Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  I finally got on the plane. The cabin was wide-bodied and fitted out with big fake-leather couches, around which people fussed and planted their in-flight stuff. There were no windows, but every wall surface was smart, although for now tuned to a drab wallpaper. It was like a lounge in some slightly cramped hotel; only the cabin’s inevitable tubular architecture gave away the fact that we were on board a plane. My couch was smart, too. As I sat down I felt pads move silently into place, fitting my body shape and supporting my back and neck and lumbar region. All very civilized, though that cheap-hotel feeling deepened. I settled in and spread my softscreen over my lap.

  The plane filled up quickly. The couches were not set in rows but in subtly randomized patterns, so you had at least the illusion of privacy. But still my neighbor, as he settled in, felt like he crowded into my space.

  He was maybe forty, a round-faced man sweating so heavily his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. His belly strained at his shirt. At one time you wouldn’t have glanced at him twice, but in these days when everybody walked everywhere he was bigger than most. He had a lot of stuff, a pack he crammed under his seat, another he shoved into the locker in front of him, and he spread out a softscreen and a pile of papers on his lap.

  He caught me watching him. He stuck out his hand. “Sorry to disturb you. The name’s Jack Joy. Call me Jack.”

  I shook his hand, powerful but hot and moist, and introduced myself.

  He snapped his fingers to summon the steward—a human, a retro symbol of a vanished age. Jack requested a bourbon, and asked if I wanted the same; a bit uncertainly, but feeling crowded by this guy, I agreed.

  Slightly breathless, he gestured at the heap of material on his lap. “Look at this crap. Every trip’s the same.” He winked. “But it costs so much to travel nowadays you have to make it worthwhile, even if somebody else is paying, right?” His accent was strong New York.

  “I guess so.”

  “You fly a lot?”

  “I flew out here, to Florida. Otherwise, not for years.”

  “It isn’t the unalloyed delight it once was. Watch this.” Without warning he slammed his fist against the fake leather armrest of his seat, making me jump. Immediately a metal band slid out of nowhere and snapped over his arm, and a blue light flashed over his head.

  A stewardess came running, fingering the weapon in her holster.

  Jack apologized, waving his other hand in the air, sloshing his drink. “Sorry, sorry. A nervous twitch! It always happens to me. What can I say?”

  He had to submit to a scan from a handheld sensor. But eventually the stewardess spoke into a lapel mike, and with some reluctance, I thought, caused the restraint to release him and slide back into the body of his seat.

  Jack turned to me. “You see that? By the time you get on the plane you’ve been through all the checks and the psycho profiling and all the rest, and you’re in your damn seat, and you think they’ll trust you at last. But no, no. One false move and wham, you’re pinned like a lab rat. I mean, what could you do? Scratch somebody’s eyes out? Lethe, even this shot glass is unbreakable. If I throw it against the wall—” He raised his arm.

  “Don’t bother,” I said quickly, “I believe you.”

  He laughed and sipped his drink. “It’s the way of the world, Mike—can I call you Mike?”

  “Michael.”

  “The way of the world, Mike. Lethe, it’s the way of the world.” He settled back on his couch with a grunting sigh, and kicked his shoes off, which did nothing to improve my immediate environment.

  Lethe. I’d heard that word used as an oath before, somewhere. John, I thought; John used it sometimes.

  That stewardess came by again, checking we were ready for lift-off. She caught my eye sympathetically. You want more privacy? I shrugged, subtly.

  The plane surged forward and I was pressed back in my couch; I felt it adjust to accommodate me. I hadn’t even heard the engines start up. With a word I turned my smart wall into a window, and watched the drowned Florida landscape recede beneath me, covered in pools and lakes that shone in the sun like splashes of molten glass.

  Once we had settled into the flight I buried myself in a softscreen study of climate change at the poles. It was a dull classroom subject, but after Tom, suddenly it was personal.

