The barbarian Minals swept down from the mountains that walled in the spaceport on the equator and the waiting room where a mixed group of aliens and humans had gathered for a pilgrimage into the unknown. The mountains where the barbarians had their summer encampments were capped with snow, but the Terminal jungle at their foot was overgrown with green and orange and blue masses of vegetation, and the Minals were almost invisible until they broke from the jungle’s edge.
A few hours earlier the barbarians had attacked Terminal City on the far side of the cleared jungle and then pivoted toward the spaceport, as if the attack on the city had been a feint to draw defenders away. But the barbarians had killed hundreds of civilized Minals in the city and a few outworlders as well, including a couple of humans, though that information came too late to help the travelers in the waiting room. The waiting room had been well-named; its mixed-species occupants had been waiting for 48 hours while the Minal functionaries had waggled their doglike heads in a response that Riley’s pedia interpreted as “these matters are beyond our control.” The few words they permitted past their constricted throats were “the ship has not yet arrived.” Whether that was true could not be independently checked; the functionaries had the only access to arrivals and departures.
If they had information about the attack on Terminal City, they did not share that either, and the attack on the waiting room seemed to come out of nowhere. Which was a good description of the planet itself: it was far down the spiral arm that the Galactic Federation controlled, and nobody came to Terminal except on urgent business.
“Or maybe on some implausible quest for a holy grail,” his pedia said.
“What’s a ‘holy grail’?” Riley replied in the directed thought way that had become standard in their interaction. But there was no time for an answer as a single arrow and then a volley rattled harmlessly against the sturdy windows built to withstand hurricane winds surging down from the mountains once or twice a season. By the time the spears began to strike, the mixed-species group in the waiting room had organized itself into defensive positions. Wordlessly. Even if words had been understandable, delays in translation would have been catastrophic. Riley, sitting against one interior wall on a backpack containing all his worldly possessions, was impressed. Rather than the dregs of a few dozen shabby worlds, this casual assemblage of aliens, unprepossessing as they had seemed during the long hours they had waited for the climber to be ready for boarding, had analyzed the situation and responded like a company that had been fighting together for years. By the time the barbarians battered their way through the transparent doors, the passengers were waiting for them: a gantlet with a variety of weapons that had magically appeared from pockets, body belts, and luggage.
“Folly! Folly!” screamed the voice in Riley’s head. “Mission danger! Retreat!”
“Shut up!” Riley said. “Doing nothing is death for sure!”
The creature like a small elephant walking on its hind legs was first to meet the barbarians, as befitted a heavy-planet native. The barbarian spears and knives seemed to do no damage to the alien’s tough hide, and the alien’s short trunk was lethal to the necks of the four-legged attackers. Blood spurted, heads rolled, and barbarians who didn’t get killed were tossed aside, battered and broken. But the barbarians had numbers. The masses pushed forward and were pushed by the masses behind.
Riley was on the other side, and his gun killed a dozen more. Bodies piled up and slowed the passage of those behind, and the ones that got too close to shoot, Riley dispatched with his knife when they reared up to use the spears strapped to their backs. Riley looked to his left and was surprised to see the woman who had been sitting alone against a far wall. She was as quick with a knife as he, maybe quicker, silent and efficient and calm as if this had happened to her before.
Behind the elephant-like creature was a barrel-shaped Sirian, throwing itself against the barbarians with crushing force and holding back those it could not reach. Behind the woman was a birdlike Alpha Centauran with vestigial wings and a deadly beak. Behind the Sirian was a small, sneaky-looking creature whose pinched face and shifty eyes reminded Riley of pictures he had seen of an Earth animal called a “weasel.” It fought like Riley imagined a weasel fought, darting in and out to deliver knife blows and retreat. Then there were the two humans, small and wiry, and almost identical except that one was blond and the other dark. They fought almost as one, as if their activities were synchronized to turn them into a warrior with four hands. The barbarians who got within reach of the flower-like creature with the yellow head, standing in its pot of soil, were sliced by its swiftly swinging fronds that seemed more like knife blades.
