Transgalactic (26 page)

Having placed the dishes in the middle of the table, the young people placed spoonfuls of rice and ladles of steaming vegetables in rich, dark sauces on the plates in front of Asha and Latha, before placing similar servings on the plates on either side of them.

“Are other people joining us?” Asha asked.

“Only my children,” Latha said, and the two young people sat down, the young man beside Asha, the young woman beside Latha, as if to refute Asha's earlier remark about servants.

It was another experience that Asha had never enjoyed, sitting down to a meal with table and chairs, dishes, and implements. Her whole life had been spent in the bare efficiencies of improvised prison quarters or spaceship food service, where eating was a necessity, not a nicety, and out of containers or recyclable plastic bowls. This was almost ceremonial, and the food that she put to her mouth, after watching Latha use the implements in front of her, was almost ceremonial as well in its intensity of flavors. She had eaten many kinds of food over her lifetime, many strange, some repulsive, most bland, but this food was an experience like viewing a great piece of art or listening to a classic work of music.

“Here we have returned to our ancestral customs,” Latha said, “with all the seasonings and spices for which this part of the world once was famous. We grow them ourselves and raise our own vegetables.”

“Exceptional!” Asha said.

“Thank you,” the young man beside Asha replied, and the young woman beside Latha nodded.

“They cook the food in addition to putting it on the table,” Latha said. “And they are not limited by Pedia restrictions on salt, for instance, or tastes that a few people might not like or that might not be considered healthful.”

“We are very healthy,” the young woman beside Latha said, “as you can see.”

“Indeed!” Asha said, and cast a side glance at the young man beside her. He returned it with an intensity she did not understand.

The evening ended with an equally exotic sweet pudding and a wine that Latha said was made and aged in a nearby vineyard, an art that had nearly been forgotten before the Anons reinvented it. Asha expressed her appreciation for the meal and the company, and once more renewed her request to leave, which Latha, in turn, rejected with her hospitable refrain that they could not let her leave, in this case without proper rest. Asha returned to the bedroom in which she had bathed and dressed. She found her clothing, dry and restored, on her bed, and changed into it before she lay down on the bed. That, too, was an experience she had enjoyed only once before—on the Squeal planet—and then with the company of Eenie and Minie. But she had little time to appreciate it. As she lay there in the darkness, staring up toward a ceiling that she could no longer see, she considered how she was going to get away from Latha's smothering hospitality that might well become imprisonment.

A small noise at the door alerted her to the presence of someone else in the room. She could see only a dark shape, but she identified the intruder by his smell. It was the beautiful young man who had served the food before joining them at the table. She readied herself for an encounter, either amorous or deadly, before the young man spoke in a near whisper. “Come!”

She rose from the bed. “Where?”

“With me. Now.”

They moved silently farther down the wing of the building, in the other direction from the living room and the front doors, until they reached a door at the end of the wing. The young man opened it with a slow, silent, practiced movement, and Asha followed him into the night, down a path, and into a shed where she could see the dim shapes of vehicles, some with two wheels, some with four. The young man swung his leg over a two-wheeled vehicle and motioned for Asha to get on behind. As soon as she was seated, her arms around his supple waist, the vehicle started moving silently down a road, past barely seen trees and outbuildings before reaching a smooth highway.

Finally Asha spoke. “Who are you and are you going to tell me what's happening?”

“My name is Adithya and she doesn't intend for you to leave,” the young man said.

“She wants to keep me a prisoner?”

“She wants to make you one of us.”

“And you don't want that,” Asha said, relieved a bit at the knowledge that the young man was acting out of a desire to protect his own position. “As one of her sons.”

“As her son.”

“You know?”

“Of course. We all know. Adithya means ‘sun' in the ancient language known as Sanskrit. ‘Sun.' ‘Son.' The mind makes curious connections that it often hides from itself. But there are things we keep from her.”

“Like the fact that your plans against the Pedia won't work?”

“That, too.”

“And that the Pedia only allows them to continue so that rebellion won't grow into revolt?”

“Yes. All that. And why you must go away before you tell her things she should not know.”

And they sped on into the night toward what Asha hoped would be, at last, her reunion with Riley and a final confrontation with the forces of stasis and suppression.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Riley's one-person spaceship—little more than an escape pod—hovered over the body of water that had once been called Lake Mead. The surface was calm, lit only by the pale moon rising above the eastern wall of the canyon in which the pent-up water was retained, and by the dam, once a marvel of human engineering named for a long-ago leader of a long-ago nation, now so often repaired that it was virtually a different structure. The intermittent droughts that had lowered the levels of the lake periodically had been ended by the Pedia's control of weather.

Looking at the moon reminded Riley of Jak's parting words: Riley could subject himself to one of the space elevators, but they took forever to descend and were under the surveillance of the Pedia as soon as people entered the waiting area. The ship could be observed as well, but he had programmed it, he said, to emulate the decaying orbit of a piece of orbital junk falling out of the sky, which might put off surveillance long enough for Riley to get away.

Riley looked again at the water about a half-dozen meters below and thought that he had never learned to swim. On Mars, where he had grown up, there were no standing bodies of water and water was far too precious to waste on a pool. And when he was attending the Solar Institute, he did not want to provide an excuse for fellow students' derision at his not knowing how to swim. But, he thought, how hard could it be?

He took a deep breath and launched himself from the ship. It rocked behind him and then took off on a programmed course that would take it back to Jak's laboratory on the other side of the moon, including evasive maneuvers that would throw off surveillance and lose it entirely after it moved onto the dark side.

