Transcendental (8 page)

He had tired of excess, wearied of indulgence, sickened of depravity, and had pressed the panic button next to his right hand, roused himself from his tank, and checked out, determined to seek Sharn and build a new life, maybe together. But multiple assailants had waited for him in a corridor almost as dark as this place. He had disposed of several of them, one fatally he thought, before they had taken him out with a blow to his head. Of course they might have been handicapped by instructions to capture him alive.

Or maybe it all was part of his sim-experience, and he had been removed from his tank already anesthetized. Or maybe what he was experiencing now was a sim that someone else had programmed for him.

If he could feel anything, he would feel bruises and aches, he thought, but even those might be sim. The back of his head had hurt, he remembered. An injury of some kind at the base of his skull. If it was real.

It was a hell of a universe: a galaxy divided uneasily between alien species that once had sworn war to the death now trying to find a way to coexist; technology beyond humanity’s dreams, some the product of human ingenuity, some modified from alien sources; and all of it used to distract, to divert, to suppress, to maintain. Riley had joined many expeditions into the unknown; he had met dozens of adventurers like himself, most of them now dead, and dozens of creatures with innovative ideas about how to do better, be better, improve conditions and possibilities for everybody … and all of them defeated, if they were still alive.

He had been one of them, early. He had worked his way through the Institute as assistant to a succession of brilliant scientists. He had studied mathematics and computer science and physics and astronomy; he had immersed himself in comparative cultures and alien art, and, most of all, in space-time engineering. He had imagined himself a diplomat or an inventor, making peace or a better future, but he had been recruited as a mercenary, trained in a dozen different ways to kill a creature silently and a half-dozen ways, undetectably, equipped with extrasensory apparatus. He was sent to scout alien intentions on alien worlds until, on his fifth assignment, he was captured and tortured. Eventually he was ransomed and restored to what the doctors called a state of health. After that his employers lost faith in him, or maybe in his luck. They told him he would be taken care of, but as soon as he was able to walk they let him go, to find his own way in the universe. He was always going to be damaged. The way to a better future seemed now permanently closed.

Humanity had ventured out into the galaxy to claim new worlds and discovered the galaxy already occupied. Dozens of alien species, many of them older and more advanced than humanity, though none of them more deadly, traversed interstellar space as if they owned it. They tolerated one another because anything else was suicidal. But humanity tipped the balance. Was it humanity’s fault? Was it humanity’s aggression or humanity’s disappointed dreams? Or was humanity simply the unknown factor that ended the status quo, a development with an outcome no other species could calculate or risk? The interstellar wars began.

Education had delayed his service, but now he was called up, good for nothing more. He fought in a dozen battles on as many worlds, each of them brutal, each of them vital to the welfare of humanity, each of them inconclusive, each of them meaningless. He had lost an arm in one, a leg in another, an eye in a third—each replaced after hospitalization. He was no worse for all his experience except for wounds inside; the surgeons could not reach them; the chiatrists could not ease them. His only remedy was to drown them in one illusion or another. Maybe that was what Sharn had seen in him and despaired.

*   *   *

Was there a lightening of the darkness? Did he hear movement? Was feeling returning?

Sharn had been his surgeon in one of his restorations. He forgot which of them it had been, there had been so many. But he could not forget her deft fingers in the surgical console or her dark eyes focused on the images magnified on her scope or occasionally raised to meet his own. Within them was all the hope and promise that he had thought forever lost.

They had reminded him of his first love, the tomboy named Tes, who had raced him through the streets of Clarkeville on terraformed Mars, and up the slopes of the towering mountains whose summits they could never hope to reach or along the shores of the new seas. Her eyes had been dark, too, and they had teased him and taunted him, and looked up at him, widened by passion and squeezed tightly in fulfillment, and he had loved her and known then that he was destined for great things.

