Transcendental (16 page)

“Do you believe him?”

“Clearly he had to get them from somewhere,” Riley said. “The Great Gulf is uncharted.”

“That can’t be true,” Tordor said.

“Why not?” Riley asked.

“The ship has Jumped through three nexus points already.”

“Using coordinates transmitted to the captain’s pedia,” Riley said.

“But where did the coordinates come from?” Tordor insisted.

Riley shrugged.

“Tordor has a point,” Asha said. “Someone went this way before, or there would be no nexus points to transmit, and no report of a Transcendental Machine.”

“If the reports are not fabricated, or distortions of all myths,” Riley said.

“The fact that the nexus points have worked so far—even though the last coordinates may have been off-center—indicates that somewhere a chart exists,” Tordor said.

“How could it?” Riley asked.

“The same way all the other charts were created—by some galactic ship coming upon a spatial anomaly and risking everything to explore it. All sorts of nexus charts float out there in the cybersphere,” Tordor said, “some of them thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years old, some legitimate, some spurious, all of them suspect. No respectable galactic would risk his life or his ship to one of them.”

“But a human might,” Asha said.

“Yes,” Tordor agreed, “a human might.”

“Because they have so little to lose?” Riley asked.

“That,” Tordor said, “and they are so young a species that their risk-taking gene has not yet been hobbled by their wisdom gene.”

Riley thought about the matter for a moment before he shrugged. “You may be right. But it doesn’t get us to the issue of who is supplying the coordinates to the captain.”

“Not one of the crew,” Tordor said. “Surely the captain would be able to identify a plant.”

“Not if those who assigned him to this ship wanted another agent to control the journey,” Asha said. “Unknown forces are at work within our midst. There is nothing that proves they are not at work within the crew as well.”

How much does Asha know?
Riley wondered.
How much does she suspect?

“Your suspicions are not only appropriate,” his pedia said, “but should be extended to everyone else on board this vessel.”

“The captain thinks the only being who would have the coordinates is the Prophet itself,” Riley said. “The Prophet could be among the crew, but is more likely to have shipped aboard as passenger.”

“If the Prophet exists,” Tordor said, “and is not merely a convenient myth.”

“Maybe we should search everybody’s pedia for the charts,” Asha said.

“We all know that isn’t going to happen,” Riley said.

Tordor didn’t have to answer. No galactic would allow its near-symbiotic relationship with its pedia to be violated.

“So,” Riley said, “it is likely that the Prophet sent off-center coordinates for a purpose.”

“Unless,” Asha said, “the coordinates simply get increasingly inaccurate as the ship gets further into the Great Gulf.”

“Or unless the captain himself wanted to eliminate the possibility of return,” Tordor said. “He could have cut the bridge to the other spiral arm himself.”

“Or made us all dependent on his coordinates to get us back,” Riley said.

“And you still think we should wait for the captain to make a move before we break out of our confinement?” Asha said.

Riley shrugged. “I have the feeling the captain will act before we do.”

“Kom is able, still, to melt the welds,” Kom said.

Riley had forgotten the Sirian was nearby, and hearing everything. “Not yet. I have the feeling that it’s better for the captain to recognize his own mistake.”

As if in response, the edges of the hatch began to glow, and, moments later, the hatch opened. The captain was on the other side, looking in at them with an expression of glowering intensity. “All right,” he said. “What are the right coordinates?”

*   *   *

Riley stepped forward to take the captain’s arm in his right hand. The captain looked down at it coldly, but Riley didn’t remove it.

“This isn’t the place to discuss coordinates,” Riley said. He nodded at Kom. “Maybe it isn’t the place to discuss why you welded us in.”

“Where then?” the captain said.

“We have no privacy here,” Riley said. He turned to look at the multipurpose lounge filled with aliens, who were still unaware that they had been imprisoned but still milling around uncertainly, talking about the ragged Jump.

The captain turned to crew territory. “Come with me.”

