Transgalactic (17 page)

Finally, after a cycle and a half, they had reached orbit when a message came over the com, giving the designation of the shuttle and addressing the pilot. “The passenger you are transporting is fraudulent and must be detained,” the computer voice said.

The Xifor looked at Asha, and Asha said firmly, “You will ignore that message,” she said. The Xifor lifted a hand. It held a knife. Why was it, Asha thought, that the Xifora always carried knives? “I don't want to kill you,” she said. “If I leave you here unconscious no one will ever know.”

The Xifor hesitated. Raised as they were in an environment of competition for survival and advancement, Xifora preferred to eliminate their rivals by treachery. Better a knife in the back than an obvious battle between equals. “Believe me,” Asha said firmly. He believed her and, a few moments later, they matched orbits with the Captain's Barge and extended the passageway between the vessels. She told him to sleep, and she left him behind.

As she directed the Barge out of orbit and headed for the nearest nexus point, she knew now where she was going to find Riley.

 

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The air was chilly and filled with the sharp chemical smell of the viscous fluid in which Sharn and the other dreamers were immersed. With their baths kept at body temperature, the dreamers had no need for external warmth, but Sharn's body was still damp and sticky. She shivered. Riley took off his shirt and wrapped it around her, covering what he had once viewed with desire and touched with passion but now seemed like the body of a child still wandering through adult dreams.

“You're not the same person,” Sharn said, her voice hoarse from disuse.

“Nor you,” Riley said.

“Because of you,” she said.

“I was going to say that.”

“I'm sorry,” she said. “They told me it was necessary. They said you had a brain condition that caused you to be self-destructive. It all made sense, at least then, when I was still recovering.”

“From what?”

“From your anger, your rejection.”

“As I recall,” Riley said, “it was you who left me.”

“You drove me away,” she said, “trying to get rid of me, like you were rejecting your arm. You couldn't stand being happy; you hated yourself too much. I saved your arm, but I couldn't save myself.”

Riley recalled those dark days, when Sharn's presence was the only relief from the memories he could never shake, of loss, the people he had killed, and the destruction he had caused. “That isn't the way I remember it.”

“That was part of the problem.”

“So, you put that thing in my head because you were angry, or hurt, about something I did or didn't do.”

Sharn put her hand on Riley's arm, the one she had replaced. “It's been so long ago,” she said. “I'm not sure anymore. I've been wandering through strange lands. It's hard to remember how it really happened.”

“Try,” Riley said. “It's important.”

She shook her head as if to rid herself of the dreams that clung to her mind the way her body was shedding the fluid in which it had been immersed. “They said your psychological problems were causing your body to reject the transplant and your mind to reject the healing possibilities of human interaction. They said it was making you try to lose yourself in the various levels of pleasure on Dante and finding none of them sufficient to ease the suffering in your soul. They told me that the ninth-level sim tanks that you finally turned to would end up in total destruction, that you would become a captive of your dreams, slowly drifting away into a simulacrum of paradise until you would die like a fetus absorbed back into the womb.”

“And you believed them.”

“Not until they took me to the ninth level and showed me your body in the tank. You were smiling. That was what finally convinced me.”

“And how did they say the operation was going to help?”

“They had a new technique that introduced into the brain a kind of continually adjusting psychodynamic monitor, like a built-in chiatrist.”

“Right.”

“I know,” she said. “It sounds foolish now. But I was desperate. I wanted to believe that there was some magic treatment for the psychic disease that was killing you. And so many new technologies had come out of the war, the way it happens in all wars, that we began to believe in magic.”

“But why you?” Riley asked. “It seems like the ultimate betrayal.”

“There were other surgeons,” Sharn said. “But they said I was the best, and I was personally involved. Ordinarily that would disqualify me, but they said that I was motivated to do the best job possible on a procedure nobody had tried before on a human. Looking back, it may have been because I was the only one they could convince to perform the surgery, because of my involvement. And then they showed me the research.”

“They had documents?”

“They had the published research papers, recordings of experiments on animals, documents of their successes and failures. It all seemed so real, so right, until I opened your skull and saw your brain lying there and the brainlike implant that went inside. I almost turned away then, the surgery unfinished, but I knew it was too late. You would die if I didn't continue.”

Riley remembered his pedia and its constant presence, and its implicit reminder that it could kill him at any moment, a fate from which he was saved only by the consequence unanticipated by its creators, the pedia's own grasp on existence.

“It wasn't until afterward that I reviewed the literature and checked its claims. That's not easy. Everything is digitized and centrally recorded. There are few independent sources. But I finally discovered that the research had never been published, that it came from a single source, and that source was a private laboratory for which there was no other record.”

“And that laboratory?”

“That was as far as I could get,” Sharn said, “but it was enough to convince me that the implant was not intended to cure you but to control you.”

“You have no idea,” Riley said.

“That's why I ended up here. I couldn't operate anymore. I couldn't keep thinking about what I had done.”

“I survived,” Riley said. “Now you need to survive. You can start with this: Whatever your reasons for what you did, it worked out better than you can imagine, and I forgive you. But there's one thing you haven't told me.”

“What's that?”

“Who is ‘they'?”

*   *   *

Sharn looked at him as if he hadn't understood her. “It was the Pedia, of course. I got my instructions from the Pedia, the way I always got everything, patient records, test results, surgery orders.”

“But who instructed the Pedia?”

“That isn't the way it works,” Sharn said. “Somewhere information gets put in, either from people who enter data or monitors who observe, measure, and record. The Pedia analyzes the data, compares it for accuracy, and issues instructions, prepares the patients, administers anesthetic, and helps guide the robotic equipment.”

