Collected Short Fiction, page 295
When, over long cycles, the crisis passed, those who had founded the cities under the pressure of necessity saw Dorians, without predators and without challenges, relapsing into their former indolence and herd mentality and began a regime of recruitment and brutal training such as Tordor had experienced, with a system that set out to replicate the conditions that had produced the Grandorians. If nature could not be trusted to provide harsh necessity, the system would supply something similar.
Humans, Tordor learned, were more fortunate, if that was how planetary conditions might be termed: Earth was not as benign as Doria, and humans had competitors against which they had to struggle, along with more frequent moments of cosmic catastrophe and mutating radiation. Humans’ view of their environment was not that of benign Doria but, as one human poet described it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Fortunate because humans evolved through struggle, and their social systems evolved to ameliorate the pain of survival, not to replicate it. Their aggressive attitudes toward the Universe were innate rather than nurtured. Dorians, on the other hand, had to be brutalized before they adopted the aggressive attitudes of humans.
Tordor thought it was time to change. Perhaps the Grandor system was needed at one time, but Dorians had passed that point. Curiosity, learning, the need to achieve, could be instilled at an early age through programs of education. Battle skills and obedience to command could be developed through programs that emulated real conditions rather than replicated them. Dorians, he thought, could be more like humans.
He had only a part of a long cycle to retrain his crew. The lower-ranking crew members were as resistant as the officers. Like them, they had survived the Dorian survival-of-the-fittest system, and they would surrender their attitudes and their positions of privilege reluctantly if at all. The process was like re-training an abused animal: repeated kindnesses and frequent strokings are required to reverse a lifetime of avoiding predators and the blows of masters.
Slowly he was succeeding. Morale was higher. The crew seemed once more like his childhood herd, happy, responding better to requests than to orders, coming forward with suggestions, developing into a team rather than a group of individuals. There were reversions, to be sure, quarrels, batterings, surly responses, but those were growing progressively less frequent.
And then the war broke out.
No one ever knew what started the war or what was at stake. For long-cycles after the legendary galactic war, which probably was a series of wars initiated by a new emerging species, the star empires had worked at keeping the peace. And the uneasy truce that followed the human emergence had seemed a recognition of earlier folly. But it was a truce easily destroyed by a careless action, a misunderstood intrusion, a failure of communication. And then every empire turned upon every other.
Wars are mass confusion; no one knows who is winning until one side turns and runs or loses its will to continue and sues for peace. Only the historians are able to decide who came out ahead and on what terms, and they were often wrong. Interstellar wars are far more difficult to evaluate. News of battles comes only after long cycles, and even then the information is unreliable. How many of the enemy ships were destroyed? How were they identified? What had their mission been? How many ships did the Dorians or the other members of the Federation lose? What were their casualties? How many colonies were destroyed on each side, how many planets laid waste? How many replacement ships had been built? How many crews had been trained? Did the Federation have sufficient resources or the will to withstand the terrible drain of conflict?
Many long cycles would be required before any of this became clear. And even then it would be the triumph of one narrative over many.
At first the Dorian enemy was the humans. They were the newcomers, the troublemakers. The Dorian warships fell upon the humans near the Sirian frontier and destroyed their ships by the dozens. Tordor tried to stop the carnage, but he had no time after the orders came. And then the humans retaliated, their ships appearing in the midst of the Dorian ships out of wormholes the Dorians had not thought the humans knew. And wreaked havoc on the Dorian fleet. Only the superior organization of Tordor’s crew allowed the Ardor to survive, damaged as it was. The Ardor was the only ship in the fleet to emerge without a casualty, despite being in the midst of the action.
At first the high command accused Tordor and his crew of cowardice, but visual records proved the opposite. And then Tordor was given command of a fleet and told to attack the humans in return. Tordor disobeyed. He contacted the human fleet commander and spoke to her in his broken Terran and arranged a meeting. Face to face they worked out their differences, and Tordor returned to his superiors with the offer of peace. Again he was placed on trial for treason. He almost resorted, once more, to a personal challenge of the court, but refrained and argued his case with all the urgency and eloquence he could command.
Reluctantly the high command accepted the terms, and Doria allied itself with the humans against the Sirians and then with the humans and the Sirians against the Aldebarans, and with the humans, the Sirians, and the Aldebarans against the Alpha Centaurans, and by extension with the Federation itself. Finally, exhausted with battle, the Galaxy strewn with broken ships, broken worlds, and broken creatures, the Federation made a peace. Ten years of war, a thousand damaged planets, and a thousand million casualties, and nothing more. Never again, the members of the Federation vowed, would they go to war. Anyone who broke the peace would be turned upon by all the others. Boundaries were established, spheres of influence were agreed upon, mechanisms for settling disputes were created.
Tordor returned to Doria a hero, commander of a battle group that had won every engagement, the inventor of new strategies of command and tactics, but most of all, the crafter of peace. He thought he could challenge the high command. He thought his innovations in training and organization would provide a strategy for change. He thought he might even compete to be the successor to the High Dorian. But instead he was once more placed on trial for disobedience and treason, and escaped punishment only through the basic right of personal combat, a tradition that he had thought to consign to history. The high command had succeeded once more. It sometimes yields, but it never forgets. Doria had won but not in the Dorian way, and the high command, and Doria itself, was not ready to accept victory on any terms but those that emerged from its own traditions. It had used Tordor and now was prepared to throw him away.
