Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  But Alia was ship-born; living things didn’t interest her much. “Very pretty,” she said. “So what? Where are the people?”

  He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. “You must learn to see, Alia.”

  One of the creatures broke away from the pack and came swimming toward the surface. Now she could see that it had four stubby limbs—four limbs as she had, though these were fins. At the end of each fin was a kind of paddle, webbed with five stubby extensions, perhaps the relics of fingers and toes.

  She got the point. That there were four limbs, not two or six or eight, was a clue. A tetrapodal body plan was a hallmark of Earth life, an accidental arrangement that had been settled on early in the development of animals there—including the ancestors of humans—and had been stuck to ever since, even as most of those animals either went extinct or scattered across the Galaxy. But it didn’t have to be that way; six or eight or twelve limbs would have been just as effective. A four-limbed body was a signature: I am from Earth.

  The creature broke the surface and lifted its head out of the water. It had a face, with a stubby, smoothed-over nose, and a mouth that gulped at the air. And though its brain pan was flat it had a smooth forehead, a distinct brow—and two eyes, sharp blue, that met her gaze. She felt a powerful shock of recognition, something deep and ancient that joined her to this animal. But those eyes were blank, empty.

  The creature broke the brief contact, and dived back beneath the waves and out of sight.

  “Remarkable,” Reath murmured. “But now you see why I was evasive about this world’s name . . .”

  “They are human,” she said.

  “Well, their ancestors were—and so are these, in the terms the Commonwealth recognizes.

  “Their ancestors came here, long ago, at the time of the Bifurcation. They tried to settle. They built rafts, ganged together. They trained their children to fish for the native life-forms—they must have engineered their digestive systems to enable them to eat the fish and crab and eel analogues to be found here.” He shook his head. “But the children and grandchildren took to the water, more and more. The rafts couldn’t be maintained, not in the very long run, for there was no raw material to fix them, and no will to do so either. Soon the ocean closed over the rafts’ last remnants. But the people remained, and their children.”

  “And they lost their minds.”

  “Well, why not? Alia, big brains are expensive to maintain. If you have an unchanging environment, like this endless ocean, you don’t need to do much thinking. Far better to spend your energy on swimming faster, or diving deeper. A big head would be good for nothing but creating drag! And the adaptation worked.” He stared out. “This ocean could drown ten Earths. There’s no limit to how many of these critters there might be out there. There is room for billions, trillions! Perhaps some of them have adapted further—to go without air, to reach greater depths, even to reach the ice of the sea bed.”

  “I never heard of anything like this.”

  “You will learn this is a common pattern. Over time humans have been projected into all sorts of environments, and they have adapted. And anywhere the living is stable you find the same phenomenon, an enthusiastic discarding of the burden of thinking.”

  She frowned. “The Nord is half a million years old. We were isolated. We could have lost our minds.”

  “But you remained a people in transition—never settling, taking your little world with you, rebuilding it all the time. Why, the stroke of genius was to have even your breeding cycle dependent on technology!”

  “The birthing pods.”

  “Yes. Of course it is possible to retain a technological capability without consciousness—think of the Shipbuilders—but you couldn’t afford to become dumb, for your lives depend on the mechanisms that keep the Nord habitable. For your kind, the trick worked.”

  Your kind. It was a chilling phrase—and an insulting one.

  Alia’s people were proud of their pedigree, proud of what they had become. It was a very long time since her remote ancestors had left the home planet, and her physiology, her frame and musculature, were built for low-gravity climbing as much as walking. But after half a million years of selection and purposeful enhancement, in Michael Poole’s terms she was an intuitive genius. But to Reath, it seemed, she was just one of another kind, her people on the Nord and all their rich history just another type of post-human, no better than the mindless creatures swimming in this monstrous sea.

  Alia felt resentful, and wanted to have nothing in common with these creatures. “All they do is swim around chasing fish. They are subhuman—aren’t they? If their brains have shriveled, if they have no mind—”

  “I always prefer the term ‘post-human,’ regardless of encephalization. Best to avoid value judgments.”

