Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Defeated, I trailed back upstairs to John’s room.

  He was sitting on his bed, glancing at headlines on a softscreen. “No news.”

  “You’ve checked with your office?”

  “No need. Feliz is a good guy; he will keep trying until he gets through, and he will call the minute he does. Take it easy. Do you want something? A drink—I brought some beer.”

  “No. Thanks.”

  Hands in pockets, I mooched around the room. There seemed to be even less of John in here than there had been of me in my room, although John would have systematically stripped the place of anything valuable long ago. But in one shadowed corner I found a small bookcase. “Hey. Here are my old science fiction novels.”

  “Really?” He came across to see. We bent down side by side, brothers, two thick-necked middle-aged men, straining to see the titles on cracked and yellowing spines.

  I said, “I imagined they had been thrown out. I guess Mother moved them in here in one of her clear-outs.” Which would have been typical of her, I thought sourly; this stuff had been unbelievably important to me as a kid, but she didn’t even know whether it had belonged to me or John.

  John ran his fingers over the titles. Some of these books went back to the 1960s or even earlier. They had mostly been gifts from uncle George, who had collected books that had been old when he was a kid. “These might be worth something.”

  “They were mine, you know,” I said, too hastily.

  He held his hands up, a faintly mocking smile on his face. “I don’t dispute it.” He pulled a couple of copies off the shelves, took them out of their protective Mylar bags, and leafed through them. “Not in great condition,” he said. “See how this is yellowed—too long in the sun.”

  I straightened up. “Yeah. But I wouldn’t want to sell them. And anyhow the collectors’ market for this stuff isn’t what it was.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Too far in the past. We’re all too old. For every collectible there is a demographic. You’re at your peak as a collector at thirty, forty—old enough to be nostalgic, rich enough to have disposable income, young enough to be foolish about spending it. But science fiction is older than that, long over.”

  “It was over even when we were kids,” he said. “I never understood what you saw in the stuff.”

  “I know you didn’t,” I said testily. “Which is the difference between us.” I glanced along the shelf and pulled out a novel. “Nobody reads the literature, but there’s still a scholarly tradition around it. And there’s a fascination to it, you know, John. All those lost futures.” When I was a kid the future was still a bright, welcoming place, a place I wanted to live. We might all have been kidding ourselves even then—the Die-back was already under way—but that was how it felt to me. Now, if you thought about the future at all it was as a black place that would erase you, like a hospital, a place you went to die. I put the frail old book back on the shelf. “It’s an anti-progressive viewpoint, almost medieval. We’re regressing, philosophically.”

  “But this stuff—fantastic dreams of rocket ships and aliens—it always repelled me. It never seemed real.”

  “But the future is real,” I said. “To ignore it is absurd. It’s as if we decided we don’t believe in Mount Everest, or the Pacific Ocean. They are still there, whether we close our eyes to them or not. The future is coming whether we like it or not. The world is changing, and so are we. The future must be different from the past.”

  “But nobody cares anymore,” John said brutally. “And what bothers you is that the future turns out not to have a place for people like you. Engineers. People who want to build things. People who want to fly in space! Well, we’re too busy fixing what we broke before to build anything new.”

  He was right. The space program had been a big disappointment to me, all my life. Nearly eighty years after Neil Armstrong, still nobody had been to Mars, nobody had left Earth’s orbit since the Moonwalkers. We hadn’t even sent a probe out to the Kuiper Anomaly. The Warming had absorbed all our energies, and the great shock of the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing in 2033 had jolted us even more.

  I think John probably knew that I was, in fact, working on a design study for a new generation of spacecraft. But the work paid peanuts, and would most probably never fly—it was a hobby, a paper model as I had once made models of the Space Station of plastic and paint and decals. Maybe that proved his point. We were all too busy fixing things, coping with one set of destructive changes after another, spending all our civilization’s resources just to maintain stasis, to dream of interplanetary adventure.

  John sat on his bed and leaned against the wall, his big football player’s hands locked behind his head. “You know, if you were to write a science fiction novel now, I’d be the hero.”

  That was outrageous enough to make me laugh. “How so?”

  “Because I’m dealing with the future as it exists. And I’m helping people.”

  Basically he dealt with compensation for environmental impacts. He had started out representing individuals, people who lost their homes or their health through avoidable toxic spills and the like. He had moved on to advise legislators on adjustments to the tax system on such things as polluting fuels, heat sources, or greenhouse-emission processes.

  It was all about a striving for balance, John said; you had to balance the drive for economic development with a need for environmental stability, you had to balance economic efficiency with equity for those impacted. He had even worked on the notion of “intergenerational equity,” in which, rather than ignoring future generations altogether or at best using them as garbage handlers for your waste, you actually paid a “future tax” for any impact you might have on them. John had made something of a name for himself; indeed to my chagrin, he’d appeared on TV a few times as a talking head on the issues.