  It all started with the Warming, of course; all the searches I set off looped back to that. For decades carbon dioxide had been accumulating in the air twice as fast as natural processes could remove it. By 2047 its concentration was higher than at any time in the last twenty million years, an astounding thought. The consequences were depressingly familiar. The ice was melting, the seas rising, ecosystems unraveling. All that heat energy pumped into the air and oceans had to go somewhere, so there were many more hurricanes and storms, floods and droughts than there used to be.

  And so on. I skimmed all this, trying to find out about the Arctic.

  At the poles the Warming is amplified, it seems. Apparently there is a positive feedback effect; as the ice melts the albedo of the ground is lowered—it reflects back less sunlight—and so the ground and the ocean just soak up more heat. As a result temperatures there have been, at times, rising ten times as fast as in the rest of the world. In the north, the ice was all gone, and strange storm systems came spinning down from that rotating plate of ocean to ravage the land. Once the sea ice actually protected the land from ocean storms and the worst ravages of the waves. Now, all around the Arctic Ocean, coastal erosion was “rapid,” “dramatic,” “traumatic,” so I read. At the same time the permafrost, the deep-buried ice cap, was melting. I’d seen some of this in Siberia; on a ground that undulated like the surface of the sea, roads collapsed, buildings just sank into the ground, and trees all over the immense, world-embracing taiga forests tipped over.

  Of course all this hit the people. As Tom had said, even fifty years ago many of the locals in Siberia still lived as hunter-gatherers, following the reindeer around. Ironically the programs to relocate them out of there were paid for by the environment taxes paid by the big oil, gas, aluminium, and logging companies that had done so much damage to the area in the first place.

  And then you had the methane.

  Right around the poles huge quantities of methane, carbon dioxide, and other volatiles were locked up in hydrate deposits, kept stable by the low ocean temperatures and the pressure of the land and water above. The physics of it seemed simple enough. The peculiar geometry of water molecules makes them difficult to pack into a solid structure when they freeze. So “solid” ice contains a lot of empty space—room enough to trap other molecules, such as methane. And there is a lot of methane to be found on the seabed; there isn’t much oxygen down there, and anerobic decay processes release a lot of the gas.

  When the temperature rose, that natural cage was broken open. The consequence was “methane burps” of the kind Tom was unlucky enough to have encountered.

  But that was a localized event, I realized, lethal as it was if you happened to be in the way. The Warming, however, was nothing if not global. There was more methane down there in the hydrate layers than in all the world’s fossil fuel reserves, and methane, though it doesn’t last as long in the atmosphere, is in the short term twenty times as potent a greenhouse gas as our old buddy carbon dioxide.

  So what would happen, I wondered vaguely, if this went on, if all that methane was released? I tabbed through pages on my softscreen, seeking answers. But my question chains petered out; my softscreen couldn’t answer. I sat back, tugging at a thread of speculation.

  I admit I didn’t know much about the Warming, about climate change in the Arctic or anywhere else. Why should I? The planet was warming up, my body was growing older, it was all just part of the world I’d grown up in; you either obsessed about it, or accepted it and got on with your life. And besides, we had dumped the automobile, we had accepted the need to run the Stewardship. We were managing the pain, weren’t we?

  But if those hydrate dep
osits all gave way, instead of the world just becoming slowly shabbier . . . I thought there was some bad news buried in here. Maybe very bad news. And on some level I just didn’t want to know.

  Was there anything to be done about it? I cleared the softscreen, took a stylus, and began to doodle.

  I kept being distracted by the environment of the flight.

  If I miss driving, I miss flying more. When I was a kid my parents flew all the time. At the peak of their careers they had pretty much sewn up the Miami Beach market for corporate eventing, and scarcely a weekend went by without them managing a sales conference or marketing-strategy session at one resort hotel or another. All that was local, but to set up the deals they had to travel to where the customers were. When they got the chance, they would take us kids, John and me. Our teachers would kick up a stink, as in those days you were still expected to attend school for the regulation five days a week. But for better or worse my parents took the blows, and we flew.

