Tordor rocked back on his sturdy tail and considered the shabby castoffs of a mixed-species galaxy. They occupied an equally shabby waiting room on a planet called Terminal because it was as far out on the spiral arm as a world could get without falling off into the utter darkness of inter-galactic space. The one thing that had lured these ill-assorted creatures to this wretched, lightweight world was the possibility of perfection. Clearly, it was something they all could use. The long journey began for Tordor on the sweeping plains of his home world, a heavy planet named Doria, when the recruiters arrived and his life changed forever.
Until that moment he had lived in an ideal world with its fertile plains and flowing rivers of sweet water and oases of trees where he and his fellow grazers could pull up the nourishing grass and tuck it into their mouths or strip the leaves from the trees under whose wide-spreading branches they would doze in the heat of the day. The sun was yellow, the pull of the world was solid, the days were long, and he was happy to eat and sleep and play mock battles with his herd-mates. He had two good friends: a male his age named Samdor who was his constant companion and a pleasingly muscled female named Alidor that he secretly admired and allowed to beat him in their games and to hit him with her trunk when she won. And then he turned five.
The recruiters came from the distant northern cities, and his parents said he must go with them. “Why must I go?” he asked.
“The Dorians from the far mountains are not like you and us,” they told him. “They are wise and know what is best.”
“I will run away,” Tordor said.
“More important,” his parents said, “they are powerful, and they will make you wise and powerful like them.”
What they did not tell him, because it was understood, was that running away only meant death, and so, bewildered and afraid, for the good of Doria, he was expelled from paradise and into a life of pain and sorrow.
The recruiters were thinner than the grass-eaters but tall, strong, and distant. They came in a big, gas-filled aeronef, and they spoke to the recruits only to give orders and said nothing to each other. Some fifty of the young grazers had been collected from the plains herds, most of them Tordor’s age, a few younger and a couple a long cycle older, larger, and meaner. The older ones bullied the younger ones, stole their food, and made them fight each other until they rebelled, and then the older recruits beat them. Their blows hurt and often injured, not like the playful slaps of Tordor’s herd-mates. The recruiters did not seem to care. Later he learned that letting the recruits fight among themselves and establish their hierarchy was part of the plan to transform passive grazers into aggressive omnivores. Children had to learn how to survive under difficult circumstances, in strange lands, and without friends. They were being transformed into good Dorians. A happy, carefree Dorian was not a good Dorian, and if Dorians wanted to compete in a galaxy full of unknown dangers and sneaky aliens they must be expelled from their youthful paradise.
Only two of them died on the long trip to the northern highlands, but one of them was Alidor. Tordor did not know whether it was the beatings or the change in the diet from grass to vegetables and meat. The stomachs of Dorian grazers had not evolved the digestive juices and biota necessary to digest what the recruiters called concentrated energy, and some of the immature bodies reacted more strongly that others, even with the pills they were forced to swallow. All Tordor knew as he squatted beside Alidor’s dying body, their trunks entwined in an embrace that Tordor had longed for in better days, was that this was worse than the pain of beatings or the agony in one of his stomachs.
“Goodbye, Alidor,” he said.
“Be strong,” she whispered.
At last the aeronef reached its destination, in the cold mountains of the north, far from the plains. Tordor had never seen a city before. His parents had told him stories about powerful Dorians who flew through the sky and traversed the great void between the stars, but he thought they were fairy tales, like the fantastic stories his herd-mates spun during the siestas under the trees or the long evenings under the stars. Sturdy, solid Dorians did not fly. But the city of Grandor, the great city of Doria, grew out of the northern mountain range like a forest of fairy palaces, glittering with crystalline reflections in the evening sun and, as the sun dropped behind the mountains, glowing with their own light. The spires of the city seemed to rise above even the peaks that surrounded them.