“You never questioned any of that?”

“At first, maybe. But we soon learn that the Pedia doesn't make mistakes. People, maybe. Not the Pedia.”

“Except in this case.”

“Yes.”

Riley recalled the voice that had spoken to him out of the darkness after the surgery that he did not remember, that had told him about the pedia in his head, about the Prophet and the religion the Prophet had started, about the Transcendental Machine and the voyage to find it. And gave him his instructions, to be enforced by the pedia in his head, to identify and kill the Prophet, and to seize the Transcendental Machine or, if that failed, to destroy it.

“So then, who instructed the Pedia?” Riley asked.

Sharn looked at him as if the question didn't make any sense. “No one instructs the Pedia. As I told you, the Pedia analyzes the data put into—”

“Pedia's lie,” Riley said.

“Pedia's can't lie.”

“Then someone instructed it to deceive you.”

“I can't believe that either.”

“It's one of the two: Either someone instructed the Pedia or it came up with the scheme on its own. Did you ever ask the Pedia?”

She shook her head.

“Have you ever been in direct contact with the Pedia?”

“Only in the sim tank, and then it was only in the dreams it prepared for me.”

Then it came to Riley that the only way he was going to be able to find out what had happened to him in the sim tank was by going back into it. He remembered what it had been like as if it had just happened. The first generalized simulations, the peaceful landscapes, the animals grazing, the happy village, the nurturing parents, the friends, the girl down the street, the holding of hands, the first kiss.… And then, as the computer measured the body's responses and gained access to memories, the personalized sims, the patient mother and the industrious father coping with the challenges of a terraformed Mars, Tes, teenage love culminating in youthful passion—all the way it should have been. No failure, no frustration and angry words, no war with the Federation that took father and Tes. Just dreams. Enough to ease the pain of a man who had lost everything he ever valued. Enough to make a man who had forgotten how to be happy smile.

He knew that he was taking a risk. Once a person has gotten a taste of getting everything he has always wanted, it is almost impossible to come back to the real world of struggle, pain, and sorrow. He had done it once because he had been forced to by the pedia in his head. He didn't know whether he could do it again. The most insidious temptation available to creatures was their own dreams. But he had to try. He was stronger now, better, maybe smarter, more certain about what the world was like and how to deal with it. And he had a vision of what it could be.

“I'm going back in the tank,” he said.

Sharn looked at him as if he had said he had chosen death.

“It's the only way I can find out what happened to me and what made it happen,” he said. “But I need your help, to watch. If I don't pull myself out within a cycle, I need you to do it for me, even if I fight against it. Can you do that?”

Sharn looked longingly at the tank from which Riley had removed her. “No one comes out by themselves,” she said.

“I will,” he said. “I just need to know you're here.”

“All right,” she said.

Riley removed the rest of his clothing and lowered himself into the empty tank next to the one from which he had removed Sharn.

*   *   *

The first stage was the hardest, when the contacts closed over the sides of his head while the nurturing fluid crept up his body, covered his chest, and moved up his head until, at last, it covered his mouth and nose, and he breathed it into his lungs while he strangled, fighting for breath, until the oxygen in the fluid began to be absorbed and peace gradually fell over him, moving up his body millimeter by millimeter until he fell into a dream state. The passage from the generic to the specific was quicker this time, as if the computer recognized him and had his personal fulfillment already prepared.

The dreams started with a vision of a terraformed Mars. It was not the reality of an atmosphere reinforced by bombardment with asteroids and meteors that left the air still barely breathable, but air as thick and sustaining as that of Earth itself, only without the pollutants. And the dream provided a land with verdant growth and frequent rains, not the perpetual drought of a water-starved world. Not a Mars that was barely livable but a Mars of his father's dreams. And in Riley's dream his father's gamble on dry-land farming, rather than the greenhouse vegetable gardening that had nourished them when his father first brought them to this new world, had prospered and made him happy and his mother content, and everything as it should have been. His meeting with Tes had been without the misunderstandings that troubled all human encounters. They had fallen instantly in love and recognized it and blessed it, as it blessed them, and they had run across the landscape of an idealized Mars and up the slopes of Mount Olympus and even reached its lofty rim that they could never have accomplished on the real Mars. They had learned about the world, about the history of Earth and of humanity. They had looked at the stars and planned how they would grasp them and bring them closer to their heart's desire. And they had made love, and in the fulfillment of their passion everything seemed possible: an education into how the universe worked and humanity's place in it, ways to make it a better place for life and the fulfillment of life's reasons for existence, and a meaningful personal life together. It was enough to make the heart swell with promise and gratitude and a future of even greater things.

And Riley fought his way through it, exerting every gram of his strength and will to free himself from the ultimate happiness the computer had provided for him. And at last, like a drowning man clawing his way to the surface, he broke free.

He was aware now, as he had not been in his dreamlike euphoria, of the weightlessness of his body, the movement of the fluid through his throat and lungs and digestive system, and the impenetrable darkness that enveloped his senses. It recalled his previous experience when a voice had spoken to him, directing him to go to Terminal and to join the pilgrims on the
Geoffrey,
and ordering him to seize or destroy the Transcendental Machine and to kill the Prophet. This time, though, he was able to open his eyes and sense a grayness through the gloom.

He directed a thought toward the Pedia that was providing the environment that kept his body functioning and his dreams pulsing through his mind. He didn't know how to describe the process that he was trying to explore—a probe, a question—but he could sense a movement in the grayness, and as he pushed his mind farther he could feel words fumbling just beyond his ability to understand. And then the voice came. It was the flat, uninflected voice that he remembered, but it was not what he had expected.