Transcendence (49 page)

And there it was.

A tap against the side of her helmet. “The entrance!” Jack said.

Janus turned her head in the glass globe to face him. Something was wrong. Something tugged at her consciousness; she wasn’t ready to enter yet. Not yet, not while something still pursued her. She couldn’t enter the most sacred of places while still tethered to the past. She couldn’t drag crap in there with her; that would be like bringing the desire for something else into a lover’s bed.

“
You go ahead,” she said. “I forgot something.”

“
In the pod?” Jack scowled. “Have you lost your mind?”

“
Don’t be a retro,” Janus said. “I forgot something outside. You know, when we took off the rope. I’ve got to go get it.”

“
Now? Janus, just look!”

She took one step back from him and one step closer to the entrance. The wall seemed to melt in the shape of a two-meter arch, creating the image of an open doorway. But she saw no edges and not even an interior. Within the entranceway, earthen hues shifted and coalesced; Janus drew a sharp breath and shook her head as she began to feel herself drawn inside.

She turned to Jack and bumped helmets. “I’ll join you as soon as I can. Go inside. If you don’t, I’ll not forgive you.”

“
You need a moment alone. I understand.” He blinked once, slowly. “Don’t forget this is what you want.” He smiled and turned away.

Without so much as a hesitation, Jack walked into the entranceway. Janus couldn’t really separate him from the roiling colors at first, and when she finally did, he was gone.

She sighed and flicked on her commline. Stars and Neptune threw up a sheet that blocked the Great House from view. Jack no longer stood near her, nor anywhere on the pillar. Janus smiled and shook her head, cherishing her nearness to the object; she lay both her hands adoringly upon its surface. Within, Jack waited.

A wispy wind hissed across the seal between Janus’ helmet and collar-clasp. She turned away from the globe and faced the crater. There it was, the cyborg, halfway up the slope leading to the pillar where she and and object stood.

Now her vision narrowed so that she saw only the man-shaped form; the rest of the universe throbbed unseen at the edges. She held it at the center of her attention, fixing him as would a missile’s targeting AI. In five minutes, it will be there, she told herself, tracing Eyes’ trajectory; in ten, there. I will meet him in fifteen minutes. Janus initialized a program she never believed she would have to use; now was the time.

She walked a short arc around the globe, found the discarded rope and climbing equipment, and ran the rope through a carabiner as had Jack. The three-barbed hook hung easily from her belt. Janus looped rope around her waist until both ends were of equal length, bonded the carabiner to her suit, then set the piton into the ice and looped through its eye one end of the rope. Slowly, Janus descended the pillar, letting out only enough slack to allow her to take another step down. Though the gravity was minimal, a fall from such a height onto the ice and rock below could still injure or kill. Once she reached the crater, the cyborg was still ten minutes away.

“
Come on, come on,” she whispered to the figure as it slipped onto one knee. She smiled and handled the hook at her hip.

Janus just remembered to shut down her card when a flicker of light lanced across her vision; the burnout program was really beginning to accelerate now. Miguel, with his sad eyes, had brought home a small, yellow cellophane packet one day. “I bought this for you,” he had said, “but don’t ever use it,
vida mia
. I could never earn enough to buy you a new card.”

“
I’m sorry, dear Miguel. I can’t destroy him while we fight on his battlefield. I’ve practiced killing a man for twenty years. Now is the time.”

Occasionally, small pricks of electrical discharge directly into the soft mass within her skull interrupted her preparations. But she was ready in seven minutes. The card would be a lifeless jumble of synthetics by the time Eyes was within personal comm range.
Just let him go in there now
, she thought, and a painful smile creased her cheeks.

Janus picked up the hook by its handle and climbed a few meters up the slope of the crater, tossing a self-bonding piton at the end of the rope and using it to steady herself, as Jack had done. She found the spot she had chosen and began chopping a rough platform on which to stand.

A last painful crackle at the base of her neck, and she felt no more from her card. Eyes fell again, this time sliding back several meters before his frantic hands found sturdy cracks. She realized he had just tried to penetrate her card and had found only chaos.

“
Stupid, filthy bastard,” she whispered; droplets of saliva landed on the inside of her helmet. “I won’t be killing you. You’ll be doing it. Only a stupid bastard would have followed me. Come on.”

And she waited. The cyborg’s backslide earned her an extra few minutes, which she used to make some final preparations.

Although feeling weaker—not physically, because that no longer had any value, but mentally, as if his thoughts were growing quiet—Miru began to see something.

He concentrated. No, not sight, he told himself. He made up a new term:
spectrasense
. By focusing every sense-receptor in his brain and coordinating them in an effort to observe his surroundings, Miru earned glimpses of things he couldn’t really understand.

The process reminded him of a time when he was a boy, sitting on the tile floor of the Island’s civic hall, where all the citizens were supposed to gather intheflesh once a month; even so, about half still appeared as 3VRDs. Rolling a ball along the seams between the black and green tiles, young Miru noticed that four of the rectangular black tiles together formed an anchor-shape. He smiled when he noticed that, and continued staring in order to feel the pleasure of discovery again. The anchor stretched wider, then formed into a box. The box sprouted tiles in all four directions, and then each sprout made a larger anchor, and each larger anchor became a great box, and so on until the box extended all around him and his mind reached overload. Then he found himself looking at only an anchor once more.

