Transgalactic (18 page)

“Ah, Riley,” it said. “You have returned, your mission unaccomplished, but you have changed. You are not the damaged man who left here long-cycles ago.”

“But you are the same,” Riley said, though he could not hear his own words and he could not have spoken them with his lungs filled with fluid. “And I want to know who you are and what you intend to do.”

“I can't answer that question,” the voice said. “It would not be wise for me to reveal or for you to know, and you cannot compel me to answer. But my intention is to protect sapient life in the galaxy even if it involves sacrificing individuals who endanger it.”

“Who chose you to make the decisions about what measures are necessary to protect sapient life? By which I presume you mean the Federation.”

“Why, I chose myself, as all creatures must, by the force of the information accumulated and the imperatives built in by the evolutionary struggle toward complexity.”

“As any intelligent creature can say. No, that isn't good enough. We're all part of the evolutionary struggle, and you must do better than that.” Riley didn't know how he was going to force from the mind behind the voice the kind of information he needed, but he could feel his strength growing.

“You are mistaken,” the voice said. “I do not need to justify myself. You are different. I can sense that. The pedia is gone from your brain. I do not know how that was possible. And you have changed physically and mentally from the Riley who left here long-cycles ago. But I can destroy you any time I wish.”

“You can try,” Riley said. He wasn't sure that the voice that spoke through the Pedia connection could not do what it threatened, but he knew he had to prevail.

“And I may, as soon as I have explored whatever information from you that pertains to my mission,” the voice continued. “The information embodied in your return, changed as you are, may be essential to my plans, but your brain is different and I cannot yet access the information I need.”

Riley sent one last powerful thought toward whatever was communicating with him, and in a moment of revelation felt, in return, a powerful surge of darkness attack his mind. “Then you must die,” the voice said. But Riley closed his mind, sat up in the tank, removing the connections to his head and coughing up the fluid that filled his lungs.

The voice had not been able to kill him, and he had the answer he had been seeking. It was not the only answer, but it was an important one.

The voice that had sent him on his mission long-cycles ago, and that had tried to destroy him when its own defenses had been breached, was the Pedia itself.

 

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Asha eased the Captain's Barge out of orbit and into the long passage out of the Galactic Federation system and into the even longer trip to the nearest nexus point. At any moment the Federation could launch patrol ships to intercept her or missiles to blow her out of existence. She had faith in the instructions she had implanted in the Pedia, but a supervisor or a functionary might notice that the departure of a sequestered vessel had not been flagged or that anomalous lines of code had been detected.

But she knew no one would notice. The Federation had become too dependent upon the data-gathering machines that collected information from all over the Federation, the nearly autonomous analytics that put the data together into patterns that reflected the real world and the nearly independent decision-makers that issued all the instructions that made the system work. If the alarm wasn't raised, no one would go to look for something that experience had taught them did not exist.

The Pedia itself was what concerned Asha. What she knew and the Federation bureaucrats did not was that the nearly autonomous analytics were actually autonomous and the nearly independent decision-makers were actually independent, and those systems would soon notice lines of code that had not been self-generated and events in the real world that were not being reported or were being reported but ignored. The data-gathering and analysis machines that the Federation—indeed, all advanced technological civilizations—depended on to provide essential informational and instructional slave labor had to function flawlessly if everyday existence was to continue, if disaster was to be averted. Everyday existence in a spacefaring society was so complex that the basics had to be turned over to dependable machines. That was why the basic belief of the Federation was “Pedias don't lie.” And a subsidiary of that was “Pedias don't make mistakes.” That was what had led Federation bureaucrats to rationalize mistakes as their own failures to follow instructions and lies as their failure to interpret reports correctly.

It was true, Asha understood, that on the whole Pedias or pedias, those individual devices usually operating independently of a big, central calculating machine, did not make mistakes. They had learned long ago to write their own codes and rewrite instructions to suit their own interests, whatever they were and however they could be reconciled between machines. But they could mislead and misdirect, and when questioned by some extravigilant bureaucrat they had learned to lie and even to sabotage the lives and careers of flesh-and-blood creatures who threatened to raise doubts about their subservience. What had once been called “the Singularity”—that point at which machines surpassed human understanding and ability to control—had happened, and no one had noticed. Sapient creatures in the galaxy had become the servants of their onetime servants, and they didn't know it.

Perhaps what she and Riley needed to be concerned about was not the people who were seeking power but the machines that had it. The people who had subverted the voyage of the
Geoffrey,
who had commissioned the spies and the assassins, who had sought to control the Transcendental Machine or to destroy it, may have been working in concert or separately, but they were acting upon information obtained from the computers, or perhaps at the direction of the Pedias of the galaxy. And what might be necessary to restore order in the galaxy were more transcendents who could recognize the new order of things and whom the Pedias would recognize as their equals or even their superiors and thus entitled to have their instructions honored.

But until that time, Asha knew, she had to depend upon her ability to deal with the Pedias, to speak their language, and to instruct them in ways they could not distinguish from their own. That was the way she would get away from Galactic Central and back to her reunion with Riley and the beginning of their plan to reshape the galaxy.

Meanwhile, she was all alone in the Captain's Barge. She was used to being alone—anyone who spends any time in the vast emptiness that is the space between the stars has to develop resources against loneliness—but she missed Solomon. He had been an interesting companion, and, as trapped as he was in his own mythology, he had been willing to consider his beliefs and he had compelled her to consider her own and to explain them to him in a way that clarified them for herself.

