Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  So this was his heroism. Tom looked away, embarrassed even by this laconic description, suddenly very childlike.

  “Who was that kid?”

  “His name is Yuri. He’s in one of my classes, Dad. His parents are, were, putting me up.”

  “I didn’t know you spoke Russian.”

  He rolled his eyes; Sonia kept a neutral expression. Tom said, “Dad, neither does Yuri. That wasn’t Russian. This is a big country. Most of my students here are locals. Well, it is their ecosystem.”

  I said, “Ecosystem? You’re teaching them ecology?”

  “Teaching them to save it. It’s a crash program, Dad,” he said. “The ecosystem in this place is falling apart. The permafrost is melting.”

  In this place, on the northern edge of the world, the deep soil had never thawed out since the Ice Age: there had been a great cap of permafrost, in some places more than a kilometer thick, and the thin skim of soil on top of the permafrost had been the basis of an ecology—always impoverished, but unique. You had lichen and fast-growing grasses and herbs, and trees that could never grow tall because their roots couldn’t dig into the frozen ground, and so on. There was a unique community of birds and animals here, gulls and lemmings and foxes; there had been reindeer that fed on the lichen, and humans that followed the reindeer herds.

  “And now,” I guessed, “it’s all dying back.” The usual story.

  “The permafrost is thawing,” he said. “Dad, you’re an engineer; you can imagine the consequences. It’s as if the bedrock is melting.”

  I thought of the buildings sinking into the ground, the pits in the landscape. Maybe the rapid coastal erosion was a consequence, too, I mused, if the permafrost had actually been holding the dry land together.

  “Even the lichen is dying off,” Tom said. “Without lichen, no reindeer, and without them the people are screwed. Even fifty years ago they were still hunter-gatherers. But now—you must have seen how old the skins they use are, reused and scraped until they are paper-thin, and then used again. And even the land is crumbling away from under their feet.”

  I had switched off long ago from thinking about the parlous state of the world. But now, sitting there as a VR projection in that scrappy mud-walled hut, I thought about what lay north of here. I remembered the year it had been reported that the last of the Arctic ice had finally gone, how the final night of extinction had come at last for the polar bears and walruses, the seals and belugas. Now, beyond this coast, there was nothing but ocean all the way to the roof of the world, and the naked oceanic North Pole viewed from space was an alien, eerie image.

  And that was why Tom was here supervising genomic grabs.

  Taking pity on me, he explained to me what he was doing here.

  He had a pack under his pallet; he pulled out a little white-box gizmo the size of his palm. “You like gadgets, don’t you, Dad? Have you seen one of these before? Sonia, do you mind?” He pressed the edge of his gadget against the back of her hand. There was a small flash; she yelped and flinched a little. “Sorry,” Tom said. “Burned off a little body hair. Just give it a minute. . . . There it is.” He showed me the back of the box. I could make out nothing of the diagram it presented—it was cladistic, I learned later, a tree-of-life representation—but I could understand the words below: Homo sapiens sapiens.

  “Dad, this is a DNA sequencer,” Tom said. “Sequences a genome in seconds.”

  I marveled briefly. I was a kid when the human genome was first sequenced, and that only at summary level, around the turn of the century; it had been a vast multinational effort. Now you could do it in seconds, with a gadget that probably cost less than this VR trip of mine. We’re all used to progress, but every so often something like this hits you in the eye.

  Tom was a trained teacher. But teaching had changed a lot since I was young. For any academic subject there were fully interactive VR tutors, available for free to every kid on the planet. Meanwhile flesh-and-blood teachers like Tom had been “released back into the wild,” as he put it. He taught kids by setting up hands-on schemes and letting them learn by doing it for real, rather than lecturing at them. This was the modern way. Tom trained at a college in Massachusetts, and he once proudly showed me its motto: “The only source of knowledge is experience”—Einstein, evidently.

  That was the philosophy behind Tom’s work here. He had been working for an international program, sponsored by the Stewardship agencies, under the umbrella title the Library of Life. He had been training local kids to DNA-sequence as many living creatures as they could: the people of their community, the plants, animals, fish of their environment, even insects and bugs. All these genomic grabs, instantly analyzed, were fed back into a massive central archive.

  Conservationists had long been trying to preserve threatened species intact, or in frozen store as embryos or seeds or spores, or at least to save a drop of blood or a bit of leaf or bark that would allow analysis in the future. They still did all that, but there had been growing despair at the sheer size of a biosphere that was disappearing faster than it could be mapped, and the impossibility of preserving more than a fraction of it.

  The rapid advance of genetic-sequencing technology had offered one solution. With the new kits, as a gene sample was collated with the massive central data stores, linked to a great phylogenetic tree of life, and even given a provisional name within minutes, even an untrained child could “discover” a new species. And once the information was extracted there was no need anymore to worry about storing the long, fragile molecular strings of DNA itself. I’d heard that even fossils barely mattered nowadays, compared to the great flood of data and interpretation now flowing directly from the genes.

