Transgalactic (15 page)

“Welcome to Dante,” a disembodied voice said. Critics of the pleasure world's indulgences have said that the greeting should have been “Abandon hope…”

Riley went into the corridors and facilities that he had come to know so well when he had been there before. The first level was the hospital. Once it had been crowded with the human wounded from the war, the dying and the near-dying. Indeed the entire satellite, all nine levels, had been excavated for the hospital until one by one they were devoted to other uses as the war grew more deadly and few survivors were left, and then, after the war, as people either survived or died, and Dante received only the unusual cases requiring the unusual skills that wartime casualties had developed.

The walls were antiseptic white and bathed by antibiotic light. Riley felt a sense of déjà vu as he made his way toward the hospital check-in station, although he had been carried in, unconscious, on an automated gurney and confined to a recovery unit until he was released to rehabilitate himself in any of the lower levels that he preferred.

Riley stopped at the entrance that opened only for patients and workers. A monitor set into the wall beside the door scanned his face as he waited with the patience engendered by a lifetime of experience. The satellite had been given sufficient rotation to simulate the gravity of a larger moon, but the effect on his inner ear took some getting used to. He pressed the back of his hand against the keypad beside the monitor.

“Greetings,” the monitor said. “What can I do for you?”

He inserted Sharn's identity number. He was surprised that he knew it. He must have seen it on one of his medical reports, and it had stuck in his memory, waiting for a newly discovered ability to access anything he had ever observed. “I'd like to speak to this person,” he said.

“There is no such individual in this facility,” the monitor said in the flat, authoritative, no-nonsense, no-argument-allowed tone standard for Pedia connections.

“She is a surgeon here,” Riley said.

“There is no such surgeon in this facility,” the monitor said.

“Has she been transferred?” Riley considered the possibility that he had made a mistake in the number, but he knew he had not: He could visualize the screen on which Sharn's identity had been listed.

“No such individual has ever been in this facility,” the monitor said.

“Is she somewhere else in Dante?” Riley said.

“Any such information is confidential,” the monitor said. Dante anonymity at work. But Riley knew what the Pedia would have reported if it had not been restricted by limitations built into its code at the most basic level: “No such individual is in Dante or has ever been in Dante.” Sharn had been wiped from existence, as if she had never been, perhaps because of his connections with her, and in a way that he had thought impossible to accomplish. Pedias might refuse to answer questions or deny the ability to answer questions, but they could not lie. The entire structure of society was built on that one basic truth: Pedias don't lie. Pedias kept track of everything, including everybody's credits, debts, obligations, connections, location, history.… If they could be corrupted, the system would topple.

And yet Riley remembered Sharn clearly, attaching his new arm and coming to his recovery cubicle afterward, checking the connections that monitored his arm and his body and passed healing currents and medications through it. He remembered Sharn talking to him about how he had lost his arm and what he had done in the war in a way that he thought indicated more than the normal interest of a surgeon in her work. And he remembered how she looked and felt later when she came to his bed and they made love.

He trusted his memory more than he trusted the system, and the fact that the Pedia could be corrupted meant that the entire social order was in greater danger than he had thought. He and Asha had more to do than he had suspected.

*   *   *

Riley waited outside the ramp that led to the lower levels. It was shift-change time, and the attendants and physicians who worked in the hospital would be returning from their off-duty hours in the pleasure levels. There weren't many who worked in the hospital anymore; most of the medical services were automated; only a few real people were required for servicing, supervision, or emergencies. Finally a technician appeared that he recognized, one who had assisted Sharn with the equipment that Sharn had guided through its complex task of connecting bone, blood vessels, nerves, and skin. Riley stopped the man with a hand to his arm. The small, dark-haired man had the blank expression and dazed look of someone who had overstimulated his pleasure centers.

Riley introduced himself as a recovered patient who had returned to thank his surgeon and her assistants for his care. The man's expression didn't change, but he didn't pull his arm away.

“Could you tell me where I could find Sharn?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Dr. Sharn, the surgeon who restored my arm. You were there.”

“I don't know any Dr. Sharn,” the man said.

“Sure you do,” Riley said. He described her: tall, blond, shapely. Friendly.

“Sounds great,” the man said, his expression clearing, “but I don't know anybody like that.”

The man didn't change his answer and after several more attempts Riley gave up. The technician seemed to believe what he was saying. Riley thanked him and apologized for his mistake. He was turning away when he saw a small cleaning-machine waiting nearby for the humans to get out of its way.

“Hello, little fellow,” Riley said.

“Hello,” the machine said in the flat, unmodulated tone of automated equipment that needed little in the way of voice responses or computer power to do their simple tasks. “If you have finished your conversation I will continue with my task.”

“Have you seen Dr. Sharn?” Riley asked.

“She is on level nine,” the machine said. Riley felt elated at confirmation of what he had never doubted, Sharn's existence and that she had never left Dante. And that the people who had tried to wipe her out of memory had overlooked the lowliest creatures on Dante, the machines that didn't need connection to the central Pedia.

“Thanks, little fellow,” Riley said, and started down the ramp toward the second level.

The second level was dusky, with a dim, rosy light pervading everything, and perfumes in the air like aphrodisiacs. Low music throbbed through the closed and open spaces, and bodies writhed on the padded floors and benches in a variety of combinations and contortions. While Riley paused on the landing, remembering his own mindless moments of anonymous passion as he had tried to forget the deaths he had been guilty of and the pain of loss and injury, as well as Sharn's abandonment. But eventually it had not been enough, and he had gone deeper into Dante's bowels.

