Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  She led him into the lounge, and Sonia followed, without so much as glancing at me. I was left alone in the kitchen.

  I took a few minutes scraping garbage into the recycler and stacking dishes, time I needed to calm down. I found myself trembling. It might have been easier if Tom had actually screamed at me.

  Then I followed them all back into the lounge, where they had started to work again, filling pages and screens with sketches and notes, as, slowly, an inchoate dream of a refrigerator system big enough to encompass the pole of a planet took shape. But for the rest of the day I felt excluded, as if I had committed an awful transgression, a ghost in my own home.

  Chapter 25

  For the third part of her training, the Implication of Emergent Consciousness, Alia was to be brought to a world at the heart of the Galaxy. She was dismayed at the thought of being taken to yet another dull mass of pointless geological stasis. And like so many others this world seemed to have no name, only a number assigned to it in the vast, growing catalog of the Commonwealth.

  But this, Reath said, was a world of Transcendents.

  To Alia’s relief, during the journey on board Reath’s austere Commonwealth ship the Campocs kept to themselves, and didn’t try to discuss their strange obsession with Witnessing and the Redemption. They seemed ashamed of how they had treated Drea. Bale kept out of her way, and made no attempt to revive their physical relationship. Drea spent most of the journey asleep. She seemed to have been wounded on some deep level. Alia tended her sister with a complex mix of concern and shame.

  And during the journey Reath continued his coaching of Alia.

  He seemed irritated by the presumption of the Campocs in trying to figure out the motives of the Transcendence—even trying to manipulate it, through Alia. “The Transcendence is not a human mind at all,” he said testily. “It is already far, far greater than that. And it has ambitions reaching still further.”

  At the heart of the Transcendents’ project was what he called entelechy, a belief that humans contained a potential, a stupendous possibility, that could be realized in full only through unity. “What is the purpose of the great churning of human history—all our striving, our wars and our peace, our colonizing and our retreats? Surely it is to explore ways in which humans can become the best we can possibly be. And the Transcendence is the highest expression of that deep ambition.”

  For now the unifying of mankind was a process, Reath said, a gathering in, a connection and sharing. But that process was not simple, not linear. It was believed that when the interconnection of the community of Transcendents reached a certain level of complexity, a critical mass, it would go through a phase change.

  “A phase change?” That didn’t mean much to Alia. “What will it be like?”

  Reath looked absent. “I am not a Transcendent. I can’t imagine. But it will be a different order of reality, Alia.

  “Think of a cone. Imagine taking slices through that cone, higher and higher, approaching the apex. You make circles, don’t you? They shrink as you get higher—but then when you reach the tip itself, those circles transmute suddenly into a point, a quite different geometrical entity. It is a discontinuity, a step change.

  “So it is with the Transcendence. It will proceed from its present scattered imperfection to a new level of awareness, a totality that will be a crystallization of mind, a full comprehension of the universe, and of ourselves. When it goes through its phase change, the Transcendence will become infinite, and eternal. Literally. Already it is planning on such scales.”

  This sounded wonderful to Alia, if scary, but baffling. “How can you plan to be infinite?”

  “What do you know of infinities, Alia?”

  “What do you think? . . .”

  “Infinity is a way of thinking, not so much a number as a process.” And the processes of infinity shaped the way the Transcendence was laying its plans for the future,” he said. “Infinity gives you room.

  “Imagine this. Suppose you owned a starship, bigger than the Nord, an immense ship with an infinite number of cabins. You number the cabins one, two, three. . . . You have one passenger in each of the cabins—an infinite number of passengers. But now another ship docks, with a second infinite set of passengers, all of whom want lodging. What do you do?”

  “Turn them away. I’m already full up.”

  “Are you? Try this. You work along your infinite corridor. You tell the passenger in room one to move to room two. The passenger in room two goes to four. The passenger in room three goes to six. . . .”

  “Everybody shuffles up,” she said. “To the cabin with the number twice their old one.”

  “Is there room for them all?”

  She thought it over. “Yes. Because I have an infinite number of even-numbered cabins.”

  “And how many cabins have you freed up?”

  “All the odd ones.” She thought about it. “An infinite number of them, too.”

  “So what do you do with the new set of passengers?”

  “Welcome them aboard . . .”

  He smiled. “You see? Infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Infinity lets you do things finitude would forbid. Infinity is a mapping; it is a way of doing things, a way of thinking, apparently paradoxical. The Transcendence is not yet infinite, but after its singularity it plans to be. So this is the way the Transcendence thinks, Alia. And if you wish to understand the Transcendence, it is the way you must think, too.”

  “There isn’t an infinite amount of room in my head. So how can infinity fit in there?”

  He held up his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. “How many real numbers are there between zero and one?”

  “An infinite number?”

  “An uncountably infinite number, in fact . . . There are many orders of infinity; we won’t go into that. So you can cram infinity into a finite space.”

  “All right. But this is the real universe! What about the granularity of space and time, of matter and energy? What about quantum uncertainty?”

  He winked at her. “I won’t worry about that if you don’t.”

  They arrived in a spectacular sky.

