Transcendental (33 page)

“I’ll take the ones on the right,” Asha said. “Shoot at their heads.”

Riley’s gun was already in his hand. His first shot exploded the head of the first, and his second felled the next to its right. His pedia or his urgency seemed to guide his aim, because he never missed. When he destroyed the third that came on behind, he turned toward Asha’s side of the avenue to find three smoking corpses that had fallen to her heat stick.

“All I ever wanted to do,” Asha said, “was offer creatures an opportunity to fulfill their potential.”

“I know,” Riley said.

“Life limits us,” Asha said. “We need something to liberate us.”

“That’s what everybody wanted to stop,” Riley said. “Liberation can be deadly.”

“Only to the masters.”

Another wave of monsters rounded the curve.

“Go,” Riley said. “I’ll hold them off.”

“No, that’s what Ren said when he caught up to me. We’ll go together,” Asha said.

Two of the monsters had stopped to feed on the remains of their fellows. Riley and Asha shot the ones that continued and then the feeders.

The third wave arrived.

“Go!” Riley said and gave her a shove toward the shrine. “I’ll follow.”

She gave him one despairing look and ran toward the building. The next wave ran into the monofilament and were decapitated, but the next wave avoided what the juices of the earlier victims had made visible. Riley picked off the monsters until his gun clicked empty. He inserted a new magazine as he backed toward the open doorway and began firing once more, knowing the monsters would reach him before he reached the shrine.

They were close enough for him to smell their alien breath when he felt a gush of warmth beside his face and one of the monsters burst into flame and then another.

“Keep shooting!” Asha said. “I’ve got to get this door open.”

Riley felt a cool breeze from behind and a hand that reached out to pull him inside.

*   *   *

A door irised shut in the face of the nearest monsters.

In the darkness Riley turned and leaned against the door.

Asha’s heat stick became a light stick illuminating the entrance. Carvings and hieroglyphs adorned the semicircular stone—not the ubiquitous semitransparent material of the rest of the city. The carvings resembled miniature renderings of the monsters outside.

“The night creatures,” Riley said. “They kept getting bigger and they couldn’t get inside.”

“They built this,” Asha said, sweeping her light stick at the carvings. “Ren was wrong. The night creatures were the city builders. They may have evolved from the barbarians or they may have had a common ancestor, and now they haunt the city and the star empire they once ruled.”

Asha turned her light stick toward the interior. The room was enormous. It soaked up the light like a dark sponge. Riley got the impression of massive walls without windows, a vaulted ceiling without skylight, and a floor vast and uncluttered except for the scattered remnants of framework. He heard no sound except their breathing. He smelled alien dust, perhaps stirred by their entrance or the wind from outside.

“It
is
like a cathedral,” Riley said. His words echoed back at him from a remote distance.

“That’s what I thought,” Asha said. “Come.” She picked her way across the floor, playing her light in front. “You can’t imagine what emotions this place recalls.”

“I can,” Riley said. He could almost feel the adrenaline pumping into her bloodstream, her perfected heart beating faster, and the improved neurons in her brain connecting to antiquated networks. He heard their muffled footprints and their echoes.

“Stop!” his pedia shouted. “Stop!” Riley’s brain felt as if it were going to explode. “If I die, you die!” it said.

“Just like the last time,” Asha said, “too many have died to get us here. How can it be worth it?”

“They all took their chances,” Riley said. “Just as we did. And they would have done it again, for all their many reasons, even if they had known the odds.”

“Even so.”

They had traveled perhaps a hundred meters and Riley saw no indication of an end.

“You’ll have to make a decision soon,” Asha said.

“Some decision,” Riley said, “with those monsters waiting outside.”

“If you accept the machine,” Asha said, “it will be better.”

“I don’t believe in the supernatural,” Riley said. “You can have your religion, your transcendentalism. I think there’s a natural explanation. If I survive this, I’m going to find out what it is and what it means to human life, and all sapient creatures, in our galaxy.”

“That’s good,” Asha said. “That’s what you should do.”

“But I believe in you,” Riley repeated.

Asha’s light stick exposed a structure at the far end of the vast room. The structure seemed perhaps three meters high and made of the same iridescent material as the city outside, but more like a small pavilion with a canopy supported by pillars on four sides. Riley could understand why Asha had described it as a shrine.

“It was added later,” Riley said. “This building was built of stone in the early stages of civilization.”

“Come,” Asha said. “We can both fit inside.”

“It might not work properly with two,” Riley said.

