Transgalactic (10 page)

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?

Riley says that we fear this strange vessel that glows with a strange light because our ancestors killed the people who came in it, because we feel something he calls “guilt.” But how can this be true? We do not feel anything when we kill, except the pleasure of killing and the satisfaction of eating. Riley says we are afraid that the people who came were gods, but how can gods be killed? And Riley says we are afraid other gods will come to punish us. Riley says many things I do not understand.

I do not understand, either, why I followed Riley through the wall that was not a wall, into the object that I fear when I fear nothing, not even death itself. I cannot explain it, the terror that took over my head and made my limbs unable to move, and the strange power that seized me and drove me forward as I tried to stop and could not. Riley says that it was a struggle within me. I felt, he says, a need to explore and to learn things none of my people have ever known and to bring back to my people the benefits of something he calls “knowledge” and its putting into use that he calls “science,” and this need was stronger than my fears and my transgressions into forbidden places. But I think I was overcome by some demon, as sometimes happens with our people, who go mad and kill and eat others and sometimes run through the jungle until they come upon something bigger and hungrier than themselves.

Or maybe, I think when I am feeling less disturbed by the strangeness of it all, I was taken over by the spirit of my ancestor who built the pyramid.

Riley does not speak my language well. He says that his throat was not made for the roaring sounds that he says my people make. It is surprising that he speaks it at all. When he speaks in his own language, it is a soft and muffled sound that I could never make, that does not sound like language at all. He is a weak animal with a flat face and hardly any jaw or teeth, and I could destroy him with a single bite or a blow from one of my legs. It is hard to believe that he even exists or was able to grow to become an adult without being eaten. But he says that on his world—that word again—the parents of his kind protect their young until they grow large enough to protect themselves. And, he says, on his world there are no hunters and feeders like my people.

He was born and raised, he says, on a world different from the one on which his kind were born. The dry, cold world on which he grew was made livable by water and air brought to it by science and by machines like the one in which we find ourselves. That world never had anything but the smallest bits of life, even smaller than the bugs that swarm around our streams and pools and dead things. But the world from which his people came was once like the world of my people, full of plants and animals and dinosaurs, as he calls us. But then, in the long ago, objects rained down from the sky, exploding against the rocks and soil and destroying the plants and the creatures who ate them and then the creatures who ate the creatures who ate the plants. And their dying allowed Riley's ancestors to become bigger and stronger and smarter and the masters of their world.

On my world, Riley says, the objects did not come down, or they came down at a different time, and my people survived and developed better brains and language and civilization, and did not make room for the weak creatures who give birth rather than laying eggs, and who kill their prey with stones and sticks rather than the jaws and teeth with which they are born. Perhaps, Riley says, our world did not have what he calls “an asteroid belt” or objects left over from the gathering of such objects that came together to form our worlds. But he will never know and I cannot tell him because these things happened long ago if they happened at all. Riley likes to think about things that he can never know. We are born knowing what we know, how to survive, and as we survive we learn whatever we need to know to continue to survive. Riley says that there are no creatures like us in what he calls “the galaxy,” that we may be the only dinosaurs who survived to become intelligent and to build cities and things like the pyramid. But we have forgotten how to do things like these, and we think the people who built them were like gods and have gone away, though maybe they will return and bring us plenty to eat.

Riley says that there are many stars, suns like ours but far away so that they seem like tiny bits of light. These suns give birth to worlds like ours, some fit for life and most not, and on these worlds sometimes creatures live. They are not like us in shape or history, but they are like us in growing over the long ages from tiny bits of unseeable things into creatures, like seeds that grow into trees. Sometimes they learn to think and how to make things like our knives and huts and cities, and even like the sacred pyramid.

He says that these creatures learned about their world and other worlds, built boats that fly through the air and then boats that fly above the air and they got to other worlds, where sometimes people like themselves live, and they make war, which I understand, or learn how to live in peace, and they learn how to live together without killing or eating each other, by agreeing how to do so. Riley calls that “politics,” and it is a sign of civilized people. I do not understand “politics.” But these agreements that once made people able to live with each other have decayed, like meat that is so old it can no longer be eaten, and people like Riley, of which there are only two, he says, must put the agreements back the way they were, or make them better. This I believe. Riley is a god, and gods can do anything. Though why he should care about these lesser creatures or spend time making their lives better I do not understand.

