Transgalactic (20 page)

On level three, the ramp was clear except for stragglers pushing by trying to find warmth and light above. Riley could smell the odors of food and vomit, and he could hear voices complaining about the darkness and the cold and demanding more and warmer food and colder drink. At level two, hands reached out of the darkness to draw him into the sex encounters that he remembered and voices tried to persuade him to enter, promising unimaginable delights. Darkness was no deterrent to lust.

At last Riley reached the hospital level, Sharn still in his arms. She had fallen asleep or had slipped into unconsciousness. He looked down upon her face and wondered if he had done her any favors by saving her from the sim tank. But she was reborn, as blessed with promise and threatened by life's blows as any infant. She might fulfill the promise or surrender to the injuries, but she would have the chance. Maybe she would return to level nine, but an opportunity was all anybody had.

Emergency lights bobbed along the corridors of the hospital level, and all the doors to the hospital itself were open for the ill and wounded staggering up the ramp from the carnage below, bringing with them the stench of death and emptied bowels. Attendants were sorting the patients for care, handing out blankets, passing out containers of hot liquids. Riley carried Sharn among them. “Here's one of your own,” he said. He finally got the attention of a passing physician.

“Sharn?” the doctor said.

She opened her eyes and raised her head. “Where am I? Is this still a dream?”

“Where have you been?” the doctor said. “Everything's going to hell. We need your help.”

“She's in no condition to provide help,” Riley said. He put her down on an empty cot. “She needs help herself. See that she gets it. She's just come out of a sim tank.”

“But—” the doctor began.

“If she doesn't get it, I'll come back and find out why.”

The doctor looked intimidated and then concerned as he turned toward Sharn.

Riley knelt beside the cot and took Sharn's hand. “Good-bye, Sharn,” he said. “I've got to get out of here before any more people die. Try to find your way back. Maybe we'll meet again.”

And he turned and made his way toward the door. He hoped that Sharn would take this second chance, for what she had been and what she might yet become and for what they had meant to each other. But he knew that she probably would return to level nine as soon as she could.

*   *   *

As Riley left the hospital, the corridor brightened with lights. He felt the cold ease its icy grasp. He wondered if the Pedia had given up, and then that brief reflection was replaced by the hard truth that Pedias never gave up. Their mandates were as inflexible as the laws of nature. His only hopes for evading the Pedia's death sentence were to outrun it or to learn, as Asha had, the techniques for inserting competing instructions into the Pedia's programming.

The first attack came as he entered the corridor leading to the docking stations. A large, muscular man hurtled toward him from a side corridor whose lights had been extinguished. Riley sensed him at the last moment, as if his old pedia had provided a warning, and stepped back. A weapon of some sort, a large knife or a pipe, whistled by his head, and a body brushed past him. He moved his leg forward and caught the attacker's leg, causing him to plunge to the floor. Riley kicked him once before he could get up, kicked the object out of the attacker's hand—it was a length of water pipe—and scooped it from the floor. He hit the attacker in the head as the man was rising. The man collapsed.

A second man was standing in the darkened corridor from which the first attacker had come. Riley recognized him as the leader of the group of thugs who had accosted him as he left Alighieri. “You followed me,” he said. “Our last meeting wasn't so pleasant that I'd think you would want to repeat it.”

The man stood still, well beyond his reach but not, perhaps, with his enhanced coordination, beyond Riley's ability to cross the distance before the other could react. Yet he had no desire to damage anyone unnecessarily.

“You're not that tough,” the other said.

“Tough enough,” Riley said. “Who sent you?” He knew the answer: The Pedia had observed the confrontation on Alighieri and informed the gang, by whatever anonymous means of communication available, where he was going, and, after that, counted on the human desire for revenge.

“Nobody sends me anywhere,” the other said. “You surprised us before. We're ready for you now.”

Riley looked down at the unconscious brute at his feet. “Like this fellow?”

The other man shrugged. “He was a warning. We ain't finished with you. You won't surprise us again.”

Riley weighed again the possibility of a preemptory strike against the gang leader and decided against it. He sensed that there were more members of the gang in the darkness beyond the leader. He could handle several of them, he knew, but there was a point at which mere numbers might overpower him, and the risk to his commitment to Asha and the possibilities implicit in their reunion was greater than the challenge to his manhood.

“Your leadership is fragile already,” Riley said, as if he were offering advice to a friend. “Another failure would mean the end of it.”

He moved on toward the docking stations, leaving his back exposed. No attack came until the second intersecting corridor. It, too, was dark, and three men came running out of it as he passed. They were as big as the one before, and these had knives. Riley took care of the first one easily enough, striking the knife hand with the pipe he had retained from the first attacker, then hitting him across the side of the neck with the side of his other hand. The second, he turned on with virtually the same motion and dropped him with fingers to the base of the throat. The third one grazed Riley's shoulder with his knife before Riley hit him in both legs with the length of pipe and then clubbed him in the jaw with his fist as he fell.

He turned. The leader of the gang was behind him, well behind. “You see?” the leader said. “You ain't no superman.”

Riley put a hand to his shoulder. It came away smeared with blood. “A scratch,” he said. “It's already healing.” It was. He could feel the oozing slowing down. His body, like Asha's, had discovered new abilities for healing as well.

“Give it up,” he said. “The next time it will be you.” He turned away.

“Ain't gonna happen,” the gang leader said. His confidence hadn't been shaken, which made Riley suspect that another, and possibly final, attack was coming. It happened just as he approached the docking station, where his recently acquired spaceship was waiting behind an open hatchway.

Riley turned to face his attackers. There were nine of them, including the gang leader. They didn't run at him, as had the previous ones. They approached silently, spreading out in a semicircle where they would not be easy to defend. They were all undepilitated surly brutes armed with clubs and knives.

