Transcendence (86 page)

Hate boiled in Janus’ mind. Closely packed waves crashed through her as she imagined various ways to murder the son of a bitch who had shot Jack. When Miru told her that he, too, was abandoning her, she even found herself angry at him.

The murderer commed again in some language she didn’t understand. Pehr was only an arm’s reach away now, but his collision with the hull had nearly canceled his momentum. It would take hours for him to reach her!

She wanted to scream, to cry, to reach out her ephemeral hands and drag that bastard into mindspace the way Jonathan had done to Blackjack. And crush him there!

A wave passed through her so intensely that she went blind for a few seconds. The fear that she, too, would abandon the injured Jack forced her to find a mote of serenity in her soul. She forced herself back, back to her body in the hold of that freezing-cold spacecraft.
I’m through with spaceships!
she vowed.

Janus drew a deep breath, held it, and pushed off toward Jack. The man with the plasma gun saw her—his eyes went wide behind the ultraglas of his faceplate—and he leveled the weapon at her.

“
No,” she begged, her nude and vulnerable body stretched out in the air for all to see, for energy to pulse through and destroy. She shook her head. The plasma-pistol’s barrel lit up as a charge passed through its crystal, but the man had aimed hastily.

Just then, a thump knocked the wind out of her. Janus lashed out with fingernails, but realized it was only Jack. She clung to him, turning their combined mass so that she shielded him from the weapon.

“
Come on, Jack,” she whispered into his ear. “We’ve gotta get outta here!”

The armed man steadied himself against a reinforcement structure and sighted along the weapon’s receiver. Janus closed her eyes.

Jack, damn your lousy hide to hell! Pay attention!

In response, a tiny, feeble voice trembled at the edge of her consciousness. Janus grabbed hold of it with all her ability, then willed herself to join Miru and the others.

Lightning-flashes of thought and images cast shadows across the galaxyscape, outlining vast spheres of personality where we huddle together. We are a cluster of stars, fearful that our plans have proven foolish. Two more spheres ripple, one of which turns inside-out like us, the thoughts visible, the mind accessible.

“
You made it!” Pang says.

“
Pehr is still alive,” Miru says. “But how long will he live? He’s dying, I can feel his presence waning.”

“
We have to do something,” I, Janus, say. “But what?” Her every memory-scene is opaque, the surfaces of the pearls blazing with her desperation and need.

Jonathan Sombrio’s presence thickens the mostly wordless conversation. “Captain?” I ask. “Where’s my Captain?”

One of the spheres—the still-dark one—glimmers briefly.

“
He’s. . .” Jonathan’s thoughts race, images flaring like starbursts, too fast to comprehend. Miru is best able to keep up.

*This is what happened.* The scene aboard the cargo vessel replays. Jonathan’s sphere quivers. A second later, he has grown a concrete shell. A second after that, if time is relevant here, the shell explodes in a great cloud of dust.
Don’t hide now
, I tell myself.

“
You fuckers! Don’t any of you know anything? Here!”

Jonathan delves into my—Byung’s—memory, extracts what I learned of human anatomy during my three-year edufeed at C’thang Institute, where I earned my nursing certification.

I see
. “I see!”

We focus on the mental analogue Pehr holds within his mind, the image of himself, and remove the injury. I and I heal the wound.

I—Pehr Jackson—wake beneath the white-hot lights of an operating room. Green-masked faces peer down at me as a DRM box rises from my chest. I take a deep breath, and—No pain!

Flash—

“
Welcome back to the living,” says Miru.

Wait. . . .
Pehr reels back through his frayed memory of the past minutes, fills in the gaps from our memories.

When assured that he is still alive, Janus sends him a gift, a mental artwork painted from all her memories of wild, growing things: a tiny rose blooming in the afternoon sun among weeds on the shore of a stream; a blade of grass, impossibly green, sprouting between slabs of cement in a sidewalk; a thousand other living images, all woven into a tapestry of growth, all held in place by the force of hope and the wordless delight of warm sunshine caressing cold, exposed skin.

He basks in the pleasure of her gift, then swells to join the others.

“
Jonathan, you saved my life.”

I (Jonathan) notice I feel a thousand times as strong, my thoughts a million times as clear, my future as bright as this: A star flares within him, illuminating the dark corridors between memory-moments, burning out the dust. *All because you found a way to save my life.*

Janus blends her mind with Jonathan’s. We other five step back. We feel the suffusion of life gush through the boy. It came from within himself. *How, when we usually seem to lose energy?*

*Ah, we have a lot to learn, friend Pang.*

Laughter resounds along the gaseous lanes of the Milky Way—Pehr, joyous, feeling invulnerable and
. . .
loved. When the laughter subsides, he says, “All right, let’s get on with things. This time, I’ll try to stay out of the line of fire.”

“
Wait,” Jonathan says as he watches us begin to use Ngoyu’s vague memory of a woman he works for. “Is this the only way you know how to get around? You’re just shooting in the dark.”

He opens a vista into himself which, when we peer into it, swallows our model of mindspace. Galaxies dim while the tendrils within them brighten. We rush in toward the Milky Way, its spiral arms engulfing us, closer and closer. Now one star—vivid yellow, casting light upon worlds that range from thin crescent to solid orb
. . .
that one star dominates our view. And now a new set of tendrils flashes like a headcard overlay atop the solar system.

*It’s this simple,* Jonathan says. Of course, we all see that even he hadn’t realized this until now, when he purged his mind clean, when his self-value rocketed after helping save Pehr.

