Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  It would be distributed, robust at every scale, clean and environment-friendly, and soaked with smartness. The administration began to fast-track enabling legislation, such as to force the utilities to purchase energy from any supplier. It was a great vision.

  But in the longest term there was no place for nuke technology, and I knew immediately that my chosen field was a conceptual dead end. Maintenance projects might have seen out my working life, but all the creative energies, and some serious government R&D money, would be focused, quite rightly, on the new Higgs-field technologies. Even as it came online my New York station was obsolete—and so, in a sense, was I, in my early thirties. I couldn’t bear it. I wanted to be in the frontline.

  I argued with Morag at the time. She pointed out that we had a kid, and plans for more. The world didn’t owe me a living, she said, no matter how hard I chased my dreams.

  But I wouldn’t listen. At age thirty-four, I quit my job and took an academic post at Cornell. I would be teaching the fundamentals of physics to reluctant students, while researching the new Higgs-field technologies.

  It didn’t work out. There was already a whole generation of grad students armed with a hands-on knowledge of the new prototype unified-field energy systems—I was already too old, at thirty-four. I continued to make a living, but I’d got myself stuck up another blind alley, and was a lot less well paid. I was unhappy. Morag was justifiably unhappy, too, unhappy at my choices, at the way it had worked out. We loved each other, but I guess we took it out on each other. We didn’t mean to hurt Tom, but he was there. Call it friendly fire.

  Then Morag got pregnant again. It was actually an accident, we weren’t sure how we could afford it. But we embraced it. It was going to be a new start, we decided, us and the kids. As Morag’s pregnancy developed I started to feel more content than I ever had before. Maybe I was starting to realize that there is more to life than childhood dreams, and whatever disappointment I felt was fading in the light of a richer joy.

  And then, and then.

  Grief doesn’t begin to describe it. It was like an amputation, maybe, a loss of half of myself. I went through the motions of my life, I ate and slept and rose again and got dressed and worked, but it all seemed purposeless, a charade. And my emotions raged, as uncontrollable and inexplicable as the weather. I even took it out on my memory of Morag, as if she’d somehow rejected me by dying. The ultimate jilting.

  Oh, I looked after Tom, materially anyhow. I never disappeared into drink or drugs or VR fantasyland, the way a lot of people expected me to, I think. I kept working, going through the motions of class after class, semester after semester, one faceless cadre of students after another, though I gave up on the idea of any original work. I kept functioning. Maybe it was “stoicism,” as one artificial-sentience therapist assured me. The way I see it, I just kept up the shell.

  After Morag’s death, I lost a decade. That’s how I look at it now. Then, one day, I found myself inhabiting my life again.

  When I looked around I was suddenly in my forties. Tom, in his late teens, had grown away from me, not surprisingly. And if I thought my career was stuck when I was thirty-four, it certainly was now. It’s a depressing progression. By twenty I knew I would never be an astronaut. By thirty I knew I would never be a brilliant engineer. And by forty-five I was all I would ever be, for the rest of my life.

  But I still needed money. I kept up my teaching at Cornell, but I put some feelers out for consultant work.

  I got a lucky break when Shelley Magwood contacted me, out of the blue. She was in one of my early cadres of students at Cornell. By age thirty or so she had already made herself rich with shares in a start-up company specializing in aspects of the new Higgs-field technologies.

  She carved me out consultancy assignments based on Higgs, and on my deeper experience in the nuclear field. For a transition period the two technologies would have to work together providing power to the common grid, and there were interfaces, protocols, loading balances, and other technical details to be worked out.

  So the work kept coming. I did it well enough. Shelley said I had inspired her, as a teacher; without me she wouldn’t have carved out her own successful track, and so forth. I appreciated the morale boost, and the money. But we both knew Shelley was doing me a favor.

  Then Shelley drew me into another of her ventures.

  “I remember how you always used to throw in space technology applications into your lectures,” she told me. “It was obvious where your heart was. I think you might enjoy working on this.”

  When the request-for-proposals for the project that became the Kuiper Probe arrived, Shelley’s consultancy company was small and nimble enough to be able to position itself to grab the work, but smart enough to see the potential for the future. “This is only a paper study,” she told me. “But it might get picked up. And even if not, we’re going to be paid to think about how to use Higgs to drive spaceships. We’ll be like Renaissance shipbuilders, holding a patent on sail technology, just as Columbus is about to embark. . . .”

  Shelley quickly put together a team with a number of freelancers, like me, and input from various other companies on specialized aspects. We rarely met; almost everything was done remotely, as Shelley’s “paper” study, actually a software abstraction, was driven to successive levels of design detail.

  Kuiper was an obvious application for Higgs technology. But for me, it was no more than a start to use this miraculous energy source as a way to drive steam rockets. In the long-term, I dreamed, control of the Higgs field could give us control of inertia itself: we could banish mass. I imagined a day when vast spaceships would float from world to world, light as thistledown.

  My God, I loved the work. It paid pennies, but it kept me sane.

