Authors: James Gunn
The continual flexing of Komran’s surface is a second fact of life. Sirians are born knowing that the stability of the land itself is undependable. This understanding gives Sirians an advantage over many species that have an unreasonable confidence in their physical circumstances. Sirians know that the unexpected can happen at any moment, that they cannot trust their environment, and that they must be ready to adjust to any emergency. This realization made them daring sailors on Komran’s tumultuous seas, and, once spaceflight began, sure space voyagers and confident warriors.
And, to say truth, it is safer to be a sailor or a space voyager or a warrior than a nurturing male.
* * *
I do not remember when I ate my way through the belly of my father after the food he had stored was consumed by his greedy offspring, but my father told me stories about it and I saw it happen to others. I dreamed about it often. My father was a great male. After separating myself from my siblings, my father told me about treating his nurturing pouch with antibiotics and then sewing up the holes we unthinking creatures had chewed. Out of all the others, he picked me as the repository of his wisdom, and we spent many happy hours together as he prepared me to assume the position and power that would have been his if he had not chosen to sacrifice everything for love.
I wish I could say the same for my mother, who ate my father when I was still young and our little piece of Komran was torn apart by quakes. “Do not worry,” he told me. “Komran will provide, and the hungry times will pass. Your mother does what she must to keep herself and her children alive, and she will see that you gain the advancement you deserve.” But she never did.
I did not eat, having already consumed too much of his substance in my unthinking larval state.
But my father was right. The hungry times passed, and our family grew sound again feasting on my father’s memory as we had feasted on his body, and the wise counsel that I passed along in his stead. I became the wise male who served as the head of the family, and part of my wisdom was to reflect that my father did not grow old and feeble like so many males of his generation, sacrifices on the altar of love.
I left home as soon as I could, escaping my mother’s ravenous regard and refusal to shield her children from her heat, and gave myself over to the state, whose concerns, and even its punishments, were blessedly impersonal. Because of my father’s once-promising career and the wisdom that he had communicated to me I was appointed to the academy for pre-spacers, where I was educated in the mathematics and the physics of space, astronomy and cosmology, history and practices of spaceflight, galactic culture, and the preeminence of Sirians among galactics.
My apologies to fellow galactics for Sirian parochial attitudes. We teach greatness so that our offspring can rise above the treachery of their biology and so that they will never encounter a galactic or a situation except on terms of equality. We teach greatness so that we can imagine it, and, having imagined it, achieve it.
I studied hard, though with the skepticism that lies behind every thoughtful Sirian’s consciousness of place. We know that the universe is unrelenting and unstable, and so we seek the truth that is unspoken, the reality behind the deception of appearance. And I studied to make my father proud and his sacrifice meaningful. I was passed on to the space college as the most promising academy student of my class.
College was far more demanding, requiring not only the discipline of the mind but also the discipline of the body that lies at the heart of the Sirian experience. We must perform not only the exercises that enable Sirians to achieve and to endure but also the rigorous protocols we must learn to control our inner states. Komran provides its offspring with such physical extremes of temperature and Komranology that we must divorce our inner states from our outer existence. Our happiness is dependent not upon events but upon our determination. We will our happiness just as we will our internal temperatures.
In the third cycle of college Sirians are introduced to space, first on a ship manned by experienced crews and then on ships operated by senior cadets. On my first trip I discovered my natural habitat. While my fellow students were panicking, floundering in weightlessness, puking in corners, and pink with shame, swinging a cloth in an attempt to blot the evidence, I felt as if I had come home, as if I resided once more in my father’s belly. It was for this, I knew, that my father had nourished me and shared not only his body but his wisdom. I was a natural spacer.
Among brighter students now, I was not as successful as I had been before. My classwork had grown more difficult and my academic efforts frantic. Even calmed by the remembered voice of my father, I could not excel as I had been able to do before. But my space-faring skills made up for everything. Where other students had to think before they acted, every decision came to me as if a product of body, not mind. I rose to a position of eminence, what humans would call the captain of cadets, on skill—and the attitude of leadership that accompanied it.
By the time my class had reached its final year, I had already been assured of the first place to open on the premier ship of the Sirian fleet. In response, my performance in intellectual pursuits improved, and once more I began to succeed, sometimes more than my peers, in Sirian history, in political science, and, preeminently, in space navigation, engineering, gunnery, and command.
Then I met Romi. She was a first-year student from Komran’s other hemisphere. In the ordinary course of life we would never have met. Not only distance but status separated us. I was a commoner, who had survived the hungry times only by reason of my mother’s moral turpitude. But here, in the space college, I was the superior, and as captain of cadets able to give orders to first-year students and expect them to be obeyed instantly. Even unreasonable orders—in fact, as tradition and common sense dictate, the more unreasonable the better, for crews must obey without thinking, without considering whether an order is reasonable.
But I could not command Romi. She was the most beautiful Sirian I had ever met, and she was in love with me. I felt stirrings within me, thoughts of storing food within my belly, thoughts of ingesting larval children. And then I remembered my father.
* * *
I understand that love takes many forms across the galaxy, and that some are powerful and enduring while some are fleeting and casual. I do not know what love is like for a Sirian female—I think it involves the predatory—but for a Sirian male, love is a great passion that prepares him for what may be the ultimate sacrifice.
I endured the situation for the rest of the academic cycle, trying to limit my contacts with Romi, but every time she was near I felt the primal urges that I knew my father had felt, the urges that betrayed him. I even went out of my way to make sure our paths did not cross. But I met her in my dreams.
I understand that some galactics do not dream; some do not even sleep. The dream life of Sirians, however, is as real as—no, more real than—the waking life. We discuss our dreams as if we have lived them. We analyze them. We write them down. We manage them so that they end satisfactorily, giving us strength or wisdom, or reinforcing our self-image.
