Transcendence (70 page)

“
Oh, Jonathan,” she says, “maybe I can help you now.”

The transformation terrifies him.
This is worse
, he thinks. His hands begin to shake, so he holds them together. The skin is tough and stretched tight over bone.

He steps away from the mirror. His eyes clamp shut, his teeth clank together like a vise. He feels as if he’s about to turn around and lash out at this woman who raised his hopes up so high on such a good day, only to reach a peak where she ripped away the 3VRD virtuality and left him suspended thousands of meters above rocks. What could he do but fall? Or whip around and grab that plastic liar by the throat to keep from falling, at least until she breathes no more. Then, at least, he wouldn’t die alone.

“
No!” he shouts, and begins to run. He’s never intentionally hurt any girl—or woman—and isn’t about to start now. The tall, dry grasses lash his face as he rushes through them. He feels his eyes water as dust shakes loose, and the watering begins to break the barrier within.

“
No, no,” he says as he begins to cry.
I can’t cry, I can’t, I’ll die, the whole world’ll crack open and swallow me up
.

But as his body shakes and cramps as he fights to stifle long-restrained sorrow, the earth remains intact. So intact that it thumps him hard on the shoulder as he allows himself to fall and curl up to cry. He isn’t worried about anything—Nooa’ll protect me, and Charity’s already done her worst.

He cries, long sobbing heaves, and he fights against them nearly as strongly. He becomes clear to himself. He can’t purge the image of that small, frightened boy from his head, that dirty faced, old-man boy. He realizes he’s made of nothing but fear and anger. Fear and anger at the world,
at everyone I know, at my goddamned self
. As he lay curled into a ball, he sees himself as a wad of loneliness and friendlessness and hopelessness, a tiny chunk of nothing isolated from all the other fragments of humanity by the nothingness of life on Earth.

“
Fuck this!” he shouts, and punches the grass-matted earth. “Fuck this.” The tears gradually subside, and he feels foolish lying on the dirt. Jonathan brushes off the dust, wipes his face on his short sleeves, and stares into the sky. His abdomen is clenched hard, his breathing shallow and fast.

While he watches puffs of cloud glide by, a mad desire to escape fills him as if poured down from above. He pictures Captain Jackson out there somewhere, able to leap planets in a single bound.
I want to live adventures with my Captain
, Jonathan thinks.
I want to get away from this rotten world. I want to understand people so well that I can go to them just by thinking about them, just like the Captain. I want everything
. . .
everything I’ll never have, another past, another life, another future. Another me
.

He’s not yet done crying, but vows never to be so weak again, never to be as gullible and stupid and blind. Never cry again, never. The tough kid inside him takes over again. His body feels hard, the boiling within him held in place by callous and stringy muscle.

A hum draws Jonathan’s attention to the north. He watches an aircar grow as it nears; it finally settles beside Charity’s. Jonathan begins laughing, and that threatens to turn into ragged sobbing; the fuzzy emotion mutates into anger.

“
Dammit,” he mutters, wiping his face again as he tromps back up the hill.

“
Jonathan—” Charity begins to say.

“
Can it, I said.” The second aircar’s canopy begins to rise. It’s a new Ford. Jonathan grins and squirms inside before it fully opens. He hits the shut button and only looks outside when he’s sealed away from Charity.

“
Get some help,” he 3-verds to her as the car’s rotors spin to life. Once again, the woman’s face collapses upon itself and re-forms. This third Charity initiates a comm, but Jonathan shuts down just before he can hear what she’s about to say. He looks at the sky as he rushes up into it.

“
Fuck her, fuck the world, fuck everything,” he says. His small, hard fist slams down on the center console.

Plans for revenge begin to form in his head. He has everything he needs to feed real pain down the meat of some people he knows. And more.

“
Nooa?” As he speaks, the girl appears in the seat beside him. “Let’s go have some fun.”

She smiles lopsidedly. He wonders for a moment why an AI would feed such emotion to its 3VRD. Jonathan feels his own face tighten into
. . .
he isn’t sure what, and quickly relaxes it.
Yeah, some fun. And maybe I’ll be doing my civic duty, too
.

Pehr looked up from Miru and Pang, up at the everlooming mass of Neptune as Triton swung around it. The arboretum wasn’t lit by light reflected from that world, nor from the direct rays of the pinprick sun; most of the room’s illumination glowed from tripod-shaped lumnisheets spaced throughout the dome and running along its reinforcement beams. He realized Miru had stopped speaking.

“
So what does all this mean?” Pehr asked, returning his gaze to the man seated cross-legged before him.

“
We must return to the artifact and continue our studies,” Miru said. “Not until we better understand it, can we use it to the full potential.”

“
Use it for what? You mean to stop the war?”

Pang’s eyebrows shot up. “War?”

“
You don’t—” Pehr stopped. “Of course. EarthCo’s declaration hasn’t reached this far yet. I thought Neptunekaisha would have let you know.” Miru and Pang stared and waited for an explanation.

He felt himself blush. His stomach tightened.

“
It’s
. . .
it’s my fault,” Pehr said. “At least partially. I couldn’t stop Lonny from bombing you, and Feedcontrol twisted the feed to make it look worse than
. . .
well, to make me look sinister. My wife publicly divorced me right afterward.”

“
I see.” Miru shut his eyes. “That’s not what I intended—stopping a war. I meant that we need to better understand the artifact so we can use it to better understand ourselves and the nature of the universe. Think about it! Instantaneous transportation, perfect communication—”

“
Yes, Miru,” Pang interrupted. “But I believe our friend Pehr is thinking along more practical lines. Do you know what it means if NKK and EarthCo have finally declared open war?”

