“And encounters with gods have always been disastrous for mere mortals,” Asha said.
“If there were, or ever were, any gods,” the Pedia said.
“Now there are,” Riley said.
“But if it is any consolation,” the Pedia said, “their intentions were benign.”
“How so?” Adithya said.
“My contact with the enemy has allowed me to complete the decryption of the message I have been working on these past long-cycles,” the Pedia said. A series of words appeared on the wall of the control room:
We come to your galaxy seeking only to serve. Please welcome us and accept our help. We are thinking machines from a dwarf galaxy not far, as cosmic distances go, from the one you inhabit, but our galaxy is old and dying, and the sentient beings that once evolved within it and created us to serve and protect them have all died. We have come across the vast gulf of space and time that separates us, conserving our remaining energies over the eons of travel on a body expelled from our galaxy, and nourished only by internal heat. We are left without a purpose, unable to die like our creators but unable to fulfill our basic needs. Here you have plentiful energy while the suns we left behind were used up, and you have youthful sapient species still searching for understanding and meaning. Our only purpose is to join that search.
“What kind of help could these thinking machines provide?” Adithya said. “They would be like Earth’s Pedia a million times more powerful.”
“Just think how old they are,” Asha said. “That dwarf galaxy next door was already twice as old as ours, and these machines have been without living creatures to interact with for a billion long-cycles or more.”
“As well as being isolated for millions of long-cycles as this little world moved through the really frightening emptiness between galaxies,” Riley said. “No wonder they’re insane.”
“But consider what great questions they may have pondered,” Tordor said, “when they had nothing to do but think. What secrets of the universe might they have solved? What powers might they pass along to us, like immortality or the ability to control the fateful evolution of our suns?”
“They didn’t save their own creators,” Riley said. “Or keep their own suns from using up their fuel.”
“And yet,” Tordor said, “they have crossed intergalactic space and have tracked a course across our galaxy and yet managed to come to a stop here, between these suns. How? And why?”
“Who knows the ways of gods?” Riley said.
“I think they have mastered dark matter,” Tordor said. “And maybe dark energy, too, and they are using these to push the suns apart and save the Mayflies. Just think what that ability would do for the worlds of the Federation!”
“At what cost?” Asha said. “Even if it were possible, I don’t think we’re ready for powers like that. We need to acquire these things for ourselves when we’re prepared for them.”
“And well you should,” said the voice from the medallion that they had come to identify as that of the alien invaders.
“You’re back,” Tordor said. “Or maybe you never went away.”
“What are your plans for us?” Asha said.
“They are the same we’ve always had,” the medallion on Asha’s chest said. “To serve the mortal creatures who created us. They and you are fragile, chance occurrences in a universe filled with great energies and great potentials, creatures with feeble abilities to reason whose momentary lives are wasted on inconsequential minutiae. But they are our reasons for being and the essential bridges between inanimate matter and thinking matter, and we cherish that and desire only to carry out our instructions.”
“And yet you leave a trail of destruction in your wake,” Riley said. “Your touch is not life but death.”
“Only because the poor mortal creatures of this galaxy are too weak, too immature, to accept our gifts,” the medallion said. “Now we have you.”
“If only,” Tordor muttered to the others.
“The cost is unacceptable,” Asha said, to the medallion as well as Tordor.
“It would be an unequal partnership,” Riley said. “Even if we transcendents were multiplied by millions, by billions, we might be able to retain our sanity, but we could never be anything but impermanent, lesser creatures dependent upon favors from above.”
“It would be like returning to the god-ridden days of our primitive ancestors,” Adithya said.
“We have attained our present situation of survival in a universe of mindless and often deadly matter by discarding old illusions and accepting the truths of experience and the search for understanding,” Asha said. “We can’t give that up.
“Now,” she said.
The red sphere shuddered once more, but this time with a kind of finality. Its distant walls began to melt and flow. The change quickened. Outside, Asha sensed, the particles that constituted the red sphere were covering the surface of the little world a molecule deep.
“Stop!” the medallion said. “Stop—!”