A woman approached him from the dusk. She was tall, slender, young, dark-haired, and almost naked. Her natural attributes may have been enhanced, but they looked good on her. “I like your looks, guy,” she said. “Would you like to join me?” She paused before she continued. “I can get other girls, if you prefer groups. Or maybe you like big, tough guys like yourself.”

“Thanks,” Riley said, “but I'm looking for a friend.”

“You won't find anything better,” she said. “Friends are overrated.”

Riley shook his head and went down a level. Here the aroma of food and drink wafted toward him from groaning tables piled high with meats, baked breads, and pitchers of what looked like wine. Overweight men and women lounged at the tables or on couches, eating and drinking until the remains of their feasting dripped from their mouths and down their chins onto their chests. Occasionally one of them would get up and stagger to a station against the far wall where automated equipment would evacuate their stomachs and clean their bodies before they returned to their eating and drinking.

Riley shook his head and continued down the ramp.

On the fourth level men and women, fully dressed, were playing games of chance, rolling dice, placing bets against numbers that sprang up randomly on a circle of lights, or buying and selling credits in a market that changed every few seconds to record the shifts in values on worlds so far removed that their success or failure would take many cycles to reach the central accounting system.

Riley had never been interested in finances or in riches, and he continued down past the fifth level and the sixth, pausing for a moment at the seventh level to see men and occasionally women fighting each other with fists and weapons, with Pediaized medics standing by to inject, stitch, and repair. And he went on to the eighth level and finally reached the ninth level, where coffinlike tanks were ranged across a long, wide, polished dark floor. Here were the sim tanks that he remembered, when ordinary pleasures were no longer enough to ease the pains of existence and where simulated experience of ultimate fulfillment were Pedia-fashioned for each person. Riley knew what it was like because it was to this level he had descended, when none of the other levels were sufficient. It was the last dark refuge of his damaged soul, and it had plunged him into even deeper darkness from which he had been dragged back to the real world by the unseen voice that told him about the Transcendental Machine and the Prophet of Transcendentalism, and forced upon him the task of killing the Prophet and seizing the Machine, or destroying it. And that had inserted a biological pedia, his pedia, into his brain to give him an added resource and to punish him, even kill him, if he failed or refused to carry out his instructions.

Riley searched among the tanks until he found her. It was Sharn, although her body, imbedded in the thick fluid that filled the tank, was thinner than he remembered and her face, though older, more at peace. Whatever dream she was living was better than what life had offered, even though the dream was devouring her from within.

He hated to bring her back to the real world, but he knew that that was what he would have wanted if it were he lying there, as he had been. He reached down into the fluid in which she was immersed, that sustained her body while she dreamed, and pulled her up by her shoulders. The fluid ran down her body in viscous streams and out of her mouth and nose. She coughed, vomited the fluid that had filled her lungs, gagged and vomited again, stirred, and opened her eyes. After a moment they focused on him.

“Riley?” she said. “Is that you? How can it—? Let go. Let me go back. For the first time in my life I was happy.”

“I can't,” Riley said. “I've got to ask you some questions. And then, if you answer them, I'll let you go back.”

“I don't believe it's you,” she said. “You look different.”

“It's been a couple of long-cycles,” Riley said. “And a lot has happened to both of us.”

“Let me see you better,” she said. The light was dim here, but that was not what she meant. She reached up and touched his face with both hands, and then slipped them behind his head. Her face hardened with suspicion. “You aren't Riley. You're a dream, a bad dream, and I'm still in the sim tank.”

He understood. She had been searching for the scar of his operation, the one that had opened his skull for the biological pedia, the scar that the Transcendental Machine had removed along with all the other imperfections, including the pedia.

“You were the surgeon who put that thing in my head!” he said.

 

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Asha's father looked old. His hair was white and thin, and his face was furrowed, as if armies of thought had waged battles across it. At the moment, it looked confused. “Asha?” he said. “You look different.”

He looked different, too. She had left him a dozen long-cycles ago, still a youngish man, vigorous, determined, filled with hopeful plans to change the minds of the Federation Council that had drawn from her father and her younger brother Kip what the Council had considered damning evidence of innate human violence. Out of that judgment had emerged ten long-cycles of war and destruction. Confirmation for the Council. Casus belli for humanity and its allies.

And yet here was her father in the heart of the Federation, in a level and an office that suggested a position of power in the Federation bureaucracy. “I left here a girl,” Asha said. “I came back a woman. With a new identity.” She gave a series of numbers that were not her identity but close enough to confuse anyone who might be listening.

“And yet more than a woman,” her father said. “There's power in the way you stand and move, a confidence that I have seen in only a few of the people I have known, including the most effective members of the Federation. I'm proud of what you've become. But what happened to you?”

“I've gone many places and done many things,” Asha said. “But what happened to you? You've grown old.” She sat down, not because she was tired, but because she didn't want to seem to challenge his authority either as a father or as an officer of the Federation.

“Life here has not been easy,” her father said, “after you and Ren left me behind.”

“We didn't leave you behind. You refused to come with us. You wanted to stay, you said. You still had hopes of changing the Federation's mind about humans. But instead we had ten long-cycles of war, dozens of worlds destroyed, hundreds of millions of people of all kinds massacred.”

Her father sat down heavily in the chair behind his desk. It was padded and looked comfortable, but he didn't look comfortable in it. “I failed,” he said. It was not so much a verdict on a plan of action as the summing up of a life.

“And now you find yourself a part of the Federation you thought you could change. The Federation that tried to destroy humanity.”

Her father sighed. “I failed because I was human, because I had violence bred into me, because I could not recognize that peace requires a surrender of rights for the good of the whole, that the Federation was right and I was wrong, that the Federation is the only force for peace and stability in the galaxy.”