Transcendental (32 page)

The city was a million years old—maybe older. Riley’s pedia had called the city in the runaway system “half as old as time.” Surely this was as old as time itself.

Riley saw long curving avenues between soaring spires and graceful arches, without open space, without a break between structures. Debris cluttered the avenues now—decaying vegetation blown in from the surrounding countryside, animal droppings perhaps, an occasional fragment of translucent building material. The spaces between the buildings were narrow, more like paths than avenues, as if they were not built for traffic. That was what had saved them during the first attack, keeping the arachnoids bunched in front. But the streets, if that was what they were, remained remarkably clear, and the city looked as if it had been abandoned for only a few years. It could be a human city, if a human city could have been built of this kind of material; it resembled translucent mother-of-pearl that changed colors as he looked at it.

But something was subtly wrong—not just the colors and the material but the shape, a curve here, a twist there, as if the builders had a different way of looking at the world or even a different kind of vision, or as if they perceived shapes as extensions from other dimensions. Riley couldn’t look at them for long at a time without feeling that something alien passed along his optic nerve into his brain and began a wrenching process of transformation.

“Don’t look,” his pedia said.

“This must have been how they communicated their culture,” Riley said. “Maybe not in literature or music or art but in shapes.”

“It bothers you, too?” Asha said. “I learned not to look for more than a minute.”

“Maybe this is why the barbarians shun this place. Once you lose the ability to absorb your own culture, it terrifies.”

“There’s enough to be frightened of as it is,” Asha said. “Five of us reached the city. I was the only one to reach the shrine.”

“You think the arachnoids will return?”

“They don’t give up,” Asha said, and shivered. “They sense prey, and I think they have hunted everything else to extinction.”

Riley studied the cityscape with an eye for movement. He saw nothing but the blowing debris. “Which way?” he asked.

Asha looked at the surrounding buildings. “I’m not sure. I was always bad at directions or locations. The Transcendental Machine changed all that, but this place is different. We entered at another spot, and Ren was leading. Then we got ambushed, and Ren and I ran in the other direction. There was no time to look for landmarks, even if these alien-shaped structures offered anything recognizable. When the creatures got really close, we ran even harder and ended up at the shrine, by accident.”

“That’s why you took a chance with the Transcendental Machine.”

“There was no way back. The lander had been overrun by the arachnoids and probably looted. Here the night creatures lurked everywhere. But it wasn’t as much of a choice as an accident. I didn’t know it was the machine then. Dust had piled up in and around it. It could have been the remains of hundreds of cycles or the detritus of the ages. I was just trying to hide. But you’ve never believed in transcendence.”

Riley looked at her without subterfuge. “I didn’t believe in anything. I was hired to find the shrine. Somebody cared—a lot. I can understand why, but I still don’t know who. And if I couldn’t reach the shrine, I was instructed to kill the Prophet. Which turned out to be you.”

“If you could.” Her gaze offered a challenge.

“If I could.” His expression admitted the possibility that he might not have prevailed.

“But you didn’t try.”

“I can’t take credit for that,” Riley said. “We haven’t found the shrine.”

They turned and moved deeper into the city. The blue sun was descending beyond the farthest spires, and the red sun would not rise for another few hours. In the darkness the night creatures awaited.

*   *   *

As they walked warily along a narrow street surrounded by towering alien structures, Riley smelled the city. Every planet has characteristic odors. Many odors, of course, depending on the zone and the vegetation and the location near bodies of water, but one underlying odor by which the planet and even its natives, wherever they are, could be identified. Pilgrim’s End was like that. The worlds in this spiral arm were stranger, as if the supernovas that had cooked the original elements of that arm had a different recipe. And the city was stranger than the countryside. Some of the materials that went into the original construction were still outgassing molecules after all these long-cycles. Pilgrim’s End smelled as twisted and strange as its architecture.

The air temperature was moderate—a bit warm when both suns were in the sky, not so warm with a single sun, and cooling quickly when both were set. Riley shivered in his jacket. Asha seemed unaffected by heat or cold.