  Shelley emerged from her quick review. “So you haven’t screwed up too badly. But your mind must be with Tom. Mine would be.”

  I tried to tell her something of my relationship with Tom. “Everything changed the day Morag died,” I said. “I took ten years to get over that. If I ever did. And Tom—”

  “Tom thinks you miss the dead baby more than you love him. Is that it?”

  That shocked me. “It isn’t true,” I said. “It never was.”

  “Maybe not,” Shelley said. “But these things get stuck in your head.”

  “How would you know?”

  She looked a little uncomfortable. “When I was younger I had a lot of rivalry with my father. He was a tough character. Didn’t suffer fools gladly, he always said. But the trouble was he couldn’t distinguish between a genuine fool and a kid trying to learn.”

  I listened to this carefully; she’d told me little about her past. “I think I remember him.”

  “Oh, you met him during my college days. Parents and teachers. He was always on his best behavior, at open days and graduation. And he was never cruel. He was loving, but in his own way. But his way was a stream of put-downs. I grew up thinking I could never be good enough for him—until one day I decided I was going to beat him.”

  “And that’s why you work yourself to the bone.” We’d had arguments about her work-rate and its effects on her health right back to our college days, when I tutored her.

  “Anyhow that rivalry stuck. And then he died, before I had a chance either to beat him or give up the chase . . . Now I’m stuck with it.” She glared at me. “Nobody gets out of the past without scars. What you have to do is deal with it, and move forward. Right now Tom is all that matters.”

  “OK,” I said. “But things may be a little more complicated than that.”

  I was thinking of my visitations by Morag.

  I felt an impulse to tell her, to confess. I still hadn’t even told John about it. But I was starting to think I ought to open up to somebody about it. But, as well as I knew Shelley, I had no idea what her reaction would be. I guess I was afraid of losing her.

  Maybe she intuited some of my confusion, if not the reason for it. She leaned forward. “Foc
us on Tom,” she said. “The project doesn’t need you right now. But he does.”

  I nodded. The moment passed, and my secret stayed intact a little longer.

  Chapter 10

  During their long interstellar jaunts in the monastic silence of his ship, Reath encouraged Alia to study the history of mankind. “If you don’t know where you’ve come from,” he would say, “you certainly don’t know where you’re going.”

  And in this study, as he had been throughout her life, it was the small, dark, unhappy form of Michael Poole that was her companion, and her anchor point.

  Humanity was thought to be some six hundred thousand years old, six hundred thousand years since the root stock had diverged from still more primitive forms. For the first hundred thousand years, mankind was confined to Earth—a period that had actually ended in Michael Poole’s own lifetime. This era was a lengthy and mostly uninteresting saga of a groping toward rationality and material command, amid endless wars.

  “The most interesting thing about mankind in this long Earthbound period is its fragility,” Reath said. “Think about it. Humanity was confined to one rocky world in a remote corner of the Galaxy—indeed, imprisoned in a membrane of water and organics smeared over the planet’s surface. Up to Michael Poole’s time, that was all the life anybody knew about in the whole universe! Why, the slightest disturbance could have wiped us out—destroyed mankind before we got started—and that would have been that.”

  The terrible contingency made Alia shudder. “Poole’s generation referred to his time as the Bottleneck.”

  “They were right,” Reath said. “But it wasn’t the only age of crisis. There were several points in human history where things went badly wrong. Seventy thousand years before Michael Poole’s time there was an immense volcanic eruption that disrupted the planet’s climatic systems. Even earlier, while mankind was still just a species of upright apes among many others, a plague cut the rootstock down to a few dozen. Mankind reduced to just fifty or so!—think of it. You can see traces of such times in our genetic legacy even now, traces of a dreadful simplifying. The major difference with the Poole Bottleneck was that this was the first anthropogenic crisis—the first caused directly by the actions of mankind.

  “It’s no great surprise that as Witnesses we are drawn to bottlenecks. They are the times of maximum danger for mankind, maximum drama—and yet of maximum flux and opportunity.”

  Alia stared at Michael Poole, his troubled face trapped in stillness inside her Witnessing tank. In this incident Poole was outdoors, in a strange landscape. In hot dense sunlight, he was climbing over a vast heap of wreckage, of smashed and abandoned machines. “Here he is aged fifty-two,” she said. “He is entering the most critical time of his life.”

  “He looks troubled.”

  “He often does,” she said wryly. “Poole knew the dangers of his age very well. Most educated people of the time did, I think. But after the danger his son encountered, Poole came to grasp the implications better than most. He worked on a geoengineering project after all.”

  “And he was a Poole,” Reath said, somewhat reverently.

  “But they were all so limited—all the people of his time, even Poole himself. The best you can say about them is that they were beginning to understand how little they did know.”

  “And is it the problems of the Earth that are depressing him so?”

  “More than that,” she said. “His own work isn’t going well. And it is a difficult time in his personal life . . .” She skimmed the projection back and forth; Poole stayed steady at the center of the flickering images while people appeared and imploded around him.