  It was an eerie thought that even as the real-world ecology died back, a ghostly logical copy was being assembled in the abstraction of cyberspace. But in a very real sense Tom and his kids, and similar volunteers all over the planet, really were saving their ecology for the future.

  But none of that mattered to me, not in those awful minutes.

  “OK,” I said to Tom carefully. “It’s a worthy goal. But it almost cost you your life.”

  “Dad—”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  He found it painful to talk about, I think; maybe he was in some kind of mild shock. “We were at the coast. Me and a dozen kids. I was actually fifty meters or so back, cross-checking their data streams as they sampled away. Then there was a water spout.”

  “A spout?”

  “Like an underwater explosion. It was like something from a cartoon, Dad. It must have been a hundred meters tall.”

  “Nearer two hundred,” Sonia said dryly.

  “At first the kids stood and stared,” he said. “I screamed at them to come away from the ocean. Some ran, others hesitated. Maybe they were too busy watching the spout. I was worried about waves. I didn’t know what was happening; I imagined some kind of tsunami. Then the mud started coming down. Dad, it came in big handfuls, and when it hit you it hurt. All the kids started screaming, and came running from the sea with their hands over their heads.

  “That was when I saw them falling, the ones closest to the water. Just falling down as if they’d decided to go to sleep.”

  “And you ran toward them,” I said.

  “I was responsible for them. What else could I do? I’d only run a few paces before I could smell that rotten-egg stink—”

  “Methane?”

  “Yes. And then I understood what had happened.”

  It had been a “methane burp.” He told me that deep under the Arctic sea floor there are vast reservoirs of trapped gas. Molecules of carbon dioxide, hydrogen sulphide, and methane can be trapped within cages of water-ice crystals—ice formed under extreme conditions of pressure, under the weight of the sea. You can find such stuff in sediments all the way around both poles, immense banks of ice and compressed gas. There is thought to be as much carbon locked up in these reservoirs as in all the world’s fossil fuel stores.
Until that dreadful day in Siberia, I had never even heard of them.

  And it’s very compressed, at more than a hundred times atmospheric pressure. Any engineer would recognize it’s not too stable a situation. When the “lid” is taken off that pressure vessel—for instance when the permafrost starts to melt, the containing pressure relieved—the eruption can be severe.

  I thought it through. “So a pocket of these gas hydrates gave away. The carbon dioxide and methane came gushing up. Carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it would settle back to the surface of the sea and start spreading out. . . .” Choking anything in its path.

  Everybody understood the consequences of a carbon dioxide flood. There had been an incident on Cephalonia ten years earlier that had killed thousands, an industrial accident, a carbon-sequestration scheme gone wrong.

  All of a sudden Tom broke down. He buried his face in his hands. “I couldn’t get them all out. The stink of the methane drove me back. And I was scared, scared of the cee-oh-two. I couldn’t help them.”

  I couldn’t even touch him. I had to sit and watch, frozen, as the competent soldier put her arms around his shoulders. “You couldn’t have done any more,” Sonia said. “Believe me, I saw your medical charts. You went as far as you could.”

  “Well, one thing’s for sure,” I said. “You can’t stay here anymore.”

  Tom looked up, and anger flared in his tear-streaked face. “You always said I was a quitter, didn’t you, Dad? I’m not going anywhere.”

  As I tried to work out what to say, Sonia butted in. “Actually Mr. Poole’s correct. The aid agencies won’t support any more work in this area, Tom. You’re going to have to leave. We can’t get you directly back to the States. But we can chopper you to Moscow, then to a military base near Berlin, and then by civilian charter to London.”

  I kept my mouth shut, knowing from long experience that while he might listen to Sonia, he certainly wouldn’t listen to me.

  At length Tom said miserably, “All right. But the sequencing project—”

  “That will go on,” Sonia said brightly. “They have robots to do this sort of thing now.” She stood up. “I’ll make the arrangements. I’ll, umm, I’ll leave you to it.”

  She pushed her way out of the tent, and Tom and I were left together, inarticulate, joined by electronics, separated by more than distance. We started to make plans. I would fly to England to meet him in person, if I could.

  But even as we talked it through I was thinking over what had happened here, and in a corner of my mind I wondered what would happen if all those icy methane deposits, all around the poles of the planet, decided to yield up their treasures in one mighty global burp.

  Chapter 8

  On the ocean world, in the shelter of the flitter, Reath continued Alia’s education.

  “Have you thought any more about what I’ve told you?”

  “You haven’t told me anything,” she said sourly. “Nothing but that list of names. The Implications of This and That—”

  He laughed. “Of Indefinite Longevity. Of Unmediated Communication. Of Emergent Consciousness.”

  “What am I supposed to think? They’re just names!”

  “Isn’t that enough? Alia, do you imagine I have a set of textbooks for you? To become a Transcendent is a process of discovery about yourself.”

  “You mean I have to figure it all out?”

  “You may discover more wisdom in yourself than you imagine. Let’s start with the first stage, for instance—”

  “Indefinite Longevity.”

  “What do you imagine that means?”

  She thought about it. “Not dying.”

  “Why is this important?”

