Transgalactic Page 7

  He withdrew his hand and heard a soft roar behind him. Rory was still following, afraid, perhaps, to be left too far behind but equally afraid to follow into these areas of magical transformation. Riley moved toward the far wall. It opened to reveal a new compartment being created while he watched. Here, though, there were lumps and crevices growing in the floor, for which Riley could determine no need or function. Maybe, he thought, as he made his way around them to the far wall, they were intended for Rory through some kind of alien guess at the dinosaur’s needs. Rory, however, did not seem to welcome them. He waited in the far corridor. Perhaps the ship’s analysis was not perfect, or maybe it had to experiment until it found the right arrangements.

  The far wall did not open when Riley approached. Neither did the side walls. Apparently Riley had reached the limit of the ship’s adaptations or its willingness to admit him. Riley returned to the corridor. Unlike the others, it had not closed behind him. Rory’s presence, Riley thought, had kept it open. Rory moved ponderously aside as Riley approached and followed as Riley passed through the previous compartment, testing the walls there before he moved on to the wall through which he had entered. It opened as he approached. He found himself once more in what he had now identified as his living quarters. Here he turned to the left wall. As he moved toward it, the wall opened onto a corridor into a bare space that took shape as he watched.

  A panel extended itself from the far wall, a stool similar to the one in the compartment he had just left extruded itself from the floor in front of the panel, and a blank square of wall above the panel turned into something that looked as if it might be a window.

  Riley had found the control room.

  * * *

  Riley walked to the far side of the compartment and looked at the blank surface of what he had thought of as the control panel. It was a red, translucent enigma. Nothing was going to be easy.

  He lowered himself onto the stool, steadying himself with his right hand on the panel. Two things happened simultaneously: the saddlelike top of the stool adjusted itself to his bottom and clasped his hips in a firm embrace from which he could not extricate himself; and his right hand sank into the panel surface as if it were potter’s clay. He wiggled his hips and the stool’s grasp loosened. He was not going to be a prisoner. He lifted his hand and watched the handprint fill in. He put his hand back and the indentations returned, exactly matching his hand’s shape. He placed his left hand on the panel, and it, too, sank into the surface. He waited. Nothing happened.

  The window in front of him was dark. Perhaps it was like the window in what he thought of now as the dining area—a menu not for food but for navigation. He lifted his right hand and pushed it slowly into the window. His fingers met no resistance as they entered the space, but the window lighted up, not with enigmatic squiggles but with the shape and appearance of rocky ruins. After a moment Riley recognized them as the fallen walls and roof of the red sphere museum. The rocks and timbers seemed solid and real but Riley’s hand passed through them. And as it did he felt the compartment shift, not like the transformations of the ship that he had just experienced but as if the ship had moved.

  As Riley altered the position of his hand in the cabinet, new perspectives appeared, as if he could see a kind of progression from the floor of the building to the walls and then up the walls to the gaping roof and the sky above, looking almost real enough for him to touch. He touched the roof simulation. The ship lifted under him. He closed his hand around what he now thought to be a holographic projection, or something even more magical. The hole filled with bright sky, and Riley had the familiar feeling of acceleration. The saddlelike seat grasped him again in what he realized was a restraint against the forces that were moving the ship.

  The image of the open sky filled the space in front of him. Riley pressed his left hand down into the indentations on the panel, and he felt the ship move faster.

  They were free, rising with whatever strange engines the ship possessed, possibly with sufficient energy resources surviving from remote times to get them into space and maybe into the strange reality outside time and space that made possible interstellar travel. He thought briefly about the spectacle their ascent must have provided for Rory’s people, terrified beyond reason, or, perhaps, liberated from their long bondage to this relic of ancient guilt.

  Riley didn’t know how he was going to find a nexus point or navigate this ship into it, but he had begun to trust the ship and its symbiotic adjustments. Somehow, Asha, we will work it out, he thought, and heard a roar behind him. He turned. Rory stood against the far wall where the corridor had closed behind him, and it had closed around the dinosaur, holding Rory in a grip shaped to his rugged body. Rory roared again in savage protest.

  Riley would have to find a source of dinosaur food, he thought—and soon.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The human female Asha calls me by my homeworld name “Squeal,” but that would sound the same to every non-Squeal-world person. To us, of course, every name is different, and every name has meaning. In the human language that I am beginning to learn, my name is the equivalent of “Solomon,” or “wise man.” I belong to a family of scholars that has specialized in recording and interpreting the events and traditions of our world, an activity like that of human historians if that occupation included the duties of culture guardian, epic poet, and the oracle of revelations and visions.

  We are bound together, Asha and I, not by the ties of our traditional encounter and its ordained outcome as we should have been by all the customs and traditions of my world, but by the grasp of this accursed machine and the terror-filled experience into which it has launched us, ascending into the forbidden sky as the weight of our sacrilege pressed hard upon us. The horror of those endless moments will never leave me, even as I grow accustomed to the everyday reality of hurtling through blaze-filled emptiness, even as we seem to be floating motionless, without weight or substance, stranded far from home and the loving embrace of everything dear and meaningful.

