Transgalactic (19 page)

Other solar systems had gas giants, some of them closer to their primary, some of them more numerous, but none quite like these. But the inner planets were what made the human solar system different. Inside the orbit of Jupiter, between Jupiter and Mars, was the asteroid belt, composed of rocky materials that formed a few dwarf planets and scattered debris, and then the red planet itself, too small to hold on to most of its atmosphere and water, with an early attempt to become a livable world frustrated by its lack of size and its distance from the sun. The terraforming of Mars had been one of humanity's greatest triumphs before its fighting the Federation to a standstill.

And then Earth itself, the goldilocks planet located where it could be warm but not too warm, cold but not too cold, where water could remain liquid over much of its surface and big enough to retain an atmosphere and nurturing enough to allow carbonaceous compounds to develop into living things and to nourish them into complexity. And with a remarkably large satellite, in comparison to Earth, so that it was almost a twin system, big enough and close enough to become the stuff of dreams, and, eventually, the first accomplishment of space flight, and to attract the first colony of humans outside the Earth.

Inside the orbit of Earth, stifled in infancy, came Venus, born too close to the sun and choked by a thick, toxic atmosphere. Humanity had tried to terraform Venus as well, but it was a long, long process that might last longer than the human will to accomplish. And then Mercury, the small, swift messenger of the gods, spinning around the sun in its scorched orbit, bombarded by the solar wind and burned by solar heat.

It was, in its entirety, a dramatic collection that pleased Asha to contemplate and delighted her to encounter at last, like returning home. She wanted to accelerate the Barge, but fuel was getting low and even here, where by tradition she should have been welcomed and even celebrated, she did not want to call attention to herself.

*   *   *

She eased into the system from outside the plane of the ecliptic. It took a long time. The outer planets are a long way from the sun, and the dwarf planets, though Pluto sometimes loops inside the orbit of Neptune, were even farther. Neptune was on the other side of the sun, and Uranus was a quarter of the way outside Asha's trajectory, but Saturn eventually showed up on her viewscreen in all its glory and Jupiter, much later, in all its majesty. Some of their hydrogen had been mined to supply the demand for nuclear fuel by an energy-hungry space program, but it didn't show. The scattered rocks of the asteroid belt were no hazard, but she slowed as she reached the orbit of Mars. That had been the first triumph of human terraforming, and the dusty red planet had been turned partially green. And it had been Riley's birthplace. Now it was in ruins, the target of Federation rage when it could not reach Earth, when Earth had abandoned the defense of Mars in order to protect the home planet: the atmosphere that had been restored through the struggles of thousands of small space tugs, dragging ice from the Kuiper Belt and icy asteroids from the asteroid belt, now blown away; the surface of the planet pockmarked with craters created by the bombardment of nuclear explosions and the slinging of its twin moons onto the surface, like the planet's primordial past; and the small settlements and beginnings of green farms wiped from the face of the planet along with all the people who had risked everything to settle there and make it their home and could not be rescued.

Asha remained in orbit around Mars for several cycles, contemplating the way in which the madness of war destroys intelligent life and all it seeks to create. As despairing of sentient sanity as it made her, she hoped that it would not turn Riley, if he ever saw it, back into the angry killer he had been.

Finally she turned the ship toward what a human poet had once called “the pale blue dot.” The trip took half a long-cycle, but at last she found herself approaching the magic of Earth, with its blue oceans, its drifting white clouds, and its green continents, like an oasis of life in a desert of death. Here, if anywhere, was where Riley would eventually return, she thought, and here, if anywhere, they would be reunited.

She sent a message ahead to the Orbital Control system, identifying herself as a human returning from origins off-planet and off-system to visit and experience the home planet of humanity. After she had given the identification of the ship in which she traveled and the personal identity she had newly constructed, she answered further questions about her origins. “I was born,” she communicated, “on the experimental generation ship
Adastra,
captured by Federation ships halfway to Alpha Centauri, and taken to Federation Central. After the war we were released, and when I earned sufficient funds to lease a ship, I set off for the planet I have never seen. I hope to be a tourist.”

