Pilgrims to Transcendence, page 5
His father had emigrated there with his new bride and his dreams of a better life. Jef Riley had built a greenhouse and a hydroponic farm with his own hands, and prospered for a time, selling vegetables to new arrivals before he decided, in a fit of hubris, to try dry-land farming and lost everything. In desperation, he volunteered for the Interstellar Guard. He drilled for a month a year and for two days every month. He was promised that the Guard would never be called up except for defense of Mars.
Riley had worked inside the greenhouse and on the shifting red Martian soil, and before and after work his mother schooled him with computer programs and video lessons. He loved the freedom, loved the new world, loved his mother, who was strong and beautiful, but hated the labor and his father’s folly, not realizing until much later that his father had cherished the same dream as his son—to get free, to be better than he was, to surpass his own limitations, like the oxygen tanks that, unlike his son, he had to carry with him outside the home. All Riley could see then was the need to get away from the farm, from Mars even, and to take Tes with him.
But Tes had been the first to volunteer as soon as she was sixteen and had been killed, like his father, in the first battles of the interstellar war. Riley had already been accepted for the Solar Institute of Applied Science, and his mother insisted he go. There had been enough death, she said; it was time to build, not to destroy. He had gone, not unwillingly but saddened, trying to make sense out of catastrophic change, trying to hate the aliens who had killed his father, his sweetheart, and his dreams. He was tortured by unanswerable questions: Why had the wars occurred? Why had the aliens attacked? There were so many of them and so few humans. Why should they want to destroy humanity? How could humanity resist? Was there any hope for it to survive?
It was difficult to focus on studies when the war raged through outer space, when media reports depicted attacks and victories and strategic withdrawals, complete with explosions and gouts of flame and the terrible faces of aliens looming out of the melee, brandishing weapons, or scattered across a barren battlefield like harvested grain. But Riley persisted, transferring to the classroom and laboratory the anxieties of wartime.
Sharn had visited him in the recovery room, checking on his arm. Yes, it had been his arm she replaced, and in demonstrating its strength he had pulled her, unresisting, into his hospital bed. She came to him often after that, and he found that her fingers were good for more than working a surgical machine. Her body was trained and supple and responsive, and her mind was quick and perceptive. They talked more than they made love.
They talked about humanity’s dreams of reaching the stars and the great ache in the heart of every human at the discovery that the stars belonged to someone else. That was what the wars were all about, Sharn thought: the battle for real estate. That was what all human wars had been about, she said, and the interstellar wars were no different. Good land was always scarce, and planets of the right size, atmosphere, and the right distance from their suns were even scarcer. If humanity wanted any, if they wanted a future, they would have to take it from those who had it.
Riley didn’t agree. “A classical humorist once said, ‘Buy land. They ain’t making any more of it.’ But they are. We made Mars livable, and we’re working on Venus and Ganymede. Every system I ever visited had habitats. Mined-out asteroids, most of them. People living there, being born there, growing up there. Soon that’s all they’ll know. Lot of advantages to habitats. People don’t need planets. They can make their own living space—sometimes better than the real thing.”
“But it’s not land,” Sharn insisted. “It’s artificial, and sooner or later the people, or creatures, who live in them are going to become just as artificial.”
Riley pointed out that she was living and working in a habitat, and she replied that she hated it. And anyway, she said, if it wasn’t land, what were the wars about?
Fear, Riley said, and misunderstanding. The aliens had been coexisting for a long time—many thousand long-cycles—before humanity came out. The basic fear was of difference. How can you trust someone or something totally unlike you, truly alien? You don’t know what they think or what they feel, or even if they think or feel the way we understand those terms. Then there was the fear of inferiority. Was some other species smarter, more inventive, more powerful, more aggressive? The aliens—the various galactics—had learned to live with that. But humanity was the joker. It could be anything from potential slaves to potential workers to potential conquerors, and the long-cycles truce that had kept peace in the galaxy for many generations broke down. Now the truce had been reinstated.
After how many billions dead? Sharn asked. And how many worlds ruined?
But will it last? Riley said. He flexed his new arm, and they made love again.
That was their last good time. It wasn’t the disagreement about interstellar policy or even war—he hated that more than she did—it was her growing fascination with Transcendentalism and his release from the recovery ward and his growing realization that he was finished and the world was finished with him. There was no role for a battered veteran turned adventurer in a galaxy organized to minimize adventure, or a role for a warrior in a galaxy bent on peace at all costs. And no role for a diplomat who had killed too many aliens and bore their wounds on the shell of his body, and inside.
