Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “How will they even know we are here? We can’t integrate them if we can’t find them!”

  He held a hand to one ear. “Can’t you hear?”

  She frowned, concentrating, expanding her hearing range. She made out a deep thrumming, subsonic, far below the standard human range.

  “It is a beacon,” he said. “Audible for hundreds of kilometers underwater.”

  “They live underwater?”

  “Where else, on a world like this? They will come.”

  “How? Will they swim here?”

  He grinned, his face gleaming with the spray.

  She stepped closer to the edge, peering out at the churning sea. But there was no sign of the swimming citizens.

  Chapter 7

  Suddenly I was standing in the open air.

  I was on a plain. The ground was scrubby and pocked by pits, some like the holes you leave when you dig out a tree stump, some bigger than that. The sky was a lid of cloud, washed-out gray-white, that seemed to suck all the color out of the landscape. There was a breeze on my face, and I could taste and smell salt, overlaid with a fouler stench of bad eggs, marsh gas maybe. But your senses are always dull in a VR; nobody wants to pay good money for a bad smell, no matter how authentic.

  Before me was some kind of industrial plant. It was a collection of squat concrete blocks crenellated by aluminium ducts and fans. A massive, rusting pipeline stalked away on spindly trestles across the landscape. The whole setup was surrounded by a chain-link fence at least twice my height; it looked to be backed up by an electrical barrier. There was no activity, nobody about; the concrete was stained, the buildings looked abandoned. Standing there, a ghost in the landscape, the buildings made me queasy just to look at them, though at first I couldn’t figure why.

  This was Siberia, the tundra, and it was spring. The landscape stretched to my left and right, and I had a sense of space, of immensity. This strip of tundra, between the sea to the north and the forests to the south, stretched a third of the way around the pole of the planet. But it was a petrolandscape, littered by oily lakes, pipelines, and rusting derricks.

  Because of that breeze, I thought I must be near the sea. Looking away from the factory, I could see a line of iron gray, an ocean horizon. It made sense. This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the northwest of Siberia, maybe five hundred kilometers northeast of the Urals. Here, I had checked, the Arctic Ocean was known as the Kara Sea. Or I could be looking at the vast gulf at the mouth of the Ob River, a huge waterway that drained a continent. There was some kind of activity nearer the shore, low structures I couldn’t make out, people moving urgently around. Was that where Tom was working? I was ashamed that I didn’t know.

  I hadn’t approved of him coming to as unstable a part of the world as this, and had hoped that my frosty silence would have deterred him from going. It didn’t. And now the result of my stubbornness was that he was hurt, somewhere in this depressing, worn-out landscape, and I had no idea how he had been injured or how badly, or even where he was.

  In a VR projection you were stuck in the presence of your transceiver drone, which the service provider drops in the destination you ask for. Possibly this industrial plant was the nearest location logged in the provider’s database. It had been the time taken to fly my drone from Moscow that accounted for the delay before the link was established. But I saw no activity within the site. There was nobody here, nobody to ask about Tom.

  Then I saw that one of those big concrete cubes was leaning. That immense building was tilted maybe ten degrees out of true, and one towering wall was cracked from top to bottom, yielding to the strain. The ground at the base of the tipping building looked as if it had melted, and was piled up in big static ripples, like warm chocolate. Further out, I saw, that pipeline dipped out of its line, too. That was why I felt faintly nauseous. The vast tilting had disturbed my sense of the vertical, already tenuous in my VR state. It was a strange sight, a surreal drunkenness. I imagined the whole plant slowly sinking out of sight, those immense concrete walls cracking and spilling their toxic contents, until the brown earth closed over the ruined buildings like a welcoming sea.

  A helicopter flapped overhead, painted bright blue, UN colors. It flew so low it came on me suddenly, making me duck. It was heading toward that township near the coast.

  I turned away from the plant and began to walk that way. As I walked the system glitched. The view around me would freeze and shatter into blocks, before reforming again, and I suffered a few strange smells and sounds, a bell-like ringing, and sharp smells of cinnamon or almond: VR synesthesia, bugs in the works. It was a sharp reminder that I wasn’t really here; this was only a phone call with special effects.