“
Of course!” says Miru. “Of course. This is how to use the maps. I see.” He and Jonathan begin a series of wordless exchanges, and the tendrils thicken to tubes. Billions of tiny lights within the tubes appear like lightbulbs—but when we try to comprehend the number, they fade—back again when we simply open our minds. *Who are we looking for? Where are we going?—These two act like coordinates. And there, our first objective.*

As we close in, Jonathan vanishes. *Hurry, catch up with him.* *How did he do that?* *You have to be a curr-gang kid to know those tricks.*

“
Now no one get shot this time.”

An alarm tugged Clarisse Poinsettia Chang from sleep. She was far too drowsy to know which alarm it was, even to recognize the symbol that glowed behind closed eyelids. Somehow she found the cognizance to shut down hibernation feed, which was stimulating the production of nervous-system depressants and keeping her body and mind in a state of deep sleep. Pleasant dream-images began to fade—more effects of brain-drug stimulant feed.

Now she began to try to open her eyes, but each eyelid weighed as much as a goose. She watched a long-winged crane begin to take off from a cattail-stubbled pond, felt herself become that bird. . . .

No
, she told herself.
Wake up. Wake up!
Suddenly, the warning symbol took on meaning: Intrusion alert.

Someone had boarded her flagship,
Sigwa
! The very battleship she occupied.
Impossible!

Fear helped dump adrenaline into her bloodstream. She felt the drowsing effects of the hibernation drugs begin to wane. But just as she was about to open her eyes, someone reached into her mind and touched her body.

“
I’m very sorry, Coordinator Chang,” that someone was saying. She recognized the voice but couldn’t pin it down. “But you’ll have to come with us.”

Clarisse was much too weak to argue or fight. She resigned herself:
It’s just one of my people, it must be
.

The swan flapped its wings, creating a rush of air across her organic airfoil, and into the sky, free and blue, no hand here can touch you. . . .

Once again, we experience the unfolding of a life. This time, however, she doesn’t speak to us as we live through the loss of her NKK-Citizen family in an EarthCo bombing raid, her transfer to an adoptive family in the Ukraine, coldness then violence from my brothers—then a ricochet of violence as I break free of those representatives of EarthCo, kicking and punching my way across the Asian continent to the corp of my youth—to Bangkok. Vengeance! Vengeance is my cry during the following years. No one sees the tiger within my breast, no one can hear me counting, One, two, three
. . .
as I tally up victims-to-be. Patriotism for NKK doesn’t spur me through victory after victory in space sim-combat;
You’re like a wild dog
, the General tells her as she climbs down from the fighter’s cabin.
I like that. You’ll go far
. Not patriotism but hate, hate! Hate like a solar flare erupts from my being, invisible to the eye; NKK’s enemy—the frothing EarthCo dogs—is my enemy. *See how I would destroy NKK just to hurt EarthCo?*

A black cloak falls from space, blocking our view into Clarisse.

*What’s happening to me?* she asks. She’s awakened. Jonathan steps forward.

Flash-flash-flash
. . .
we can’t follow their exchange. Worlds of imagery and thought pass from his sphere to hers, blinding some of us, confounding others. I catch a glimpse of a great sword forming between them, dropping into place atom by atom, a particle stolen from each exchange. When I try to touch that weapon to see what it is, my mind explodes with an unbearable heat:
Hate! How can there be so much hate in all the worlds of Solsystem? How can all that hate belong to a single woman?

“
I’ve got to go in there and save Jonathan,” Pehr says. “I’ll help,” says Janus.

“
Stop it, both of you,” says Miru. “Those two are built of the same material. That material is not compatible with ours—it would be like trying to mix light with concrete. They have lived in the virtuality of cybernetics. No one of us, except Janus, could even hope to stay sane in their coinciding sphere. Wait.”

The sword’s tip finally forms. A woman’s scarred hand reaches out from one of the roiling balls composed of light, snarling faces, smoldering spaceships, varied scenery, the clouds of Neptune. It grasps the sword’s hilt. The other sphere—Jonathan’s—forms a concrete skin, but we all see out of our peripheral vision as another, larger, globe emerges from him; Fifth dimensional? When we try to understand, it becomes invisible again.

The sword rises high, reaching far into the interstellar blackness of the Milky Way’s arm. “I’ll do it!” Clarisse shouts. “Keep away.”
If she swings that thing, could she kill him? Could she kill us all?
I and I poise to leave.

Jonathan’s larger circumference bends as it encounters her mind. Slowly, like wax covering a warm object, it passes over her and finally pops into place behind: She’s within him now.

“
This isn’t how we did it with Lonny,” Pehr whispers. We all wait. Our tension is like thin shells, making it even more difficult to pass thoughts from one to the other.

I am Clarisse Poinsettia Chang. The moment-memories look different. How?
Watch:

Each kind act anyone ever did for me opens: the rarest of pearls. Ukrainian Mother sets a plate of boiled vegetables before her newly adopted daughter, the little Nik rescued from a raided village. Brother—even he who later became the monster of my nightmares—brother shows me how to work his fireball; we laugh and pull the cable and watch the holo ball leap into the air, casting a spell of pictures: Extinct animals from all around the world caper about our heads. A nameless bosun aboard the crew-ship that carries me to Neptune grants me a smile when I feel most alone. And Kaigun Taii Nikolai Sekiguchi, that cocky bastard, that beautiful man I killed during a dogfight in the skies of Neptune when all he really wanted was to prove himself to me. . . .