Tordor did not blame the high command or Doria. He wasn’t good enough, he thought. He recognized his failings as a Dorian, as a sentient creature. Perhaps no one was good enough. Not on Doria, nor on any world. At least there was peace, and he decided to retire to a world at peace, to a Galaxy at peace, back to the fertile plains and sweet streams of his youth.
But that lasted only half a long cycle before he was summoned, this time to a meeting with the High Dorian himself in Grandor’s lofty spires. The High Dorian was alone in a room atop the tallest of the tall spires, as if getting far from the nourishing soil was a sign of elevation of soul, a denial of Dorian desire for the tug of their massive world and an affirmation of his title. Like all of the leaders Tordor had encountered, the High Dorian was massive and scarred by the wounds of many battles. He stood with his hindquarters to Tordor and stared out one of the many windows at the sun setting behind the mountains. The silence grew until at last the High Dorian said, not turning to face Tordor, “You think the Dorian way is wrong. You think you have been treated badly.”
“No worse than any other Dorian,” Tordor said.
“Dorians were blessed by a fortunate world with a benign sun, fertile plains, abundant water, and an absence of predators. And it would have remained that way until the end of time had it not been for the Great Catastrophe. And then the truth was revealed. The Universe does not love grazers.”
Tordor did not know where this encounter was going.
“Those who were forced to recognize this truth in their effort to survive understood that they had to change, and when the good times returned that they had to change the nature of Dorians themselves. If the natural order did not produce Dorians capable of competing for an appropriate position in the Galaxy, Dorians would have to do it themselves.”
“So “Tordor said, “we had to torture ourselves into an interstellar species.”
“And we succeeded,” the High Dorian said. “It has been worth the sacrifice. We have become leaders in the Federation. We have fulfilled the promise that Doria provided.”
“And yet?” Tordor asked.
“What do you know about Transcendentalism?”
Tordor hesitated. “Not much,” he said. “A silly rumor about a new religion.”
“Silly maybe. A rumor maybe. A new religion, yes. And new religions are always a danger to established truths.”
“Like Dorian dominance?” Tordor said.
“The Galaxy has just returned to normalcy.”
“Surely the peace has not been threatened so soon.”
“Peace is not so simple as a few words,” the High Dorian said. “The Federation had to set up a system to evaluate new inventions and their potential for creating change.”
“You just said that it was necessary for Dorians to change.”
“The change that Dorians achieved through self-transformation and that other species attained through another painful process they call evolution is threatened by a religion that promises instant transformation. And that means any species that claims its promise—if it exists—also has an advantage of every other. Transcendentalism is dangerous for that reason.”
“A religion?”
“A religion that includes a machine, a Transcendental machine that can produce perfection in any individual. A machine, if the rumors are true, that exists in the spiral arm next to ours, that no one from our spiral arm has ever visited.”
Tordor was silent for a moment. “There is a reason we are having this conversation.”
For the first time the High Dorian turned ponderously to face Tordor. “A ship is setting out from Terminal to search for the Transcendental machine. And you will be on it.”
“To do what?”
“Whatever is necessary,” the High Dorian said. “You will receive more detailed instructions during the journey to Terminal.”
“By whom?”
“That you will discover.”
The High Dorian turned back to his view of the setting sun. The meeting was over. Tordor was to go on a strange journey to a part of the Galaxy no person had ever visited, across great gulfs of space no ship had ever dared to enter, in search of a mystical object no one had ever seen, with a group of strangers whose purposes and motives no one could know.
But he could not help but wonder if the High Dorian or the high command had decided that he was a threat to them even in retirement. It did not matter. He had no choice but to find himself in this shabby waiting room on the planet aptly named Terminal with a group of shabby castoffs of a mixed-species Galaxy, each of them, like himself, with goals and motivations and secrets that were bound to end in conflict if not in death. And all in search of a machine that surely did not exist.
Well, he thought, perhaps this was the fate for which his troubled life had prepared him.
Arriving at Terminal: Xi’s Story
James Gunn’s memoir, Star-Begotten: A Life Lived in Science Fiction should be out any minute from McFarland and Company. It follows Mike Page’s book about Jim’s career from the same publisher, Saving The World Through Science Fiction, and the publication by Tor Books in June of Transformation, the third volume in the Transcendental trilogy. The two “Tales from the Transcendental” that you are about to read derive from this trilogy.
Xi looked quickly to either side before he left the comparative safety of the space-elevator climber for the unknown world of Terminal. The bare box of the climber and the absence of guards or law of any kind meant that he had to spend seven sleep periods in a corner with his self-protection senses alert for movements and approaches, and one hand on his knife. But Xi was born prepared for peril in enclosed spaces. He had evaluated his fellow passengers over the half a long cycle in the freighter that had brought them to the top of the elevator, and he knew which were too strong to be challenged and which were weak enough to kill. An alien planet with its unknown dangers was different, and this miserable planet at the end of nowhere fed into all Xi’s paranoias.