  They had come some distance into the Core, the Galaxy’s central bulge, and there were stars everywhere, stars and turbulent clouds of gas and dust. You could still see a curtain of darkness hanging behind the stars, a black sky not completely obscured by the light. But toward the center itself there was a still denser crowding. In that bath of light and sleeting radiation thousand-year battles had once been fought, and trillions of humans had lost their lives.

  Against such an astounding background, the world of the Transcendents, as it loomed out of the crowded light, was unprepossessing. It wasn’t even a planet, really, not much more than an asteroid, even though inertial generators buried in its heart gave it a gravity close to standard, and a layer of air thick enough to breathe.

  Reath’s shuttle swept over a landscape crowded with buildings that clustered in craters and ravines. Many of the buildings were massive, with walls of blown asteroid rock fixed on foundations that dug deep into the dirt. But the buildings were mostly dark, unadorned, with only small clusters of lights within their hulking shadows.

  In a sky full of stars this worldlet didn’t even have a sun of its own. Alia learned that orphaned worlds were in fact common here, for the stars crowded so close that close encounters and even stellar collisions were frequent, and planets were often torn away from their parent systems.

  But this nameless, homeless fragment had its own history. Huge energies had been spent in turning it into a munitions factory—and even vaster energies expended on flattening it again. The modern buildings were built into the relics of those long-vanished days, structures so massive and solid it was likely the asteroid itself would erode away before they did, leaving the blocky buildings to drift away.

  And now these buildings once devoted to killing had been rededicated as the temples of a new god.

  As the shuttle des
cended Alia grew increasingly uneasy.

  With her new faculty for listening beyond the confines of her own head, she reached out, tentatively. She could see the bright minds of the Campocs, and she could read their poignant emotions as clearly as if they were her own—their apprehension at being here, their strange, complex concerns about the Redemption, and their muddled guilt over their treatment of Drea. In the foreground, too, were the minds of Reath and Drea. They were still mostly closed to her, like silvered spheres drifting in her mental sky; it would take her some time to build up her skills before she could see into the minds of non-adepts. But she glimpsed what lay within when a particularly strong emotion disturbed the surface of one of their minds—especially Drea’s love and concern for her sister, Alia saw with shame.

  And beyond all that, she began dimly to hear, there was a greater roar, inchoate and confused. It was as if ten thousand voices were calling at once, their words merging into a roar as meaningless and as thunderous as the crashing of the waves on a shore. This was the Transcendence, the churning of multiple interconnected minds. And it was terrifying.

  She recoiled, trying to shut out what lay beyond the walls of her mind.

  The shuttle came down at the edge of a township, small and very quiet. Nobody was in sight. And after they landed, nobody came to greet them.

  They clambered out of the shuttle and took a walk. It was a strange experience. This battered world was very small, with a horizon as close as the curve of a hill; you could have walked all the way around it in a couple of days. The gravity was artificial, and felt like it; Alia could feel lumpiness, subtle discontinuities, as she passed from the influence of one Higgs-control inertial field to another. Even the clouds that littered the cramped, dark blue sky were orderly, artificially formed. Though stars glared this worldlet had no sun of its own, and lamps hovered in the lee of buildings to dispel shadows.

  It was a drab, shabby place. Dwellings had been built into the ancient ruins without much sense of beauty or elegance or individual style—nothing but functionality. There was no art anywhere, Alia noticed, just like the Rustball.

  They came upon people, but the people ignored them.

  Everybody from the children upward wore clothes of a dull, machine-manufactured uniformity. They passed a kind of refectory, a public eating place. Few people even prepared their own meals, it seemed. Everywhere was quiet, lifeless. Nobody even seemed to talk.

  In one shallow rubble-filled crater, a group of children played a game with a bat and ball. They ran and threw and caught, working hard enough to sweat. But their faces were empty, and they ran without calling out, or laughing, or clapping, or bickering over dropped balls and missed swings. And their movements were oddly coordinated. You could see there was something higher about them, Alia thought, something that distracted them—or controlled them, she thought uneasily. But there was something missing in them, too. They flocked like birds, somehow less than human.

  “Most of the children are Transcendents, too, of course,” murmured Reath. “From before they were born, the moment of conception. Many Transcendents breed true, though not all. They play only because of the needs of their growing bodies; it is more a structured exercise than a game as you would understand it.”

  “Everybody goes around as if they are in a dream,” said Drea. “Even these kids.”

  Bale said, “Wouldn’t you?”

  Drea said at last, “What a dull place! Is this really how superhumans live their lives?”

  Reath muttered something about how the richness of a Transcendent’s individual life was as irrelevant as the cultural milieu of a liver cell.

  Alia walked on stiffly, uneasy, a complex shadow cast before her by Galaxy-center light.

  Drea said dryly, “Your imminent godhood doesn’t seem to be improving your patience.”

  “Wouldn’t you be churned up? I keep waiting for it to happen.”

  “What, exactly?”

  “For them to come get me. The Transcendents.”

  Reath laughed, not unkindly. “It isn’t going to be like that. There are no teachers, no guides. This is the Transcendence, remember, a manifestation of the group, not of individual actions.”

  “Like a Coalescence,” Drea said.