“Don’t be afraid,” Asha said. “I’ll go first then and show you it’s safe.” She turned toward the evanescent canopy and then turned back to toss her light stick to Riley. “You’ll need this,” she said, and turned and entered the shrine without a backward look. The door started to close.

She shimmered. Her clothing disintegrated. Her skin disappeared, leaving her standing, for only a moment, with a network of veins and arteries over flesh, and then those, too, vanished, followed by internal organs, and finally bones. Everything happened so swiftly there was no time for action or reaction, no time for blood or fluids to escape, no time for speech or thought.

Riley watched dust drift to the bottom of the shrine. She was gone. Promising transcendence but suffering, maybe, extinction.

He turned to look back once more at the vast space they had crossed and up at the remote ceiling that arched into darkness. He thought about the monsters who lurked outside, who had built this monument to something, whatever it was, and then, perhaps, forgotten how to use it or used it too often.

“Stop!” his pedia shouted again. “Don’t do this. We can escape! We can go back!”

“It’s a waiting room, Asha,” he said, and stepped forward and felt himself fall apart.

EPILOGUE

Riley woke up.

He was alone in a dark, closed space.

“Asha?” he called, but he knew she wasn’t there.

He knew a lot of things he had never been aware of before, and with a clarity he had never experienced. He knew, for instance, that the Transcendental Machine was a matter-transmission device that had been used by the other spiral-arm aliens—an earlier version of the arachnoids or the species the arachnoids had replaced—to explore not only their own spiral arm but the spiral arm of humans and the aliens of the federation.

The machine analyzed anything that entered it, destroying it in the process, and sent the information to a receiver in which the same entangled quantum particle was embedded, where what had been destroyed was recreated from local materials. But in the process the imperfections were left behind—and that included sapient creatures like Asha, and now himself. Transcendence, he realized with a shock that almost made him laugh, was an accident.

He had been restored but his pedia, which was not part of his ideal condition, was not. He didn’t know yet how he would get out of wherever he had been sent, nor how he would find Asha. Clearly the machine had sent her somewhere else. Maybe, if it were not programmed, the machine cycled through a series of destinations.

But he knew he would find her if he had to fight his way halfway across the galaxy. And when he found her he knew that they would change the galaxy.

BOOKS BY JAMES GUNN

Novels

Station in Space

The Joy Makers

The Immortals

The Burning

The Listeners

The Magicians

Kampus

The Dreamers

Crisis!

The Millennium Blues

Gift from the Stars

Transcendental
*

Story Collections

Future Imperfect

The Witching Hour

Breaking Point

Some Dreams Are Nightmares

The End of Dreams

Human Voices

Edited by James Gunn

Man and the Future

Nebula Award Series Ten

The Road to Science Fiction Volumes 1–6

The Best of Astounding: Classic Tales from the Golden Age of Science Fiction

The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

With Jack Williamson

Star Bridge

Nonfiction

Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction

Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction

Inside Science Fiction

The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction

The Science of Science-Fiction Writing

Paratexts: Introductions to Science Fiction and Fantasy

With Matthew Candelaria

Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction

With Matthew Candelaria and Marleen S. Barr

Reading Science Fiction

Media Tie-Ins

The Immortal

The Joy Machine

*
A Tor Book

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

James Gunn is the author of more than thirty books, including the Hugo Award–winning nonfiction work
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
and the novel
The Immortals,
on which the television series
The Immortal
was based. Other novels include
The Listeners, The Joy Makers,
and
Kampus.
He also has collaborated with other authors, most notably with Jack Williamson on
Star Bridge.
He was named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America in 2007.

Mr. Gunn is also the editor of a series of anthologies tracing the history of science fiction,
The Road to Science Fiction,
and is a past president of The Science Fiction Writers of America. He is professor emeritus of English and was the founding director of the Center for the Study of Science Fiction at the University of Kansas. He is the winner of the Pilgrim Award for lifetime achievement in science fiction scholarship, and is a past president of the Science Fiction Research Association. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

TRANSCENDENTAL

Copyright © 2010, 2013 by James Gunn

Several chapters of this book were previously published, in somewhat different form, in
Gateways,
edited by Elizabeth Anne Hull, Tor Books, 2010.

All rights reserved.

Cover art by Stephan Martiniere

Edited by James Frenkel

A Tor Book

Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

www.tor-forge.com

Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-7653-3501-2 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4668-2081-4 (e-book)

e-ISBN 9781466820814

First Edition: August 2013