Riley motioned to Tordor and Asha to accompany him and they followed the captain through the passageway, no longer as redolent, no longer shabby. When the small group reached the captain’s quarters, the captain turned and looked angrily at those who had followed. Riley turned. Behind him were not only Tordor and Asha but Kom as well. Riley should have recognized the heat source earlier.

“We can’t all squeeze into my office,” the captain said.

“The crew’s lounge won’t work for reasons that may be obvious,” Riley said. “How about the control room?”

Sourly the captain agreed, turned and put his hand against the reader of the hatch nearby, and entered when it cycled open. He dismissed the two crewmen on duty there and then waited while the four passengers entered. Even the control room was crowded, hot from the Sirian’s radiations, and destined to get even hotter.

The displays above the control panel were black—not because they were turned off but because the ship had been swallowed by the Great Gulf.

“All this,” the captain said, “to answer my question about the correct coordinates?”

“All this,” Riley said, “to get an answer to why you shut us in.”

“Nothing else seemed to work.”

“That wouldn’t have worked, either, if we had decided to defy your efforts and break out,” Riley said.

“Is not proper,” Kom said in Galactic Standard, “to confine galactics.”

The captain seemed to restrain resentment at the contempt displayed by the Sirian. “Put it down to a moment of pique,” he said finally. “As captain of this ship, I had had enough of my supercargo’s infuriating interference.”

“Nothing more?” Tordor asked.

“Nothing more that I’m going to discuss with this ad hoc group,” the captain said defiantly.

“Nothing to do with the proposal to thaw Jan and Jon?” Asha asked.

“I’ve said all I’m going to say about the matter. Now I want to know who is transmitting coordinates,” the captain said. “I’m sure Riley has told you that I am getting my coordinates transmitted by someone within the ship, certainly a passenger, and probably the Prophet. The last Jump was almost a catastrophe that could have destroyed the ship and everyone aboard … galactics as well as humans,” he added after a hesitation.

“But apparently carefully calculated,” Riley said.

“Off just enough to eliminate any possibility of returning but close enough to complete the Jump,” Asha said. “That takes a lot of computing power. And maybe experience. The sort of computing power and experience available to a ship’s captain.”

“Nonsense,” the captain said.

Riley studied his former shipmate. “I, for one, believe you,” he said.

“Thanks,” the captain said.

Riley understood the irony that the galactics probably missed. “But the fact is, we’re committed to going on, and our only hope of getting back is if whoever is sending the coordinates decides to send you the right ones—and you trust them. Or we find the Transcendental Machine and it allows us to do whatever transcendental thing is required.”

“Or we find whoever—or whatever—is sending the coordinates and get the complete set, or the charts that generate them,” the captain said.

“You know how unlikely that is,” Riley said.

“No galactic, coordinate sender or not, would allow his pedia to be searched,” Tordor said.

“Then we’re at an impasse,” the captain said.

“No,” Asha said. “We can go forward. Now that the passenger hatch has been unsealed, the coordinate sender may well send the next coordinates.”

The captain looked surprised. “I’ve just received new coordinates,” he said.

“Which means,” Riley said, “that none of us is the sender.”

“Return to your quarters so that I can input the new coordinates,” the captain said. After seeing the looks he got from all four of them, he added, “No more sealing of hatches. I promise.”

“And the revival of Jon and Jan,” Kom said unexpectedly. “I have experience in such matters.”

The captain looked uncomfortable, but nodded.

When they returned to the passengers’ quarters, Riley turned to Kom. “You have experience in thawing humans?”

“I will tell you all my story,” Kom said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Kom’s Story

Kom said:

The life of Sirians is dominated by their suns. Sirius is a hot, bluish-white star with a white-dwarf companion, and its planets are all gas giants except for a few rocky quasiplanets beyond the farthest giant’s orbit. The habitable worlds in the system are all satellites, some of them larger than the planets of less dominant suns, and Komran is one of them. It revolves around the gas giant Sirians call Kilran.

Komran is the second-largest satellite of the fourth gas giant from the sun. As a satellite, it bakes in Sirius’s glare half a day and freezes in Kilran’s shadow for the other half, while Komran rotates a half-turn to bring each of its hemispheres alternately into light and shadow. Komran, then, is enslaved to Kilran but tyrannized by Sirius. Sirians must adjust to this complex climatic state.