It was as marvelous as his parents had described it, and he would have exclaimed at its beauty and the fabulous people who had built it if he had not been bruised and afraid. He and the other young Dorians were herded off the ship and prodded into crude quarters underneath the crystalline towers, not astonishing beauty but squalid dungeons with little more than crude stalls for sleeping, without privacy. Drink was available at a central trough; to eat they had little grass, not even hay, but now almost totally hard-to-digest vegetables and the strange animal portions that their stomachs tried to reject. Later he learned that this treatment was intended to toughen them against future hardship and to prepare their bodies for the increasing demands that civilization required.
They got used to it, as youngsters will, even the meat, and to the morning run up and down the mountainsides, to the mock combat in the afternoon, with and without weapons, and to the classrooms where they were taught mathematics and engineering and spacecraft, the military arts and their Dorian history, and the minor skills of computers and accounting. The classrooms were the good times when it was possible to doze off if a student had a classmate willing to nudge him awake when the instructor looked his way. Otherwise, a club was likely to come crashing down upon a student’s skull, and more than one young Dorian met his end that way and had his remains carted away like carrion, perhaps to end up in the next day’s rations. Tordor was lucky. He got a lump or two, but he had a thicker skin and a thicker skull than most. One classmate died. Sometimes, in all the torment and deprivation, the others envied him.
In the evenings Dorian heroes would tell the youngsters stirring tales of combat, and Tordor wondered if he would ever be like them: strong, confident, swaggering, dangerous, full of honors, mating whenever and with whomever they chose. Tordor could not imagine it. None of the young Dorians dozed then. Sometimes their supervisors showed patriotic or space combat videos. Tordor thought they seem staged for the recorders. In the real ones he could observe nothing except the confusion of battle in which it was next-to-impossible to distinguish friend from enemy. The young Dorians were always tired. If they napped during the films, nobody cared.
So it went, long cycle after long cycle, as Tordor grew to be even taller than the recruiters and his plains fat was converted into muscle. He was the one who triumphed in the mock battles, even when he faced his instructors, and he wore his new-found strength and skill with modesty and quiet confidence. One by one his fellow students, those that survived, recognized Tordor’s superiority. Of his cohort of fifty, only forty remained when they reached the age of decision. He personally killed the two older ones who had bullied them on the way to Grandor and he blamed for Alidor’s death.
The age of decision was ten. He had been hardened emotionally as well as physically. He no longer wept for his parents and his siblings. He had given up ever seeing them again. He knew that if he returned his family would be required to put him to death as a disgrace to the family and the herd, and he would have to kill them instead. So he only dreamed about the flowing plains of grass and the sweet streams and the clear blue sky, and about running, running endlessly and untiringly under that yellow sun, knowing that it could never be anything but a dream.
They lined up at graduation to learn their fates and heard their records read aloud and their destinations announced. Some were consigned to Tordor’s worst nightmare: they were rejects, to be returned to their families and certain death, or to wander the plains as rogue males, ostracized by everyone they met and subject to termination by anyone. Some became factory supervisors. Some were sent to become engineers or scientists at one of the technical institutes. Some were assigned to bureaucratic posts within Grandor or one of the lesser cities scattered along the coasts to the far southernmost tip of land, while others received postings to other planets under Dorian rule, or became recruiters, like those that came for them five long cycles before.
A few were appointed to the military academy.
Tordor was one of those.
The military academy was situated in a valley among tall mountains that divided the southern continent from the north, and near the spaceport at the equator, with its space elevator that the pilgrims were told had been invented by a Dorian scientist but Tordor later learned was the product of technology that had been acquired from humans—perhaps the only thing Dorians learned from humans besides ferocity. The cadets had their own ferocity, among themselves and among the savage Dorians who occupied the southern continent, separated for long ages by the mountain range and now by choice. With the superior technologies of the north, they could have been subdued thousands of long cycles before, Tordor learned from a wise master, but the Dorian rulers had decided that savages were of greater utility as anvils on which to hammer out the blades of Dorian soldiers.