  I didn’t grow up with immersive VRs. I could never get used to the pale washed-out sensation of the immersion, or the slight mismatch between the impulse to move and the motion itself, and I always imagined I could feel an itch at the top of my spine where data was pouring into my nervous system.

  I was restricted to a walking pace, for such were the health and safety rules of the service. In theory you could fly around like Superman, and some people did, but nine out of ten threw up in the process. Cautious, I followed the rules of the game, but it seemed to take me an inordinately long time to tramp across that wounded landscape in search of my son. My anxiety built. It was unreal enough that I felt like I was trapped in a dream, unable to hurry, unable to run. I didn’t want to be here, dealing with this, a faulty VR projection in this awful, desolate, dreamlike place, where buildings melted into the ground.

  It was at that low moment that I saw her: a slim figure, a pale dot of a face, a flash of strawberry-blond hair.

  She was standing in my path, but ahead of me, perhaps as much as half a kilometer away. She was calling something, and pointing toward the coastal village. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to focus on her, but when I stared straight at her she seemed to disappear, to melt into shadows and clouds; I saw her clearly only when I wasn’t looking at her.

  Phantoms weren’t so unusual in VR worlds. Often the system would wipe over something it was not expecting to see, editing it out of its reality altogether. Or, other times, the system would show you something that wasn’t really there, a construct of badly imaged shadows and highlights, an interpretation of objects it couldn’t recognize. She could be an artifact of the visual processing system.

  She wasn’t an artifact, though, I knew that deep in my gut. This was Morag. Even in here, in VR reality, she wouldn’t let me alone. But I didn’t have time for this, not now.

  I continued to stalk across the landscape. Morag didn’t come any closer, but nor did she walk away from me. She just retreated, her movement subtle, mysterious. “Go away!” I shouted. “I’m here for Tom, not you!” I dropped my head and stared at my VR feet as they padded across the broken ground.

  When I looked up again, she had gone.

  At last I approached the little township. The place was small, maybe a dozen buildings in all, set out in a rough grid pattern. A few cars were parked on the rutted tracks, big battered four-wheel-drives with minuscule engine compartments that looked like early hydrogen burners, 2020s vintage. No pod-bus service here, I thought.

  There were plenty of people around. Some of them moved purposefully between the buildings, talking rapidly in a language I didn’t understand. Others were gathered in little huddles, some of them weeping. They all seemed squat, small, round, and were dressed in heavy coats and boots—bright Day-Glo artificial fabrics, not the seal fur or whatever that I had been expecting. They looked to be a mix of races, some round-faced Asiatic, others more obviously European, even blond and blue-eyed. I vaguely knew that Siberia had been used as a vast slave labor camp by the Soviets in the last century; perhaps some of this mixed population were descended from prisoners or exiles.

  They were all hard-faced, weary-looking. And they were all spattered with mud. Though I was cast an occasional glance, there was no curiosity, no welcome.
I walked on through the town.

  Most of the buildings were wooden-walled huts. But I saw a few rounded tents made of what looked like leather: maybe they were yurts, I wondered, as the Mongols had once built in another part of this great ocean of land. And there were buildings something like teepees, tented poles tied off at the top, walled not with skin but with brush and dried earth. Ribbons dangled from poles: prayer ribbons, I learned later, put up by people who still practiced shamanism and animism, people only a generation or so from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the idea that the very land is crowded with spirits. If that was so, the spirits weren’t being too propitious that day. Everything was plastered by that gray-black mud. It clung to the walls and roofs in big dollops as if it had been sprayed out of a vast hose. Even on the ground, trampled bare between the buildings, there were splashes and craters, the gray of the mud mixing with the earth’s dark brown.

  The strange melted-ground subsidence had affected some of the more solid buildings. One little shack adorned with a cross, perhaps a Christian church, was leaning at a spectacular angle. The yurts and teepee structures looked more or less upright, though. I supposed that if the ground started to give way you could just roll up your home and move to somewhere a bit more stable.