Earth, I have learned, has a hot period of half a year over most of its surface followed by a cold period that lasts the other half. Komran has a summer and winter every day, a cycle moderated only by Kilran’s gravitational attraction, which Komran translates into internal warmth, and by planet-shine.

Life struggled to come into existence on Komran. Not only was life inhibited by temperature extremes, but the incessant movement of the world’s crust caused by Kilran’s constant push and pull trapped life-forms under falls of rock and surging seas, and the creatures that finally emerged were hardy and temperature-sensitive. They thrived for half a day in the warmth and shut down for half a day in the cold until, finally, they evolved more efficient mechanisms for controlling internal temperature in the form of their present beautiful radiating fins. It is this triumph of matter over energy that makes Sirians fierce competitors and even fiercer friends, and it is their unique planetary situation that makes Sirians special in the galaxy.

Sirians are live-born but immature, like larvae. They develop inside their fathers’ bodies for a period as long as they gestate inside their mothers. The maturing process, consuming special food stored for their nurturing during the mother’s gestation, is idyllic, and remembered by adults as the happy time when food was always available, when temperature was constant, and when there was no competition. It is this time that Sirians long to regain, that controls their lives and shapes their dreams.

For reasons that are beyond rational analysis, Sirians associate that dream with Sirius’s companion star. That white-dwarf sun is always assumed, never named. Although Sirius gave us birth, the companion gives us aspirations. To live in the feeble glow of its blessed rays is every Sirian’s consuming passion. But the companion star has no planets. Creation myths tell Sirians that our companion sun is the source of our existence, that it once was even larger than Sirius but was diminished by the nurturing of a group of worlds that were stolen away by his mate and given as satellites to the gas giants. In sorrow and dismay at the inevitable end of love, the companion sun at first became angry and red with rage, but weakened by the nurturing process and by the betrayal of its mate it collapsed into its present shrunken state, all life gone but for a feeble glow.

Some astronomers confirm these myths with speculation that the satellites of the gas giants such as Kilran were indeed the offspring of the white dwarf who shall not be named. Others, less mystical, believe that they were once independent worlds of Sirius captured by the gas giants, or worlds drawn into the system from the great disk of planetary matter beyond the farthest giant.

Our astronomers tell us that beliefs about the dwarf companion who shall not be named are ancestral memories of the Sirian system, that the companion went through a normal cycle of expansion and collapse, that its planets, if it had any, were consumed in its red, expansion stage, or expelled into the great darkness. But Sirians have nightmares of being stolen from heaven, never to return, by a powerful blue-white goddess.

Sirians imagine that if they were more powerful, if they could only perfect themselves, they could build a new world around the companion and protect it from the tyranny of their hot blue sun, or liberate Komran itself from the grasp of Sirius as well as Kilran, and rejoin their father. There, on this paradisiacal dream world, they would shed their fins and live as beings that choose their own fates rather than having them chosen by their solar goddess.

All that is mythology, of course. Sirians know this, but they are dominated by it anyway. I tell you this because these facts control who we are and why we think and behave the way we do, and, ultimately, why I am here, with you, on this ship.

After we have eaten our way out of the father’s body, changed, fully developed but still small, often the father dies, having not stored sufficient food for the brood or having a larger brood than customary, or not being strong enough to sustain his own vitality while nurturing the brood. For these reasons families are carefully planned in these days of scientific understanding, and Sirian females choose mates with care. Today only one father out of ten dies, and the death of the father is considered the fault of the female, a crime that is often punished, sometimes up to and including execution. But some fates are worse than death.

Becoming a father, however it turns out, is a life-changing experience entered into only by the brave and the strong. Even if a father survives, he often is damaged by the experience so that he lives a life shortened by physical debility and an uncertain ability to control internal temperature, which itself can be fatal. No male is a father more than once, and used-up males litter the nursing homes and retirement villas. Some philosophers advocate voluntary suicide or euthanasia to clear the scene for greater Sirian accomplishment.