  His first love, though, had always been adversarial law, and in his fifties he had been drawn back to it—but to much larger cases. “Rather than defending the little old lady against the company who is poisoning her drinking water, I’m now, for instance, advising the administration on a massive suit against China.” While the United States had become a leader in global environmental management in the 2020s, China, in a relentless drive for economic growth, had continued to pollute, even to the present day. And then there are redistribution charges . . .” It was a rule of thumb of the Warming that hot areas lost out while cooler areas won. So, for instance, an Iowa farmer afflicted by increasing aridity lost, while a Minnesota farmer with a longer growing season won.

  “Simple equity is the philosophical guide,” John said. “The guy in Minnesota uses his bounty to subsidize his colleague in Iowa. And if things change around in the future, the flow of funds can always go the other way. People accept this, I think; it’s all manifestly fair.” He even said you could extend this on a planetary scale—not through lawsuits, like the United States vs. China, but through “planetary bargaining.” Canada, a winner, could bail out India, a loser, and so on.

  A lot of work came John’s way through the various Stewardship agencies. The whole notion of the Stewardship was based on taking responsibility for your actions, on accepting the true cost of what you did, or sharing any benefit. But of course you’d always put “winning” and “losing” in quotes; really it was all simply change, which hit everybody to varying degrees.

  But all this equity and balancing and taxing and fairness was just a way of sharing out the impact of the Warming, I thought, not of reducing that impact in the first place. It occurred to me there was a narrow assumption hidden here, that things would carry on much the same as they had for a while—falling apart, maybe, but doing so slowly, staying more or less bearable, manageable. But what if not? . . .

  John started to tell me about a book he was working on.

  “Back up,” I said. “A book?”

  He grinned smugly. “It’s all about the future of money.”

  He was developing an idea that dat
ed back to John Maynard Keynes, an economist who worked in the middle of the twentieth century. “You’d run international trade in a whole new currency which would earn negative interest. So you would naturally spend your diminishing wealth as quickly as possible, which will boost trade and the exports of other nations. It’s a new paradigm,” he said. “A way to avoid the debt mountains of the past, and to boost the global trade on which we rely. Why not? Money is just a mental construct. We can make up its rules any way we want. I have some contacts in the Administration through the China case, and I think I can garner some support. . . .”

  And so on. I listened to all this with a sickening feeling. Whereas I, the engineer, was a nineteenth-century relic, a sad Jules Verne character, perhaps my smart-ass brother really was an archetype of our times, a modern hero. “So you’re going to become more prominent than ever,” I said. “I’ll never be able to get away from your face.”

  He laughed. There was a grain of sincere bitterness in my harangue; of course he detected it. “I’ll invite you to the launch of the book,” he said.

  I managed to sleep that night, but only a little. I got up early and left the house.

  I went down to the coast, and walked and walked. I wasn’t going anywhere; I was just trying to escape the contents of my own head, as my airline therapist had so wisely suggested.

  Everywhere the angry sea had risen. The water had washed away fences, waves had lapped over lawns, and palm trees sagged over the water, undercut, surely doomed. One guy had built a chicken shack right at the edge of his land, not meters from the sea. When the wind blew the chickens must have got soaked, terrified; I wondered what kind of eggs he got out of them.

  It was all depressingly predictable. Florida was always flat and soggy. Human efforts over centuries had pushed the water out of there, and reclaimed much of the land. But now the ocean was coming back. Even the Florida aquifer was contaminated with salt, as well as with industrial spill-off. It wasn’t good news for the flora and fauna, either. The salt water that now pushed inland with every tide had played havoc with freshwater ecologies. The Everglades weren’t a place the tourists went to nowadays; the rotting vegetable matter that clogged the dead swamps stunk to high heaven. It was said the crocs still survived though, living off the rotting detritus around them, surviving this extinction event as they had survived so many others.

  The wind changed, to blow off the sea. That ocean breeze smelled foul, a choking smell like rubber burning somewhere. It was a cocktail of toxins that might have blown all the way from the sprawling industrial wastelands of central Europe and Africa or even Asia: some of that crud got very high up, and could even circle the Earth.

  I wondered how I would feel about all this if I were Happified, like John’s kids. I had once discussed this with John, the only time I dared, the only time I was drunk enough, with his wife out of the way.

  “The pursuit of happiness is our inalienable right, Michael,” he had said. “It says so in the Constitution, remember. Every parent wants their child to be happy, above all. You try to care for them, you give them education, money, to maximize their opportunities to get on in life—but in the end happiness is the final goal. That’s an argument that goes back to Aristotle, actually; he argued that every other good is a means to an end, but happiness is the end.”

  “Smart guy.”

  “And now we know that at least fifty percent of the likelihood of your happiness is inherited, even without modification. But we can modify. We’re the first generation that can guarantee their kids happiness.”

  So you plied your kids with drugs and therapy. Or you spliced their genomes, as John had, to make them happy come what may.