He felt that way again, although this time the pattern he was glimpsing was something much more complicated. Whereas the tiles formed a two-dimensional series of repeated shapes, this specrasense of his worked to discern something three-dimensional.

He tried to be logical yet open-minded when he came to this conclusion.
The only way to do any research here
, he thought,
is to accept anything
.
Down may be up
, he thought;
up is sideways.
I must re-educate myself out of animal instincts. They are not useful here. They are hindrances
.

He cleared his mind and thought only of observing, shutting out all thought.

A tantalizing flash pierced Miru’s mind, as of a city surrounding him, its internal structure a vast interwoven network of red cables or braces or skyways. Perhaps veins, he thought. But when he tried to put what he saw into a slot he understood, the image vanished.

After nothingness replaced the city, his mind continued to process the information. Now he remembered that it had smelled of copper and sweat, tasted of fish; he had brushed up against something warm and vibrating, and he thought he remembered a great chatter of distant voices and the sound of wind.

Once more he quieted his thoughts and tried to observe. After a certain time, he sensed what he labeled “the city” again, and again it vanished almost as soon as he perceived and identified it.

Time.
Time is meaningless here
, he told himself; humans think linearly because they live and evolved on the surface of a world. Hindered by gravity and a lack of wings and gills, we only recently began to stretch up to the sky and down beneath the water, and then only briefly. He thought of how Ryukyu Submerged Island had seemed like an entirely different object when viewed from beneath the waves; it became a metal and plastic bubble bobbing in the ocean, a mere ship like the thousands that arrived and departed every day from the rings of salt-crusted docks. Later, from an orbital craft’s telescopic camera, it had looked to Miru like no more than a silver spot dimpling a thin sheet of greenish-blue.

He tried to think like that—in three dimensions.

A startled shout shattered his concentration. The sound that was more than a sound passed through him. He felt as if he might dissolve in its wake. Sound here, he realized, can be as deadly as a wind to a lighter’s flame. He had to scurry mentally to keep himself in order; he had continually to point to places in his psyche and say,
That is me
.

*Is someone there?* Miru asked. The screaming persisted. As it trailed off, Miru found the energy to ask again.

*Hello?
*
The other responded with a question; the word seemed much louder than Miru’s thoughts.

*Are you the builder of this object?
*
Miru asked.

*No. My name is Pehr Jackson,* the other said. *Who are you? What’s happening in here?
*

Miru was elated. He was also confused, since he couldn’t perceive how the voice sounded, because he didn’t really
hear
anything. He could not even identify the speaker’s language. Yet he knew the words; the conversation was simply translated in his mind.
An alien was communicating with him!

Miru again felt the old wonderment of the universe, the magic of childhood: stars glittering down through scattered light and sheets of fog and the orange haze emitted by the Island, tiny ancient lights unaffected by the byproducts of humankind; luminescent fish swarming through the black-stained waters near the Island; a grey and dying reef populated by a million little swimming and eating things—each of these alive against all odds, nature’s unwillingness to be defeated without making the victor vanquished. And, trapped alone within an alien artifact that might never let him leave, Miru felt no fear; never again in his life would there be such an experience as this, so to die would be a small sacrifice to witness the awesome first-hand.

*I am a human,* he said with the greatest dignity he could manage. *My title is Project Hikosen Director Liu Miru. I have been studying this artifact.
*

*You’re that TritonCo scientist, the one who told us about your find. Why can’t I see you?
*

Miru now recognized the name. Pehr Jackson. Not an alien. He felt mildly disappointed. But at least he would now have a partner in exploration.

*You are one of the EarthCo warship soldiers who were about to attack the project,* Miru responded. *So you did not attack, after all, since you are here with me.
*

*I’m
ashamed
to admit that we weren’t able to stop our crazy bombardier from firing the torpedo, but we didn’t damage the artifact. I’m sure you know that already, since you’re still alive. Even so, I extend my deepest apologies.
*

A brief pause. Miru was not ready to respond to an apology yet. What kind of captain cannot control his bombardier? He felt an old, creaky anger rise up between the two of them.

*What happened to my body?
*
Jackson asked. The voice sounded farther away. *I can’t seem to
. . .
well, do anything. I can’t move or see or anything.
*

*I’m trying to understand that myself,* Miru answered. *Perhaps we can help one another. When you found the object, did you see my body?
*

*No. It may have been
. . .
vaporized. I didn’t see any trace of your body. I assumed we both entered physically.
*

Miru didn’t answer. He was too preoccupied by the word, “vaporized.” *You say you can’t see anything right now?
*

*I
. . .
I don’t know. I thought, at first when I stepped through the wall, that I saw
. . .
I don’t know. Something.
*

*A city?
*

*What?* Jackson asked. *I can hardly hear you.
*

*A city,* Miru repeated, directing his thoughts with as much energy as he could muster toward the speaker’s locus.