  So, trapped in this tiny metal cylinder from which there is no exit and no termination, like the close-of-life fate that awaits us all, we talk, Asha and I, thrown into each other’s constant company by the narrow confines of our vessel. We learn each other’s languages, histories, and worldviews. Asha teaches me what she calls “Galactic standard,” which is a bastard blend of many languages with equivalents for sounds that some alien voice equipment find difficult or impossible. Language, she says, is the sum and confirmation of sapience, the treasure house of our wisdom and being, and the source of the frustrations that keep us from achieving our ultimate perfection.

  Asha talks a lot about perfection.

  We Squeal people, however, know perfection. Perfection is a world of just enough, where everybody receives sufficient food and adequate protection from weather and the night, where there is never anything left over to accumulate and nurture the sins of acquisition and status, where the traditions of the past blend without break into the actions of the present, where everyone has a place and everyone knows and accepts that place, where the connections between people are determined by tradition and physiological response, not by competition. Perfection is knowing where you came from and why you are here and why things are the way they are.

  My people were created by a benign god saddened by anger, hatred, and destruction. So we were brought into existence, the Squeal people, happy, blessed, and peaceful. Until a vengeful rival god, outraged that we had achieved what only the gods may enjoy, dragged our world into his fiery domain. And still, by maintaining our happy attitude, by accepting our world the way it is, by refusing to dignify the victory of the rival god by looking at the sky, the Squeal people have remained true to themselves and to their creator.

  Asha tells me another story. The Squeal people were not created; they “evolved,” she says, from less complicated forms of existence through a process that she calls “natural selection,” and the Squeal people could not have evolved
in the “radiation-filled” space near the center of the galaxy. The Squeal world had to have begun its existence in a quieter area of space where it could acquire and preserve an atmosphere, with its protection against “radiation,” and been dragged into its present position after the Squeal people had attained their present condition—dragged, that is, not by a vengeful god but by a passing body of great nothingness, a “black hole,” she calls it, or by the collision of “galaxies,” vast groupings of something she calls “stars” that sometimes, over the vast ages and even vaster reaches of space, cross paths, that caught up not only the Squeal world but the sun that nurtured it and the other worlds that had formed around it. We have legends of a sun in the sky. We know that it is up there, though we do not look at it. We know that it brings day to our world, the day that hides the dreadful night. Perhaps that sun we do not look at is the god who created us. Asha says that this is a metaphor, that the sun of our mythology is the source of our being.

  Maybe it is so. Asha knows a great many things, including how to direct this vessel to move through the terrible place that all Squeal people must shun and how to talk to the spirit that lives within the vessel and obeys her commands. But I think that her story is no better than mine and no more likely to be true.

  We must leave this fiery place as soon as we can, she says. The ship is protected against the “radiation” of the galaxy center, but it cannot resist greater explosions when worlds or suns get eaten by the nothingness at the heart of the galaxy or when suns explode. Just, she says, as the Squeal people must conquer their fears of the sky and learn how to travel through it as we do now. We must listen, she says, to the large, misshapen creature from the stars that she calls a “Dorian,” who is a representative of a group of alien creatures, some like himself but many with different shapes, cultures, and histories. They are the masters of space, she says, and they have sent the Dorian to help us join them. It will be my duty, she says, when she has reached her destination, to return to my world with the knowledge and skills to master my new role as the prophet of a new vision and the wisdom and courage to lead my people out of their willful blindness to an acceptance of their true condition as citizens of the galaxy.

  But it seems to me that the Dorian and the creatures who sent him want to trade our happiness for their informed misery, to make us driven like themselves from an acceptance of things as they are to a ceaseless struggle for things as they might be. And yet, Asha says, we cannot survive as we are. Perhaps, I tell her, we should be content with whatever fate awaits us. I am not sure I am the one to lead my people into a new life. I am a scholar, not a leader. And yet, Asha says, she has chosen me according to my own sacred traditions. When we moved from the sacramental fountain to this cursed machine, I was chosen by Asha and the gods to lead my people from their happy acceptance into a troubled discontent.

  The reality, as we see it, is far different. It was she who appeared in the magical fountain as promised by our legends. It was she who had the responsibility to choose a suitor and, when he had attained his gender identity, consummate their union in the fountain. The legends are silent about what happens next. Perhaps at that moment the world as we know it will end and Squeal and everything on it will be transformed into a state of eternal bliss far from the burning sky.

  But, Asha says, none of that is true. The magical fountain is a transportation device like the vessel in which we travel, and out of it ancient devils once appeared. But that cannot be so. The magical fountain does not move, and out of it comes salvation, not beings from another world. Proof lies in the fact that Asha is like us, but different, as, indeed, salvation must arrive. She accepts our rituals, yet she transforms them. She accepts me as a suitor, yet she does not consummate our relationship to fulfill the meaning of our myths, but instead explains them, as if explanation changes reality. What are we to be saved from? she asks, and I reply, From the demon god who dragged us to hell!