  We kids loved seeing the great centers of business across the country, from New York to San Francisco, Chicago down to Houston. A few times we traveled overseas, to Europe and Africa and even Japan once, though my mother worried about the effect of such long-haul trips. The whole thing was a great eye-opener that gave me a real sense of the planet I lived on.

  But most of all I just loved to fly. I relished being in a vast machine that had the energy to hurl itself into the sky. I was always fascinated to come into a major airport, and to glimpse all those other sparks of light in the sky, and the mothlike shapes of more planes on the ground; you got a real sense of the millions of tons of metal suspended in the air over the continental United States, a great dome of dynamic engineering speckled with fragile humanity, every minute of every day. All gone now, of course. Now nobody flies—nobody but the very rich. It’s the same logic that took away the automobile: we’ve had to sacrifice some freedom to survive. I accept all that, and most of the time, like everybody else, I don’t think about it. But I still miss flying.

  Jack Joy was leaning over to see what I was doing. Some instinct made me blank out the softscreen.

  He leaned back with his pudgy hands up. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

  “It’s OK.”

  “Work? Stuff about climate change? That’s your job?”

  “No. It’s my son’s, in a way. . . .”

  I felt guilty about shutting him out like that. I told him a little about Tom’s work, and the accident.

  He nodded. “Good kid. You must be proud.”

  “I guess. More relieved he’s still around.”

  “And now you’re boning up on global warming?”

  “I kind of feel the world has targeted me, or anyhow my son.”

  “I get it,” he said. He tapped his nose. “Know your enemy.”

  “Not that I want the Earth to be my enemy.”

  “Ah.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Neither enemy nor friend. It’s just a stage, right? A stage for us humans to strut our magnificent stuff.” He stuck out his belly as he said this.

  I couldn’t help laughing at him. “I don’t know if I’d say that. The Die-back—”

  “Who cares about that? You see, there I would take issue with your son. All that DNA cataloguing bullshit? Forget it! Let it happen. Let them all die off. So what?”

  I couldn’t believe him. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course I am.” He leaned closer, conspiratorially. “Listen to me. The Die-back has been going on for millennia. Ever since the Ice Age. First we wiped out the big mammals. In North America, the mammoths and the cave bears and the lions, pow, whole populations pop like soap bubbles when the first guy with a funny little spear wanders over from Asia. Australia the same. Asia and Africa it’s different, but there the animals evolved alongside us, and had time to get used to us.” He cackled. “I guess they learned to run fast. But now we’re working our way through them, too, and the smaller critters, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the plants and the bugs. Whatever.”

  “And you don’t think that’s a bad thing?”

  “Two words,” he said. “Morally neutral. It just happened. There have been mass extinctions before, worse than this mother will ever be. And every time, you know what? Life bounces back. An evolutionary rebound, the biologists call it.” He winked at me. “So you just have to let it fix itself, and in the meantime sit back and enjoy the view. They don’t report this stuff—”

  “But it’s true,” I finished for him.

  He glanced at me and grinned. “Lethe, you know me already.”

  “I don’t often hear people curse like that. Lethe.”

  “You don’t? Actually there’s a scientific hypothesis called Lethe. You’ve heard of Gaia?”

  “Sure.” Named for a Greek earth-goddess, Gaia was a model of the Earth’s unified systems and processes, from the rock cycle, to the exchange of gases between air and ocean, to the vast cycling of matter and energy which sustained life, and which life sustained in its turn. All this was the paradigm among biologists, and a staple in Eco 101 for everybody else.

  Jack said, “ ‘Lethe’ is the opposite to Gaia. An anti-Gaia, if you will. The Warming isn’t a simple event. Everything is working together, different effects reinforcing—just like Gaia, but now the Earth has begun working to destroy itself, as opposed to sustaining itself. Ask a biologist; you’ll see.