Tordor and his fellow cadets fought the savages with their own weapons, not with those of the Dorian military or even simpler arsenal of the academy, and the cadets prevailed, not because they were stronger or more bloodthirsty but because they were disciplined. That was their first lesson—discipline or death. Fight as a group or die as an individual.
Sometimes, as if by pre-arrangement, the savages attacked the academy, and the cadets were roused from their stalls to grab their weapons and repel the attackers from the academy walls. More often the cadets ventured forth in hunting groups and fell upon the savage Dorians in their villages, killing them all, males, females, and children; the cadets were not allowed to venture too far south lest they reduce the numbers of the savage Dorians beyond replenishment. Sometimes the savages ambushed cadet excursions, and they had to fight for survival. Often groups returned with their numbers depleted. Those who returned without their fellows were beaten and those who returned without their fellows’ bodies were expelled—south of the mountains. Sometimes groups did not return at all.
In Tordor’s first five long cycles at the academy he had learned the most important lesson—survival. The cadets among whom Tordor and his cohort were thrown would have treated the newcomers in the same way as the bullies in the aeronef, but Tordor had prepared the dozen appointees sent with him. They would arrive as a group and survive as a group. They would not fight among themselves, but they would fight anyone else. And they would fight before they would submit.
Tordor fought the cadet leader on the day they arrived. The cadet leader was older and more experienced but he was over-confident, and Tordor was determined not to surrender to officially sanctioned sadism. The cadet leader’s cohort carried him off the field, unable to intervene because Tordor’s cohort stood solidly between Tordor and the older cadets. After that no one touched Tordor’s group, no one taunted them, no one challenged them to individual combat. Another leader was chosen from among the older cadets, but unofficially Tordor was the leader and consulted about plans and procedures affecting his group. Tordor’s group was not sent on missions without strategic goals, detailed plans, and mission-oriented training. It operated as a unit with advance scouts and side scouts and rear scouts, and it knew the terrain and its ambush points as well as it knew its own plains. None of Tordor’s group died.
Even the academy instructors began to notice. Ordinarily they let the cadets create their own culture, but now they understood that the culture had been taken over by a newcomer who was challenging tradition. They feared change, since their standard practices had worked for so long they had hardened into laws. They tried to break Tordor’s will and his power over the group. They separated him from the others, but he had warned his team of this possibility and deputized Samdor to serve in his absence. They imprisoned Tordor for a time on imaginary charges and sent him out to do battle alone. He survived and returned with grisly proof of his success.
Finally they recognized his leadership and the success of his organization, and let Tordor install his program for the entire academy, forming the cadets into cohesive units and letting each choose a commander—with Tordor’s approval—and preparing for battle with the same kind of strategic planning. Casualties dropped. Successes mounted.
Life at the academy was not all skirmishes with the savages or combat training within the yard. The cadets were being prepared to be the new Dorian military leaders. They studied military strategies, combat maneuvers, enough space navigation to understand—and sometimes check upon—the navigators, weapons and weapon repair, chemistry and physics and mathematics, but no literature or art. That they had to acquire—if they had the taste for it—in their leisure hours, such as they were, and secretly, for such materials were considered suspicious if not, perhaps, subversive.
Cadets had only limited exposure to current events and politics. They knew about alien civilizations—their citizens were considered lesser creatures who had ventured, almost by accident, into space and could serve, at best, as suppliers to Doria, and, at worst, as servants and their lands potential Dorian dominions. Alien languages were not part of the curriculum. “Let them learn Dorian” was the official attitude. Although Tordor did not understand why this was so, he sensed that it was a mistake. Dorians could not depend upon translators, particularly alien translators, nor even upon mechanical translators. Within each language, Tordor came to believe, was the heart and soul of the people who spoke it. So, as he did with literature and art, Tordor studied alien languages, beginning with the language of the savages to the south. It was then he learned what moved them and how to work with them in ways other than combat.
