Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

I told her about our wedding day. We had married in Manchester, to be close to Morag’s family, and most of my mother’s, too. But her parents were both dead, and only one of her two siblings showed up. On my side my mother was restless; she always felt confined by England, by her past. Uncle George had turned up—but not my mother’s other sibling, my aunt Rosa, whom I’d never met. Still, the day had gone well; weddings generally do, despite the family bullshit that always surrounds them.

  And at the end of the day Morag and I headed off to York to begin our honeymoon, a couple of weeks of hopping around some of Britain’s historic sites.

  Shelley said cautiously, “I don’t know anything about York. Nice place?”

  “Very old,” I said in a rush. “It was a Roman city. Then it was the capital of the northern kings who dominated Saxon England for a while. Then the Vikings came, and this was the last of their kingdoms to fall, as England finally unified politically. And then—”

  “I get the picture,” she said dryly.

  I forced a laugh. “A good place to come ghost-hunting. Don’t you think?”

  She stared at me. She knew me well, but surely she’d never seen me in this agitated state before. “Michael, digging into the past isn’t a bad thing. People do it all the time. Everybody’s family tree is online now, extracted from the big genome databases, all the way back to Adam, and people are fascinated. Who can resist looking on the reconstructed faces of your ancestors? But, well, you can lose yourself in there. Isn’t that true?”

  I felt impatient. “That’s not the point, Shell. And that’s not what I’m doing.”

  “Then just tell me, Michael. Did you say something about ghosts?”

  And I admitted to her, at last, that I’d come here to seek the ghost of Morag, my lost wife. It was a relief to express it all, at last.

  Shelley listened carefully, watching my face. She asked a string of questions, dragging details and impressions out of me.

  When I’d finished, she said dryly, “And so you thought you’d give me a call. Thanks a lot.”

  “I never did have too many friends,” I said.

  “Look, I’m honored you told me. I am the first, aren’t I? I can tell. And this is obviously very important.”

  “It is?”

  “For you, certainly.”

  “For me. So you don’t think it’s real. I’m just—” I made scrambled-egg motions beside my head.

  She shrugged. “Well, that’s one explanation, and it’s the simplest. But I’ve known you a long time, Michael, and you never seemed crazy to me. An asshole maybe, but never crazy. And what do I know about ghosts? I’ve seen the same movies you have, I guess.”

  I’d never discussed the supernatural with Shelley; she was hardheaded and practical, thoroughly grounded in a world she could measure and manipulate. The hypothetical alien builders of the Kuiper Anomaly had generally seemed enough strangeness for her. “Do you believe any of that?”

  She shrugged. “The universe is an odd place, Michael. And we see only a distillation of what’s out there, a necessary construct to allow us to function. Nothing is what it seems, not even space and time themselves. Isn’t that pretty much the message of modern physics?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But it’s a strangeness we tap into, with our Higgs-field drive. Do you ever think of it that way? As if we’re slicing off a bit of God with our monkey fingers, using the Absolute as fuel for our rocket engines.”

  No, I never had thought of it that way. But I was starting to realize that my intuition to call her in my confusion had been a sound one. “So there are layers of reality we can’t see. The supernatural. Eternity.”

  “Whatever.” She was dismissive. “I don’t think labels help much. Some of our experiences are more profound than others. More significant. Times of revelation, perhaps, when you solve a problem, or when you figure something out, something new about the world—you’re an engineer; you know what I mean—”

  “You feel as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to reality.”

  “Yes. Something like that. I’m quite prepared to believe there are times when we’re more conscious, more aware than at other times. Especially since the neurological mappers and other bump-feelers freely admit they still have no idea what consciousness is anyhow. And if you follow that logic through,” she said doggedly, “maybe you’d expect to find, umm, hauntings associated with places where high emotions have been experienced.”

  “As in classic ghost stories.”

  “Yes. Who knows?” She studied me. “So if you really want to confront this ghost you say is stalking you, maybe you’ve come to the right place.”

  I nodded. “I sense a ‘but.’ ”

  “OK. But you aren’t really here to become a ghost-buster, are you, Michael? You’re here because you want a release from the past. Redemption maybe. And surely there are other ways to do that other than to try to get yourself haunted.”

  “I design starships as therapy. Now I’m ghost-hunting as therapy. I must be pretty fucked up.”

  She smiled, but her scrutiny was unyielding, intense, a bit intimidating. “Well, aren’t you?”

  “I think I have to do this.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe. But, look, I’m worried you’re going to come to harm. That you’ll descend into some pit inside yourself that you’ll never come out of.”

  “I’ll be careful,” I said.

  “Now, why isn’t that reassuring? When you come out the other side of this shit, it’s obvious what you should do.”

  “It is?”

  She leaned forward, her giant-screen image looming over me. “Talk it over with Tom. Your son. And then get back to work, for Christ’s sake.”

  She cut the connection.

  Chapter 14

  Alia woke early, her first morning on the Rustball.

  She washed and ate. Swathed by the Mist, which had spared her from the effects of the gravity, she had slept reasonably well, but the air inside the rust-walled little dwelling was just as murky and still as outside. She felt stale and worn down, joyless, just like the planet itself.