  “I can give this world a name,” she said. “They can’t.”

  “But what need have they of names? Alia, names or not, they were once human. They may have no advanced consciousness now, but they have feelings, sensations, a sensorium probably unlike any other type. They are a thread in mankind’s history, Alia, that must be drawn back into the tapestry. This is why I brought you here. You must learn to see mankind as the Transcendence sees it, without prejudice—”

  She hazarded, “And with love?”

  “Love, yes! And though we have talked of long loves, time is short—at least, in the longer view of the Transcendence. We are all diverging from each other, we different sorts of humans. There may come a point when we can no longer talk to each other, even recognize our commonality. We have to find our way back together again before we lose each other completely. . . .”

  The post-humans, swimming beneath the platform, were baffled. They had responded to the subsonic beacon that drew them there, but there was nothing for them, no food, no mates. Disappointed, in pairs and family groups, they drifted away.

  Chapter 9

  Once I’d surfaced from VR I tried to get down to some work, which I figured was the best way to waste the days I had to endure before I could get into that plane seat. With a fat mug of coffee I went to my mother’s study, which had the best connection and display facilities in the house, and closed the door.

  The first thing I did was bring up a VR of the current design-freeze of our space probe. The bulky main body unfolded, bejeweled with lacy antennae, attitude thruster nozzles, and instrument booms, hanging in the air before me like a beautiful toy.

  Just looking at the thing was calming. This was my pet starship.

  It was called the Kuiper Probe, in the requests-for-tender documents from NASA and the USAF that defined it. If it ever actually got built it would no doubt be given some more exotic name. I inspected the liquid-lead coolant tanks and the neutron shield and the instrument buses, and the suite of tiny probes we planned to drop off on the way out of the solar system, and the Higgs field power plant at its very core.

  Strictly speaking it wasn’t really a starship, of course. For one thing it was unmanned, and for another it wouldn’t go to the stars. But it was an “interstellar precursor mission,” in the jargon. It would fly a proving flight for the key technologies that might one day take our machines, or even us, very much further.

  Our probe was designed to sail a thousand astronomical units from the sun—that is, a thousand times as far as Earth is from the central star. By comparison the furthest planet, Pluto, is a mere forty AU out, but the nearest star, in the Alpha Centauri system, is more than a quarter of a million AUs away. But our probe’s ten-year, thousand-AU mission would be a first step, a preliminary sail out of the cozy harbor of the inner system. Nothing had traveled further from Earth save the long-derelict Voyagers and Pioneers, planetary probes from the 1970s. And where the Voyagers had had to rely on gravitational slingshots to hurl them so far, we would be going under our own steam, fueled by cosmic might.

  There was even good science to do on the way. We would be able to explore the outer solar system, far beyond Pluto, where flocks o
f ice moons, the Kuiper objects, fly through the frozen dark. Our trajectory would give precise measurements of such huge numbers as the total mass of the solar system. We would pass through the heliopause, where the wind from the sun disperses into the wider interstellar medium, and study whatever strange cosmic particles and radiations from deeper space are blocked from Earth’s view.

  And, most significant of all, we could visit the Kuiper Anomaly. That glimmering tetrahedron had continued its own long, aloof orbit around the sun ever since its discovery in the first decade of the century. Now was the time to go confront that strange visitor.

  That, in fact, was the reason the USAF was involved. In our little design community there was even a rumor that in among the reserve payload weight, set aside for contingencies and late additions, was an allowance of fifty kilograms or so for a small bomb.

  I tried to focus. I had plenty of challenging work to get done; I was in the middle of involved structural analyses of the Probe’s propulsion system. But my concentration wouldn’t gel. Designing a starship as therapy: it often worked, but not today.

  I was deeply relieved when Shelley Magwood, my nominal boss, spotted I was online, and logged on to talk to me.