  I thought I saw something slithering through scrubby dune grass. It might have been a tree snake, which had come into Florida and other parts of the continental United States from Guam, via Hawaii. Poisonous as hell, and a vicious predator of birds. On the other hand, tree-snake meat recipes were spicing up the menus in Miami restaurants.

  They could grow three meters long. Looking at it sliding through the grass made me shudder. I turned back, heading for home.

  By the time I got back to the house it was around eight in the morning.

  My mother was already out, working on a row of potted plants at the top of the yard, in the lee of the house. She was on her knees on a railed pad, an old lady’s gardening aid. But her bare fingers were crusted with dirt, and she dug away with a vengeance.

  I remembered how she had always loved her garden. When we were kids I used to think she loved it more than us. Now, watching her, I wasn’t so sure we had been wrong.

  She glanced up irritably as my shadow fell over her. “You missed your breakfast,” she said.

  “I wasn’t hungry.”

  “I’ll fix you something.” She sniffed. “Better yet, do it yourself.”

  “Really, I’m fine.”

  “There’s no news. About Tom, I mean.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m sure everything will be fine. You’d have heard by now if not.”

  “You’re probably right.” I sat down beside her on the wooden floor of the porch. She had a jug of lemonade beside her; I accepted a glass.

  “I don’t suppose you want to help me with this,” she said.

  “Not especially.”

  “Where did you walk to?”

  “Nowhere particular.”

  “Oh, you’re always so vague, Michael, you’re maddening.”

  “Mom, the breeze off the sea—”

  “I know. The air used to be so clean here. One reason I always loved it. Now it’s like Manchester.”

  “Yeah.” I watched her doggedly digging away at the roots of her plants. “It can’t be good for you.”

  “My lungs are made of leather. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “They’re evacuating Miami Beach, aren’t they?”

  She snorted. “No, they aren’t. Nobody uses that word. There is a program of transfer. Of migration, if you want to put it like that. Evacuation is what refugees do,” she said sternly. “It’s not as if we’ll be underwater tomorrow.”

  I knew how painful this was. Since the automobile had vanished from America, this had become an age when you stayed home rather than traveled, an age of villages, of local stuff. And for a close community to be broken up was difficult.

  “We have a program of agreements with other population centers,” she said. “In Minnesota, for instance. John has helped negotiate the settlements.” I hadn’t known that. “Seventy-five here, a hundred there. Always family groups, of course.” It had to be planned, she said. You couldn’t let the community left behind just fall into decay. So there were incentive schemes to keep teachers, doctors, civil servants working here, even though there was no long-term career for them. “It’s a long-term program. A cultural achievement, in its way.”

  “But Minnesota is a long way from the sea,” I said.

  “Well, I know that, but it can’t be helped. What’s worse is that everything is being”—she waved her trowel vaguely—“dispersed. All the history here. The culture.”

  “History? Mom, you’re a newcomer here. You’re from England!”

  “Yes, but so is everybody a newcomer but the Tequesta Indians. That’s part of the charm of the place. I think it’s important that we stay, you know. We old ones. Isn’t that what old people are, symbols of the past, of continuity? If we go then the place will just die. And what will happen to people then? . . . It does feel very strange to live in a place which has no future, I admit that.”

  “Mom—”

  “You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia—all of those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they to
ok away the world instead.”

  She wasn’t really talking to me, I saw. She continued with her patient gardening, digging and digging.

  I found John out back. He was sweeping windblown sand off the porch.

  He had a distracted expression. I wondered if he was getting news about Tom. But it turned out he was listening to his personal therapist. He grinned, touched my ear, and I heard a gentle male voice: “John, you’re overly perturbed about a situation you can’t control. You know you have to accept what can’t be changed. Take an hour off, then let me play you some stuff on cognitive feedback which . . .”

  I pulled away.

  “You should try one of these things,” John said. “It can even prescribe pharmaceuticals, you know. Spin-off from the space program. Would you like me to set you up?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He stepped toward me. Our closeness of last night had dissipated back into the usual rivalry; his blocky face, in the slanting morning light, looked ugly, coarse. “You never did accept any drug therapy after Morag, did you? You know, it is possible to block the formation of traumatic memories altogether. You just take the right pill in the hours immediately after the event—you target the formation of proteins, or some such—I guess that’s too late for you now with Morag, but—”

  “I suppose you fed pills to your kids after Inge left, did you?”

  He flinched at that, but he snapped back, “They didn’t need it. You, on the other hand—”

  My anger, frustration, helplessness came boiling out. “You know the trouble with you, John, your whole fucking life? You deal with symptoms, not causes. You fix your kids so they’ll never be sad. You listen to a tin voice in your ear and you pop your damn pills so you don’t carry scars from anything bad, even from your wife dumping you. And your work is all about symptoms, too. The coasts are flooded? Fine, spread what’s left of the wealth around a little more. The Atlantic coast is hammered by a dozen hurricanes a season? Fine, add a couple of zeroes to your lawsuit against the Chinese. You don’t do squat about the root cause of it all, do you?”