The distance between the platform at the foot of the elevator and the waiting room some hundreds of meters away was strewn with unknown perils. Xi had to cross a dark body of water on a bridge of untested safety and then the space carved out of a tropical jungle with its grotesque green and orange and blue vegetation, and, beyond the jungle, ranges of mountains that completely surrounded the primitive spaceport. Terminal was fecund and strange, so unlike Xi’s native Xifor and therefore to be feared. Except the mountains. He was from the mountains of Xifor, and it was the mountains that nourished strength and resentment. But Xi was in the unexplored valley of Terminal, where his destiny had delivered him. Here was where the dangerous quest began. Here was the opportunity to find the pardon from the death sentence that Xi had received when he was hatched.
Xi broke through his shell into a world that wanted him dead, that hated itself as much as it hated Xi. He was born knowing that the world was created to kill him, and that was what kept him alive the first cycle. He studied his environment with quick, apprehensive glances, the close areas first and then the rest. The nest seemed to be made of sticks bound together by some sort of cement that he later learned was hardened Xifora saliva. In the far distance was the outer rim of the amphitheater that enclosed the nest, and in the middle distance were the figures of other Xifora hatchlings roaming, competing for food, sometimes fighting among themselves. Xi knew instinctively that they were his siblings, and they would kill him if they had the chance. He cowered back over the remains of his shell and fell into a gap in the stick and mortar wall. He didn’t know it then, but he had earned a reprieve by two strokes of good fortune: he had been hatched close to the amphitheater wall, and he had found a hiding place from the deadly competition into which an unfair universe had thrown him. It was the last good fortune he did not fashion for himself.
Xi worked with his immature arms to remove sticks and stones to enlarge the recess into a tiny cave. From the sticks and the rocks, Xi concealed the entrance to his hideaway. In this surrogate egg, Xi rested from his birth struggles and nursed his strength until hunger drove him into the perilous outer world. When he emerged he was as strong as he was able to be, but he would always be smaller and weaker than his dozen fellow hatchlings. They were the lucky ones—the siblings that had been born a cycle or two earlier and gained an unfair advantage in the game of survival. But, as Xi learned early in his existence, everything was unfair in an unfair universe.
Every morning, Xi learned, food was dropped into the center of the nest by creatures unseen and unknown, perhaps the parents of the hatchlings, perhaps some governmental bureaucrats. The food consisted of chunks of unidentifiable meat and rotting vegetables. Part of the meat may have been parts of dead Xifora. Xi never learned because rushing toward the food was suicide for a small Xifora like him. Instead, while his siblings were fighting over the morning feast the first time a meal arrived, Xi came upon a part of a hatchling limb that had somehow escaped his hungry siblings, possibly when two of them had turned upon each other before they had finished eating. Xi dragged the food supply back to the cave. Anticipating disaster was Xi’s saving talent. He needed whatever help his apprehensive mind could provide.
The next time Xi ventured out of his cave, he was not as lucky. He lurked outside the battle for the morning food drop, hoping to be able to go unnoticed until the others had been satiated and had drifted away. But before that occurred, the largest of them turned to see Xi trying to make himself inconspicuous. In a couple of strides, the large hatchling had come within reach of Xi.
“Ah,” the large hatchling said. “This person has not seen you before, and this person will not see you again because you will be dead and eaten. You are small, but you will make a suitable meal.”
Xi thought of running, but he knew he was no match in speed or strength for his brother, whom he later learned was named Xivic. Instead he offered his left arm. Xivic grabbed it and tore it from Xi’s body. The pain was excruciating, but Xi blocked it from his mind, and while Xivic was holding the limb, Xi ran—not toward his hideaway, but toward the mound of food, and then dodged the other hatchlings to run toward the far wall. His siblings, unaware of his encounter, looked toward Xivic and then toward the food in front of them and went back to eating and squabbling among themselves and grumbling at Xivic when he tried to make his way through them. Finally, when even Xivic had lost interest, Xi circled back to his cave and cowered there, hungry and afraid, while his arm grew back. That took almost all the nutrients Xi had absorbed after hatching as well as from the partial limb he had found. The encounter left him more cautious than before. Now he always foraged for scraps at night.
One night Xi returned to his cave to discover a sibling that had lost two legs and an arm and had, apparently, pulled himself laboriously across the nest until he fell by accident into Xi’s sanctuary. In the open nest or in the cave he was doomed and incoherent much of the time from the pain of loss and the struggle of regrowth, but in moments of clarity he spoke what seemed like cryptic revelations.
“One is bad,” he said. “Two is dangerous. Three is fatal.”
He was speaking of limbs, Xi thought.
“Eat or be eaten,” the dying Xifora said.
This was the way of the nest.
“The fittest survive.”
That was the Xifora way, Xi learned. That was life and death in the nest, and existence on Xifor itself. For the hatchlings who survived it meant food and status, and for Xifor it meant stronger Xifora to withstand the enmity of a cruel universe. But what Xi had learned was that mind was as good as strength, and cunning was as good as aggression.