In their fourth long cycle the cadets learned of humans—these pretentious interlopers who emerged from their single system as if they were the equals of the long-established Dorians and the others, who, though unequal, had been part of galactic civilization for tens of thousands of long-cycles. Their instructors let the cadets know, not just by word but by intonation and trunk-language, that humans were inconsequential, that they were nothing to be concerned about except as they disturbed the aliens whom Doria allowed to coexist.
This, perhaps, was a Dorian error that was almost fatal, not simply to Dorians but to the entire galactic civilization that had existed for so many long-cycles in equilibrium—an uneasy equilibrium like supercooled water but equilibrium all the same.
And then it was time for graduation, deliverance from the petty tyranny of the academy and into the great tyranny of military service. But their instructors had one more graduation barrier for the cadets to hurdle—one final hand-to-hand combat to the death for a pair of matched champions—and Tordor learned that the academy may yield but it does not forget. It matched Tordor against his old herd-mate and second-in-command, his best friend Samdor.
“I cannot do it,” he said of Samdor.
“Nor I,” Samdor said.
“But if we refuse they will kill us both.”
“So let it be,” Samdor said.
Samdor did refuse, but Tordor persuaded him to retract his refusal before it was too late. “It is better to be killed in combat than to be executed as a coward.”
“I will not kill you,” Samdor said.
“Nor I you,” Tordor replied.
But he secretly planned for Samdor to prevail, even if it meant Tordor’s own death. He loved Samdor, as he and Samdor had loved Alidor. But in the end, in front of the jeering instructors and the quiet cadets, a blow from Samdor got through the parrying and something in Tordor responded. Tordor had practiced survival too long.
With one final, almost instinctive blow, Tordor killed Samdor and became a true Dorian, someone who has been so transformed from his gentle beginnings that he reacted to situations automatically. But it left a scar, like the death of Alidor, that he would carry with him for the rest of his life.
Tordor’s superiors assigned graduating cadets to military posts by lot, they said. Only later did he learn that the system was manipulated to place the new officers where the authorities thought the graduates should go, just as the combat by lot was fixed to pit friend against friend. Tordor went to his post as the gunnery officer on a Dorian light-cruiser off the farthest Dorian outpost, where the Dorian empire met the humans. They were always encroaching with their inexhaustible numbers and insatiable appetites for land and conquest. Tordor went with an empty heart, always seeing the eyes of Samdor as he accepted Tordor’s fatal blow, seeing the light behind those eyes fade and go out. Tordor tried to accept the fate that had been forced upon him, but what he could not accept was the expression of gratitude that flashed over Samdor’s face at the moment of his death.
Was death so welcome? Or was his love so much greater than Tordor’s that he wished to buy Tordor’s life with his own death?
The journey to the outpost was long. The newly commissioned officers were jammed into the hold of a cargo ship like bales of hay. But they had little hay and not much of the new diet of vegetables and meat. They were on short rations from the start of the journey, and many would have died along the way had they been left on their own. Like in the military academy, the fittest were intended to survive. But Tordor organized a small group of natural leaders to see that the rations were divided equally, and that they all lived in a state of semi-starvation. Only one died.
When they reached the fleet, Tordor reported to the commanding officer. His name was Bildor. He was the biggest Dorian Tordor had ever met, and his body was criss-crossed with the scars of battle—Dorian battle, Tordor learned later. He looked at Tordor as if he saw him as a potential rival, but Tordor recognized that he was clearly the inferior in everything but promise. The commanding officer would gain nothing by challenging Tordor, so he challenged Tordor’s ideas instead.
“So, you are the newly commissioned officer who thinks he has a better way of doing things?”
“There is always a better way,” Tordor replied with proper deference.
“Tradition has brought us to this mighty empire,” Bildor said.
“New challenges arrive daily,” Tordor said, “for which tradition has no responses.”
“You will perform your duties as a proper Dorian,” Bildor said.
Tordor lowered his head and was dismissed. But he knew that Bildor was watching through his senior officers.
