Transcendental (27 page)

The look of it was different, too. The hills and valleys and mountains were different shapes, the sea was a different color, and the sands and soil had different textures and no doubt different compositions. The sounds were different, as well: the wind made an odd, keening sound in the ear, and somewhere alien creatures spoke or complained or wailed—it was hard to tell if they were manufactured by living creatures or the planet itself.

It all took a great deal of getting used to. But they didn’t have time. Strange animals appeared fleetingly behind hillocks or splashed in the alien sea. The exploring party pointed them out to each other and compared them to creatures they had known. But they were all subtly different. The land animals often had eight spindly legs or maybe six and two manipulating limbs in front, and the sea animals they could glimpse were oddly shaped, compressed in places familiar creatures were not, and expanded in others.

“They’re like wolves and rabbits and dolphins,” Asha said.

“Yeah,” Riley said, though he had never seen a wolf or a dolphin and realized that Asha hadn’t, either.

“Creatures evolve to occupy environmental niches, but from different beginning points,” Asha said.

“Evolution is a force that acts upon us all,” Tordor said. “The question is: what has it produced in this arm of the galaxy, and how will that affect us?”

“Or: how has it already affected us?” Asha said.

“You think this arm has influenced our own?” Tordor asked.

“Someone discovered or created the nexus points,” Asha said, “and someone moved this system or built cities on this planet before the system drifted out of the local arm—cities that have not yet crumbled.”

“The Dorians claim we discovered the nexus points,” Tordor said.

“And the Sirians claim they discovered them,” the weasel said, “and so did every other civilization we have encountered.”

“Except humans,” Asha said.

“It’s a good bet that creatures from this arm were more advanced than any in ours,” Riley said. “Look at that city!” He gestured toward the buildings that loomed in odd outline a kilometer or so away beyond the coastal hills. “It must have been abandoned a million cycles ago, and yet it still stands, with no apparent signs of deterioration.”

They had started toward the city when Tordor whirled back toward the barge. The flower child was standing in the open hatch swinging its fronds frantically.

“It says we are under attack,” Tordor said.

*   *   *

And it was so. The doglike creatures with eight legs were running toward them from the hillocks and over the sands, and strange creatures with tentacles were rising from the sea. They drew their weapons.

“There’s too many of them,” Riley said. “Tell the flower child to get back inside and protect the ship while we retreat to the city.”

Tordor gestured at the distant ship, and the flower child retreated and closed the hatch. Tordor turned and led the rest of them toward a gap in the hills that opened from the beach toward the city. They moved rapidly. The doglike creatures were quick, scuttling more than running, but they fell behind. Then the city was in front of them, clustered in the valley below, even stranger up close.

The city was well preserved, as if it were a museum exhibit protected under glass. Slender translucent towers with jagged offsets and twists were scattered without apparent order across glassy surfaces. There were no streets, just crooked spaces between buildings where nothing grew and not even dust particles could find traction.

“How did they get around?” Riley asked, and Asha pointed at strands of transparent materials that connected the buildings near their tops and glowed in the reddened sunlight.

It was a magical city, a fairyland that would have captured the imagination of a million dreaming children.

“‘A rose-red city half as old as time,’” Riley’s pedia said.

“How long has it been abandoned?” Riley asked. “A million cycles? A billion?”

“Somewhere between those,” Tordor said.

“And still standing,” the weasel said. Even it seemed impressed.

“What makes you think it’s abandoned?” Tordor asked.

“There’s no movement,” Riley said. “No hot spots.”

“Maybe they’re night creatures,” Tordor said. “And cold-blooded.”

“We’ll see,” Riley said.

They moved down toward the city, Riley first, followed by Asha, Tordor, and the weasel. There were no roads or streets, as if the city builders hadn’t needed surface transportation or had outgrown it. The surface was rough and rocky underfoot until they reached the valley and the beginning of the glassy surface they had noticed from the hills.