  Shelley coalesced in my mother’s study. She was sitting in a fashionable molded-ceramic chair projected from her office in Seattle. She had heard about my troubles. “I don’t know what you’re doing sitting there working on the damn Probe,” she snapped. “The Probe can wait. The Kuiper Anomaly isn’t going anywhere. . . .”

  Shelley was thin, intense, with a strong face, high cheekbones, and a Roman nose. Her hair was dirty blond, but I suspected she was already dyeing it, in her thirties. I always thought she worked too hard, burning herself up in her energetic pursuit of too many projects, but there always seemed to be a smile, just behind the door of her face. Nowadays she was more a manager, an entrepreneur, than an engineer, and I suspected she indulged in this deep space probe proof-of-concept project as a sanity release, just as I did. I liked her a hell of a lot.

  “You should be with Tom,” she said. “Get your fat backside on a plane.”

  “I’ve tried that,” I said. “I have a seat lined up. The protocols—”

  “Bugger the protocols. Look, if you need help—”

  “Thanks. I just have to be patient.”

  “I’m sorry about Tom.”

  “Don’t be. The work is helping.”

  “Oh, is it?” Through some fancy projection-software interpolation her VR was made to look as if it were peering at the same diagrams I was. “Just sit tight a minute,” she said sternly. “I’ll check over what you’ve done. The state you’re in you’ll probably screw the whole thing.”

  “Thanks for your support.”

  “I mean it,” she said. No doubt she did. She frowned, focusing on the schematics, and I sat back and waited.

  So a kid who had once watched space shuttles launching from his backyard had ended up designing a real-life spaceship, after a fashion. It had been a long journey, though.

  My primary ambition, as a small kid, had been to fly in space myself. But as I grew older it quickly became apparent that that would never be possible. Not only were the only manned space missions on the cards endless round-the-block tours on the Space Station, for which there was a whole queue of candidate astronauts lined up before I reached age twelve, but I soon learned that my personal spacesuit, my body, wasn’t up to the task of taking me off the planet.

  So my ambitions downscaled a bit. If I couldn’t fly myself, maybe I could be involved in designing the next generation of ships. But even that got compromised.

  I majored in math and engineering at college. But when I graduated in 2017, it was quickly apparent that there was no work to be had in designing spaceships. There were only a few proof-of-concept projects sponsored by NASA, ESA, and the other space agencies. But even this was playing; there was no serious money in it. This was not a time for flying into space: it was an age of entropy, when the oil was running out and energy running down, and our attentions were increasingly absorbed by the need to cope with the Warming, and other hazards of the Earthbound future.

  But I was an engineer. I wanted to work on something that would get built—and, incidentally, that would pay; I had no ambitions to be poor. So I looked for opportunities.

  What was coming up at the time was a new generation of nuclear power plants. Whatever its drawbacks, nuclear power had become fashionable again, as it was not a source of carbon dioxide emissions—and as a source of energy, a lot less problematical than chasing down the world’s remaining oil supplies.

  So I went into nuclear engineering. I spent eight years working on a plant that eventually opened in 2027.

  It was what we called a fifth-generation design. The core worked at nearly a thousand degrees, a temperature that would have signaled the start of a meltdown in early generations of reactors. Those high temperatures offered much greater efficiency, but to achieve them we had to go through an immense program of research and development, for instance in ultra-hard materials that were resistant to intense heat and neutron bombardment. We actually cooled the thing with a huge vat of molten lead; I learned a great deal about refrigeration principles on that project, principles I applied later to the Kuiper Probe.

  When our meltdown-proof, terrorism-proof plant came online and started to feed its first watts into the grid, we were very proud of what we’d achieved. Super-safe and super-clean, we used to say. We even won the economic argument, even though the costs of our competitors, at the time renewables like solar and wind power, were tumbling. That New York station is still operating today, even though its economic justification has gone away a little.

