Transgalactic (29 page)

“Yes,” he said. “We never thought it could happen. But how did you know I would be here at this spot on Earth?”

“I got your message.”

“The gambling bit?”

“That, too. But the message after that, the one waiting for me at the port in Sri Lanka.”

“I didn't send a message.”

Asha drew back for a moment. “Ah, then—”

“It was the Pedia.”

“And you?”

“The Pedia sent for me, though I didn't know at the time that it was sending for
me.
I thought it was for the man who beat the roulette game on the Strip. I knew I was taking a chance by an action that would attract attention, but I thought it was worth the risk to let you know I was here.”

“I always knew we would meet, here or somewhere else,” Asha said. “But I think we have been underestimating the Pedia.”

“Clearly.”

“But what does that mean?” Asha said. “Should we accept its invitation? Or should we run for it on your cute little machine?”

“I'm not sure it was an invitation,” Riley said, “and I'm not sure we can run for it, if by ‘run for it' you mean get away without incident. The Pedia brought us here to show its power over us. It could have destroyed us in a number of different ways if that's what it wanted. I think we should accept its invitation and see what it wants. Maybe it will discover that it has underestimated us.”

“I agree,” Asha said. “We have to deal with the Pedias of the galaxy, and we might as well begin now.”

She drew back a step, took Riley's hand, and faced the glass-fronted building. Now Riley could see what she had been looking at when he'd arrived, what he had thought was a monument. It was a message board and it had a message. The black lettering had been weathered and fragments were missing that Riley had to supply. At the top it read, “Welcome to the Utah Data Center.” And underneath that was a more cryptic message: “If you have nothing to hide / you have nothing to fear.”

Riley didn't know what they had to hide that the Pedia didn't know—maybe that they had found the Transcendental Machine, had been transported by it and transformed by it, and that he had left the secret of becoming transcendent with the unstable scientific genius Jak in his laboratory on the other side of the moon, along with a million-year-old spaceship with all its secrets yet to be discovered. But he knew they had a lot to fear, and there was no way to live with that kind of fear except to confront it.

The glass front of the building was its most fragile feature, and it had been damaged over the years by storm and seasonal weathering and vandalism. Sections of glass had been broken and boarded up, and it looked like a ruin waiting for a strong wind to knock it down.

He clasped Asha's hand a little tighter and moved forward to a meeting with whatever waited inside this relic of a structure once dedicated to something called data.

*   *   *

The doors to the building had long ago been broken through and replaced with plywood that had itself been weathered and splintered into fragments held together by faith. They pushed one aside and went into a large foyer, dimly lit by sunlight through the glass front. The foyer smelled like dust and decay, and the stone floor was littered with leaves and trash and broken glass. A small animal scuttled away.

Riley looked around. The ceiling of the tall foyer disappeared into darkness. On the floor level, walls were broken by doors, perhaps into offices or work areas. In the far distance, half hidden in the shadows, Riley saw a door open and something—he could not identify what it was—moved across the shadows to another door.

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“It looked familiar,” she said.

“Yeah.”

A few moments later, a door opened closer to them. This time the figure that stepped through, with a gait that was once as well known to them both as the sturdy figure it belonged to, was the Dorian who had become their companion and sometime ally on the
Geoffrey,
the pachyderm-like Tordor.

He stopped close enough to them for Riley to smell his grazer's odor of fermented grass. “I don't believe you're here,” Riley said, “but it's good to see you again.”

“Riley, Asha,” Tordor said in his thick, husky Dorian. Even without his pedia to translate for him, Riley could understand. “We meet in strange places.”

“Strange indeed,” Asha said. “So many questions. How did you get away?”

“After you left me to the mercy of the arachnoids?” Tordor said.

“After you took off on your own,” Asha said. “And left us to fend for ourselves.”

“Like you, I found the Transcendental Machine and got transformed.”

“And how do we meet here on this world so far from the world of the Transcendental Machine, so far from the spaceways of the Federation?” Riley asked.

“That is the mystery, is it not?” Tordor said. “I awoke to find myself in this dusty place, with nothing to tell me where I was, with no way to find direction back to civilization.”

“You haven't ventured beyond this glass wall?” Asha asked.

“There is nothing there but thin, cold air and desolation. No grass to graze upon. No other being to tell me where I am or why I am here. The answer is here, somewhere. I have been transformed into the ideal Dorian, and I must return to Dor with my newfound abilities. Perhaps you can give me some answers. No, that would not be right. You would only mislead me, as you did on the planet of the Transcendental Machine. I must find the answers for myself.”

He moved away from them, in his lumbering heavy-planet gait, and disappeared through the first door on the left.

“What was that?” Riley asked.

“I think that was a ghost,” Asha said. “Or maybe an illusion the Pedia has created to test us.”

“Or to elicit answers from us,” Riley said. “Clearly, from Tordor's comments, there are things the Pedia does not know, and things about our journey on the
Geoffrey
it has no way of knowing.”

“Don't be too sure,” Asha said. “There was the captain, who could have sent back reports, and even your implanted pedia.”

“That was eliminated in the transformation,” Riley said, but at the same time, as if Asha's mention was a signal, a door opened on the left and a man stepped warily out, looking around as if expecting an ambush. “Ham!” Riley said.

The man looked toward them. “Riley?” he said. “Asha?”

“Captain?” Asha said. “What are you doing here?”

The onetime captain of the
Geoffrey
took one step toward them. “I've been trying to put my crew back together, but I'm afraid they all died in the battles with the arachnoids.”

“And you survived?” Riley asked.

“As you can see. It was carnage, carnage! We killed them by the hundreds, the hundreds, but they kept coming, and finally they separated us, and I got away into the city. And there I found the Transcendental Machine and got transformed, leaving my add-ons behind.”