  Oh hell! she says. If indeed we were perfect, if our happy acceptance were real, we would not need salvation. What we must be saved from is our fears of the night sky, our fears of looking up, our fears of travel through space. The Squeal people can only thrive by doing as the misshapen emissary says, building ships that leave this world, and joining that group of creatures, like the Dorian, who travel between the stars.

  What are stars?

  They are suns, Asha says, but so far apart that they look like points of light. There are billions of them in our local group alone, and they are gathered together in clumps called galaxies, and there are billions of galaxies.

  And all of them have creatures who live on worlds around them? I ask.

  Only a few, she says, but out of billions a few is a great many.

  Such a waste, I say. But I am thinking that her story does not make any sense. Why should there be all these “stars” with worlds and only a few are suitable for life, and none of them is as happy as Squeal?

  She goes on as if she had heard my thoughts. The universe, she says, by which she means the everything of everything, was not created for the living, thinking creatures who exist within it. Life is an accident, perhaps an inevitable consequence of the conditions that came into being at the birth of the universe, but an accident of that birth. And because it was an accident, it occurred only where conditions were right for it to happen. Those were unusual conditions, but they happened because there were so many places where they could happen. The places where life produced thinking, self-aware creatures were even fewer, but they, too, happened because of the same proliferation.

  You have a scheme, I say, that says the Squeal people and creatures like us, like you, like the Dorian, have no purpose. Accidents have no meaning.

  Even an accident can find meaning, Asha says. She is passionate in a way that she is not when it comes to fulfilling her responsibilities to us and to the world to which she was sent. The transcendent occurrence of life becoming intelligent and self-aware means that it, and it alone, can do what nothing else in the universe can do; it can seek understanding and provide meaning. Just consider a universe of mindless forces acting upon each other in mindless ways, and out of this welter of forces emerges, by accident, a creature or group of creatures equipped to consider all of this and attempt to understand the ways in which things happened and the causes of things and to consider its own existence. Without that understanding the entire universe is merely a grand display that nobody observes and nobody understands.

  I honor her passion even as I reject her vision.

  And it is our responsibility, she says more quietly, as accidents of evolution, to get better at the one thing we are equipped to do, and to improve ourselves so that we can do it as well as we possibly can.

  Our conversation is interrupted by our arrival at what Asha calls a “nexus,” a place where the fabric of space has been parted to allow material objects like this vessel to pass through from one point to another far away. There are a few natural nexuses, she says, but they are scattered randomly, and where they allow a vessel to emerge is also random. The nexuses she seeks were created by ancient wizards to allow them to become a star civilization, and now, although they died in spite of their wizardry, their star bridges remain for lesser civilizations to use.

  She performs her ritual at the altar she calls a control panel, and the horror begins! Even the terror-filled world of the vessel in which we travel dissolves around us, and we find ourselves in a world that could only exist in a troubled mind. It is a world of nothing, of no thing, and we float in it, unsupported, detached, turned inside out, scattered, while invisible particles hurtle through us from everywhere, every impact inflicting pain!

  If I could think I would think that this horror will never stop, and it goes on and on.…

  CHAPTER NINE

  I find myself in this place that changes around me. More like dream than life. Nothing that has happened to me in the world I know has prepared me for the wrongness of where I am and what is going on. Bad things happen
to people. Prey turns into predator. Trails turn into traps. Play turns into angry bites. People get hurt, get sick, die. This is the way life is. Being inside a cave that moves, with walls that melt, without the crunch of leaves and soil beneath one’s claws, without the smell of growing and rotting things in one’s nose, can break a person’s hold on the way things are. Things that happen like this come only after death. I wonder if I have died.

  The creature who calls himself Riley says that this is not so. This is a ship, a vessel like my boat, built by creatures like me but with different shapes and minds who are long dead. This strange boat has walls on all sides to keep the waters out and air inside. It was built, Riley says, with materials that never grew and never die, and it flies in the air like the dinosaurs who fly instead of walk or climb, only beyond the air, where the stars are. I do not understand “beyond the air” or “stars.” These are not real things.

  But then this vessel is not a real thing. It is a sacred object, a shape like no other shape, that has been a central part of my people’s lives forever, something to be shunned, worshipped from afar like the pyramid that contains the spirit of our mighty ancestor, but feared as nothing in our lives is feared. My people are afraid of nothing but this. Riley says we fear it because it is different. It does not belong here. It was made. It came here from another world. I do not understand. How can there be another world? Riley says there are many worlds with suns like ours and creatures on them like us, only different like him, and they make flying boats, like this one, that travel between worlds. I do not understand why they would want to do this. Is there food there and they are hungry?