  Without ceremony Bale invited her to join what he called a “conversation.”

  She found herself in a large, plain room. It was all but full. Perhaps twenty people sat on the floor, informally. When Alia asked where she should sit, Bale just shrugged, and she picked a spot at random. The three Campocs sat close to her, giving her a welcome bit of familiarity. The others were more distant, their faces receding into the gloom. The room itself was as dark and enclosing as the whole planet seemed to be—and uninteresting, the strange iron faces of the walls unadorned.

  There was a round of introductions. These people, it seemed, were all members of Bale’s extended family: parents, children, siblings, cousins of varying complicated degrees. Alia effortlessly recorded the names, and built up a map in her head of this densely populated family network.

  When the formality was done, she asked, “Are we going to start now?”

  “Start what?” Bale asked.

  “My training. The Second Implication.”

  Bale shrugged, his shoulders machine-massive. “We’re just going to talk.”

  She said, irritated, “Just as I spend most of my time with Reath, talking.”

  “Reath is a good man. But what is the subject of the Second Implication?”

  “Unmediated Communication. I’m not sure what that means but—”

  “You can’t talk about communication,” Bale said gently, “without communicating.”

  She sighed. “So what are we going to talk about?”

  “What humans always talk about. Themselves. Each other. You’re a visitor. We’re curious.”

  With all those gazes on her, she felt terribly self-conscious. “What can I tell you? I’m ordinary.”

  “Nobody is ordinary.”

  Somebody spoke up from the back—a great-aunt of Bale’s, it turned out. “Who’s the most important person in your life?”

>   She said immediately, “My sister. She’s ten years older than me. . . .”

  Once she had started she found it easy to open up. These “Rusties,” as they called themselves, were good listeners. And so she talked about Drea.

  When Alia was small Drea had taken care of her, as a big sister should. But as Alia had grown that ten-year age gap became less important, and the sisters became more equal friends. Gradually Alia’s interests had come to dominate the time they spent together—especially dancing, especially Skimming.

  Drea had always seemed grave to Alia, a bit stolid, a bit dull. Alia was more exotic, perhaps, her mind livelier, her body always a bit more flexible. It had been up to Alia to pull her sister along with her, to involve her in things she mightn’t otherwise have tried. It was a rivalry that added a spark to their relationship.

  Gradually warming up, she told this story in anecdotes and in sweeping summaries. Sometimes one of the Rusties would give her something back, tell her a similar story from their own complicated family networks. There was nothing remotely judgmental about their reaction.

  But, slowly, Alia began to feel uncomfortable. She wound down.

  Twenty pairs of eyes watched her.

  Bale said, “Alia, are you well? Do you need a rest—a drink, perhaps, or—”

  “What is meant by ‘Unmediated Communication’?”

  For an answer, Bale reached out and took her hand. It was the first time any of them had touched her physically; she felt an odd jolt, like a mild electric shock. She pulled back, startled.

  Bale said, “Most human communication is symbolic.”

  She struggled to regain her composure. “You mean language?”

  “Language, art, music. Language is a legacy of our deepest past. With it we envisage past and future, build cities and starships—with language we won a Galaxy. But it is all symbolism. I encode my thoughts in symbols, I transmit them to you, you receive them, and decode them. You can see the limitations.”

  She frowned. “Bandwidth problems. Difficulties of translation.”

  “Yes. What I say to you can only be a fraction of what I think or feel. But there are modes of communication deeper and more ancient than language.”

  Suddenly he snapped his fingers in her face, and she flinched.

  “I apologize,” Bale said. “But you see the point. That message was crude, just a gesture of threat. But you reacted immediately, in the deeper roots of your being. And when I took your hand you felt something beneath words, didn’t you? We humans communicate on a tactile level. Even a cellular, even a chemical level . . .”

  “It sounds scary,” Alia admitted.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” said Denh.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Before you can communicate with others, you have to be able to communicate with yourself.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You will.”

  “When will my treatment begin?”

  “It already has,” called Bale’s great-aunt from the back of the room.

  She looked around, feeling claustrophobic, helpless, exposed before these drab strangers.

  Chapter 15

  I lay down in the dark and took a pill.

  After I lost Morag I was prescribed medication. There were medicines, I was told, that could target the sites in your head where traumatic memories are formed. Something to do with inhibiting the formation of certain proteins. If I only took the pill, I was told, I would still remember Morag and all that had happened, as if I stored a narrative in my head, but I wouldn’t feel it—not the same way, not so much that it would harm my functioning.

  John had always pressed me hard to take the medication. For sure it’s what he would have done. But I had refused. Memories are what make up me—even bad memories, dreadful memories. What’s the point of “functioning” if I lose that? When I refused to allow Tom the same treatment I faced a battery of counselors who gravely advised me on the harm I was causing to my helpless son, the hurt I could help him avoid. I stuck to my guns. But sometimes, I admit, when I look back on Tom’s life since, I wonder if I made the right choice for him.

  So I refused the “forget” pills. But I did learn that there are also such things as “remember” pills.

