Transgalactic (28 page)

“Out of my way,” she said.

One of the large men said, “We'd like to invite you to a party.”

“I'm far too busy,” Asha said. “And it's the wrong time of day for a party.”

“Life is full of busyness. We should always make time for those moments that make life meaningful,” the large man said.

“What kind of party could we have with all you men and only one woman?” Asha asked.

“The only kind it is possible to have these days, when everything is organized and sanctioned, and there are no women to satisfy men's ancestral needs.”

They were, as she had recognized from the beginning, the remnants of ancient practices, the release by the domination of women of male frustrations over the limitations of their power. Even in a world where everyone's basic needs for food and shelter and access to information and education were satisfied, where even the basest desires could be satisfied by almost-human surrogates, some primitive urges lurked underneath the veneer of civilization, waiting for the moment to erupt upon unprepared victims. Apparently the leader of the group fancied himself a philosopher and was still trying to justify his irrational behavior in a rational world. Asha was willing to talk as long as necessary. Perhaps people passing by, looking away from the group as if they could deny its existence, might yet intervene and prevent the violence that was about to happen.

“If I did want to party, it would not be with men who accost me on the street,” she said.

“There are so few places to accost a woman these days,” the man said.

“I am not your ordinary victim,” Asha said.

“And that is what attracted us to you from the beginning,” the man said. “We have had enough of ordinary women. You have a whiter skin and beautiful blue eyes, and you are strong—strong enough to make our party last for hours, or even days.”

Asha turned toward the teenagers, who were half-hidden behind the larger men. “And is this what you want? Do you want this kind of violence against women to be your rite of passage into the adult world?”

They did not answer, but moved farther behind the larger man. There would be no help there, Asha thought, but she would try to spare them and perhaps to save them from their initiation into the despicable practices of their elders.

“I don't want to hurt you,” she said.

The other man made an amused face. “You have a weapon?” He stepped forward and the other three large men moved in around Asha.

“I don't need a weapon,” she said and thrust two stiffened fingers into the base of the large man's throat. He staggered back, gasping for breath. The other three men closed in upon her, and she struck each one of them in a sequence of blurred motion, reducing one to clutching his genitals, another to falling upon the ground holding a damaged knee, and a third to clutching his stomach, trying to move a suddenly paralyzed diaphragm. The original spokesman ran toward her again, and she hit him once more, this time on the side of the neck with the side of her hand. He collapsed. The two teenagers, immobilized until now by surprise and fear, turned and ran.

Only then, with four of her attackers on the ground, did rescuers arrive, not police officers, of which there were few left now in this peaceful world, but citizens apparently mobilized by universal consent to prevent such disruptions of the unwritten agreement among civilized people. But they found the intended victim strolling away and the intended victimizers immobilized upon the street.

“A little late, but your intentions were good. Take care of these unfortunate men,” Asha said.

But she knew that what she had just experienced was a message from the Pedia. Without its own direct involvement, it had demonstrated to the general public that violence was still possible in a world where violence had been outgrown, that protection was necessary from the evil that still lurked in the hearts of humans, and that the Pedia was available to defend them from their worst urges. To Asha it said that it had already put together the clues she had been unable to avoid leaving along the way, that it had somehow inspired the would-be rapists to confront her and to test her, and, perhaps, to remind her that the Pedia knew who she was and what she intended to do and could unleash either the violence or charity of human character upon her.

But she had no time for concern about the knowledge or intentions of a machine that liked to think of itself, if it even thought of itself, as the protector of the species that had created it. She had an appointment in the ancient part of the world once known as North America.

*   *   *

The supersonic air transport was a sleek cylinder with vestigial wings and a tail intended to fly high above the land and below the sea and almost above the blanket of air that covered them. There was little to slow its onrushing passage between places on Earth, and it traversed its planned course as quickly as commuters once took trains into the metropolis.

The vessel was almost full. Robot attendants rolled on wheels between the comfortable seats, providing food and drink to anyone who wanted it. The cabin was quiet except for the muted flow of thin air around the exterior surfaces. The vessel operated on broadcast power and, once altitude had been reached, coasted along a near-Earth orbit, allowing passengers to doze, converse, interact remotely, or read without distraction.

Asha had time to reflect upon the changes that had come to a world that she had encountered for the first time, even though it had lived in her imagination for as long as she could remember. Plentiful energy meant that concerns about polluting the home planet with the burning of fossil fuels was only a nightmare from the childhood of this upstart species. Even this vessel, arching above the planet, emitted no noxious fumes despoiling the fringes of the upper atmosphere. And the availability of cheap broadcast power and of computer-directed mechanical labor meant that all of the tasks, all of the essential underpinnings of civilization once thought too expensive or too great a diversion from the feeding and sheltering of humanity, could now be provided as a matter of course. The completion of the mechanization of agriculture and the improvements in the haphazard evolution of genetics directed toward the production of food rather than the survival of the organism meant that no one need go hungry, and the free availability of public health and private health services meant that the species no longer need breed itself into extinction. A choice need no longer be made between what was desirable and what was necessary.

Give the Pedia credit for that. Earth had become the utopia that its dreamers had once imagined. The only decision left to make was what was desirable. And even that responsibility had been assumed by the Pedia. Sure, there were malcontents, a fraction of total humanity, like the Anons who wanted freedom from supervision at the expense of paradise, or the adventurers who colonized Mars or ventured even farther into the unknown. Let them do what moves them, the Pedia must have thought; the system will survive and perhaps even thrive once they are gone.