They moved cautiously between the buildings, which up close seemed even stranger than they looked from the hills, as if they had not been so much built as extruded. Nothing moved. The only sound was the odd swooshing of air currents as they struggled to find their way between staggered structures. Overhead the traceries of translucent strands glowed in the descending sunlight, but now they could see that in places the strands were broken; fragments remained on the surface beneath, along with accumulated dust, assorted debris, broken pieces of something that looked like wood, and an occasional plant that had taken root.

Riley and Asha walked carefully on the glassy surface but Tordor and the weasel were more sure-footed. Tordor strode forward confidently; the weasel scuttled behind.

The structures seemed to have no entrances and no apertures at all within reach, although they seemed open, even lacy, from about a third of the way from the surface level to their tops.

“Curioser and curiouser,” Riley’s pedia said. “Be very careful.”

Tordor said, “Whoever built these structures came from above.”

“They flew?” Riley said.

“Or they climbed,” Asha said.

“And there they are now,” Tordor said.

“Where?” asked the weasel.

“There!” Tordor said, and pointed toward the strands that connected the translucent structures in front of them.

Spider-like creatures were swarming down the traceries, which now obviously seemed much like webs.

“I think retreat is in order,” Tordor said.

But as they turned they noticed that the webs behind them were filled with dark scuttling creatures as well.

“We’re trapped!” the weasel squeaked.

“This way,” Asha said, leading the way down an alley-like passage between structures. Riley followed. Tordor came more slowly. The weasel sprinted ahead of them all until it stopped in front of another web clustered with creatures.

“They’re acting as teams,” Asha said. “Trying to turn us back into the city. Odd behavior for arachnoids.”

“Like pack animals,” Riley’s pedia said.

“I think we’d better get out,” Riley said, and lifted his hand weapon. An explosive missile destroyed the bottom of the web ahead, scattering shards of translucent material and dark fragments of aliens. Those still alive scuttled back toward the top and sides and into apertures at the top of structures.

Riley’s group moved forward rapidly under the web, slipping occasionally on the slick surface beneath, and reached the edge of the city. Dark figures had reached the surface behind and were racing toward them.

Riley shot again at a nearby building and sent a broken slab crashing to the ground, temporarily blocking pursuit. “They’ll climb that soon enough,” he said. “Let’s get back to the ship.”

“This expedition has been a disaster from the beginning,” his pedia said.

As they reached the passage through the hills, he said, “Tell me again, Asha, why we decided to explore this world.”

*   *   *

The seashore was deserted and the captain’s barge stood closed and silent beside the restless alien sea. From their side they couldn’t see whether a hose still stretched from the ship to the sea.

As soon as they descended from the hills, the eight-legged creatures—smaller versions of the city arachnoids—reappeared and began pouring over the dunes on either side of the ship. Riley’s group raced toward the barge. As he ran, Tordor prodded his forward leg with his proboscis, signaling to the ship with a device whose function Riley had only guessed. But the ship’s hatch remained closed.

“Faster!” Riley shouted and turned to fire an explosive bullet at the nearest group of attackers. A sport of red sand erupted like a gush of blood, and the wave hesitated. Riley fired at the group racing from the other side. It too paused before it came on again.

Now they were only a hundred meters from the ship and Riley could see that the hose had been retracted. He turned and fired once more toward the nearest group. One of the alien creatures had pressed forward, however, and was close enough to grab the weasel by one arm, too near to shoot. Riley grabbed the weasel and pulled. The arm held by the arachnoid broke free, and they were at the ship, looking up at the unbroken flank, turning to meet the attackers, when the hatch opened and a ramp tumbled out to let them in.

Riley turned in the hatchway as the ramp retracted, kicking away clutching mandibles, and seeing the creature that had attacked the weasel plunging an extrusion from its forward part deep into the weasel’s lost arm. And the hatch closed.

“Are you badly hurt?” Riley asked the weasel. A purple substance was oozing from the socket where the right arm had been pulled away, but alien skin was closing over it.

“Damaged but alive,” the weasel said. “My abilities may be limited for a time. I hope it poisons him,” he continued, pointing where the arachnoid would have been.

“A dangerous encounter,” Tordor said, breathing heavily. He had moved swiftly for a large creature but apparently at a large energy expenditure.

“You did well,” Asha said, and Riley felt a glow of appreciation before he realized that she could have acted even quicker, but had allowed him to lead.