  When she was young Alia had focused her Witnessing on the more accessible moments of Poole’s life: his joyous childhood, his discovery of love as a young man. With Reath’s gentle coaxing she had been trying to concentrate on this period, the most difficult time of his life—Poole’s own Bottleneck, perhaps.

  But it was very hard for her to get into the head of a fifty-two-year-old man from the middle of the twenty-first century. Everything about his life was so different. Her fifties would be the start of her young adulthood, a time of opportunity and growing command over her destiny. For Poole, more than half his life—and the more productive, enjoyable part—had already gone. He was rapidly running out of future.

  Sometimes, when she studied Poole, all she seemed to see was his smallness. He was a dark, unhappy creature, shut in on himself, trapped in a world so impoverished of stimulus and capability it was a wonder people didn’t simply die of boredom and frustration. “He knows so little,” she said. “He will die knowing so little. He suffers so much. And yet he will shape history.”

  Reath touched her shoulder. “This is just as Witnessing is meant to be. As you come to understand the life of another embedded in the past, you come to understand yourself better.

  “But you must try to keep a sense of perspective, Alia. Mankind did pass through this terrible Bottleneck. And the future of this limited little species was remarkable indeed . . .”

  After its long Earthbound prologue, mankind erupted off the planet, “like a flock of birds lifting from a tree,” said Reath.

  There followed a wave of exploration, colonization, and conquest, in which Michael Poole’s descendants played a significant part. But after the startling discovery of a Galaxy full of alien cultures, many of them ancient and malevolent, it was a wave of expansion that was pushed back several times. Once that reverse reached all the way back to Earth itself.

  With the alien occupation of Earth overthrown, mankind re-emerged strong, united, focused—pathologically so, perhaps, Reath said. The government of the time, the most powerful central authority ever to emerge in human history, was known as the Coalition. A new expansion, a froth of war, conquest, and assimilation, swept across the face of the Galaxy. It took twenty-five thousand years, but at last the center of the Galaxy itself lay in human hands, and legends of the victorious warriors, the “Exultant generation,” resonated down the ages that followed.

  Alia said, “ ‘Pathological’? That’s a strange word to choose.”

  “But it was a pathology, of a sort,” Reath said. “Think about it. The Coalition controlled mankind for twenty-five thousand years! That’s a period that was comparable to the age of the species itself, at the time. For all that time the Coalition controlled culture, politics—even the genetic destiny of mankind. The soldiers who finally broke into the Galaxy’s Core were as human as Michael Poole, save for some superficialities. It was unnatural, Alia! That’s why I say it was pathological. A kind of madness gripped mankind, as we became defined solely by the war.”

  “But it was a successful madness.”

  “Oh, yes!”

  When the war was won, the center could no longer control a Galactic mankind. Reath said darkly, “It was as if a truce had been called among humans, for the purposes of the war against the aliens. But with the Galaxy won history resumed—history of the usual bloody sort.”

  The great expansion that had climaxed in the Exultant victory had cleaned out or marginalized most nonhuman life-forms, leaving the Galaxy an empty stage for a new human drama. New ideologies emerged, and successor states sprouted like weeds in the rubble of empire, each of them claiming legitimacy from the collapsed Coalition. The long age of conquest had bequeathed a Galaxy well stocked with the machinery of conflict, and the wars that followed, motivated by economics and ideology, glory and ambition, consumed millennia and countless lives.

  “It was not a noble age,” Reath said, “though it threw up plenty of heroes. And it was played out in the shadow of the monumental achievements of the Exultant generation. Many were afflicted with a sense of shame at what they had become. But there was always somebody else to blame for the squabbling, of course.

  “And time exerted its power. We are fleeting creatures, we humans!”

  The river of time flowed on, bloodied by war, thousand-year empires bubbling like spindrift. The Coal
ition and its works were forgotten. And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted. This was the Bifurcation of Mankind.

  There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other. Some were so different that they no longer competed for the same resources—“they no longer shared the same ecological niche,” as Reath put it. But a more fundamental xenophobia fueled genocidal wars.

  “So much suffering,” Alia said. “How terrible it all was.”

  Reath said, “I wonder what Michael Poole would have thought of it all, if he could have looked forward. Was all his struggle worth it, merely to enable so much suffering to follow?”

  “Michael Poole gave those who followed the opportunity to live their lives,” she said. “He can’t take responsibility for what they did with that opportunity.”

  Reath nodded. “When your children leave home, you can’t live their lives for them. But you always worry.”

  Alia wondered briefly if Reath had any children of his own. He said very little about his past—indeed she knew far more about Michael Poole, dead half a million years, than she did about the man who had come to share her life.

  The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

  Ninety thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier saw only opportunity in the fragmentation of mankind. By using one human type as a weapon against another—and, somehow, by inspiring loyalty in soldiers as unlike each other as it was possible to be and yet still be called human—he built an empire. In the end he was defeated by the sheer scale of the Galaxy. One of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent.