Free Transcendental by James Gunn Page B

or later the people, or creatures, who live in them are going to become just as artificial.”
    Riley pointed out that she was living and working in a habitat, and she replied that she hated it. And anyway, she said, if it wasn’t land, what were the wars about?
    Fear, Riley said, and misunderstanding. The aliens had been coexisting for a long time—many long-cycles—before humanity came out. The basic fear was of difference. How can you trust someone or some thing totally different, truly alien? You don’t know what they think or what they feel, or even if they think or feel the way we understand those terms. Then there was the fear of inferiority. Was some other species smarter, more inventive, more powerful, more aggressive? The aliens—the various galactics—had learned to live with that. But humanity was the joker. It could be anything from potential slaves to potential workers to potential rulers, and the cycles-long truce broke down. Now the truce has been reinstated.
    After how many millions dead? Sharn asked. After how many worlds ruined?
    But will it last? Riley said. He flexed his new arm, and they made love again.
    That was the last good time they had. It wasn’t the disagreement about interstellar policy or even war—he hated that more than she did—it was her growing fascination with transcendentalism and his release from the recovery ward and his growing realization that he was finished. There was no role for an adventurer in a galaxy organized to minimize adventure, or a role for a warrior in a galaxy bent on peace at all costs. And no role for a diplomat who had killed too many aliens and bore their wounds on the shell of his body, and inside.
    If he had grown moody and combative, if he had tried to ease his pain with ceuticals smuggled out of the pharmacy, if he had quarreled with Sharn too often and resisted her pleas to become the person she had first known, that she knew he once had been, the person who dreamed of something better—then her leaving him would have been understandable. But the way it happened—with no explanation, no apparent reason—leaving him was not.
    Did the darkness brighten? Did sound and feeling return?
    *   *   *
    The disembodied voice was everywhere and nowhere. “We have a job for you.”
    “Who is ‘we’?” Riley asked but he could not hear his own voice.
    “That information is unnecessary; receiving it is unwise.”
    Riley could not tell if the voice belonged to a man or a woman, or a machine. It was devoid of emotion, uninflected. “How can you hear my voice, and I cannot?”
    “Unimportant.”
    “Where am I?”
    “Meaningless.”
    “All right, then, what is the job?”
    “You will join a pilgrimage starting from Terminal in some thirty days.”
    “A pilgrimage to where?”
    “That is what you are hired to find out.”
    “A pilgrimage has to be headed somewhere.”
    “It is seeking the shrine of the transcendentals.”
    “But no one knows where that is.”
    “Until you find out.”
    “And how will I do that?”
    “You will accompany the pilgrimage until it reaches its destination.”
    “And how will the pilgrimage know where to go?”
    “Most on the ship will not, but we have information that the Prophet will be among the pilgrims.”
    “And who is that?”
    “We do not know. That, too, you will discover.”
    “Maybe the Prophet doesn’t know where to go. Maybe the whole thing is as illusory as all other religions. Maybe it’s all supernatural.”
    “That, too, you will discover.”
    “How do you prove a negative? If the pilgrimage gets nowhere, does that mean there is no shrine? That the Prophet was not aboard? That the Prophet was aboard but has forgotten where the shrine is? That the Prophet was aboard but discovered my presence or the presence of others and decided not to head for the shrine…?”
    “Your assignment is to see that the pilgrimage reaches the shrine, if it exists.”
    “You don’t ask much for your money!”