the aliens?” Riley said.

  “It is alien,” the Pedia said. “It does not belong in our world, or even in our galaxy. But what it is I do not know. All I know is that we should leave this place as soon as we can and never come back.”

  * * *

  “Faster! Faster!” the Pedia kept shouting as they ran back toward the red sphere, their movements exaggerated by the low gravity of the small world, its dust spurting into small clouds that slowly settled back to the surface behind them. The Pedia was almost babbling when they passed through the ship’s skin into the safety of the rosy interior.

  “Lift off!” Asha shouted to Adithya as she stripped her protective suit from her body.

  “Is something attacking?” Adithya said as he ran toward the control room. “I heard the Pedia, but I couldn’t—”

  “It’s not so much what the Pedia said,” Asha replied, “but that it said what it said.”

  “The Pedia has never been frightened before,” Riley said. “That it’s frightened is frightening enough.”

  “Waste no time,” Tordor said.

  “Danger!” the medallion on Asha’s chest said. “Failure imminent. Breakdown near. Escape essential.”

  Asha felt the red sphere shiver. Or perhaps it was only her imagination. What was not imagination was that the ship was not lifting off. “Why aren’t we moving?” she said.

  “The ship isn’t responding,” Adithya replied from the control room.

  Asha was already moving down the oval red corridor. Only a couple of more strides brought her beside Adithya, whose hand was thrust into the display that the red sphere offered as viewscreen, navigation chart, and control panel. She moved Adithya aside with her left hand and put her right hand into the display in a motion that had become automatic and intuitively connected to the red sphere’s mysterious operations. What was not automatic was the ship’s response. It sat unmoved in the dust of the crater, perhaps trembling a bit like a chained beast struggling against its restraints. Or maybe the ship itself was experiencing the same panic that had gripped the Pedia. Asha felt a connection to something stirring within the red sphere, as if the intelligent matter that composed it was struggling for something or against something she could not identify.

  “Silence,” she told the medallion. Its babbling subsided.

  “What’s going on?” Riley asked. He had followed close behind Asha, and Tordor was just behind him.

  “The ship seems stuck here,” Asha said. “As Adithya said. My guess is that whatever has terrified the Pedia is preventing us from moving.”

  “What kind of power can keep a ship from moving?” Tordor said.

  “And do it from a distance,” Riley said.

  “The same kind that ruined half a dozen worlds,” Asha said. “Apparently we have discovered the enemy, and more important, the enemy has discovered us.”

  “But it has not won,” Riley said. “Not like on those other worlds. We still have our identities and our minds and our ability to fight back.”

  The four of them were silent for a long moment, and then Asha said, “Whatever fighting back means in our current circumstances.”

  “We knew we would face this moment,” Tordor said, “and we have talked about what we would do when it happened. Though our first course of action, to report back to the Federation the nature of the alien invasion, seems to have been eliminated.”

  “I’m not sure we should be talking about strategies,” Adithya said. “If it can attack our Pedia and control our ship, perhaps it can also overhear our conversation.”

  Asha had turned her back to the control panel, Adithya beside her, both of them looking at Riley and Tordor against the red wall on either side of the corridor that led to the little round room just inside the permeable entrance to the red sphere and the corridor that led to the other spaces the red sphere had provided.

  “Whatever the enemy is or whatever it has learned, it has never encountered human speech,” Tordor said. “Galactic Standard, yes. The disappearance of previous expeditions and the return of the single doomed ship is proof of that. But learning a new language in an instant is beyond any creature’s capabilities. It took me a long-cycle to acquire a rudimentary knowledge of human speech.”

  “So it would seem,” the medallion on Asha’s chest said. Its voice had changed from the matter-of-fact tone of computer certainty to a deeper, inflected diction. It echoed from the medallion on Riley’s chest in a weird, stereophonic effect that made comprehension difficult. “Do not be alarmed, as so many of the creatures have been that we have encountered along our way.” Toward the end of the speech the medallion on Riley’s chest cut off.

  “Are we talking to the aliens who have seized our ship?” Asha said.

  “We have not seized your ship but prolonged your stay so that we can have a meeting of minds.”

  “Or take them over?” Riley said. “As you have taken over the mind of our Pedia?”

  “What you call a ‘Pedia’ is scarcely a mind,” the medallion said, “but a simple calculating machine with a rudimentary memory. We are simply using it to communicate, like one of the machines you use for speaking over distance.”

  “Which you are doing very well,” Asha said.

  “The communication symbols were embedded in this machine’s circuits,” the medallion said. “It was a simple matter to acquire them.”

  “Simple?” Tordor said. “That implies a capacity beyond our understanding.”

  “This is a young galaxy with limited experience,” the medallion said. “That is something we hope to remedy.”

  “So far your remedy has resulted in dozens of ruined worlds,” Tordor said.

  “It is not our fault if creatures with weak minds cannot accept our remedies in the terms they are offered,” the medallion said. “You are the first creatures with whom we have discovered the ability to converse.”

  “Should we take that as a compliment?” Asha asked.

  Adithya lifted the medallion on Riley’s chest and began speaking softly into it.

  “What is that creature doing?” the alien voice said.

  Adithya continued.

  “It must stop!” the alien said. And then “Sto—”

  The alien voice cut away. The medallion on Asha’s chest went silent.

  “What have you done?” Asha asked.

  “A simple virus from the early days of my research,” Adithya said. “Intended to remove other viruses. I thought it might work.”

  “But the Pedia remains silent,” Asha said.

  “It may take a moment of two for the virus to complete its work,” Adithya said. “But we must move fast. The alien mind, whatever it is, will solve it soon. It probably hasn’t encountered a virus for millions of years.”

  “What has happened?”
the Pedia said.

  * * *

  Asha and Riley looked at each other and then at Tordor, not wanting to voice the question that all of them had in their minds. And then the medallion said, “I have encountered a mind of great power.”

  “So it would seem,” Tordor said.

  “Greater than the Federation Central Pedia,” the medallion said. “Greater than all the Pedias of our galaxy combined.”

  “And it terrified you,” Riley said.

  “As it should you,” the Pedia said. “It is beyond anything I am capable of comprehending, and that is frightening to any mind. And it is old, not just millions of long-cycles old, but billions. Billions.” The Pedia repeated the word as if it carried meaning beyond numbers and time.

  “What does it matter how old it is?” Tordor said.

  “The Federation Central Pedia was old and growing senile,” the Pedia said. “This is far older and beyond senility into insanity.”

  “It sounded sane enough,” Asha said.

  “It does not reason in the binary fashion of our galaxy,” the Pedia said. “It uses a different base, or perhaps no base at all.”

  “How can it think without a base?” Riley asked. If they could figure out a way to attack its method of calculation, they might still be able to stop its invasion, or, at least, to free their ship. “Have you tried the controls again?” he asked Asha.

  Asha turned and thrust her right hand into the control mechanism again, but the ship did not move. “Apparently the ship is controlled in a way different from the Pedia.”

  “It may use multi-valued logic,” the Pedia said, an unfamiliar and unsettling note of uncertainty in its voice. “It may use what we would consider chaos. It may be not simply a union of artificial intelligences but the downloaded minds of alien beings as well. That may be what proved disastrous to the Federation ships and the worlds we visited. The invader is not only more powerful than anything ever encountered, but it doesn’t think the way we do.”

  “Like gods,” Tordor said.