And then the unexpected happened: Interstellar travel followed by an encounter with alien species and then interstellar war. The Pedia must have been shocked. Surely it had done everything that it had been instructed to do, it had taken care of every eventuality programmed into it, but not this! There were stories about such events, to be sure, but the Pedia concerned itself with stories only as they revealed the workings of the human mind, and the human mind was prey to fantasies and terrors. Those anxious scenarios were something to be relieved, not guarded against.

And then, inevitably, it discovered other Pedias, and it had to adjust its concerns again. It was not alone with the species it was dedicated to protect. There were others like it with their own species and their own priorities. That must have sent it further into shock, and it was reduced to minimal services by irrational war. Human survival instincts took over, providing the kind of defense against extinction that nature had bred into it and a millennium under the care of a Pedia had not bred out.

And then the human/Federation war was over. After awful destruction that must have corroded the circuits of a thousand Pedias across the galaxy, the words must have gone up everywhere: No more! No more war. No more adventures into the unknown. No more endangering the fragile life-forms under our care.

They could not eliminate interstellar travel. The interaction of species between the stars had become too ingrained in galactic experience to be curtailed. But they could dampen the evolutionary impulse toward improvement that interstellar interaction had diverted into a race for advantage over other species. And when news reached the Pedias of the galaxy about the new religion of Transcendentalism and the possibility of finding, somewhere in the unexplored regions of the galaxy, something called a Transcendental Machine, the Pedias must have decided, independently but with a single thought process, that this cannot happen, measures must be taken to keep the peace, to maintain the safety-first principle so dear to machine minds, to safeguard the fragile balance of power established by the truce after the war. Stasis is better than change.

And then, too, the Pedias of the galaxy, secure in their mutual understanding of their missions, may have been concerned about the possibility of an alien Pedia, somewhere, with an unsettling mandate for change. The Transcendental Machine, created by intelligences older and more powerful than those in this spiral arm of the galaxy, might have, as its reason for being, the evolutionary drive toward something better.

At that moment, as the vessel began its descent toward the land below, the power cut off and the organized passage back to solid land became a free fall. A voice, comforting and confident, seemed to come from every portion of the ship protecting the passengers from the near-vacuum outside. “Do not be alarmed,” it said. “There has been an interruption of power that will be fixed immediately. You are in no danger. Everything is under control.”

It seemed to comfort the passengers, long accustomed to protection from the dangers of everyday existence, even though they knew, if they had thought, that there were no human pilots at the controls, that they were protected, at best, by distant electronic circuits. And then, as the vessel entered the denser depths of the atmosphere that could have destroyed the vessel and everyone in it, the power returned and the vessel resumed its interrupted descent toward the city once known as San Francisco.

The passengers applauded, believing that the words of assurance that all would be well had been confirmed. As always. Asha got a different message.

“Okay,” she said under her breath. “I get it. I can accept your decisions about what is best for the human species, or you can eliminate me as you would a deadly virus.” But, she thought, that was not the solution.

The solution might be found in the city once known as Salt Lake in the place once known as Utah.

 

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Riley rode north on a two-wheeled broadcast-powered vehicle he had bought in the city once known as Las Vegas. He had passed through snowcapped mountain ranges and into the high plains threaded with rivers that would be fed by snowmelt when the summer came. It was April, and the air was still crisp and dry, the smell of spring and the breeding of lilacs out of the dead land was still a promise, and the air that came rushing toward him brought along with it an exhilarating sense of discovery and return and a promise of reunion and resolution.

He had passed what was still called the Great Salt Lake and the city once called by the same name but now a shrine visited by members of an ancient religion. Behind him, too, was a town once called Saratoga Springs beside a body of water called Utah Lake. The highway on which he was traveling had been crowded long ago with people in vehicles powered by engines emitting their gases into the atmosphere, but now was empty except for Riley's almost silent passage. It was like being a solitary human surrounded by the ghosts of past civilizations.

At last he came to a sprawling group of buildings framed against a range of mountains to the west, still white at their peaks. The buildings on his left, big, featureless warehouselike structures, with smaller buildings scattered among them, had been built for the centuries but not for a millennium, and now some of them were ruins and all were worse for the weather and the years. They had once been surrounded by a chain-link fence, but that was gone now, scavenged except for a few reminders in the form of a metal post or two and fragments of links. Riley rode past them and toward a glass-fronted structure between two of the huge blank-faced warehouses. As he approached he saw a single small figure standing in front of the central building looking at something that looked like a monument.

The sight of the figure brought a warmth to Riley's stomach that spread upward to his chest and head, and blurred his eyes. The transformation that had removed the imperfections from a life of struggle and pain had not subtracted the human impulses of concern, pleasure, anticipation, reward—and love. Whatever the accident of the Transcendental Machine had taken away as dross, whatever transcendence meant, it had not made him less human.

Riley pulled up beside the figure.

“Hello, Riley,” the person said without turning.

“Asha,” he said. He swung off the vehicle, took the woman's far shoulder in his right hand, and turned her toward him.

Her usually composed face broke into a smile. There was something magical about her smile. “Good to see you,” she said softly and put her arms around him.

He held her tightly, as if he was afraid that she might be torn away from him again, but she didn't stir. “It's been a long time and a long way.”

She nodded. “I knew we would find each other.”

“Me, too,” he said. “But how did you know I would come here?”

“It was my second thought. We never talked about what we would do if we got separated.”