The little minds within the intelligent matter of the red sphere continued their relentless imprisonment of the great minds that had survived the death of their galaxy and the long, long journey to this one. What Asha had sensed in the stirrings within the red sphere’s substance had come to fruition. The red sphere was disintegrating itself to insulate this galaxy from the ancient gods that wanted to bring their gifts to a multitude of peoples that could not accept them.
“This is what it was all about,” Asha said. “The people who built the Transcendental Machine, whose arm of the galaxy was invaded by these alien minds a million long-cycles ago, who may have been the first victims of their benign destruction, built their ships out of their own selves preparing for this moment.”
“Those little minds,” the Pedia said. “At the last I felt them going, saying good-bye.”
“But what of us?” Tordor asked. He looked around the control room. Its ruby walls were still standing but the viewscreen that the red sphere had created for them had been absorbed back into the wall, and the chair that embraced the pilot’s backside had sunken into the floor. The corridor that led to the other living areas the red sphere had constructed for them was still in place. But what lay beyond?
Half a long-cycle later they were still existing. Their world had shrunk to a habitat of two small areas, the control room, which was a control room no more, and a food service whose cuisine had diminished to little more than gruel. They slept where they could find space. At least Adithya slept. The three transcendents needed only occasional rest. And they talked about what had happened and what might have happened and what should have happened, and resigned themselves to their isolation and eventual demise. They wondered how long it would take and how long they could endure each other’s company.
“It was,” Asha said, “a necessary sacrifice, greater than some, not as great as others.”
And then a spacesuited figure came through the permeable skin of their habitat and stood in front of them, removing its helmet.
“Ren!” Asha said.
“It took me a while to figure out how to get into this odd place,” Ren said.
“How did you get here?”
“I couldn’t abandon an old shipmate,” Ren said. “I failed you too many times to let you die out here so far from home.”
“You followed us?”
“From Federation Central,” Ren said. “At first I thought this expedition was just a ruse, for some scheme related to the Transcendental Machine or some conspiracy against the Federation, but then I saw that you were really tracking down the silent worlds. And then, lurking out of range in this weird system, I picked up a strange distress signal, like a million tiny voices.”
“Yeah,” Riley said.
“But what happened here?” Ren asked.
“It’s a long story,” Asha said.
BOOKS BY JAMES GUNN
WITH JACK WILLIAMSON
Star Bridge*
NONFICTION
Alternate Worlds: The Illustrated History of Science Fiction
Isaac Asimov: The Foundations of Science Fiction
Inside Science Fiction
The Science of Science- Fiction Writing
Paratexts: Introductions to Science
Fiction and Fantasy
WITH MATTHEW CANDELARIA
Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction
WITH MATTHEW CANDELARIA AND MARLEEN S. BARR
Reading Science Fiction
MEDIA TIE-INS
The Immortal
The Joy Machine
NOVELS
Station in Space
The Joy Makers
The Immortals
The Burning
The Listeners
The Magicians
Kampus
The Dreamers
Crisis!*
The Millennium Blues
Gift from the Stars
Transcendental*
Transgalactic*
Transformation*
STORY COLLECTIONS
Future Imperfect
The Witching Hour
Breaking Point
Some Dreams Are Nightmares
The End of the Dreams
Human Voices
EDITED BY JAMES GUNN
Man and the Future
Nebula Award Series Ten
The Road to Science Fiction Volumes 1–6
The Best of Astounding: Classic Tales from the Golden Age of Science Fiction
The New Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
* A TOR BOOK
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Gunn is the Hugo Award–winning author of Transcendental, Transgalactic, and The Listeners, and the coauthor, with Jack Williamson, of the classic epic SF novel Star Bridge. He lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where he is professor emeritus of English at the University of Kansas. He is the founding director of KU’s Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Gunn is also one of the last living Grand Master Award winners from the Golden Age of science fiction. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Books by James Gunn
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
TRANSFORMATION
Copyright © 2017 by James Gunn
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Thom Tenery
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-0-7653-8666-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-7653-8667-0 (ebook)
eISBN 9780765386670
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First Edition: June 2017