Transgalactic (12 page)

Asha chanced a few moments of acceleration and then drifted toward the next planet closer to the sun, the planet that had no name other than Federation Central, to which her brother Pip and then her father had been taken for interrogation, in her brother's case, and to consider her father's appeal for peaceful relationships and understanding, both of which had been used to build a case against the upstart humans.

At last they arrived without being intercepted and parked in orbit around the planet. It had so many structures that it looked almost like a single giant building covering the entire planet. The metal roofs reflected the reddish rays of the feeble sun. Asha thought about the majestic eternal cities of the Transcendental Machine. They would still be standing after the Federation buildings had rusted away into middens of junk. What kind of creatures would inherit the ruins? Arachnoids, like those on the planet of the Transcendental Machine? Or cockroaches.

Asha turned on the ship's identifier signal and the communication system, knowing that the ship's acceleration and deceleration maneuvers as they parked in orbit had already been detected. “Apologies from the Captain's Barge belonging to Sandor, ambassador to the planet Squeal. Our electrical system went down and has just now been restored, and we did not get your reply until now. We are in orbit, ready to present our appeal for the Squeal people.”

Asha waited for several moments, not certain whether the response would be destruction by missile.

Then came the reply. “Your identity is false.…”

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Rigel was a blue-white super-giant sun primed to become a supernova. It had already consumed the hydrogen in its interior and was converting the resulting helium into carbon before it finally collapsed upon itself, in one final dramatic suicide that would take its remaining planets along with it and destroy life for dozens of light-years in all directions. And, in the process, seed the nearby universe with the higher elements needed for new stars, new worlds, new life, and new intelligence to consider the irony. Beside Rigel, Earth's sun would have looked like a pale yellow dot.

Supergiants don't live long, on the stellar scale, and Rigel had been around for only eleven million years. Most of the planets that Rigel had pulled together out of the rock and gas debris left over from its own birthing, mostly gas giants, had been consumed when Rigel expanded into a gauzy red giant before pulling back into its current blue-white magnificence. Only remnants of the outer planets remained, their gas envelopes largely blown away, exposing their rocky cores.

And yet it was Rigel that humans had selected for their pleasure-world Dante, a habitat carved out of a moon of a onetime gas-giant planet, equipped and dedicated to all of the fleshly and sensory delights that human fancy could imagine and named, according to official histories, for the classic work by the ancient Italian poet,
Paradiso.
Many of its patrons and all of its many critics said, instead, that it represented the nine circles of hell.

Because the devices of pleasure were often interchangeable with medical treatment and rehabilitation, both physical and psychological, Dante also included a hospital section. It was there that Riley had been treated for his most recent injuries, where he had met Sharn, the surgeon who had replaced his left arm and tried to replace what she called his death wish with her love. Riley looked upon it now from the magical window in the red sphere that he had navigated across the galaxy, and he wondered about the human impulse that had chosen this doomed location for its pleasure-world.

What pleasure was it to contemplate instant immolation, catastrophic destruction, without warning, of everything and everybody within light-years, perhaps even precipitating similar titanic explosions from Rigel's companion stars, the binary systems Rigel-B and Rigel-C, even though they were light-minutes away? And then he thought about the people on Earth that he had read about, who built their cities on earthquake faults, unruly ocean coasts, or active volcanoes, or even those hardy pioneers who had prepared the way for him and his family to colonize Mars, who had braved space and the hazards of a terraforming project that bombarded a planet with asteroids and the icy remnants of planetary evolution.

There must be a fatal flaw in human psychology that relishes the possibility of destruction by natural catastrophe, Riley thought, that heightens the pleasure and dulls the pain. That leaves one's fate to the whims of the gods. Perhaps it was this love of apocalypse that terrified the Galactics when they encountered it, that led to the human/Federation war, that he and Asha would have to cope with and maybe find a cure for if they were to bring about a new era of transcendence to the galaxy.