The Dorian fleet skirmished with human ships whenever they came across them. But between skirmishes the two unlikely species encountered each other in less combative arenas. Tordor met humans, and other aliens, in bars or theaters on neutral worlds. He learned a bit of human speech and what passed for humor between both cultures. They told each other jokes. Tordor learned something of human history and the history of other species in the galaxy and compared them to his own. That was his education in xenology. He learned what made them drunk and broke down their limited reserves, and tried to hide from them what made Dorians drunk. Not that it would have mattered. Dorians become sullen and withdrawn when drunk on—something Dorians never revealed—fermented hay.
Tordor even grew to like the humans, perhaps even more than he liked his superiors. His superiors were determined to make Dorians hate humans as much as Dorians hated the Dorians who had forced them to leave their childhood paradise and tormented them into civilization with all its agonies. Now their successors pitted Tordor and his fellow officers against one another for promotions, in what they called “fight days” that were carryovers from the military-school survival programs. Tordor was clearly the best at personal combat, but after Samdor he refused to fight to the death. Instead, he defeated his opponents and spared them the final blows. Only one of his superiors dared to challenge him, and in his case Tordor made an exception and killed him. That gained Tordor a promotion to his challenger’s position as second navigator, and freedom from challenges from below or above. Even Bildor seemed to relax his vigilance.
So Tordor made his way up the Dorian military hierarchy, from lowly academy graduate to second in command, and then, when Bildor got killed in a personal duel with the commander of another ship, Tordor got his own command. He changed the discipline, did away with fight days, encouraged his subordinates to come to him with their problems, to make suggestions, and generally to work toward a harmonious crew.
Change did not come easy. Dorians are herd creatures, as are most grazers, elevated to sentience by hard times hundreds of thousands of long-cycles before. Some historians traced the transformation to a tumultuous period of volcanic activity that contaminated the Dorian atmosphere with smoke and ash, causing the death of grass almost everywhere and the near extermination of the Dorian people. Other scientists pointed to deep pits in the Dorian soil caused, they say, by meteoric bombardment raising clouds of dust and smoke that caused similar death and near-starvation. Whichever was correct—and perhaps both were—Dorians were forced to change. They had to learn. They had to invent. Most of all, they had to survive, often at the expense of another group or another individual. The most successful of these founded Grandor, so remote from Dorian experience and nature, and then the other cities of the northern hemisphere, and, more recently, the southern.
When, over long cycles, the crisis passed, those who had founded the cities under the pressure of necessity saw Dorians, without predators and without challenges, relapsing into their former indolence and herd mentality, and began a regime of recruitment and brutal training such as Tordor had experienced, with a system that set out to replicate the conditions that had produced the Grandorians. If nature could not be trusted to provide harsh necessity, the system would supply something similar.
Humans, Tordor learned, were more fortunate, if that was how planetary conditions might be termed: Earth was not as benign as Doria, and humans had competitors against which they had to struggle, along with more frequent moments of cosmic catastrophe and mutating radiation. Humans’ view of their environment was not that of benign Doria but, as one human poet described it, “Nature, red in tooth and claw.” Fortunate because humans evolved through struggle and their social systems evolved to ameliorate the pain of survival, not to replicate it. Their aggressive attitudes toward the universe are innate rather than nurtured. Dorians, on the other hand, had to be brutalized before they adopted the aggressive attitudes of humans.
Tordor thought it was time to change. Perhaps the Grandor system was needed at one time, but Dorians had passed that point. Curiosity, learning, the need to achieve, could be instilled at an early age through programs of education. Battle skills and obedience to command could be developed through programs that emulated real conditions rather than replicated them. Dorians, he thought, could be more like humans.
He had only a part of a long cycle to retrain his crew. The lower-ranking crew members were as resistant as the officers. Like them, they had survived the Dorian survival-of-the-fittest system, and they would surrender their attitudes, and their positions of privilege, reluctantly if at all. The process was like re-training an abused animal: repeated kindnesses and frequent strokings are required to reverse a lifetime of avoiding predators and the blows of masters.