If he had grown moody and combative, if he had tried to ease his pain with ceuticals smuggled out of the pharmacy, if he had quarreled with Sharn too often and resisted her pleas to become the person she had first known, that she knew he once had been, the person who dreamed of something better—then her leaving him would have been understandable. But the way it happened—with no explanation, no apparent reason—was not.
No, the darkness was still total. His senses were still dead.
It was a hell of a universe: a galaxy divided uneasily between alien species that once had sworn war to the death now trying to find a way to coexist; technology beyond humanity’s dreams, some the product of human ingenuity, some modified from alien sources; and all of it used to distract, to divert, to suppress, to maintain. Riley had joined many expeditions into the unknown; he had met dozens of adventurers like himself, most of them now dead, and dozens of creatures with innovative ideas about how to do better, be better, improve conditions and possibilities for everybody... and all of them defeated and few, if any, still alive.
He had been one of them, in the early days. He had worked his way through the Institute as assistant to a succession of brilliant scientists. He had studied mathematics and computer science and physics and astronomy; he had immersed himself in comparative cultures and alien art, and, most of all, in space-time engineering. He had imagined himself a diplomat or an inventor, making peace or a better future, but he had been assigned as navigator and gunnery officer in a two-person, unarmored speed-ship captained by a reclusive aristocrat from Earth named Hamilton Jones. Together they had harassed the alien battleships and strafed ground forces until, inevitably, they had been hit in a battle of undiscriminating missiles and he had been pulled from the wreckage, more dead than alive, and put back together after a year in a military hospital.
There was no use for a shattered warrior, and he was discharged. He drifted from job to job and dive to dive until he was recruited as a mercenary, trained in a dozen different ways to kill a creature silently and undetectably. He was sent to scout alien intentions on alien worlds until, on his fifth assignment, he was captured by creatures he could hardly identify as sapients and tortured. Eventually he was ransomed and restored to what the doctors called a state of health. After that his employers lost faith in him, or maybe in his luck. They told him he would be taken care of, but as soon as he was able to walk they let him go, to find his own way in the universe. He was always going to be damaged. The way to a better future seemed permanently closed.
Humanity, like Riley himself, had ventured out to claim new worlds and discovered they were already owned by someone else. And like humanity, Riley had found himself broken by uncounted battles, lost or won. Humanity might survive; it was resilient, and perhaps it could learn to be tolerated like all the other species in the galaxy. But he could see no future for himself. He had left too many parts of himself in a dozen battles on a dozen worlds, each of them vital to the welfare of humanity, each of them inconclusive, each of them meaningless. He had lost an arm in one, a leg in another, an eye in a third—each replaced after hospitalization. He was no worse for all his experience except for wounds the surgeons could not reach and the chiatrists could not cure. His only remedy was to drown them in one illusion or another. Maybe that was what Sharn had seen in him and despaired. And maybe that was what had led him to the sim tanks.
Out of the darkness words came at last, words without sound, words that took shape inside his head.
The disembodied voice was everywhere and nowhere. “We have a job for you.”
“Who is ‘we’?” Riley asked but he could not hear his own voice.
“That information is unnecessary; receiving it is unwise.”
Riley could not tell if the words that formed in his head belonged to a man or a woman, or a machine. They were devoid of emotion, uninflected. “How can I hear your words when there is no sound? How can you hear my words and I cannot?”
“Unimportant.”
“Where am I?”
“Meaningless.”
“So is your job offer. I’m not available.”
“We know what you are.”
“Then you know more than me.”
“You are a man who has lost himself along with parts of himself.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You have sought forgetfulness in many ways, all in vain.”
Riley was silent, or whatever passed for silence in his isolation.
“But we believe in redemption. We believe in your redemption.”
“You have more faith than I have. But what’s the job?”
“You will join a pilgrimage starting from Terminal in some sixty cycles.”
“A pilgrimage to where?”
“That is part of your job. To find out.”
“A pilgrimage has to have a goal.”
“It seeks the shrine of the Transcendentals.”
“But no one knows where that is.”
“Until you find out.”
“And how will I do that?”
“You will accompany the pilgrimage until it reaches its destination.”
“And how will the pilgrimage know where to go?”
“Most on the ship will not, but we have information that the Prophet will be among the pilgrims.”
“The Prophet?”
“Whoever it is who announced the new Transcendental religion.”
“And who is that?”
“We do not know. That, too, you will discover.”
“Maybe the Prophet doesn’t know where to go. Maybe the whole thing is as illusory as all other religions. Maybe it’s all supernatural.”
“That, too, you will discover.”
“How do you prove a negative? If the pilgrimage gets nowhere, does that mean there is no shrine? That the Prophet was not aboard? That the Prophet was aboard but has forgotten where the shrine is? That the Prophet was aboard but discovered my presence or the presence of others and decided not to lead us to the shrine...?”