He had grown up on Mars, terraformed over the centuries by bombardment with fragments from the asteroid belt and by water-laden comets and pieces of Saturn’s rings. His father had emigrated there with his new bride and his dreams of a better life. Jef Riley had built a hydroponic farm with his own hands, and prospered for a time, selling vegetables to new arrivals before he decided, in a fit of hubris, to try dry-land farming and lost everything. In desperation, he volunteered for the Interstellar Guard. He drilled for a month a year and for two days every month. He was promised that the Guard would never be used except for defense of Mars.

Riley had worked inside the greenhouses and on the shifting red Martian soil, and before and after work his mother schooled him with computer programs and televised lessons. He loved the freedom, loved the new world, loved his mother, who was strong and beautiful, but hated the labor and his father’s folly, not realizing until much later that his father had cherished the same dream as his son—to get free, to be better than he was, to surpass his own limitations. All Riley could see then was the need to get away from the farm, from Mars even, and to take Tes with him.

But Tes had been the first to volunteer as soon as she was sixteen and had been killed, like his father, in the first battles of the interstellar war. Riley had already been accepted to the Solar Institute of Applied Science, and his mother insisted he go. There had been enough death, she said; it was time to build, not to destroy. He had gone, not unwillingly but saddened, trying to make sense out of catastrophic change, trying to hate the aliens who had killed his father, his sweetheart, and his dreams. He was tortured by unanswerable questions: Why had the wars occurred? Why had the aliens attacked? Who were they? What did they want? How could humanity resist? Would humanity survive?

It was difficult to focus on studies when the war raged through outer space, when media reports depicted attacks and victories and strategic withdrawals, complete with explosions and gouts of flame and the terrible faces of aliens looming out of the melee, brandishing weapons, or scattered across a barren battlefield like harvested grain. But Riley persisted, transferring to the classroom and laboratory the anxieties of wartime.

Sharn had visited him in the recovery room, checking on his arm. Yes, it had been his arm she replaced, and in demonstrating its strength he had pulled her, unresisting, into his hospital bed. She came to him often after that, and he found that her fingers were good for more than working a surgical machine. Her body was trained and supple and responsive, and her mind was quick and perceptive. They talked more than they made love.

They talked about humanity’s dreams of reaching the stars and the great ache in the heart of all humanity at the discovery that the stars belonged to someone else. That was what the wars were all about, Sharn thought: the battle for real estate. That was what all human wars had been about, she said, and the interstellar wars were no different. Good land was always scarce, and planets of the right size and the right distance from their suns were even scarcer. If humanity wanted any, if they wanted a future, they would have to take it from those who had it.

Riley didn’t agree. “A classical humorist once said, ‘Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.’ But they are. Every system I ever visited had habitats. Mined-out asteroids, most of them. People living there, being born there, growing up there. Soon that’s all they’ll know. Lot of advantages to habitats. People don’t need planets. They can make their own living space—sometimes better.”

“But it’s not land,” Sharn insisted. “It’s artificial, and sooner or later the people, or creatures, who live in them are going to become just as artificial.”

Riley pointed out that she was living and working in a habitat, and she replied that she hated it. And anyway, she said, if it wasn’t land, what were the wars about?

Fear, Riley said, and misunderstanding. The aliens had been coexisting for a long time—many long-cycles—before humanity came out. The basic fear was of difference. How can you trust someone or some thing totally different, truly alien? You don’t know what they think or what they feel, or even if they think or feel the way we understand those terms. Then there was the fear of inferiority. Was some other species smarter, more inventive, more powerful, more aggressive? The aliens—the various galactics—had learned to live with that. But humanity was the joker. It could be anything from potential slaves to potential workers to potential rulers, and the cycles-long truce broke down. Now the truce has been reinstated.

After how many millions dead? Sharn asked. After how many worlds ruined?

But will it last? Riley said. He flexed his new arm, and they made love again.