It was a good idea, she knew, to stick as close as possible to the truth, without revealing anything that might attract the attention of databases or their human attendants, or even agents of the Federation, of unidentified adversaries, or even of the Pedia. She didn't know how wide the Pedia cast its data net or how close to similar sentience the human equivalent had developed, but experience had made her cautious. Eventually Orbital Control assigned her an orbit far from Earth, where she could see the huge, cratered moon up close and the great, looming presence of the world that had given birth to humanity. How far it had come from those microbial beginnings was evidenced by the orbital clutter below and the small evidences of moon settlement burrowed beneath the surface.

Now she had to find a way to locate a solitary human among a population of billions while not revealing that she was searching or who she was. And hope that Riley thought as she did and had come up with his own way home.

 

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Riley coughed out the fluid in his mouth and throat and vomited the fluid from his stomach. The fluid in his digestive track would have to be eliminated over time. He looked around the semidark level nine with its coffinlike tanks. His inner clock told him he had been under the influence of the sim tank for more than six hours, although it seemed like only a few minutes. It was the opposite of dreams, in which an experience that seems to take hours happens in only a few minutes of real time.

Nothing moved in the space around him, not even Sharn. One step took Riley to the side of the tank she had occupied. She was immersed in it again, emotions chasing themselves across her face, mostly happy and intense, clouded with an occasional frown. In spite of her promises, she had returned to the emotional embrace of the sim experience, where all went well and a happy outcome was assured.

Riley knew he should leave her where she longed to be, rid of her guilt, her disappointment in life's rewards, and her despair at anything ever getting better. He should get away while he could; the Pedia that wanted to kill him would find some way to work its will. But he couldn't leave Sharn in that false bliss. He knew from personal experience how seductive it could be, but he knew, as well, that it was like death when struggle ends and surrender begins. In all those sim tanks ranked in rows across the long space of level nine were bodies that were as good as dead, though they might live on long past their normal expirations, and even some that were actually dead but had not yet lost the last flicker of brain activity. He didn't want Sharn to be among them.

He pulled her back up again, sputtering and protesting, coughing and vomiting and pleading to be allowed to return. He ignored her tears and pleas, stroked as much fluid as he could from her body, picked up his shirt where she had dropped it, and put it back around her shoulders.

“We've got to get to the top level while we can,” he said as he put on his pants and shoes. “The Pedia wants me dead.”

“Why would the Pedia—” she began to ask in a weak, choked voice, but he silenced her with a finger across her lips.

“Come now,” he said, and took her hand. He pulled her behind him across the dimly lit floor toward the ramp that led upward, that few people who had descended this far ever ascended.

Before they had crossed more than half the distance, the lights went out and they were left in total darkness, much like the stygian night that had enveloped him when he was in the sim tank. “Don't worry,” Riley said. “I remember the way.” He wasn't lying to comfort her—the memory of the way he had come was like a recording he could play in his head. He put Sharn ahead of him so that she would not bump into the sim tanks on either side, and guided her through the maze to finally reach the bottom of the ramp. The beginning of the upward slant confirmed that the map in his head was not an illusion.

As they started up Riley sensed, through sound or instinct, something large and monstrous coming toward them from farther up the ramp. At the last moment, Riley pulled Sharn to the side and something went past them, perhaps some machine used for delivering equipment to the lower levels or some maintenance device large and complicated enough to need guidance from the Pedia rather than the autonomy of the routine devices like the cleaning machine. Riley took Sharn's hand again and started upward once more, trying to sense in the darkness the return of the murderous machine from below or some new threat from above.

They had not yet reached level eight when Riley sensed a chill in the air. He put his arm around Sharn's shoulders. “Be strong,” he said. “I think it's going to get very cold.”

She shivered. “Let me go back,” she said weakly. It was a desperate whisper in the dark.