  I soon walked right through the township and out the other side, and found myself facing the sea. Perhaps this was a fishing village, but I saw no boats, no harbor. A few hundred meters away the coastline rose up in low sandy cliffs that looked as if they were just melting into the sea. I saw no sign of that chopper; perhaps it had passed on along the coast. The sea itself was solid gray; it looked bitterly cold. And it seemed perilously close; I could see tide marks on doorsteps and around the bases of the houses. It looked to be eating into the shoreline here, the way it was in Florida.

  There was one building obviously not owned by the locals. It was a tent in camouflage green, with a Red Cross painted brightly on the canvas. Familiar from too many disaster-zone news reports, it was an ominous sight.

  Somebody screamed, so loud it hurt my ears before muffling filters cut in.

  A little girl was standing before me. She was just a bundle, almost lost in an oversized parka. Her face was a round, ruddy ball, streaked with tears, and she was staring at my feet. A woman came and scooped her up, glaring at me.

  And as I watched the woman walk away I noticed a row of body bags on the ground, all neatly zipped up.

  “Hey, you!” It was a crisp summons in an American accent, west coast perhaps.

  A woman walked toward me in a space suit—or anyhow that’s what it looked like, a bright blue coverall marked with UN relief agency logos. But she had her masked hood open and pushed back from her head. She was black, late twenties maybe, a severe expression on her small face. “You shouldn’t be out here with so much exposed flesh,” she snapped at me now. “Haven’t you heard of tick-borne encephalitis? And how did you get here anyhow?”

  “I’m not really here,” I said. I reached out as if to shake her hand. She responded automatically, offering me her own gloved hand; my hand passed through hers, briefly breaking up into a cloud of boxy pixels, and a protocol-violation warning pinged in my ear.

  “Oh, a VR,” she said, her urgency morphing smoothly to contempt. “What are you, some kind of Bottlenecker? A ghoul, come to see the dead people?”

  Her words chilled me. “I’m no disaster-tourist—”

  “Then show some consideration.” She pointed to my feet.

  Looking down I realized what had upset the little girl so much. I was hovering a few centimeters above the ground surface; no wonder the kid was spooked. I hastily issued system commands, and I sank down to the ground.

  The soldier turned to go. Evidently she didn’t have time to waste on the likes of me.

  I hurried after her. I wished I could grab her arm to get her attention. “Please,” I said. “I’m looking for my son.”

  She slowed, and looked at me again. Her name was Sonia Dameyer, I read from a tag on her chest, Major Sonia Dameyer of the U.S. Army. She was a familiar sight, an American soldier dressed in a space suit in some godforsaken corner of the planet, like most of her kind nowadays devoted to rescue work and peacekeeping rather than war-fighting. “Your son was here in person, through the burp?”

  “The what? . . . Yes, he was here. I heard he was alive, but maybe hurt, I don’t know anything else. His name is Tom Poole.”

  Her eyes widened. “Tom. The hero.”

  She said this gently, but it was not what you want to hear about your missing child. I was dimly aware of my body, my real body, immersed in a body-temperature fluid and mildly anesthetized, churning in the dark, as if I were having a bad dream. “Do you know where he is?”

  “This way.” She turned toward that big hospital tent.

  I followed. My VR steps felt very heavy.

  We walked into the tent. We had to pass through a kind of bubble airlock, inflated from clear plastic. Of course I could just walk through the walls, but Dameyer lifted the flaps for me, and I followed protocol. Inside it was dark; my vision blinked and juddered. But my VR eyes responded to the changed light levels as fast as a camera aperture dilating open.

  When I could see, I looked around wildly at rows of fold-out canvas beds. Med robots, clumsy gear-laden trolleys, whirred self-importantly. Most of the patients wore oxygen masks, and drips snaked into arms. I couldn’t see too many signs of traumatic injuries, no broken legs or crushed ribs. They looked like victims of a poisoning, or a gas attack, like the London underground incident in the 2020s. Not that I’m an expert on medical emergencies. The patients were all adults—and obviously not locals; this whole setup was sent in by the Western powers to tend for their own.

