Transcendental by Gunn James

Author:Gunn, James [Gunn, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2013-08-27T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Riley woke feeling relaxed and pleased with himself, the way he had felt when the world was new and he had not yet been wounded by its indifference, the way he felt after he had been with a woman. The cubicle even seemed to hint of passion and pheromones.

But that was all illusion. He knew now that the universe offered nothing for rational existence but heartache and pain, and he had not been with a woman for more than a year. The cubicle did not smell of a woman, it smelled of sweat and dirt and stale emissions, human and alien. And he had no reason to feel relaxed, here halfway between the known and the unknown, confined with enigmatic aliens in a tin can traveling toward holes in space at one-tenth light speed, protected from the universe’s hungry void by a fragile metal shell. And his pedia was silent. Not that this was unusual. It was often silent when he needed it the most, as if it were programmed not to comfort.

He slipped into his simple space coveralls, opened the cubicle door, slid himself out feetfirst, and climbed down the ladder. Asha and Kom were waiting for him.

“Kom wants to thaw Jon and Jan,” Asha said.

Riley turned to Kom. “Why?”

Riley’s pedia translated Kom’s rumble, “I thought you understood.”

“I understood your story,” Riley said. “You lost the human you had tried to save, and now you want another chance.”

“That’s only part of it,” Asha said.

“I understand the other part, too,” Riley said. Kom’s relationship with his dead father, if it had been anything like the one between Riley and his father, was not something he would have wanted to discuss. That is, presuming Kom’s story was true and not simply a convenient half-truth hiding a deeper, darker truth. “But the captain isn’t going to like it.”

“The captain,” Kom rumbled, “can’t refuse.”

That was true. When Riley and Kom confronted the captain, he waved his hand and said, “Do what you want,” as if it didn’t matter anymore. But it did matter, Riley knew, though why it mattered he wasn’t sure.

The captain had other worries.

“What’s wrong?” Riley asked. They were in the control room, but a control room more disordered than Riley had ever seen it. Crumpled paper nearly obscured the air-return vent and handheld pedias adorned several of the flat navigator panels, as if the captain was checking every calculation to find one in which he had confidence. And half the readouts were blank, as if the captain had erased them as Riley and Kom approached. “A disordered control room,” his pedia said, “is evidence of a disordered command.”

The captain looked at him as if it was a question too obvious to answer, and as if the answer was too intimately related to the responsibilities of decision for Riley to appreciate. “We have another Jump coming up,” he said.

Riley shrugged. Space travel was one Jump after another.

“The last one was off.”

Riley shrugged again.

“The next one may be off as well.”

“And it may not,” Riley said.

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