Slowly he was succeeding. Morale was higher. The crew seemed once more like his childhood herd, happy, responding better to requests than to orders, coming forward with suggestions, developing into a team rather than a group of individuals. There were reversions, to be sure, quarrels, batterings, surly responses, but they were growing progressively less frequent.
And then the war broke out.
No one ever knew what started the war, or what was at stake. For long-cycles, after the legendary galactic war, which probably was a series of wars initiated by a new emerging species, the star empires had worked at keeping the peace. And the uneasy truce that followed the human emergence had seemed a recognition of earlier folly. But it was a truce easily destroyed by a careless action, a misunderstood intrusion, a failure of communication. And then every empire turned upon every other.
Wars are mass confusion; no one knows who is winning until one side turns and runs or loses its will to continue and sues for peace. Only the historians are able to decide who came out ahead and on what terms, and they were often wrong. Interstellar wars are far more difficult to evaluate. News of battles comes only after long cycles, and even then the information is unreliable. How many of the enemy ships were destroyed? How were they identified? What had their mission been? How many ships did the Dorians or the other members of the Federation lose? What were their casualties? How many colonies were destroyed on each side, how many planets laid waste? How many replacement ships had been built? How many crews had been trained? Did the Federation have sufficient resources or the will to withstand the terrible drain of conflict?
Many long cycles would be required before any of this became clear. And even then it would be the triumph of one narrative over many.
At first the Dorian enemy was the humans. They were the newcomers, the trouble-makers. The Dorian warships fell upon the humans near the Sirian frontier and destroyed their ships by the dozens. Tordor tried to stop the carnage, but he had no time after the orders came. And then the humans retaliated, their ships appearing in our midst out of wormholes that the Dorians had not thought they knew and wreaked havoc on the Dorian fleet. Only the superior organization of Tordor’s crew allowed the Ardor to survive, damaged as it was. The Ardor was the only ship in the fleet to emerge without a casualty, despite being in the midst of the action.
At first the high command accused Tordor and his crew of cowardice, but visual records proved the opposite. And then Tordor was given command of a fleet and told to attack the humans in return. Tordor disobeyed. He contacted the human fleet commander and spoke to her in his broken Terran and arranged a meeting. Face to face they worked out their differences and Tordor returned to his superiors with the offer of peace. Again he was placed on trial for treason. He almost resorted, once more, to a personal challenge of the court but refrained and argued his case with all the urgency and eloquence he could command.
Reluctantly the high command accepted the terms, and Doria allied itself with the humans against the Sirians and then with the humans and the Sirians against the Aldebarans, and with the humans, the Sirians, and the Aldebarans against the Alpha Centaurans, and by extension with the Federation itself. Finally, exhausted with battle, the galaxy strewn with broken ships, broken worlds, and broken creatures, the Federation made a peace. Ten long cycles of war, a thousand damaged planets, and a thousand million casualties, and nothing more. Never again, the members of the Federation vowed, would they go to war. Anyone who broke the peace would be turned upon by all the others. Boundaries were established, spheres of influence were agreed upon, mechanisms for settling disputes were created.
Tordor returned to Doria a hero, commander of a battle group that had won every engagement, the inventor of new strategies of command and tactics, but most of all, the crafter of peace. He thought he could challenge the high command. He thought his innovations in training and organization would provide a strategy for change. He thought he might even compete to be the successor to the High Dorian. But instead he was once more placed on trial for disobedience and treason, and escaped punishment only through the basic right of personal combat, a tradition that he had thought to consign to history. The high command had succeeded once more. It sometimes yields, but it never forgets. Doria had won but not in the Dorian way, and the high command, and Doria itself, was not ready to accept victory on any terms but those that emerged from its own traditions. It had used Tordor and now was prepared to throw him away.