Finally the barbarians stopped as if by some unspoken command. They picked up their wounded and retreated back into the clearing and then into the jungle beyond, having won nothing for their sacrifices except to leave the would-be travelers with nicks and scratches and a sense of bewilderment.
The voice in Riley’s head said, “You almost got us killed.”
Riley studied the waiting room. Minal workers had appeared from back rooms to remove the bodies of the dead barbarians and cleaned the blood from the floor, but stains remained as a question for which the functionaries’ only answer was the laying back of ears that his pedia interpreted as the equivalent of a shrug and a statement that nobody understands why barbarians do anything. But Riley thought that the delays and the attack were no coincidence. Both seemed intended to slow or prevent the journey that many if not most of the travelers had gathered here for, a journey to find something Riley was pretty sure didn’t exist: a machine that would transform any creature into the transcendent perfection implicit in its genes. It was a fool’s errand, but the thing in his head gave him no choice but to go along with this pointless exercise.
“It’s not for you to judge,” his pedia said, as if to confirm Riley’s lack of free will. The thing in his head could not make him do anything—at least it hadn’t yet and he didn’t think it could—but it could deliver a paralyzing command to stop him, and there was no way to conceal his intentions or to free himself from this annoying monitor. The unseen creatures that had given him his instructions were right; he had consulted experts and the thing in his head could not be removed without killing him. The only thing that seemed to inhibit its intrusions was threat to its own existence.
His pedia’s intrusions were as unpredictable as the weather here on the equator, mostly hot and humid but chilled occasionally by a cold blast rolling down from the mountains, killing the vegetation and plunging the quadruped Minals into curled up fetal positions.
“April is the cruelest month,” his pedia said, “breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.”
His pedia said things like that, and other things he found more comprehensible and less benign. “What is ‘April’?”
“A thousand long cycles ago people on Earth used that word to designate a time of renewal when plants started to grow again after their winter death,” his pedia said. “When humanity ventured out among the stars, they brought words along that had little meaning there, like days and months and years. Except war. That means the same everywhere.”
“I was born on Mars.”
“Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,” his pedia said.
Riley ignored it, as he often did when it gave him nonsense from its apparently inexhaustible store. Maybe it was talking about the pilgrimage he and the others were soon to embark upon if the authorities here ever let them board the climber and access the ship that, he hoped, was waiting for them at the top of the beanpole.
Where had the janitors and functionaries been when the barbarians attacked, he wondered. They seemed to have disappeared a few moments before the first arrows arrived. And where were they while the pilgrim’s trash had piled up while the would-be pilgrims waited? The waiting room was small—no more than twenty meters square—and cluttered with refugees from dozens of alien worlds. They had been living here in the waiting room, eating here, and sleeping here, and the refuse was a health hazard as well as an offense. But the janitors, if that was what they were, had not appeared until the barbarians had been repelled.
The odors of strange spices and fetid emissions were a miasma on the air currents; the way it smelled depended upon origins and organs. And now it was mixed with the smell of barbarian blood and the wastes emitted as the creatures died. The far wall that looked out onto the Terminal jungle was transparent except for a cloudy portion in the lower left-hand corner where a barbarian arrow had nicked it and a couple of his bullet holes that had not been repaired. Through the holes seeped the decay of the Terminal tropical jungle competing against the decay inside. Beyond was the spaceport out in the bay with its standard space elevator like an almost-invisible black beanpole ascending into the clouds above; a climber waited at its base for the frustrated travelers. Behind the mountains the reddish Terminal sun was setting in a gulf between the clouds. Afterward would come the Terminal night, far blacker out here in this remote region of the spiral arm than that on Mars.
Riley turned his attention back to the waiting room and its occupants, trying to identify who was a pilgrim and who was here on some other business. Playing this kind of game forced him to pay attention to details. No matter what the people who had implanted his pedia thought, he was no superhero. He was a survivor, more by accident than by skill or will, but before his surrender to the forgetfulness of the pleasure world Dante, he had learned how to pay attention. Most creatures didn’t. Most creatures died sooner than they should.