But I could not manage my dreams of Romi. They always ended with small Sirians eating their way through my belly while I stared down, helpless to control them or my temperature, leaving me helpless and weak, doomed to a lifetime as an invalid. And I told no one.
Finally my ordeal ended. My class completed its classwork and we were assigned to ships. Somehow I had managed to retain my status during my inner turmoil, and I joined the
Kilsat
as junior pilot-in-training. I left Romi behind as a second-cycle cadet and put her out of my mind.
I was happy. Space was my environment; Romi no longer haunted my thoughts or controlled my dreams. I was a natural pilot, responding intuitively to subconscious cues, as if my dear father were guiding my actions from his place of honor near the star that shall not be named. I made friends with my fellow spacers and filled my off-duty moments with good male fellowship. We bonded as Sirian crew members do in the unifying environment of space. We talked of challenges and accomplishments, of ambitions and achievement, and never of family or sacrifice.
The
Kilsat
made its first Jump during my maiden voyage. That took us beyond the narrow confines of our Sirian system. The experience shook many of my crewmates, but I found it exhilarating, not only space but the realization that the hidden universes within space were my real home. During the second Jump I was at the controls and gloried in the power of transcending time and space. All the universe was mine, I felt, and I dedicated my joy to my father’s memory.
By the time we made our third Jump we were in galactic space, surveying the magnificence of the Galactic Center. Xi told us about meeting with the Galactic Council. What he did not describe was the center itself—not the center of the galaxy but Galactic Center, where the representatives of the great peoples meet and the galaxy is governed. Galactic Center is an insignificant system of rocky planets orbiting an insignificant sun. No one would think of it as a place of greatness, as a place of any importance at all. And that, no doubt, is why it was chosen, along with the fact that it was uninhabited, at least by any member species. And although representatives to the Galactic Council and innumerable bureaucrats inhabit those planets, some for their entire lives, the destruction of the Galactic Center would mean little except to those personally involved.
To look at that impoverished system and realize its importance makes even the most robust Sirian realize the value of inner strength and the pitfalls of appearance. We had learned that principle from the shiftings of Komran beneath our extremities, but here it was brought home to us again.
We looked, we admired from afar, and we departed, learning nothing of the workings inside the capitol of the galaxy beyond what we had learned in the academy. But it was enough for simple spacers, and we pondered its meaning as we returned to Sirius and our lives there, now a crew in the true meaning of the word, functioning as the brain and central nervous system of the ship, working as a single entity. For the first time in my life I felt as I had when I was part of my father, at peace with my world, content in my way of life. The
Kilsat
had become my father, or, perhaps more accurately, now the
Kilsat
and my father were one.
But when we returned to Sirius, Romi came back into my life. It was time for the cadet cruises, and, by the evil goddess, she was assigned to the
Kilsat.
When I saw her, I knew my time of greatest temptation had arrived. Without a word to anyone, I went to the nearest two-person fighter craft, crawled through the tunnel that linked it to the ship, detached it from its mooring bolts, turned off the communications gear, and drifted away before I started the propulsion system.
I knew where I was going. I was headed for the nexus point that everyone knows and nobody dares use, the Jump that ends in orbit around the white dwarf without a name.
* * *
To speak truth, my reaction was not the awe and reverence that I expected. During the lengthy trip I had managed to neutralize the panic that had driven me from Romi, but I anticipated a psychic fulfillment that never came. The Companion was an ordinary white dwarf, shining wanly on a ruined desert of orbital space while Sirius burned brighter than any star above the Companion’s shawl of night. The Companion had not been stripped of planets, as mythology had told us. Instead, while I watched as if from a height, cinder after cinder swam into view. If they had once been gas giants, the gases had been blown away, leaving only a few charred fragments behind. If they had been habitable worlds like Komran, their atmospheres and seas had been stripped from them, along with all the living things that had evolved there. The Companion had consumed its own children long before life came to sentience on Komran.
My father was not there, nor was any other spirit. The desolation before me was matched by the desolation within.
What was there, as I discovered when my black mood eventually lifted, was a lonely beacon, like the sign of intelligent life in a lonely universe. I tracked it to a location near the Companion. There was no planet, no satellite, no ship, nothing within the discernment of my sensors that could send a signal.
The passage from the outer reaches to near-solar space took many periods during which I saw much closer the devastation caused by the Companion’s expansion phase. Finally I came upon the source of the signal: a battered escape capsule of an unfamiliar design turning slowly in the Companion’s wan radiance, getting just enough energy from its rays to sustain its limited operation.
I connected the capsule to my small ship. I could not decipher the instructions beside the capsule’s hatch—they were incised in a cryptic series of lines—but I finally found a button that set off explosive bolts. I sampled the atmosphere, which was within tolerable limits and without apparent toxins. Inside the capsule was a still functioning deep-freeze chamber, and inside the chamber was the ugliest creature I had ever seen—a creature with four weak extremities emerging at awkward angles from a shrunken and fragile central torso and topped by a strange growth dotted with openings and covered in places with threadlike tendrils.
Only later—my apologies to present company—did I discover that this was a human. This was the first human I had ever seen, certainly the first human any Sirian had ever seen except, perhaps, at the highest level of galactic leadership where, I learned later, human emissaries already were making their demands that soon would result in war.
But all of this was yet to come. Here, now, was this alien creature, and it was dead—or so nearly dead that the difference was imperceptible. If any other galactic had discovered this castaway, the end would have been certain, but Sirians have such fine control of their temperatures that freezing is not necessarily fatal. Indeed, Sirians have been discovered in hidden glaciers and been revived after being frozen for many hundreds, even thousands, of cycles.