“Thanks,” he said. He and Asha returned their weapons to the wall magnets that clasped them in place.

“Those creatures,” Riley said, “were they the city builders? They seemed too—primitive—to be engineers and architects and technologists.”

“Maybe their descendants,” Tordor said. “Or their heirs.”

“Maybe they didn’t build the way we do,” Asha said, “just as they didn’t travel the way we do.”

“What do you mean?” Riley said.

“That city looked like it had been extruded rather than constructed,” Asha said.

“The creatures were more like bugs than the warm-blooded creatures who populate the Galactic Federation,” Tordor said. “Maybe they also harnessed buglike abilities.”

“A lot like Terran arachnids,” Riley said. “Spiders.”

“Arachnids don’t breathe the way warm-blooded creatures breathe,” Riley’s pedia said. “Their tracheae or book lungs don’t supply enough oxygen to support a functional brain.”

“But how do they get enough oxygen to feed a creative brain?” Riley said.

“They may have evolved lungs,” Tordor said. “Or maybe they developed mechanical lungs that their descendants forgot how to make.”

“Ah,” Riley said.

The inner hatch opened. The flower child was just inside. Its fronds were rustling.

“It says we are ready to depart,” Tordor said. “Trey has stored sufficient hydrogen, and we have nothing to keep us here.”

They moved to the control room where the coffin-shaped alien named Trey was working at the controls with its extrudable cables.

“You asked back there why we decided to explore this world,” Asha said.

“I was joking,” Riley said.

“But it was a good question. We needed to find out what kind of creatures and technology we’re up against,” Asha said. “And we needed to get off the
Geoffrey.
”

“For more than aesthetic reasons?”

“The captain is getting increasingly undependable,” Asha said. “His emotions, or his instructions, are kicking in. He was approaching the point of eliminating his chief competition. So it was best to let him eliminate us in a non-terminal way.”

“Then how do we get back to the ship?”

“We don’t,” Tordor said. “Trey informs me that the
Geoffrey
has left the system.”

“And abandoned us?” Riley said. He had the sickening feeling that whatever game Ham was playing, he had won. And they had lost.

“So he thinks,” Asha said. “With a damaged computer and a lack of fuel. But Trey has fixed that, and I insisted on the captain’s barge.”

“Why?”

“The captain’s barge can navigate through nexus points,” Asha said. “And I got the coordinates of the next one. If we’re quick, we can beat the
Geoffrey
to the Transcendental Machine.”

“Trey says that we are ready to depart to seek transcendence,” Tordor said. “And he is ready to tell his story about why he seeks it.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Trey’s Story

Trey said (interpreted by Tordor):

We were not there at the beginning, but we have learned everything we could about the process that concluded with our creation. Understanding became our mission and reason for existence.

Life started small and without meaning, as it always does. Our world was an unlikely place for life to occur, a planet of an insignificant yellow sun even farther out toward the end of the spiral arm than the planet called Earth. Maybe because it was far from the radiation of the galactic hub and from the supernova explosions that provided the means for existence, change came slowly, but it came steadily—the process of all life, as we have come to understand it. The universe deteriorates into greater simplicity; life evolves into greater complexity. Inanimate and animate are eternally in opposition.

On Ourworld, single cells developed from precellular chemicals combined by accidental bursts of energy, cells aggregated into groupings and became amoeba, amoeba evolved into more complex creatures, which in turn developed sapience, invented technologies, and in time created us. That sequence of evolutionary development summarized so quickly took billions of cycles to accomplish.

Ourworld was a world of great oceans, and that is where life began, where life always begins, where the environment is rich with nutrients, where food comes floating by, where encounters of potential partners are frequent, where gravity is neutralized and existence is easy. Ourworld was different only in the length of time life stayed in the oceans, changing, growing, evolving, while islands slowly emerged through undersea eruptions and accretions, and continents formed from the grinding and upthrusting of tectonic plates. Finally the land was ready for habitation, but still it was left to the flora, which grew and flourished with only small flying creatures to enjoy its plenty, while sea animals continued to live within the comfort and bounty of the seas.