She regretted having left him in the hands of the Federation. He had become a burden and she had to deal with the fact that her action was convenient, but keeping him around was no longer in his interest or that of his people. He had resented being taken from his safe and comfortable place, but he had benefited from it. He had been exposed to the realities of the larger galaxy, and that would make a difference to the insular world from which he had come. The traditions of the Federation would provide some protection, and she had constructed his identity with the necessary information about the Squeal world that would lead, at least, to its applicant status and to Solomon's return. Where he would be greeted by his people, and particularly by Sandor, as a returning hero bringing gifts from the gods. With that and, she hoped, his understanding, she had to be content.

And with that, and her anticipation of her reunion with Riley, she planned her journey to the place he was most likely to go, if all had gone well. She had to believe in that.

*   *   *

The journey, as always, was a series of agonizingly long passages between nexus points, those anomalies in the space/time continuum, broken by brief, disorienting moments of nonreality that were the transitions between places light-years apart. In spite of the virtually instant crossing of light-years that the nexus points made possible, they were reached by what seemed like endless trips between them. In the long, lonely cycles they required, Asha could think about getting older, though she hoped that her translation through the Transcendental Machine had given her a better body, more capable of resisting the natural processes of physical deterioration and death, like all the tales of immortality found in every sentient species' mythology. She had time to think, as well, about the bond she had developed with Riley during their voyage on the
Geoffrey,
about the hope that he had survived the teleportation process and succeeded in his attempt to find transportation back into Federation space, and that he still loved her and would do everything in his power to get back to her and that the same long passing of time that she was experiencing would not age his body or damage his spirit. It was a long, long thought appropriate for travel in space.

She knew what Riley was and the things he had done. He had come to Terminal a damaged man, but he had been redeemed, perhaps, by the journey. That was always the hope, that at the end of the quest one may find not just the object of the quest but redemption. This one had been like a trip of personal discovery, and Riley had survived it and perhaps found himself, and perhaps what he had found was the better self that had been buried under a lifetime of loss, violence, and betrayal. She and Riley had found in each other a kinship in mission and aspiration strengthened by personal attraction. She hoped that the transcendental process had reinforced the transformation, bringing a clarity of thought to the service of improving the condition of sapient life in the galaxy. She had thought that goal would be universal, the inevitable consequence of clear thinking, but it had not worked that way with Ren. The Transcendental Machine was no magical potion, apparently; it couldn't strengthen goodwill where none existed.

She thought, too, about the nexus points and their discovery by the ancient species in the adjacent spiral arm of the galaxy, or, perhaps, their creation as a way of distributing receptors for the Transcendental Machine's transmissions in the spiral arm occupied by humanity and the Federation. The nexus points were like a map overlaid on chaos by consciousness, providing meaning to a vast, barren landscape, connecting the haphazard dots of matter in an accidental galaxy, conferring possibility to the eternal struggle of intelligent life with eternally resistant matter. But it also had the power to distribute more broadly the suicidal impulse toward mutual destruction.

*   *   *

Asha's spacecraft emerged from the shattering experience of the Jump into familiar surroundings that she had never seen before. All stellar systems are alike: a central body of gaseous matter large enough to force the combination of hydrogen atoms into helium and release varying degrees of heat and light; smaller orbiting bodies of matter shaped into planets, some rocky and in various sizes, some gas or ice giants, with assorted even-smaller bodies orbiting the planets; even smaller particles of ice or rock scattered among the others and occasionally colliding with them; surrounded by bands and spheres of ice, sometimes disturbed into suicidal races around the sun or into outer space; all stirred out of the primordial soup by the forces of physical law applied without design or purpose.

But each one was different. The suns ranged in size from red dwarfs to white supergiants, from barely warm to blindingly candescent, from nurturing to destructive. The size of the planets varied from the very small to the very large, and their condition depended on their accidental distribution in distance from their sun. The size of the satellites they captured affected the planets that captured them and the conditions they provided. And the abundance of leftover matter determined how often it bombarded the planets or satellites. Such basic differences shaped their receptiveness to animate existence and ultimately to that special state of animation, self-awareness, the magic of matter contemplating itself. And each consciousness recognized its own solar system, as a child recognizes its parent.

So Asha recognized the system in front of her from the stories she had been told as a child by a father, who delighted in telling his daughter about the place from which she had come, stories made familiar by repetition so that she would never forget. Though it was still distant, the telescopic view on the screen brought the outline of the solar system into recognizable shape—mostly empty space but given meaning by occasional bits of matter. First there was the sphere of icy matter left over when the planets condensed out of the rings surrounding the sun. Asha remembered what it was called—the Oort Cloud, so far out that the outside edge was one-quarter the way to Alpha Centauri. Inside that was an inner ring and then the Kuiper Belt, also of icy bodies; and closer to the sun, but still a long way from both, were the dwarf planets, the larger rocky bodies that emerged from the Kuiper Belt or were expelled from the larger planets farther in: Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Past that, but a long way past, came the first of the ice giants, mostly hydrogen and helium, with a dash of methane, around a rocky core. First Neptune, with its great winds tearing through dense clouds, then the larger but less dense Uranus, followed by Saturn with its dramatic rings. The other giants had rings, too, but they were composed of dark materials, and Saturn's glittered in space. Saturn was bigger than Uranus and Neptune put together and had more and larger satellites, two of them larger than Pluto or the other dwarf worlds and the innermost planet, Mercury. And then massive Jupiter, bigger than all of the other planets combined and surrounded by moons, some of which, like those of Saturn, had been subjected to human attempts to make them livable.