The air was breathable enough, a little higher in oxygen and lower in carbon dioxide than humans were accustomed to, and exhilarating at first. Tordor said it was because the planet had lost oxygen-consuming animal life after degeneration began and vegetation had a chance to restore the primeval balance. Sapients changed their worlds in their own images, but once they were gone the worlds recovered. Sapients destroyed; worlds restored.

The silence of the city was palpable. Only the occasional keening of the wind and the rustling of the litter broke the spell. The quiet in a place built for bustle and noise was unsettling.

Riley kept his head in constant motion. Although his pedia was an early warning device, he trusted his own senses more, and he had survived by paying attention—in this case to movements perceptible only at the edge of vision. “What are we looking for?” he asked.

“It was dark,” Asha said. “The long night, after the blue sun had set. I had the impression of long spidery legs. They moved fast and were hard to hit, as if their bodies were small and perched high above their legs.”

“We see aliens as variants of the creatures we already know.”

“They might not be anything like spiders,” Asha said. “They didn’t like fire. After the first three were grabbed—transcendence knows what happened to them—Ren and I built a fire, but in the long night we ran out of fuel, and the creatures almost got Ren when he tried to collect more, just outside the firelight.”

The blue sun was almost down behind the farthest buildings, its fierce light shining through their walls like a prism. “Maybe we’d better prepare for the short night,” Riley said, “and gather enough firewood so that we don’t have to brave the darkness.”

“That’s a metaphor for the human experience, isn’t it?” Asha asked. “Sit by the fire and be protected, or risk the darkness and maybe die.”

“Like all metaphors, this one doesn’t gather firewood,” Riley said, and stopped at a spot along the avenue where the buildings were lower and heaps of brush and deadwood had been blown by ancient winds. He made one small pile of brush a few meters from a solid building wall, topped it with deadwood, and built two larger piles of deadwood along the wall.

Asha pulled a stubby pipe from her pack and aimed it at the brush. The brush burst into flame. “One thing I learned,” she said, “was to bring a heat stick.”

“You are a fount of resourcefulness,” Riley said and settled himself with his back against the building wall. He patted the spot beside him. “Get some sleep,” he said. “We’ll rest until the red sun rises, and then move farther until we stop again for the long night. I’ll stand watch.”

Asha settled down and let him put his arm around her shoulders. “I never sleep,” she said. “You sleep. I’ll watch.”

Riley didn’t argue. “Wake me if anything moves or the fire needs wood.” And he dropped into a deep sleep almost immediately.

His pedia awakened him an instant before Asha’s hand touched his shoulder. “There’s movement,” she said.

Riley caught a glimpse of something vaguely spidery at the edge of his vision. It vanished when he looked at the spot directly, but he knew it had been there. The fire had diminished. Riley tossed another piece of firewood on top, and sparks flew upward into the night, dying as they ascended. Beyond the flames Riley got the impression of more thin, segmented, hairy arms retreating. He added another log and slid his gun out of its holster and laid it on the ground next to his right hand.

“I don’t think they’ll attack,” Asha said, “and the red sun will be rising in less than an hour. But I thought you’d want to be awake.”

“My pedia woke me anyway,” Riley said.

“I know you hate it. I could silence it again.”

“Get rid of her!” his pedia said. The pressure again began to mount in his head.

“I may need it before we find the shrine.”

“I know you can’t get rid of it, even though it’s like having a spy in your head, but there’s hope that the Transcendental Machine could free you. It removes imperfections and perfects potentials.”

“You’re trying to kill me,” his pedia said. The inner voice was bordering on hysteria.

“I’d like to believe that, but if that’s what it does, why did you return after already achieving transcendence?”

She was silent for the time it took him to draw several long breaths and check for movement. “I needed to find this place again,” she said finally. “What good is a Prophet who can’t show people the way to salvation? I was just a low-level assistant on the previous voyage. No one told me where we were going and I didn’t ask. Ren kept everything inside, like a treasure hunter with an ancient map. So I didn’t know where we were when we got here.