Tordor did not blame the high command or Doria. He wasn’t good enough, he thought. He recognized his failings as a Dorian, as a sentient creature. Perhaps no one was good enough. Not on Doria, nor on any world. At least there was peace, and he decided to retire to a world at peace, to a galaxy at peace, back to the fertile plains and sweet streams of his youth.
But that lasted only half a long cycle before he was summoned, this time to a meeting with the High Dorian himself in Grandor’s lofty spires. The High Dorian was alone in a room atop the tallest of the tall spires, as if getting far from the nourishing soil was a sign of elevation of soul, a denial of Dorian desire for the tug of their massive world and an affirmation of his title. Like all of the leaders Tordor had encountered, the High Dorian was massive and scarred by the wounds of many battles. He stood with his hind quarters to Tordor and stared out one of the many windows at the sun setting behind the mountains. The silence grew until at last the High Dorian said, not turning to face Tordor, “You think the Dorian way is wrong. You think you have been treated badly.”
“No worse than any other Dorian,” Tordor said.
“Dorians were blessed by a fortunate world with a benign sun, fertile plains, abundant water, and an absence of predators. And it would have remained that way until the end of time has it not been for the Great Catastrophe. And then the truth was revealed. The universe does not love grazers.”
Tordor did not know where this encounter was going.
“Those who were forced to recognize this truth in their effort to survive understood that they had to change and when the good times returned that they had to change the nature of Dorians themselves. If the natural order did not produce Dorians capable of competing for an appropriate position in the galaxy, Dorians would have to do it themselves.”
“So,” Tordor said, “we had to torture ourselves into an interstellar species.”
“And we succeeded,” the High Dorian said. “It has been worth the sacrifice. We have become leaders in the Federation. We have fulfilled the promise that Doria provided.”
“And yet?” Tordor asked.
“What do you know about Transcendentalism?”
Tordor hesitated. “Not much,” he said. “A silly rumor about a new religion.”
“Silly maybe. A rumor maybe. A new religion, yes. And new religions are always a danger to established truths.”
“Like Dorian dominance?” Tordor said.
“The galaxy has just returned to normalcy.”
“Surely the peace we just made has not been threatened so soon.”
“Peace is not so simple as a few words,” the High Dorian said. “The Federation had to set up a system to evaluate new inventions and their potential for creating change.”
“You just said that it was necessary for Dorians to change.”
“The change that Dorians achieved through self-transformation and that other species attained through another painful process they call evolution is threatened by a religion that promises instant transformation. And that means any species that claims its promise—if it exists—also has an advantage of every other. Transendentalism is dangerous for that reason.”
“A religion?”
“A religion that includes a machine, a Transcendental Machine that can produce perfection in any individual. A machine, if the rumors are true, that exists in the spiral arm next to ours, that no one from our spiral arm has ever visited.”
Tordor was silent for a moment. “There is a reason we are having this conversation.”
For the first time the High Dorian turned ponderously to face Tordor. “A ship is setting out from Terminal to search for the Transcendental Machine. And you will be on it.”
“To do what?”
“Whatever is necessary,” the High Dorian said. “You will receive more detailed instructions during the journey to Terminal.”
“By whom?”
“That you will discover.”
The High Dorian turned back to his view of the setting sun. The meeting was over. Tordor was to go on a strange journey to a part of the galaxy no person had ever visited, across great gulfs of space no ship had ever dared to enter, in search of a mystical object no one had ever seen, with a group of strangers whose purposes and motives no one could know.
But he could not help but wonder if the High Dorian or the high command had decided that he was a threat to them even in retirement. It did not matter. He had no choice but to find himself in this shabby waiting room on the planet aptly named Terminal with a group of shabby castoffs of a mixed-species galaxy, each of them, like himself, with goals and motivations and secrets that were bound to end in conflict if not in death. And all in search of a machine that surely did not exist.
Well, he thought, perhaps this was the fate for which his troubled life had prepared him.