  By getting glutamate or some such molecule to work more efficiently, there’s a medication that can sharpen memories, rather than dull them. It takes some analysis by various therapeutic machines to figure out what you need, and you have to put up with counseling about the damage that might be done to your personality by too much memory. But it’s over-the-counter stuff. When I found out all this I bought some pills, and put them aside, kept them in my bathroom bag. I’d carried them everywhere since, knowing they were there but not thinking about why I wanted them with me.

  Now was the time. I popped my pills, and I lay in that bed, in that small hotel, in the middle of England, and I tried to remember.

  Here I had been with Morag, that first night. We had gone to bed early, still full of the bonhomie and speeches, the food and champagne of the wedding. We made love.

  But I remembered waking later, maybe three in the morning, the time your body is at its lowest, all your defenses down. She was awake, too, lying beside me, here in this hotel. The booze had worn off by then; I felt mildly hung over. But she was here. As we’d lived together for a year before anyhow I think we’d both imagined the marriage wouldn’t matter. But we’d made a commitment to each other. It did make a difference.

  So we came together again, in this hotel, in the dark, right here. I remembered the scent of shampoo and spray on her hair, the softness of her skin, a slight saltiness when I kissed her cheeks—she’d done plenty of crying that day, as brides do. And around us the hotel breathed, centuries old, and beyond its walls the still more ancient pile of the old city thrust its stone roots deep into the ground. Immersed in my pharmaceutically sharpened memories, I remembered it all, as if it were real again. Maybe I cried. Probably. Maybe I slept.

  I thought I heard somebody calling.

  It was a woman, outside the hotel, calling from the street below, the line of the Roman road. The room felt cold, terribly cold. Listening to that voice, I hugged myself to stop my shivering.

  I found myself outside the hotel.

  It was nearly dawn, and a blue light leaked grudgingly into the sky, totally lacking warmth. That light was mirrored in a flood that blocked the street, between me and the city center. I was surrounded by the silhouettes of darkened houses. No traffic moved on the road, nobody was out there, nobody awake but me. The flood water rippled languidly, strewn with rubbish. The world seemed a drab, defeated place.

  How had I got here? I couldn’t remember dressing, or coming down from my room. I was disoriented, overtired.

  Looking along the road toward the city, I saw a shifting shadow—a curve of back, a leg, the faint sound of footsteps.

  I turned north, up the road toward the city center. I walked along the middle of the road, trying to catch up with her. But those cobbles were big and smoothed with use and shiny with dew, and I had to watch every step I took in the uncertain light. I tired quickly, mentally as well as physically.

  Then I came to that flood. As I approached it I could see water bubbling up out of the drains and around the rims of manhole covers. I vaguely remembered that somewhere near here the two rivers that ran through the city, the Ouse and the Fosse, came to a confluence, and the place was notorious for flooding. The water looked old and dirty, covered with a layer of dusty scum, and with bits of garbage floating in it. I couldn’t see how deep it got toward the center. You get used to these things; once towns like this had probably flooded once a decade, but now it was a rare year when it didn’t flood, and people got worn out with trying to fix things, and just accepted the change.

  But the pond was in my way. I walked to the left and right, helpless. There was no obvious way around it. The side streets would lead me away from the direction to the city cen
ter, from the way I wanted to go, toward Morag. Everything was mixed up, made chaotic by the water intruding into the land; I was stranded in a strange landscape, a place where nothing worked anymore.

  I couldn’t see Morag. Perhaps I had already lost her. I grew panicky.

  Lawned gardens lined one side of the street. I decided to go that way. I made for an old, crumbling wall on the right-hand side of the road. It was too high to be easy to climb. I jumped up, and had to use my arms to haul my bulk up so my belly was resting on the wall. Then, with a lot of swinging, I got my right leg onto the lip of the wall, and then the left. I more or less fell down on the other side.

  I landed heavily on my side on soft, moist grass, hard enough to knock the wind out of me. I lay there for a few seconds. I could feel dew, or flood water, soaking my face, my jacket, my trousers. There were high-water marks on the wall, and somebody had chiseled dates into the brick beside the higher of them: 2000. 2026. 2032. And I saw a worm, a long earthworm, crawling around on the grass. Maybe the rising water had forced it out of the ground. It looked as bewildered as I did.

  I got to my feet. The side of my body I’d landed on felt like one long bruise, and I was wet and cold. I felt very foolish, a fifty-two-year-old man standing in somebody else’s lawn in the dawn light. I had to get on, get out of there.

  I stepped forward and walked straight into a tree. I stumbled back and crashed into more foliage. The tree was a fern, no taller than I was, and the foliage around me was bamboo. English gardens aren’t what they were. I pushed away, not sure which way I was facing. I had been turned around in the fall. I stumbled forward again, but tripped on a skinny mound of moist earth sticking out of the lawn. It might have been a termite mound. I felt stupid, befuddled, surrounded by clinging obstacles, and every step I took, everything I tried to do to make progress, just threw up more problems.

  Right. The wall had been on the right-hand side of the street, so I should keep the house to my right. I turned and pushed that way. The grass was long and clung to my shoes, and now my feet were soaked through. But I kept going, and I came to a gate that led me back to the road.