“And I needed to prove that it was real, not just an illusion.”

“But you didn’t have to come this far, once we arrived at a place you recognized.”

“I had to prove that the shrine itself existed and that the Transcendental Machine really worked.”

“Then you’re going to trust yourself to its mercy again?”

“I’ll let you know when we get there. And you?”

Riley laughed. “I don’t believe easily. And not in what I can’t see or feel or taste. But I believe in you.”

He again put his arm around her shoulder. She did not pull away. They waited for the sunrise and watched for monsters.

*   *   *

When the red sun began casting long rose-edged shadows along the street, they still had one small pile of firewood left and the night creatures had not attacked. They left no sign that they had been there at all.

“We’d better get farther into the city before the long night,” Riley said, as he holstered his gun and got up, “and hope that something looks familiar to you.”

“I’d recognize the shrine anywhere,” Asha said. “It stood alone at the intersection of two narrow streets, a low building among giants, like a cathedral.”

“Or a hospital?”

“You continue to doubt.”

“I’m just trying to understand why a civilization would build a machine like that. What was it used for? Why did the creatures who used it abandon their city and their empire?”

He got to his feet, hoisted his backpack, and reached to help Asha to her feet, but she sprang up unaided.

“Forward,” she said.

They traversed the city canyons, watching the iridescent walls on either side.

The red sun was low in the sky behind them when they came upon the remains of an old fire. Asha stopped and stared at a blackened spot on the pavement that was the only thing remaining. “This is it,” she said. “This is where Ren and I built the fire before the onset of the long night. This is the place where Ren was almost taken.” She circled the area, looking at the pavement, and shook her head. “We came from the opposite direction, and that was the direction Ren went for firewood, so I must have run the other way.”

“But that’s where we came from,” Riley said.

“I must have turned down a side street.”

“Shall we build a fire here and wait out the long night?”

“Most of the brush and wood are gone,” Asha said.

“And you don’t want to spend another night on this spot,” Riley said.

“That, too.”

They turned and went back the way they had come, but this time Asha moved slowly with her eyes half-closed as if she was seeing something distant in space or time.

“Here,” she said. “I turned here.”

She turned toward her left. Another avenue had broken the wall of buildings. “They were very fast,” she said, “but maybe they were busy pursuing Ren. I could hear something behind me, but I didn’t look back. I was afraid to look back.”

The sun had dropped so low behind the spires that they glowed with an inner fire, and the avenue darkened as if warning of the approach of night.

“There’s more brush and wood here,” Riley said. “Maybe we should stop and get a fresh start in the morning.”

“Not yet,” Asha said.

Beyond the next curve of the avenue Asha cried out. Riley saw it, the building, the shrine. The avenue split in two a few hundred meters from them, and a low, massive building nestled in the triangle between.

*   *   *

“Wait,” Riley said. He reached into his backpack and removed impervium gloves and an impervium bag. He removed the almost invisible monofilament and stretched it across the narrow street as high as he could reach. He attached it with fast-drying glue on either side. “Now,” he said.

In the gathering night, Riley’s pedia warned him. Almost simultaneously they heard a warbling sound mixed with a whisper of something moving. Riley turned and felt Asha turning behind him.

Half a dozen of the giant arachnoids raced down the street toward them, not waiting for the concealment of night, perhaps aware of how near they were to their goal. Two on the left were closest and one on the right. Three, in a rough triangle, filled the middle. More, perhaps, were hidden by the curve of the street.

The resemblance to spiders was superficial. Their legs were long and thin and bent inward at the top, to be sure, but there were only four legs and two more that were shorter, legs or arms, closer to the head. Above them was an oval body with a face parodying humanity: two eyes and what may have been a nose but below that a cruel jaw that looked capable of crunching thigh bones.

Asha aimed her heat stick at the pile of brush on the left and, as it burst into flame, the pile on the right. Only the three in the middle came on. The other three shifted to the center and followed.