  I was thirty-two years old. I was married to Morag, and we had a son, Tom. We were very happy. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I guess that was in some ways the peak of my life. I would never have believed that things would fall apart so quickly.

  My work suffered first. I admit I didn’t see the Higgs revolution coming—but then, few others did.

  Higgs technology came out of cosmology. The physics of the early universe was exotic. In our era some particles, such as the quarks that make up protons and neutrons, are massive, while photons, particles of light, are massless. It is an elusive critter called the Higgs field that gives objects mass. But when the universe was less than a millionth of a millionth of a second old, and it was still hotter than a certain crucial temperature of a thousand trillion degrees, the Higgs field couldn’t settle. Every particle was massless. The universe was filled with them, flashing across unraveling spacetime at lightspeed. But when the universe expanded and cooled the Higgs field condensed out, like a frost settling on blades of grass. Suddenly everything changed.

  And when the Higgs field condensed it released a flood of energy, cosmos-wide. It is just as water freezing to frost must release heat energy: it was a phase transition, as the cosmologists say. And that vast injection of energy powered the universe into a surge of “inflation” that dramatically accelerated its expansion. All this is cosmology; it can be seen written in the relics in the sky—the remnant background Big Bang radiation, the gravity waves that slosh back and forth—a story deciphered when I was a boy.

  What changed our world was the development in the 2020s of a new breed of particle accelerator so powerful it was able to emulate, in tiny spaces and brief instants, the tremendous energy density and temperature of the early universe—hot enough, in fact, to drive out the Higgs field from a bit of matter. And when the Higgs was allowed to recondense, it released a flood of energy—vastly more than the energy input, under the right conditions. If that sounds like something for nothing, it isn’t: it is just as in a fission bomb the relatively small energy of conventional explosives is used to liberate the much greater energies locked up in atomic nuclei.

  As soon as control of the Higgs field was achieved, even on a small experimental scale, its potential was obvious. Here was an energy source of much g
reater density than anything we’d dreamed possible before—and we could tap it, tap an energy that had once driven the expansion of the universe itself. It was even as safe as you could wish, far safer even than our new-generation nukes.

  When you try to predict technological trends, it’s easy to follow straight lines. For instance computer power, measured in operations per buck, has been doubling every couple of years since long before I was born, and has continued to follow that trend, more or less, ever since. Maybe you could have foreseen some of the consequences: a world in which a machine equivalent of human-level intelligence has long been passed, a world in which artificial self-awareness has become a commodity, and a part of everyone’s life. What’s much harder to predict is what comes out of nowhere, out of left field. I was still a kid when the great orbital astronomical observatories confirmed the universe’s biography from the Big Bang to the present. And out of that great cosmological revolution has come a new power source for cars and planes and cities—and, maybe, starships. Who’d have thought it?

  Not me, that was for sure. In the late 2020s, as I followed these sudden developments in the technical literature, I was alarmed.

  In terms of my career, it needn’t have mattered, maybe. We had only just brought that New York station online, and others of the same design were sprouting around the Great Lakes, and in Nevada and California. There is an asset inertia with big technology; you can’t throw away your whole infrastructure just because somebody somewhere has a bright idea.

  But the fact was, somebody had had that bright idea.

  A new long-term national energy strategy began to emerge, born out of existing trends, notably the painful weaning of America off of oil, and the possibilities opened up by Higgs. “Generation distribution” was the catchphrase. Every block, every home, would be a source of energy, from photovoltaic cells, rooftop wind turbines, maybe even biofuel crops in the backyard. And everybody would be connected into a local microgrid, from which you would draw energy when you needed it, store energy in hydrogen fuel cells in your basement, and even sell power back when you had a surplus. The microgrids would be connected up to larger regional, national, and international grids, supported by key nodes that would, in the first phase, by existing-technology power stations, including old hydrocarbon-burners and our new nukes, but these would be phased out as soon as they paid off their development costs, and replaced by Higgs generators.