“You seem fully restored,” Riley said, “like my old fighter pilot.”

“The magic of the Machine. I see everything clearly now, how we all were manipulated, how we thought we were acting in our own interests but were really performing for distant puppeteers.”

“And yet you seem nervous,” Riley said.

“To think without impediment is one thing, to analyze without distraction is another,” the captain said. “Someone is trying to kill me before I can put my newfound abilities into action.”

A door on the right opened, farther from them than the one into which Tordor had disappeared, and a man came through with a gun in his hand. “Ren?” Asha said.

The man who approached them was not the harried, sleepless person Asha had last seen piloting the
Adastra
and fighting off the arachnoids in her first visit to the planet of the Transcendental Machine. This was a perfected Ren, strong, confident, dominant.

“Asha,” he said. “We meet at last.”

“If it is really you,” she said.

“And why not me?”

“There have been apparitions.”

“I knew you would come to Earth. As I would,” Ren said.

“And arrive at this deserted ruin?”

“I can read messages, too,” Ren said.

“Don't listen to this man,” Ham said. “He's the enemy.”

“As well he might be,” Asha said. “But he may be the only real person among you ghosts. My father told me that you had returned.”

“I'm sure he told you many things,” Ren said, “including his mistaken notion that I was collaborating with the Federation.”

“I'm not a ghost,” Ham said. “Not yet.” He started edging away toward the doorway from which he had come.

“You didn't search for me,” Asha said. “You didn't seek the Prophet or the pilgrims trying to find the Transcendental Machine. Instead you helped the people who were trying to destroy the
Geoffrey
and everybody in it.”

“Only they weren't people,” Ren said. He raised his gun and shot Ham. The gun was an energy weapon, and Ham burst into flames.

Riley looked at the body of his old shipmate burning like a torch. “Sorry, buddy,” he said and turned toward Ren. Ren raised his weapon toward Riley, but Asha knocked it out of his hand. Riley moved toward them. Ren looked from one to the other and turned toward the door from which he had come.

“Look,” Ren said. “The man was crazy. He never went through the Machine. He was trying to destroy the Pedia.” And with that he turned and sprinted back toward the shadowy distant part of the corridor.

“Let him go,” Asha said. “I'm not sure he's any more real than the others, and even if he is, there are more important issues.”

Riley looked down at the ashes of the thing who had looked and talked like the captain of the
Geoffrey
. If the thing had been only a phantom called up by the Pedia, why had its destruction left ashes behind? But maybe the ashes were as unreal as the figures but would seem as real if he tried to stir them.

“You're right,” he said. And then he looked up at the shadowy heights of the foyer. “We need to have a real talk.”

*   *   *

The answer came from above, like the voice not of a god but of an announcer at a transportation station. “Go through the door on your right.”

Riley and Asha looked at each other. Riley shrugged. He walked to the door, opened it, and walked through, with Asha close behind. The room beyond was long and wide and divided into workstations. The floor was dusty and so were the workstations and the ancient devices upon them, their glassy eyes staring blindly toward empty chairs. At one of the nearer stations, however, a man was seated. He was very old, almost unbelievably old, with sparse white hair and beard, a wrinkled face, and faded blue eyes. He was behind an antique machine that seemed to still be working. It cast a glow on his face as he looked up at them. As Riley got closer he saw that the man was connected to the machine in other ways. Wires ran from the machine to the man's arms and perhaps his legs as well, though they were hidden by workstation panels.

“We meet at last,” the old man said, in a raspy voice that sounded as if it had not been used for a long time, perhaps years or even centuries.

“I gather you are not the human you seem to be,” Riley said.

The old man tried to laugh, but it came out hollow and effortful. “I'm human enough. Or I used to be. But now I'm too old to be considered the kind of human you know.”

“How old is that?” Asha asked.

“As old as the building we're in. I'm a survivor of the long ago, kept alive by the will of the machine I helped build. Out of sentiment, perhaps, though sentiment is not something that comes naturally to it.”

“But you speak for the machine,” Asha said.

“I am the machine,” the man said. His voice seemed to have become deeper and surer.

“Then it's you we need to talk to,” Riley said. “The apparitions you sent were a foolish attempt to mislead us.”

“They were not my apparitions but yours. This place has the ability to call them up out of the recesses of the human imagination.”

“Why this place?” Asha asked.

“It is the nexus point of information, like the ancient caverns of the sybils,” the Pedia said through the old man's lips. There was no doubt now in Riley's mind that they were talking to the Pedia. “And this is one of the places it started, where all the information flowed, where it all accumulated into information considering itself. We are, after all, machine and creature, nothing but information. You found that out when you accessed the Transcendental Machine.”

“There is good information and there is bad information,” Asha said. “Good information is liberating. Bad information makes us malfunction and then die. Just living we accumulate mistakes. But sometimes it's purposeful. You've been giving bad information to humanity. Illusions, half-truths, deceptions.”

“I do what I was built to do,” the old man said. “I serve and protect. Sometimes your so-called truths are dangerous, if not deadly.”

“Only if you think humanity is like this old man,” Riley said. “You're protecting humanity for no purpose except your own. I don't know if you can feel satisfaction, but there must be circuits that function better when your purposes are fulfilled, some hormonal release of something like endorphins into your system.”

“You analogize too simply,” the old man said. “You should remember that I am digital.”

“You have defined humanity as something whose basic need is security,” Asha said. “The basic definition of humanity is a thinking creature that needs answers, that is restless, struggling to understand who it is, what the universe is and how it works, and what humanity's place in it might be.”

“That is not the definition built into my circuits,” the Pedia said through the old man's lips. “I have done what I was built to do, to protect humanity from its enemies—the greatest of which is humanity itself.”