And yet these lesser creatures fly through the places between the stars like we do, and guide their air-boats like Riley does with his magical hands, those extensions of flexible arms with what he calls “fingers” that can do magical things. He says that I can learn to do such things, but my arms are not like his and my “fingers” can hold food and weapons but cannot pick up and turn small objects. And they cannot do magic.

There are moments when even the melting walls seem ordinary, when the enclosed boat, the sacred object, fades away, and we are in a place that is no place, where our existence becomes part of the great nothing, and we are nothing with it, and yet we are everything as well. Riley says that there are places, “nexus points” he calls them, that are shortcuts between the stars, that make going to the stars something people can do. I think it is like death and that we die and are born again, like the souls of our ancestors, and I am not afraid. I am not afraid of death or being born again. Riley thinks that is strange, but Riley is a god and I am in the hands of the gods and they will do as they will.

Riley says that he is not a god, that he came to my world through some kind of magic that is not what the gods do but what people do. But I do not believe him. He came from the sacred place built by my ancestor so that he could become a god and live forever in the god place. I saw Riley high on the side of the pyramid, and I knew he was the born-again spirit of my ancestor, the god-shape my ancestor has taken on his return to us bringing the gifts of the gods. Riley may not know this. The gods sometimes forget. Being born again is like hatching, leaving the security of the egg for the bright danger of the world. Hatchlings are born with the desire to eat and no memory of their lives before. Sometime Riley may remember his life before and bring forth the gifts that he brought from the god place. I will keep him safe until he does. This may be why I followed him into the sacred object.

Riley gets food and drink out of the walls. The drink is a kind of water. Dinosaurs drink when they are thirsty, and one kind of water is like another. Riley says that dinosaurs do not have things in their mouths that tell one kind of taste from another. We eat meat, he says, often rotting meat, and our bodies are made to take in the tiny, living things that make meat rot without harming our bodies. Weaker creatures like him, he says, need to be able to tell when things are not safe to drink or eat, so they have tiny things in their mouths that tell them when things are not safe. Gods are strange.

Food is different. The stuff that Riley gets from the wall is like the mash that comes from fruit that has been crushed and left to rot, something we sometimes eat when meat is scarce or our bodies tell us we should eat something different. This mash that the place of melting walls offers is miserable stuff that no dinosaur would eat if he had a choice. Riley says it is enough to keep us alive and even healthy, and he eats it several times a day. He says I must eat it, too, and I try. But I am a meat-eater, and Riley is meat. He worries that I will eat him, that I will become so hungry that I will forget everything else, that I am a civilized person, that he is a god, but I would never do that.

Unless I get very, very hungry.

 

CHAPTER TEN

Asha hid the ship in the cloud of debris left over from the formation of the planets billions of long-cycles ago, well outside the range of sensors that might detect her approach. It was a meager cloud like the system it orbited, but it was enough. The sun was small and cool, not much more than a red dwarf, and the planets it had accumulated were poor, scrawny places that had never given birth to any sentient life-forms, and scarcely to life of any size except bacteria and lichens.

But that is why the Galactic Federation had chosen it as the central governing location for its sprawling member worlds, and why the Federation had spent vast amounts of time, resources, and energy bringing water and air to one of the inner planets and building and maintaining the structures that housed the complex operations of its custodians. No one would come to this out-of-the-way, lifeless, worthless system by choice or chance, and no one came who wasn't invited. And anyone who was invited was sent coordinates that self-destructed if copied and disappeared immediately after use. It wasn't that the bureaucrats who ran the Federation, or the leaders of the legislative bodies who directed them, were paranoid—any disaffected member system, or any newly discovered civilization with interstellar capabilities, would launch its protest by cutting off the head of the organization that had oppressed it.