He put his head close to hers so that his voice would not seem disembodied. “I can't do that. You know what it means if you go back.”

As they approached level eight, the cold grew more intense. It must be approaching the freezing point, Riley thought, and drew Sharn against his body so that she could share some of his warmth. The cold didn't seem to bother him, as if his system was automatically adjusting. That move turned out to be fortunate. Voices that Riley had heard for several minutes became clearer. There were screams, shouts, and curses in a variety of languages, mostly human, swearing at the management of what had been promised as a world of pleasure, and offers of great amounts of credits if someone turned the lights back on and turned up the heat. Bodies began battering against Riley, some going up and some down, and Sharn might have been torn away if he had not been holding her tight. And then the bodies were gone, and Riley continued their sightless journey upward.

The next level was worse. Riley remembered that the eighth level had been filled with people pretending to be something other than they were, getting their satisfaction from deceiving someone else. Level seven was for people, male and female, who vented their emotions on animations, beating them, kicking them, stomping them, seeing them damaged to the point where they had to be replaced, and sometimes committing violence on each other. When they spilled out onto the ramp they brought their frustrations with them, striking out blindly in the darkness, hitting Riley with blows that he could not entirely brush away without exposing Sharn, until he made his left arm into a battering ram and cleared a way for them to pass.

*   *   *

Level six was not as difficult. As they neared what Riley remembered as the entrance, he could hear voices from within seeming to plead for a savior, addressed to a variety of deities in a variety of languages in a variety of voices, from the demanding to the ingratiating. Some of them seemed to change in midvoice. As he could sense the opening to the level on his left, he could hear that some had begun praying to the Pedia on the same terms as they had addressed their gods, and Riley thought they were recognizing, in their panic, what they would not contemplate in normal times, that the Pedias of the galaxy were more likely to save them than the supernatural powers of their religions—and though they would not have believed it, just as likely to sacrifice them for some unknown and unknowable cause.

As if in response to his musing, Riley sensed the return of the unseen apparatus that had tried to attack them as they started up the ramp, and, at the last moment, drew Sharn aside into the level-six entrance. When he stepped onto the ramp again, it felt sticky under his feet. It smelled like blood, and he thought that the machinery, whatever it was, had encountered and injured or killed some of the people from the levels below that he and Sharn had fought their way through.

Level five was stickier and noisier. Riley threaded his way among bodies, sensing them in his path, though he had to help Sharn over some of them, and she shuddered, as much from revulsion as from the increasing cold. Meanwhile there were angry voices demanding that someone, anyone, everyone, be punished for the failure of the system, wanting to know who was responsible, who was attacking them in the dark, where their friends, and enemies, were. Blows were struck in the darkness. Fists thudded, bones shattered, people fell, curses and threats echoed. Riley hugged Sharn closer and struggled past.

On level four, voices were trying to buy their way to a brighter, warmer place, offering or accepting great sums of credits for rescue, and Riley would have marveled at the variety of responses to crises if he had not remembered the variety of ways in which people had chosen to satisfy the needs they identified as pleasure that were actually ways to bury pain and psychic anguish.

The cold was getting worse. Sharn was shivering and asking, in a small, frightened voice, to be warmed. Riley picked her up and held her against his chest. She seemed to welcome that and relaxed. Riley sniffed the air. In addition to the smell of blood and other fluids on the ramp, he could sense that the level of oxygen had diminished, and, possibly, carbon dioxide had increased. The Pedia controlled the systems that kept Dante livable, and it could destroy him any time it wished—if it was willing to destroy all the other living creatures on the pleasure world as well. Riley had no doubt that the Pedia would sacrifice thousands of people without hesitation or remorse, if it could feel such emotions, or emotions of any kind, but he hoped that the Pedia might balance that outcome against the possibility that such total destruction might raise questions about the infallibility of Pedias and whatever long-term plans they might share—if they shared. This one had already risked its reputation by the failures of the systems under its care. Did it dare to risk more?