And yet, would a removal of that human edginess, that willingness to risk all on a throw of the dice or a turn of the cards, remove, as well, what made humans exceptional, that induced them, unaided, to launch themselves into the unknown, to challenge accepted wisdom, to reject mediocrity, to refuse submission? He would have to think about that some more, Riley thought, and discuss it with Asha when they were reunited. He refused to consider the possibility that he might never see Asha again. The galaxy was immense, with billions of stars, and many billions of worlds, and he could never explore them all. But he would find Asha. Everything in his misspent life had led to this, and he had to see it through to whatever unlikely resolution lay in wait for him.

It was, he thought, the same kind of living-on-the-edge-of-a-precipice decision that he was willing to challenge in others.

Of course, there were practical advantages to the Rigel location. Its size and temperature meant that energy was plentiful. Dante consumed the power required for a world the size of Earth, and even at a livable distance from the blue-white giant—two hundred times the distance of Earth from Sol—solar arrays on the sunny side of the world around which it orbited could provide all of Dante's needs and more, and collector ships stationed closer to Rigel could acquire megaliters of antimatter for export. Pleasure and repairing bodies were not Dante's only sources of income.

And, perhaps more important, Rigel was available. None of the other species that made up the Federation had humans' appetite for living with the possibility of imminent destruction.

Riley maneuvered his ship closer to the planet below. It, too, had once been a gas giant, far from its primary, but now only its rocky core remained, one face always turned toward Rigel, like a worshipper in perpetual adoration. More than any sun-god, Rigel was worthy of adoration and respect and fear.

A city had been built in the twilight zone, enough in the shadows to be protected from the charged particles in the massive solar wind, even at these distances, but shielded from the eternal night, and the air-freezing cold, of its dark side. In the twilight zone a bit of atmosphere remained—toxic, to be sure, but capable of retaining a bit of warmth and a modicum of protection against radiation. Unlike Dante, the city was ramshackle and flimsy, existing only to serve the habitat carved from one of this world's satellites, and filled with thieves, organ snatchers, kidnappers, and assassins. Riley had once considered himself one of them. Now he would have to walk among them again.

The city was named Alighieri, but nobody remembered that. Everyone called it “Alley” and thought of it as short for “Blind Alley” or “Blood Alley,” either of which was more appropriate than something that referred to a long-dead poet.

Riley found a place in a valley not far from the city, knowing that no one would venture out into the deadly night. He had the ship create a breathing mask and a protective suit, told Rory to remain behind, and went out to begin his search for Asha.

*   *   *

Alley had ports located strategically around the ragged perimeter. Some of them were equipped with expandable extensions that allowed connections with spaceships or shuttles without the necessity of protection from Alley's elements. Others were used for external construction or repairs. Alley itself was a domed city lit by the glare in the far sky of a sun hidden behind the horizon. Riley found one of the ports, touched the emergency signal plate, entered the airlock through the rush of foggy air, and waited until the thin, poisonous outside atmosphere had been exhausted and replaced by breathable inside air. He took off his mask and took a deep breath. It held the old Alley smell of cooking food, garbage, refuse, and excrement. He was back in civilization.

He removed his breathing mask and coveralls, and stowed them in a locker where they returned to their normal state as lumps of rosy plastic. That was how they would remain, even if the locker was opened by inspectors or thieves. The stuff of the red sphere had adjusted itself to Riley and, Riley hoped, to Rory when Riley wasn't there, and it would remain inert until he touched it again.

The inner door opened at Riley's touch, and he walked into the outskirts of the enclosed city. It was much as he had remembered. The areas closest to the walls were not the suburbs but the slums, poorly lit, poorly maintained, poorly policed, and the first victim of a meteorite strike if one should occur. A curving avenue circled the perimeter, cluttered with trash and with shanties built from used shipping containers and plastic sheets. Straight lanes, interrupted by occasional airtight doors, tunneled through to the interior. Riley knew that he would have to be watchful. When he had been here before he had been one of the unemployed mercenaries who survived on the wastes of the pleasure-seekers in the satellite above and the suppliers within Alley itself. Nobody cared if they lived or died, not even the mercenaries themselves. But they had nothing to steal, not even hope, and their only danger was from overindulgence in dangerous drugs or from casual quarrels that always chanced turning deadly.