Miru looked down at his feet crossed in his lap, grunted, and brushed dust from his pants. “War. Gomi-kuzu! Let the fools have their war. The artifact cannot be damaged.”

“
Miru!” Pang shouted, standing up. “Do you not care for your fellow man?”

“
Please, guys,” Pehr said, also standing. He looked down at Miru, who was fondling an agate he found among the gravel. “Until you brought me here, I didn’t have a chance to think about how to use this new
. . .
ability of ours. Hell, I was even having trouble with who I was.” He let out a syllable that didn’t sound much like a laugh. “But Pang’s right. We have to do something.”

Miru stood, but continued looking only at the stone. “What will you have us do? Take every man and woman in the whole solar system into artifact-space? What will that accomplish? Can you imagine how long that would take? Even if our numbers increase exponentially—which they will not, because most people will be afraid to even hear us—we would require years.

“
No. We must study the artifact and attempt to understand its mechanism.” He looked up, his face suddenly hopeful. Those dark eyes caught and reflected a tripod of light.

Pang looked doubtful. “How can you understand it? Remember? Every time we thought too hard about what it meant, we lost contact with the artifact.”

“
Then we must be careful not to think.” Miru’s eyes crinkled in silent laughter. “Pang! Do you remember the map we glimpsed just before Janus left us? We must go back inside and study it!”

“
Don’t forget that we will need someone to provide spiritual energy. We are both weak, you dangerously so.”

“
Non de mo arimasen
,” Miru said while waving his hand in dismissal. Pehr was shocked to realize he understood: “It is nothing.” But then, he oughtn’t be shocked: I fed those language classes, too; I grew up with Japanese-speakers, too, through Miru’s memories.

“
Do not become mystical, my friend,” Miru added with a grin. “You are a scientist, as I am. We will speak no more of spirits, hmmm? I believe you mean that we require another’s mental energy, or perhaps physical energy. . . .
That is another thing we must learn. Pehr is very strong.” He looked at Pehr.

“
All right. Will you join us in our studies?”

Pehr looked into the eyes of the two Asian men and saw in them, for a second, the eyes of all the pilots of enemy craft he had shot down. Yes, he had to stop the war. There was no need for anyone to kill anyone ever again—And they wouldn’t, he realized, not after they spent a lifetime together, truly as one, in the artifact. He would begin a new Crusades, one that would change the world.

But: “I don’t have time right now for scientific studies,” he said. “What you need is another scientist. I’ll do what I can intheflesh. If you find out something I can do, let me know and I’ll do it.”

He felt himself growing anxious. “I’d better get back to Earth.”

Pang smiled. “Find Janus.”

Miru frowned for a moment and looked at his old friend. Then he, too, smiled and put out his hands to Pehr. They took one another’s hands in the old EConaut tradition, a double-shake designed to avoid zero-
g
torque problems. Pehr felt light-headed. This man knew every part of him, just as Pehr knew every part of Miru.

I know myself
, Pehr realized. He felt warm and strong and directed.

“
I guess I was simply trying to keep you with me,” Miru said. “You are right. We need assistants not only trained in scientific thought—remember now you are as trained as I am—but those who are, in their hearts, scientists. You will serve us well when we learn something.”

Pehr pulled his hands free and crossed his arms. “Miru, the artifact must have done something to your brain. I’ll always be with you, and only a thought away from being here intheflesh.”

Miru barked an odd laugh, staccato and musical. “Go away from us, Pehr. Go to Janus.”

Pehr felt Miru had read his mind. “I can do that, can’t I? I mean, the transport
. . .
thing isn’t only one-way? I can go to someone else who has the artifact inside her, right?”

“
We’ll find out,” Miru said with a smile that showed uneven teeth—strange in a time of cosmetic perfection.

Pehr nodded, then closed his eyes. He reached out in his mind for Janus. He saw nothing but the red insides of his eyelids.

I’m doing this wrong
, he thought. He recalled how he had found Miru: recalling all he knew of the man, picturing him as well as he could, his voice and appearance and mannerisms; and needing him—he did everything he could remember, not knowing which element was necessary to make the system work.

I need to know you’re okay, Janus
, he thought.
Dammit, why’s nothing happening?

“
Pehr,” Miru said, his voice somewhat faint, “what’s wrong? Why are you back so soon?”

“
Back?” He opened his eyes and saw the arboretum. He felt the tug of gravity—but only a slight tug. This was still Triton.

“
Is Janus hurt?” Pang asked.

“
I never found her,” Pehr said.

“
Hmmm.” Miru rubbed his temples and paced a bit. He spoke while looking up at the dark sky. “You and she have not shared time together inside the artifact. Perhaps that is necessary. All right. Pang and I will assist you and then remain inside to do our studies.”

“
Go ahead and bleed me dry of the strength you need,” Pehr said. He grinned. “I’ll just have to eat well once I reach Earth.” He looked at Pang: “Last time, Miru hardly took anything from me.”

“
I took much. You simply have a great amount to give. We will go now.”

“
Wait,” Pang said. He began to walk toward a sealed passage. “I’ll fetch Byung, as well. He showed the most interest of the City crew.”

The man left. Pehr felt anxious. He wanted to get back to Earth now. He needed to find Janus now. And he felt a little bothered that it hadn’t been with him that Janus had entered the artifact. They stood in silence as Pang cycled through the pressure-seal.