Transgalactic (11 page)

Nobody from outside had ever discovered Federation Central's location except, the bureaucrats feared, the newly emerged humans toward the end of the ten-year war. That war had been the natural (to humans) resistance to assuming humanity's appropriate junior role in the Federation until the upstart humans had earned full status, a process that sometimes took thousands of long-cycles. When Ren and Asha and the human crew escaped, after being held as subjects for experiment and interrogation for twenty long-cycles, the bureaucrats had to consider their worst fear. It was this fear as much as the ferocity of humans and their allies that led to the peace talks.

“Why are we stopping here?” Solomon asked in his Squeal language. He was able to understand Asha's Galactic Standard and even some of her own human terms for which there were no Squeal equivalents, but he was not fluent in either.

It had been a long trip. Even with nexus shortcuts to make interstellar travel possible within normal life spans, passage between nexus points took time, lots of it, and Asha and Solomon were forced to spend much of it together. A Captain's Barge, capable as it was in its essential function of accessing those shortcuts, had no room for privacy. Once Solomon had gotten over his outrage about the flouting of the Squeal traditions and what he considered Asha's betrayal, he had become a tolerable companion, even, Asha thought, a welcome diversion from her concerns about Riley and the problems ahead.

She had come to think of Solomon as a person, knowledgeable, informed, curious, even wise in the tradition of his namesake, particularly as his external gender characteristics had begun to be reabsorbed, along with, she supposed, the hormonal stimulants that had produced them. In spite of his paranoia about the sky, his inexperience with space, and the superstitions of his species that he brought to all explanations of the Squeal world's situation, he was willing to talk about them and even to discuss the possibility of alternative explanations. If he was a good representative, the Squeal people were ready for Galactic acceptance. Not that she thought that membership in the Federation was a desirable outcome, but it might save the Squeal people from destruction.

“We have to establish an identity,” she said.

In a complex organization like the Galactic Federation, she explained to Solomon, everyone had to have an identity. It had to be detailed and foolproof and appropriate to dozens of disparate creatures and their cultures, combining planet of origin, species and species norms, recognizable deviations from norms, individual identifying criteria, skills, occupation, status, credit level, and DNA, all coded into a series of numbers suitable for computer recognition and manipulation. Every Galactic Federation citizen had an identity imprinted or embedded on an appropriate part of the body at birth, and variables were updated each identity check, which occurred every time an individual made a transaction or passed a sensor. And sensors were everywhere, so that everybody was under constant surveillance—at least in Federation Central. Interstellar communication was still limited by interstellar distances, and even unmanned communication devices that shuttled through nexus points could shorten it only to hundreds of long-cycles. So the identity issue, though universal, was system specific.

Solomon, Asha told him, was not a member of a species accepted into membership by the Federation—not yet, anyway—and thus had no identity. As far as the Federation was concerned, he was a nonperson. She would have to create a temporary identity for him, or he would be seized and imprisoned, or even executed, before he could be presented as a representative of an applicant species. Computers, she said, had no nuance. Her own situation was different, she said. Passage through the magical fountain—actually, though she did not say so, the Transcendental Machine—had removed her identity along with other imperfections.

What she didn't tell him was that she couldn't encode her real identity. Being human was damning enough, in the view of the Federation. But being recognized as the Prophet of Transcendentalism was a death sentence and, having passed through the Transcendental Machine, would mean instantaneous execution for Riley if he were identified, as she would be if the Federation suspected what it meant.

And there were forces, private and public, determined to find and destroy them both.

*   *   *

Preparing an identity for Solomon was the easy part, although the Captain's Barge was not equipped with the scanner necessary for reading DNA and she had to cobble one together from spare computer parts. Everything else came from the answers Solomon provided, and the ship's computer, with some new programming, put all the information into a series of numbers printed on a silicon sliver that Asha inserted into the back of Solomon's hand.

“Now you're somebody,” she said.

He looked at her as if he wanted to say that he'd always been somebody until she appeared in the fountain, but he refrained.

Her own identity was more difficult. It had to be accurate enough to convince the sensors that she was the person described, but it could not identify who she really was: the child born on the generation ship
Adastra,
intercepted by Federation ships and taken to Galactic Central, where she grew up and eventually escaped, with Ren, discovered the planet of the Transcendental Machine, and became the Prophet, the accidental messenger of instant perfection that threatened the uneasy stasis that had followed the human/Federation war.

Using the memories of her talks with Riley, she put together an identity as the girl Tes that Riley had loved, growing up on Mars; the girl who had volunteered for the war as soon as she became sixteen and was killed in the first battles. She could not falsify her DNA, could only hope that the Transcendental Machine had changed that as well, removing the imperfections that had accumulated over the long generations of mutation, exposure to viruses, and evolution. As a captive nonperson, she had never been given an identity, or, she hoped, had her DNA recorded, but she had left her father behind, when he refused to join the escape, still hoping that he could persuade the Federation to make peace. His DNA might have been recorded, and any scan might reveal the relationship.

But that was a chance she would have to take, as well as the chance to find her father, if he was still alive.

Asha edged her ship out of the debris cloud and drifted into range of Federation Central computer transmissions, realizing that she was also in range of the Federation's sensors. But she hoped that before she had to announce their arrival the ship would be mistaken for icy fragments heading for an orbit of the sun. She picked up the feeds from the computers. Much of it was coded message traffic, reports, financial data, statistics, bureaucratic drivel, but some of it was information broadcast for general consumption. Using simple search parameters, she studied it for news about the Federation and its member species, disagreements, quarrels, even battles—since even in a well-ordered and closely supervised family, discord can arise—knowing that all she was seeing was what the bureaucrats and the Council that supervised them were willing to let the public know.