  My vision shattered again. I shook my head, as if that was going to help. “Damn it.”

  “The trouble,” came a weak voice, “is the tent. Partial Faraday cage woven into the fabric. It might be the UN but this is a military operation, Dad. . . .”

  I whirled. It was Tom, that familiar face staring up at me from a green military-issue pillow. I could barely even see him.

  It was a tough moment. As a VR you can’t cry, not with the cheap software John had hired for me anyway. But I was crying, that overweight, out-of-condition body floating in a tank in downtown Miami like a baby in a womb crying its embryonic heart out. Not only that, my comms link kept crashing, so that Tom’s image would break up into planes and shadows, as if he was the one who wasn’t really there, rather than me. I tried to hug him. I closed my arms on empty air while protocol warnings pinged. How sad is that?

  Tom was bound to disapprove of the way I’d come running out here after him. The logic of our father-son relationship would allow nothing less. But, in the gloom of that hospital tent, as I fumbled to make contact with him, his expression was soft—not welcoming, but at least forgiving. In his way, I thought, he was glad to see me.

  After a few minutes of this farce, the doctor attending Tom ordered me out of there as I was distracting the other patients. But he took pity on us. Tom’s “dose” had been light, he said, and though Tom still needed bedrest he could leave the field hospital.

  So Tom swung his legs out of his bed, and a med-bot helped him pull on his trousers and jacket. Carrying only a light oxygen pack, with the mask loose around his neck, he limped slowly out of the tent. I longed to support him, but of course I couldn’t. Instead he allowed Major Sonia Dameyer to take his arm.

  She walked him all the way to one of those mud-covered teepeelike buildings, and helped him through the low doorway with its leathery flap. Inside, a dirt floor was covered by rugs of some kind of animal skin, very old and worn with use. There were three grass-stuffed pallets, and a stack of cooking pots. The only significant piece of furniture was a big old trunk, firmly padlocked: the family treasure of a nomadic people. My systems brought me a stink of stale cooking fat.

  There was one occupant, a local, a boy in a cut-down military-looking parka jacket. Aged maybe
twelve, thirteen, he was forking his way through an open tin of baby carrots. When we came in—injured Tom with his oxygen mask, Sonia in her space suit, and me, a VR ghost—the kid, wide-eyed, tried to push past Sonia and run. Tom spoke to the kid softly. The kid answered before running out, though not without another spooked stare at Sonia and me.

  Tom eased his way painfully down onto one of the pallets. He clutched his chest as if it hurt. Somewhat to my surprise, Sonia settled down on a pallet near Tom.

  I asked, “You two know each other?”

  “Not before the burp,” Tom said.

  Sonia said, “It’s advisable for Tom to have some protection. Some of the locals take it out on the Westerners. Even aid workers like Tom.”

  “Well, you can understand it,” Tom said. He wheezed slightly, as if he’d suddenly turned into a turn-of-the-century heavy smoker; it was a lung rattle you didn’t hear anymore. “The locals have a difficult time of it, Dad. Even before the Warming the industries in the area made a mess of everything. You must have seen the plant a couple of klicks away. Even in the last century you had oil spills, the rivers killed by waste, the ground melting around the factories—”

  I wanted to scream at him. “Just for once,” I said, “can’t we talk about you and not the state of the damn planet?”

  Tom stiffened. “It’s why I’m here in the first place.”

  Sonia Dameyer just watched this exchange, an amused expression on her face.

  I backed up and tried again. “Just tell me what happened.”

  He took a deep, rattling breath. “I just got a lungful of gas.”

  “Gas? Poison gas, nerve gas? What are we talking about here?”

  “Dad, take it easy—”

  “Not an artificial agent,” Sonia said quickly. “You don’t have to worry about that, Mr. Poole. It wasn’t terrorism, not intentional. The event was natural. The gas was mostly methane laced with carbon dioxide.” She raised her eyebrow at Tom. “But your son got rather more than a lungful. He wouldn’t have got that if he hadn’t gone running into the worst of it to pull the children out.”