That was the last good time they had. It wasn’t the disagreement about interstellar policy or even war—he hated that more than she did—it was her growing fascination with transcendentalism and his release from the recovery ward and his growing realization that he was finished. There was no role for an adventurer in a galaxy organized to minimize adventure, or a role for a warrior in a galaxy bent on peace at all costs. And no role for a diplomat who had killed too many aliens and bore their wounds on the shell of his body, and inside.

If he had grown moody and combative, if he had tried to ease his pain with ceuticals smuggled out of the pharmacy, if he had quarreled with Sharn too often and resisted her pleas to become the person she had first known, that she knew he once had been, the person who dreamed of something better—then her leaving him would have been understandable. But the way it happened—with no explanation, no apparent reason—leaving him was not.

Did the darkness brighten? Did sound and feeling return?

*   *   *

The disembodied voice was everywhere and nowhere. “We have a job for you.”

“Who is ‘we’?” Riley asked but he could not hear his own voice.

“That information is unnecessary; receiving it is unwise.”

Riley could not tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman, or a machine. It was devoid of emotion, uninflected. “How can you hear my voice, and I cannot?”

“Unimportant.”

“Where am I?”

“Meaningless.”

“All right, then, what is the job?”

“You will join a pilgrimage starting from Terminal in some thirty days.”

“A pilgrimage to where?”

“That is what you are hired to find out.”

“A pilgrimage has to be headed somewhere.”

“It is seeking the shrine of the transcendentals.”

“But no one knows where that is.”

“Until you find out.”

“And how will I do that?”

“You will accompany the pilgrimage until it reaches its destination.”

“And how will the pilgrimage know where to go?”

“Most on the ship will not, but we have information that the Prophet will be among the pilgrims.”

“And who is that?”

“We do not know. That, too, you will discover.”

“Maybe the Prophet doesn’t know where to go. Maybe the whole thing is as illusory as all other religions. Maybe it’s all supernatural.”

“That, too, you will discover.”

“How do you prove a negative? If the pilgrimage gets nowhere, does that mean there is no shrine? That the Prophet was not aboard? That the Prophet was aboard but has forgotten where the shrine is? That the Prophet was aboard but discovered my presence or the presence of others and decided not to head for the shrine…?”

“Your assignment is to see that the pilgrimage reaches the shrine, if it exists.”

“You don’t ask much for your money!” Riley said as dryly as he could. “And, speaking of money, how much is this job worth?”

“Money is irrelevant.”

“Not to you, maybe.”

“You will be handsomely rewarded.”

“Easy for you.”

“Funds have been deposited to your account. They will pay for your expenses with a sizable sum left over. If you are successful, you will have your choice of a habitat, a habitable moon, or an estate on a favorable planet.”

“You seem sure I will accept.”

“You have no choice. Your family is gone.…”

“Except my mother,” Riley said.

“She, too. You have not heard yet, but she was killed in the last alien attack on Mars before the battle fleet was destroyed.”

“You bastard!”

“These are facts. Sharn has left you.…”

“What do you know about that?”

“Everything. We had to be sure you were the right person for the job.”

Resentment filled Riley’s mind. He would have tasted bile if he had been capable of tasting anything. “Why do you expect me to accept?”

“Because of the kind of person you are.”

“You have abducted me. You have raped my past. You plan to control me. Why should I want to work for you?”

“Because of the kind of person you are.”

“You think you know me.”

“Yes. You, too, were once in love with transcendence, but life has wounded you and disillusioned you, and now you want to immerse yourself in a task that will consume you. What better task than this? Adventure, violence, romance, adversaries, little chance of success, even of surviving.… This is what you were looking for on Dante. And this is a search for transcendence—the goal that you have abandoned.”

“Maybe you do know me,” Riley said. “But what makes you think I have any chance at all?”

“We have given you an edge.”

“What?”

“First of all, you will know more about the pilgrimage than any of the others. Second, you have a new pedia.”