The water, cold and incredibly
wet,
swallowed him, gulping him down, pulling him deeper and deeper into its unplumbed depths. It was not like the embrace of the sim tanks' thick, body-temperature fluid that he could breathe in and know that it would nourish his need for oxygen and sustenance and give him peace and happy dreams. Instead the cold, thin water warned him that its embrace was death, that he had to hold his breath if he wanted to live, and that he had to push himself back to the surface. He kept descending, until, instinctively, he began to flail with his arms and hands. His descent slowed, and he began to use his mind against the shock of sensory assault. If flailing his arms and hands helped, perhaps he could use them more efficiently and, when that helped, his legs as methods of propulsion. He began to move them back and forth as if he were squeezing the water of the lake between them. His descent stopped, and he began to ascend.

At last he broke free, shook his head, and took a deep breath of air, thinking that he had never before appreciated the sheer pleasure of filling his lungs with something so sweet. Compared with this the seduction of the sim tank paled to nothing.

Riley paddled for a few moments on the surface before he put his newfound skill to work and swam to the shore with powerful strokes of his arms and kicks of his legs. He understood now what had drawn his fellow students to the Solar Institute pool. He liked doing this.

He pulled himself up on the pebbly shoreline, sat down, removed his shoes, poured water from them, and put them back on, squishy as they were. He had a long way to walk. He stood up, feeling the water dripping from his clothes and the breeze, warm as it was this time of year, chilling his body. He took another deep breath, enjoying air that was not thick with spaceship stench and the alien odors of creatures that had evolved on different worlds under strange suns, with air that wasn't as thin and cold as the air of Mars.

He set off to the northeast, toward the lights that he had seen, some forty kilometers distant, as his ship had descended. As transformed as he was, he was still human. He needed food and he needed civilization—not so much for the companionship and the assistance of others as for the reach of technology.

*   *   *

The sun was rising as he came upon the outskirts of the urban area whose lights he had seen during his approach. He had traveled through mountain ranges and across desert areas dotted with cactus and sagebrush but mostly along ancient highways that were smooth and maintained even though no surface traffic moved on it. Once he had caught an unwary hopping creature and cooked it over a fire he had put together from scattered brush and what seemed like ancestral wisdom. The act of hunting, cooking, and eating seemed to satisfy some ancient yearnings, and as he consumed the roasted flesh it felt like a ceremonial act of commitment to the evolutionary process that had brought him across a galaxy to this moment of return to his origins.

The lights that had attracted his attention were extinguished now, and the highway had turned into an avenue between towering buildings that led, on the other side, to the more modest structures of a small city. The towering buildings had fountains spouting plumes of water in front of them and big signs, no longer illuminated by moving lights, that read
GAMES
,
TEST YOUR LUCK
!, and
EVERYBODY WINS
. And reaching even higher above were signs that identified them as places like
THE FLAMINGO
and
MGM GRAND
.

Riley chose The Flamingo because he liked the apparently real pink birds with long legs stalking through the pond in front. He entered through broad front doors that slid open for him as he approached. Machines with displays of numbers and symbols took up space against either wall of the entrance, but they were unused now, except for two older players, a woman and a man, each with white hair. They were pushing buttons in a routine that seemed more machinelike than the machines themselves. The tables inside, on either side of a grand lobby with a marble floor and a lofty ceiling, were completely unused. Riley made his way to a nearby counter where a drowsy female receptionist in a colorful pink uniform opened her eyes at Riley's appearance.

“This place isn't hiring right now,” the receptionist said.

“I want a room,” Riley said, and offered an identity he had inserted into the back of his hand. It was one he hadn't used before.

The receptionist's eyes widened as she looked at the display in front of her, but she accepted the identity and keyed an entrance code into it. “Room four-sixteen,” she said.

“When do the games start?” Riley asked.

“When do you want them to start?” The woman's attitude had changed when she saw the number of credits on Riley's identity, and she no longer apparently considered Riley's appearance disreputable.

“No special treatment,” Riley said.

“Things get started about noon,” the receptionist said.

“Soon enough.”

On his way to the elevator, Riley stopped at an automated shop and purchased a change of clothing like that worn by a mannequin that acted as an animated display at the entrance, and stopped at another shop for a depilatory and a teeth-cleaning device. He didn't want to attract the kind of attention the receptionist had displayed. When he got to his room, however, he found that clothing and personal items were already available. He showered, enjoying the delightful wastefulness, got rid of his whiskers, got dressed, and lay down on the bed that embraced him as he reclined. Like Asha, he had found that he didn't need much sleep, but an occasional hour or two of rest was desirable if he were to perform at peak efficiency.

Two hours later he had checked the monitor set into the table in the middle of the room. No information sources that he could check without calling attention to his specific interest offered any clues that might indicate Asha's presence on Earth, much less her location. But then, he thought, he had done nothing to suggest similar information about himself. He would have to do something about that.

He ordered food from the menu on the monitor and consumed what emerged through a door in the table. It was not nearly as good as the four-footed hopper he had caught and cooked himself, but it was fuel for what he needed to do. He went down to the gaming floor to do it. The air that had seemed sterile when he entered now seemed perfumed with human excitement.

The rows of machines and tables were busy now, though not full, and the people who were sitting or standing by them were not the feverish lot he had experienced on Dante. Here they seemed not only measured in their approach to the risks they were taking but even a bit bored.

Riley considered the machines. He decided that their operation could be analyzed but the process would take too long and the payoff wasn't that remarkable. One of the tables was more interesting. Cards were dealt by a machine to players who attempted to match or beat the dealer at reaching twenty-one without their cards' value totaling more than that. Riley studied the way the cards came out of the dealer's card-shuffling apparatus and the sequence in which they appeared, and then sat down and inserted his hand into the place provided for it in the portion of the table in front of him.