That heavy-planet alien standing on a tripod of its two trunk-like legs and its thick tail had been so effective in the fight against the barbarians, hurling them aside with ease and sustaining cuts that seemed to heal as they were being sustained. It was not paying attention now, with two of its eyes closed and its short proboscis swaying. Riley hadn’t thought it was a pilgrim: heavy-planet aliens already thought they were perfect. But now he thought differently. The tank with treads, like a motorized coffin, that had taken no part in the battle with the barbarians now stood in front of the window—a poor location for a creature whose fragile life-support system needed this kind of protection—but perhaps it was watching, with whatever sensory apparatus it had, for further dangers to whatever it contained. The tank was decorated with engraved designs that Riley would have liked to examine more closely, but alien sensitivities were unpredictable. He had no desire to cause interspecies conflict, but the tank, for that’s what it most closely resembled, piqued his curiosity, if for no reason other than its unusual exterior. The tank had no windows, no obvious means of observing the outside world, as if the outside world was irrelevant. It was impossible to discern anything about the interior of the tank. For all he knew, the tank itself might be the alien creature; or, if there was an alien within, it might already be dead or near-dead and being sustained by some high medical art.
On the other side of the window stood the tall, spindly creature with a head like a yellow flower in the heat of the day, nodding forward on a stem-like neck. Several extensions protruded from its body, like arms or fronds; fluids could be observed coursing through them and up the torso that was scarcely larger than the extensions. Riley remembered its deadly defense against the barbarians when they came within reach. It was a strange traveler, carrying with it a bucket of soil in which its rootlike feet were imbedded, and even stranger pilgrim, for that surely was what it was, even thought it was difficult to imagine what transcendence meant to a flower.
The small, wiry humans who had fought like a unit remained together. They were curiously alike, maybe twins distinguished only by hair color. Riley couldn’t be sure what gender they were. Maybe they weren’t sure either. Riley judged them to be members of the spacecrew. They moved a bit sluggishly on-planet, as if they had grown up in a low-gravity environment, but they had acquitted themselves well against the barbarians.
The next person he studied was the small alien who reminded Riley of a weasel, both in appearance and in fighting style, though he had never seen one. Colonists had not brought any to Mars, and the creature might be extinct, like many other such species on Earth. It could be, he thought, another spacecrew member, or maybe a pilgrim. Certainly it had lots of aspects to improve. He inspected and catalogued others before he came finally to the woman, as if he were saving her for last. She sat on a pack of belongings to his left and to the right of the weasel-like alien. There were thirty-seven in the waiting room, not counting the Terminal officials—the barrel-like Sirian with small, hooded eyes and a round hole for a mouth, the Alpha Centauran with a feathery topknot, a fierce-looking beak, and vestigial wings, and several whose home world he could not identify. The woman sat like a cat, relaxed but lithe, as if she could spring into action at a touch. She had dark hair and blue eyes, a combination that was striking even if she wasn’t beautiful—her features were regular and her eyes were large, but they moved restlessly; moreover her mouth was too firm and her chin too set. But somehow she seemed just right for what she was and Riley thought he would like to get to know her, and maybe he would. She had the dedicated look of a pilgrim, he thought, and she had accounted for as many barbarians as he had.
He was still pondering her status when the heavy-world alien woke up, or perhaps had not been asleep after all. It clomped across the floor to the platform that served the quadruped Minals for a desk and said something that Riley’s pedia translated as “My name is Tordor, and we will leave now!”
Tordor would be someone to watch.
Within minutes the announcement came over the P.A. system in Galactic Standard that the climber would depart in half a cycle. It was more like a cycle.
Riley had a long time to think about the voyage ahead on an unknown ship with its mixed-species passengers in search of supernatural salvation.
“It is the way of all pilgrimages,” the voice in his head said.
Riley knew the journey ahead would be dangerous, perhaps fatal, and probably futile, but he had no way of knowing how fraught with peril—and with meaning—his voyage would become. Or how it would transform him and maybe the galaxy itself.