  “But you know what Lethe actually means? It’s from Greek myth. Lethe was a river in Hades, which if you drank from it, would wash away your memory. Later on it was used by Shakespeare, to mean ‘death.’ Lethal—you see. But the original meaning kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Forgetfulness.”

  “Exactly. So as one species after another turns to dust, Earth is losing its biotic memory: look at it that way. But we, in turn, may as well forget it all, too. I never saw a tiger, and never will, but I never saw T. Rex either. What difference does it make that one died out thirty years ago and the other sixty-five million? Dead is dead.”

  “That’s a brutal viewpoint.”

  “Brutal? Realist, my friend. And a realist deals with the world as it is, and not as he wishes it to be. You just have to accept it. In the long-term, from the viewpoint of history, all of this will be seen as an adjustment. It’s just our bad luck to be living through it.” He grinned, wolfish. “Or our good luck. In the meantime, why not enjoy life? Fuck it. I mean, if it’s raining, grab a bucket.”

  “So what kind of bucket do you carry?”

  “Me? I deal in shit,” he said, evidently enjoying the look on my face.

  If a Martian came down to Earth, he said, he might conclude that the main product of mankind was shit. Great rivers of the stuff pour out of our bodies and into the sewers of our towns and cities. In less civilized communities, we just dump it into the sea. In more enlightened places, Jack said, we stir it around and perfume it in sewage plants, and then dump it into the sea.

  I could guess where this was going. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” It was an expression of my mother’s.

  Jack grinned. “I like that.” He actually wrote it down on his softscreen. “Muck and brass. But that’s what it boils down to—literally.” Jack worked for a company that sold fancy reactors that treated excrement by driving off the water that formed its bulk, and then extracting various useful hydrocarbons from the residue. “It’s an amazing technology,” he said. “I’ve a brochure you can download if you like.”

  “Thanks.”

  “It’s all a spin-off from space technology, those closed-loop life-support systems they use up there on the Space Station. Now here we are on Spaceship Earth using the same stuff. Inspiring, isn’t it? Fresh water is short everywhere, and just reclaiming that is often enough to justify the cost of a kit.” He winked again. “Of course we don’t advertise the fact that we’re selling your own shit back to you, but there you go.” He talked about how he sold plants small enough for an individual household, or big enough
to handle a whole city block, and then he got on to payment schemes.

  I wasn’t very interested, and my attention drifted off.

  He glanced at me speculatively. “Here.” He gave me a card. It was black and embossed with silver: THE LETHE RIVER SWIMMING TEAM. “My contact details,” he said. “If you’re interested. It will download into your implant.”

  “I don’t understand the name.”

  “The Swimming Team is a group of like-minded thinkers,” he said.

  “All realists?”

  “Absolutely. Listen, I hand out dozens of cards like this. Hundreds. It’s the way we work. No obligation, just like minds on the other end of a comms link. If you ever feel like talking over this stuff, give me a call. Why not?” He eyed me speculatively. “Of course some take the logic a little further.”

  Intrigued despite myself, I asked, “They do? Who?”

  “I met a guy once, through the Swimming Team. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you his name.” He winked again. “He called himself a Last Hunter. You ever heard of them? . . .”

  The premise turned out to be simple. A Last Hunter aimed to take out the last representative of a species: the last eagle, the last lion, the last elephant of all.

  “Think of it,” Jack breathed. His voice was almost seductive. “To be the man to take down the last gorilla, a species that split from humans megayears ago. To end a ten-million-year story, by writing your name across the end of it in blood. Isn’t it a fantastic thought?”

  “Are you serious? I’ve never heard anything so immoral—”

  He wagged his fingers at me. “Now, let’s not start up on morality again, Mike. Illegal, I grant you. Especially if you have to sneak into a zoo to do it. You see my point, though. Even in a declining world there are ways to make money—a lot of it, if you are smart enough. And, more important, to find meaning—to define yourself.”

  I had the feeling he was offering me something. But what? A finger or an ear chopped from the carcass of the last silverback gorilla? I found him overwhelming, disgusting—fascinating.