But that was then. Now Riley had resources and hope. He had something that could be taken from him.

The circular avenue was empty for the moment. Riley knew that wouldn't last. The opening of the port would have lighted up a thousand monitors, some of them legal, and the vultures would begin to gather. That they had not arrived yet was a tribute to the fact that nobody expected anyone to enter from Alley's deadly outside. Riley took the first straight tunnel toward the interior.

He passed doors and the entrances to living units, which increased in size and maintenance as he went. There were no windows. He had been in a few of them when he was here before. They would have simulated windows showing scenes of landscapes from far away, meadows, forests, waterfalls, animals, people, all the things that people once had but had left behind, or that had died or been destroyed and could never be brought back. Yet here they were to contemplate, to console, to torment. Even aliens had them. After the truce other species had begun to infiltrate human space and adopt human vices, adjusted for their own physiologies and psychologies, and to invent some of their own.

Only at the top of the housing units, the penthouses, Riley knew, was there a view of the real world outside, the devastated landscape of the planet, the glow, even the direct vision, of the distant but still overwhelming Rigel and in the other direction the scattered stars, but mostly the glittering pleasure-world Dante. Even on Alley the privileged enjoyed their special privileges.

Riley reached the center of the city, the vast open plaza, lined with shops, bars, and restaurants, that extended clear to the top of the dome. Above the commercial establishments the walls were lined with panels displaying the latest news or touting various commercial products. Several featured displays of the pleasures available on Dante. At the apex the dome was transparent, or seemed to be, revealing the stars. Occasionally Dante would pass by, with all its promise of dreams fulfilled, while in the plaza below throngs sought out surrogates.

Riley pushed his way through the congregation of humans dressed in colorful attire, as if they were going to a costume party, or little at all, as if they were going to the beach or an orgy. Scattered among them were a Dorian, a few Xifora, and a Sirian or two. Guarding the scene, around the edges and threading their way among the crowd, were humans in uniform. The noise was deafening, from the commercial messages overhead to the conversations, necessarily shouted above the ambient sound level.

Riley found a bar that he remembered, entered, surveyed the patrons, found them and their behavior much the same as when he had been one of them, and waited until he could occupy a corner booth that provided a measure of privacy, with his back to a wall. Some of the patrons nearby were armed, but none of them seemed belligerent and none of them seemed interested in him. He sat down and pretended to study the menu that appeared in the table's window before he selected coffee and the number of an account that had once held a small credit balance. Payment was accepted, and a steaming cup came up through an opening in the table. Riley picked it up and took a sip. It was not great, but it was hot and it was coffee.

Riley sighed. It had been a long time since he had tasted coffee, and he had missed it.

*   *   *

Riley switched the window to general access. One of the benefits offered by the public purveyors on Alley was anonymity. Riley knew that would last only long enough for monitors to pick a pattern of information-gathering out of the welter of electronic noise, but he could frustrate that temporarily by avoiding key words and adopting a random sequence of inquiries. First he checked on general news, skimming over local events and announcements while reading a page at a glance with his new abilities, before moving to galactic summaries. There was nothing, not even a hint in the miscellany of curious events, about the mysterious appearance of a human female anywhere in known space. Riley was not discouraged. He had not expected anything to be easy. Asha might have been transported to a world, as he had, where the native population had not yet risen to the technological level of spaceflight. Or, if she had been more fortunate in the Transcendental Machine's lottery, she might have encountered difficulty in obtaining passage. Or her return to Federation space might not be considered consequential enough to deserve notice. Or she had been successful in concealing it. Or the news had not yet arrived at Federation Central or been transmitted elsewhere by information drones.