“This is not a good idea,” Riley said. “This time there are too many to merely knock you unconscious. I will have to kill some of you, and I will start with you.” He pointed at the gang's leader.

“You and who else?” the gang leader jeered.

Riley sensed a movement behind him. “Why,” he said, “me and my friend.”

The movement that Riley had sensed became a heavy footfall emerging from the passageway. Rory roared. The group facing them stopped their advance. Two of them in the center dropped their weapons and fled, followed by those on the edges of the semicircle and those between until only the leader was left. And then he, too, backed away.

“Let's go, Rory,” Riley said and led the way down the passageway to the ship that would take them back to Alighieri, take Rory back to his homeworld, and take Riley to the ancient red vessel that would take him to Asha. He knew now where he would find her.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Asha inserted into the Barge's pedia the coordinates for the Earth orbit she had been assigned, closer to the oversized moon than the Earth, summoned a shuttle, and waited while her ship assumed its spot in the cluttered space around the place she thought of as her home planet, even though she had never been there. She had much to learn if she was going to blend into the human community while she waited for Riley to reach the same conclusion as she and to find the means to reach her across the vast expanse of space. And then, after he had come to Earth, she still had to find him among a sprawling collection of strangers. The task ahead was how to gain access to the inexhaustible treasure-house of data accumulated by the Pedia without identifying herself or the purpose of her search. And with only her father's fond recollections, long-cycles out of date, about the community that was Earth and the rules, written and cultural, by which it functioned.

There was so much to learn—an entire world history—and so little time to learn it.

She thought she might have a chance to gain some insight from the shuttle pilot, but the shuttle was unmanned, controlled not by a built-in pedia but by a multiple-purpose pedia housed in one of the beanstalk platforms, or perhaps by Earth's central Pedia, if Earth followed the pattern of Federation worlds in its reliance on central data-gathering and processing units. No doubt it did—technological civilizations would collapse without the microsecond by microsecond supervision and direction of Pedias, from the provision of essential utilities to the control of material processing and automated travel—but was it part of the Pedia network that pervaded the Federation? Or had it arrived, by Pedia logic, at the same philosophical position on the relationship of Pedias to the societies that had produced them and the living creatures that they were created to serve?

She could have accessed the shuttle's information system, but in the shuttle she was all alone and easily identified, not one of a vast group with its multitude of inputs. The process of identification that the Pedia would automatically begin might, in time, pierce her carefully created identity, but there was no point in making it easy. She waited the half cycle for the shuttle to deliver her to the nearest beanstalk, the one built from the island community once known as Sri Lanka. There, at the top of the beanstalk, in a geosynchronous orbit, a climber waited. Asha passed through an air-tight extension from the shuttle into a small waiting room with windows from which she could view Earth below, in all its living glory—the gorgeous blues of oceans, the whites of clouds, the greens of vegetation. So starkly different from the black sterility of space that it caused one's heart to ache with its beauty.

And in the midst of all that splendor were the ugly reminders of old mistakes: the craters of ancient nuclear explosions, still in the process of being restored by a forgiving Earth; the shattered ruins of ancient cities, destroyed by bombs or barbarian attacks over burning issues long forgotten; the seashore farms, villas, villages, and soaring metropolises buried under rising seas and the snowy polar icecaps shrunken by the warming effect of ancient vegetation, accumulated since the beginnings of plant life itself, burned in an orgy of industrialization and released, in noxious fumes, into the atmosphere.

The people waiting in the room were mostly human, as Asha would have expected, but there were several Federation species—a couple of weaselly Xifora, a barrel-shaped Sirian, and a feather-topped Alpha Centauran. They sat or stood apart from the humans. No Dorians. Dorians were administrators—decision makers—not merchants or emissaries. And the wounds of the war were too recent for Dorians to risk their reputation, even though, in the end, the Dorians had aligned themselves with humans and perhaps swung the pendulum of battle toward the human side. But no one was sure why the Dorians had made that choice, whether it might have been a Federation powerplay rather than a love of humanity or an admiration for reckless human defiance.

The waiting room was equipped with pneumatic furnishings, inflated sofas and chairs and an occasional table. Asha chose a chair in the corner, where she could survey the room without being noticed, and looked around. The humans were a mixed group of males and females. They looked healthy and fit, generally better-looking than the people she had known aboard the
Adastra,
perhaps because they had the benefit of better nutrition and medical care or had access to cosmetic services that remedied imperfections. All of them, almost without exception, had a slightly darker complexion, as if the various differently hued races of humanity had blended their genetic codes over the past thousand revolutions of the Earth around the sun. Or perhaps this was the style of the moment and such choices were easy to make. In any case, this might be a self-selected group not typical of the general population. Surely not everybody traveled in space, not even in near-Earth orbit.

She inspected them individually, but shifted her gaze so quickly that no one would think she was more than casually curious. There were men that she might have considered talking to, but gender politics probably were still in play, and often that evolved into questions she did not want to answer. Women, on the other hand, might also be interested in romance, but Asha thought she could tell if that was an issue, at least in part by the way in which the women grouped themselves or looked at other women. She picked out one that she thought might be a good person to get to know and managed to get into line just behind her when the door to the climber opened and the announcement came that it was time to board. The trip down the beanstalk would take several cycles, and there would be much to learn.

*   *   *

The climber was more comfortable than the cattle-car accommodations of the one on Terminal, whose beanstalk had been severed halfway to orbit. There were small rooms with berths and other conveniences for those who preferred isolation, comfortable chairs and couches and stanchions for aliens who did not sit, tables with built-in terminals and attachments for personal devices, restrooms with doors and self-cleaning service modules, a restaurant in one corner complete with menus and automated delivery, and even a bar in another corner providing drinks and other mood-altering substances.