  “Like a Coalescence, yes—although a Coalescence is a mindless machine, and the Transcendence is the essence of mind. There’s nobody in charge. Alia, I called this a ‘Transcendent world,’ but that’s just a simplifying label. It isn’t a headquarters, or a capital. It’s just that many of the population here happen to be Transcendents. But there are Transcendents all over the Core—indeed all over the Galaxy. Just as individuals don’t matter, nor do places; the Transcendence is everywhere, or nowhere. . . . Even I’m not in charge; I’m only here to point out your choices. It’s always been up to you.” He sounded wistful—even envious, she thought.

  They walked on until they came to a kind of compound. Here, behind a low fence, was a group of very old people. Though dressed in the same dull robes as everybody else, they were bent, slow—most of them were in fact immobile, on chairs or beds set out on a scrubby lawn. They looked small to Alia, as if they had sublimated with age. Younger attendants walked among them, adjusting blankets and offering them bland-looking food. But the attendants seemed as distracted as everybody else.

  Then, for a moment, the old people, those who walked, seemed to move in a coordinated way, blank faces lifting, twiglike limbs moving, a ghost of the energetic flocking of the children. Alia thought she could see the spirit of the Transcendence move through them, as it had through the children. But the moment passed, and all she saw were old people, muttering and stumbling in the dirt.

  “The undying,” said Reath softly. “Survivors of history, and now the heart of the Transcendence, a new form of mankind altogether . . . Nobody knows quite how old some of these people are. That immortality pill works wonders, Alia!”

  Drea asked, “But who wants to live forever if it’s going to be like this?”

  Still nobody approached them, or even acknowledged their presence. Drea said that the Transcendence might be superhuman, but it wasn’t very polite.

  Tired, disappointed, deflated, they trailed back to the shuttle.

  Chapter 26

  Another flight, more airports and processing and online booking-system therapists. But I got through it.

  From the air Seville looked like a jewel glittering on the breast of a desert. A river, the Guadalquivir, cut through the city, but its waters were low, brown, sluggish. The city itself, much of it gleaming silver with Paint, seemed oddly static, even for these traffic-free days, like a vast movie set. As the plane banked for its final descent I glimpsed the countryside stretching off to the east, across southern Spain toward the true desert of Almeria. Its barrenness was broken by patches of gray-green, maybe olive groves. Further out I saw dazzling silvery rectangles that might have been greenhouses, or solar farms—and one spindly needle shape that must have been the famous Sundial, all of a kilometer tall. But these signs of life were sparse in a huge empty landscape.

  The airport terminal was a big box of glass and concrete, turn-of-the-century chic, but the concrete was cracked and stained. Spidery cleaning bots clambered stiffly over the windows, but they just seemed to be pushing the dirt around. Even inside the terminal building there was reddish dust on the floor, like fine-grained sand, swept carelessly into the corners in tiny dunes.

  The debarkation processing was straightforward enough. My exit interview from the plane took only thirty minutes, with the usual blood, DNA and retina scans, psychological profiling and neural probes. But there was a lot of walking to be done from one stage of the induction to the next, and only a dribble of us passengers to do it. I felt I was in the guts of a vast machine, devised to process herds of humans that had now vanished.

  Once I’d collected my bags, I made it through customs. And there was my aunt Rosa to greet me.

  She was a small, compact old woman, her shoulde
rs rounded, her movements stiff. She looked solid, though, slow-moving, oddly muscular. Her face was a disc of rumpled flesh, tanned like leather, but her eyes were pale and clear, tiny gray stones. She looked like my uncle George, far more than my mother had. Her hair was a scattering of gray threads, roughly cut. She was in the uniform of her profession, a black shirt, black slacks, and a cardigan of black wool, heavy-looking despite the heat of the afternoon. Even her shoes were black, brightly polished on her small feet. And around her neck she wore a pale slip of stiffened cloth.

  She looked me up and down, her gaze critical; after the long flight I felt murky, crumpled. “So you’re Michael. Gina’s boy.”

  “I’m glad to meet you, Aunt Rosa.”

  “Aunt.” She snickered. “Great heavens, you must be fifty years old. What kind of word is that to use?”

  “Actually I’m fifty-two—”

  “ ‘Rosa’ will do, I think.” Her accent was odd, British-tinged English rather than American, but with unfamiliar cadences.

  We stood there facing each other. I felt awkward, uncertain. In the end I bent to kiss her. She didn’t flinch; she looked amused. I kissed her on her left cheek, and then her right, in the European style. Her skin was hot and very dry.

  She stepped back. “So we got that over with. You have all your luggage? Good. Follow me. . . .” She led me out of the terminal building.

  When we stepped out of the air-conditioning it was like walking into a wall. I’d never felt anything quite like it, a dry, heavy heat that seemed to drag every bit of moisture out of my skin, and the air had a dusty, almost aromatic tang. It was almost like my jolting virtual-Permian experiences.

  Rosa just stomped her way through the heat, oblivious. I struggled to follow.

  She brought me to a rank where a cab waited for us, an empty white pod with tinted glass. I touched the metal handle of the trunk, and was zapped by a static shock that made my hand jerk backward.