There were disagreements, there were quarrels, there were battles between systems and even within systems, and reprisals by Council forces. The largest number of these involved humans, who were represented as a petty, quarrelsome species whose application for admission to full membership in the Federation was unlikely to be acted upon until humans learned how to live in peace with other species and even each other. Asha knew this was propaganda, but she also knew that it was a sign that Federation resentment at the arrogance of humans and their willingness to fight for what they believed to be their rights had not ebbed with the signing of the peace agreement. For too long the Federation had been the sole arbiter of disputes, and species, members and nonmembers alike, had acquiesced to its power and righteousness, sacrificing their own interests for the good of the whole, or recognizing that resistance would be met by reprisals, perhaps even destruction. Much remained to be done before the galaxy could settle back into its accustomed state of enforced civility, and civility in foreign relations was not a human tradition.

Mostly, though, Asha looked for items to suggest that a human had appeared unexpectedly in a place where no humans had ever been observed before. Or seemingly impossible appearances or occurrences of any kind. She did not expect to find anything. The galaxy was broad and information traveled slowly, and as complex and comprehensive as the Federation computer system had become, information of a dubious credibility from a remote system was likely to be lost in the welter of miscellaneous data or discarded as superstition or mistaken observation, if it ever arrived. Even the best search engine was no better than the terms requested, and Asha didn't dare use one of those, since its focus would be detected by the roving monitors that searched the search engines. The computers, though vast and complex, were not yet sentient, but the difference was semantic. They behaved as if they were.

Moreover, there was no guarantee that Riley had been transported to a place with access to interstellar travel or, if he were, that he could manage to gain passage or steal a ship, and, even if he did, that he would manage to enter Federation space and be detected and reported. The odds of finding Riley were infinitesimal, and the odds of their getting back together were even smaller. But she had faith in the destiny that had brought them together, even as it had flung them violently apart, and faith in their newfound transcendence.

She turned to Solomon. “It's time,” she said.

*   *   *

She sent a message to Federation Central. The message said that she was the emissary of the Dorian ambassador to the planet Squeal. Only she used the name the Federation had given it. She attached the ambassador's identification, which was recorded in the ship's computer. The identification for the Captain's Barge was automatic. She was escorting a representative of the planet Squeal to request contact with the Galactic Federation and apprentice status for his people. She attached the identification that she had prepared for Solomon. She said that she was a human stranded on Squeal who had been asked to bring Solomon to the Council to present his application. She attached the identification that she had concocted for herself.

She waited for the message to travel the millions of kilometers from her ship in the farthest reaches of the system to the planet much nearer the weakly glowing sun. And she waited for the message to be analyzed and a reply to be prepared and for the reply to arrive. It came with the speed of light, which took the better part of a cycle. “Your message has been received. One identity has been confirmed. Two have not. Your ship is registered to the Dorian Sandor, who is serving as the ambassador to the planet you have identified. Your entrance into this system is uninvited. You will remain in your present location until your application has been considered.”

Asha immediately turned off the ship's communication system and its automatic identification module, which was supposedly tamperproof, and started the ship moving in a random pattern but generally toward the inner planets.

“I could understand only a small part of the message,” Solomon said, “but I did understand the order to stay where we were.”

“The chances are that they have already launched a missile to destroy us,” Asha said. “The word ‘uninvited' was code for ‘unwelcome,' and ‘unwelcome' means it's better to eliminate a potential threat than to take the responsibility for anything that might happen. That's the way bureaucracies work. If they make a mistake out of extreme caution in applying regulations, they will be forgiven. If they make a mistake in interpreting them too liberally, they run the risk of losing everything.”

“I didn't come all this way to be destroyed,” Solomon said. “And, if you are right, the fate of my people lies in my presenting their case to the Federation Council.”

“Don't worry. Or at least don't worry more than necessary. All this was anticipated. Our mission has always had a small chance for success. But the missile or missiles, if they were sent from near the inner planets, will take several cycles to reach us, and even some that may be lurking in these far reaches of the system would take at least a cycle or two. We have a chance to evade them if we act immediately. They aren't expecting that, and they will have some difficulties tracking us. By that time we will be within the inner system and they will be reluctant to destroy us there.”

“That's supposed to make me not worry?” Solomon said.

Asha smiled. It was good to know that Solomon had a sense of humor. That and a taste for irony were the saving grace for a rational approach to the sentient condition in an uncaring universe.

The random-movement approach of the Captain's Barge took several dozen cycles to reach the inner planets, but at last the ship came within eye view of the cold, rocky planet the passengers and crew of the
Adastra
had named “Hades.” That and the satellite they had named “Hell” were where they had been taken after their generation ship had been intercepted by armed Federation vessels in a first-contact meeting that had preceded the human/Federation war. And it was where they had been imprisoned and interrogated and experimented upon for twenty years, the time it took for Asha to grow from infancy to adulthood. And it was from there that she and Ren and the rest of the humans, except for her father, had escaped.

The satellite Hell was lifeless. It had been abandoned, and no trace of the structures that had housed the human prisoners remained. The human ship
Vanguard
that had set out twenty years after theirs but had been intercepted earlier than the
Adastra
had been towed away or destroyed. Even the structures left on Hades, where their Xifora and Sirian guards and their Dorian supervisor were housed, were dark and abandoned.