“Your job is to see that the pilgrimage reaches the shrine, if it exists. False religions are as dangerous as real ones.”
“You don’t ask much for your money!” Riley said as dryly as he could, without words to speak. “Since you speak of money, how much is this job worth?”
“Money is irrelevant.”
“To you maybe. But you have to remember: I’m a used-up soldier of fortune.”
“We did not speak of it, but you will be rewarded.”
“Like how?”
“Funds have been deposited to your account. They will pay for your expenses with a sizable sum left over. If you are successful, you will have your choice of a habitat, a livable moon, or an estate on a favorable planet.”
“You seem sure I will accept.”
“You have no choice. Your family is gone....”
“Except my mother,” Riley said.
“She, too. You have not heard yet, but she was killed in the last alien attack on Mars and the planet itself was destroyed before the battle fleet was turned back in one of the crucial engagements of the war.”
Riley’s mind went blank. There was not even the illusion of sound for several moments.
“I thought I was beyond feeling pain. I was wrong.”
“These are facts. Sharn has left you....”
“What do you know about that?”
“Everything. We had to be sure you were the right person for the job.”
Resentment filled Riley’s mind. He would have tasted bile if he had been capable of tasting anything. “Why do you expect me to accept?”
“Because of the kind of person you are.”
“You have abducted me. You have raped my past. You plan to control me. Why should I want to work for you?”
“Because of the kind of person you are.”
“You think you know me.”
“Yes. You, too, were once in love with transcendence, but life has wounded you and disillusioned you, and now you long to immerse yourself in a task that will consume you once again. What better task than this? Adventure, violence, romance, adversaries, little chance of success, even of surviving.... This is what you were looking for on Dante. And this is a search for transcendence—the goal that you thought you had abandoned.”
“Maybe you do know me,” Riley said. “But what makes you think I have any chance at all.”
“We have given you an advantage.”
“What?”
“First of all, you will know more about the pilgrimage than any of the others. Second, you have a new pedia.”
“A new pedia?” He remembered that the back of his head hurt, when he could still feel.
“An advanced model. Perhaps one of a kind. It is many times as powerful as any predecessor.”
“In what way?” Riley tried to think skeptically.
“It has a massive storage capacity stuffed with information and sensory extensions that make other senses seem pallid by comparison.”
“And you have implanted this without my permission, without my agreement to take this job?”
“We had no time for fine distinctions.”
“And why shouldn’t I have this thing yanked when I turn you down?”
“That would be fatal.”
After a silence that stretched into a gulf, Riley said, “Fatal?”
“The new pedia is a biological computer that establishes its own network throughout the brain. Therefore it not only is impossible to remove, the attempt leaves the brain damaged beyond repair. On the other hand, you will find the pedia so powerful you would feel only half a person without it, if survival was a possibility.”
“Yeah?” Riley replied, contemplating the thing in his head like a metastasizing cancer—if it existed. “If this is so great, why doesn’t everybody have one?”
“Something like this, if it became generally available, has the potential to upset the balance of power in the galaxy, and if more than one were implanted the technology could spread beyond a few chosen users to many, and then beyond humanity to aliens, or, if aliens discovered that it exists, they might join to eliminate humanity before it achieves a unique advantage.”
“All that is”—a word appeared in his mind—“Machiavellian.”
“Machiavelli’s advice to his prince was aimed at giving his masters an advantage. Our goal is to maintain the status quo.”
“And that is why you want me to sabotage the pilgrimage.”
“Not sabotage. First of all, you will discover if there is any truth to the rumors. If a practical method of transcendence exists, humanity must have equal access, or it must be destroyed. Destruction may be safer.”
“If it exists, how do you propose I destroy it—whatever it is?”
“You are an ingenious man. You will think of something.”
“And if it is only another religious myth?”
“Even myths can be powerful. Maybe more powerful than the reality. If you discover who the Prophet is, you will kill him.”
“It’s a person?”
“It may be an alien.”
“Death is pretty final.”
“Millions have died already. Better one should die than many millions more. Think how many died in the name of the ancient prophet Christ.”
“As I recall—” he did recall—“he was killed.”
“Prophecy is a risky business. For the prophet and for those who believe in the prophecy.”
“I repeat: who is this ‘we’ who makes these decisions, not just for me but for everybody?”
“As we said before, that is unimportant, and it would be unwise for you to know.”
“Well then, what gives you the right to make these decisions for humanity?”
“All of that is irrelevant. We are the sole possessors of the knowledge; we have the means; that gives us the right. You have your instructions and the resources to carry them out.”
“One last question: who else knows about the pilgrimage and the Prophet?”