  “Because the Transcendence was created by immortals.” Every child knew that, even though it sounded like nothing but a scary story.

  “Do you think extreme longevity is possible?”

  She shrugged. “On the Nord we expect to live to five hundred or so, barring accidents. In Michael Poole’s day, it was rare to live much beyond one hundred. Surely it would be possible to come up with a treatment to stop the aging process altogether.”

  “An immortality pill?”

  “Yes.”

  “And if I had such a pill, and gave it to you, you would expect to live forever?”

  “Not forever. There will always be accidents. This stupid platform might fly up and tip me off into the sea any second.”

  He laughed. “Yes. Undying, then, if not immortal. But, statistically, with luck, you could expect a much longer life span. An indefinite life span, in fact.”

  “Indefinite Longevity.”

  He smiled. “You see, we don’t just pluck these terms out of the air. And how would that make you feel?”

  “It would be a wonderful gift. So much extra life—”

  “Don’t spout clichés, child,” he said.

  She was taken aback; he rarely snapped at her.

  “Think it through,” he said. “Suppose it were true. How would you feel?”

  To know you would certainly die one day was one thing. To know that there was at least a chance that you might live on and on and on, without limit, would change everything. How would she feel? “Different.”

  “How? What about other people? You’ve just had an almighty row with your family. Would you feel differently about that if you thought that you might face millennia more of life?”

  “I wouldn’t have had the row at all,” she said immediately. If her mother were to die before they could be reconciled, Alia would always regret it. And if she lived for tens of millennia or more, that regret would burn away at her soul, irresolvable. “It would drive me crazy, in the end. If I knew I was not going to die I’d try not to do anything I might have to regret forever.”

  “You’d become cautious.”

  “I wouldn’t make enemies. And I wouldn’t hurt my friends.” But I might not even make friends, she thought, if I knew I might be stuck with them forever—or, worse still, outlive them.

  Reath was watching her, as if trying to follow her thoughts. “What else? I know you are a Skimmer. I envy you that! But the real excitement of Skimming comes from the risk, doesn’t it? Now, as things stand, if you were to have an accident, if you managed to kill yourself, you would be giving up a few centuries of life. But what if you were risking millennia—an indefinite future?”

  She snorted. “I’d have so much more to lose. You don’t think about that consciously when you Skim, but—if I took your pill I’d never leave my room!”

  “Suppose your sister was here with us now, and she fell into the sea. Would you try to rescue her?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’d risk your own life to save hers?”

  “Yes!”

  “Even at the cost of a hundred thousand years of existence?”

  “I . . .” She shook her head.

  “How do you think other people would feel about you?”

  “They would hate me,” she said immediately. “They would envy me—turn against me.”

  “For your long life? Even if they knew that your longevity was for a purpose, for their own betterment?”

  “Even so. Nobody would see past the fact that I would live on when they were dust. I would think like that. I would have to hide. . . .” She shook her head. “Some gift it would be! I’d be paralyzed by the thought of all that future. I’d have to hide away.”

  “I think you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “To be given Indefinite Longevity, to be released from a finite life span, is a step change, like ice turning to water, a total transformation. And you would have to find a way to act, to contribute to the human world, to make a difference, even though this great weight of time was hanging over you.”

  “Why must I act?”

  “Because longevity is necessary for the greatest projects of all. A human life is just too short to accrue true wisdom. By the time you’ve figured out how things work, you’re aging, losing your faculties, dying.”
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  “But Michael Poole lived less than a century.”

  “True. It’s amazing those poor archaics achieved as much as they did!”

  “Reath, if I were to become a Transcendent, what about my family?”

  “They couldn’t follow you,” he said gently.

  She would be alone, she thought, left stranded by time. One by one her family and friends would turn to dust—even Drea, even her new kid brother. Could she live with that? Only by shutting herself off, by closing down her heart. How could she possibly choose such a path?

  “Reath, you said I might discover wisdom within me. I’m not wise at all. I haven’t lived long enough. Ask my mother how wise I am!”

  “Your age isn’t the point. If you know you are undying, it’s not your past that gives you wisdom. It is your future—or your awareness of it. And I think you are already starting to acquire some of that awareness. You don’t have to choose now,” he said gently. “We’re only at the beginning, you and I, of our exploration.”

  “Reath—” She hesitated. “Are you a Transcendent?”

  “Me?” He laughed, brusquely, but he turned away.

  An alarm chimed. “Oh!” Reath said. “They’re arriving at last.”

  They hurried from the flitter.

  At first she could see nothing but the clamor of the waves as they swelled and subsided. But then she saw a sleek shape, pale white, passing just under the surface of the water. Another followed, coming up from the darker depths, and a third, skimming like the first around the platform.

  Soon there were a dozen of the creatures, perhaps more. Some of them were smaller—children, perhaps, calves with their parents. They were streamlined and coated with a thick fur; they moved with grace and startling speed. And they swarmed past and over each other, moving with an awareness of each other that seemed uncanny.

  Reath peered down, smiling. He was clearly enjoying the sight.