Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Things had changed in the late 2030s when the Stewardship money had started to flow. Suddenly people discovered they had a conscience after all.

  Seville turned its attention to the vast blister on its doorstep. But those early do-gooders, following in the steps of Rosa and others, found their efforts were not welcome. “The Reef had become a home,” Rosa said, “a way of life.” After that the authorities had taken a more subtle approach. The police had worked more carefully to establish a presence, and Stewardship money was used to establish a basic human infrastructure, schools and hospitals and the like.

  “But the local economy is still the same,” Rosa said, almost proudly. “And the ecology. People live off the garbage—and not just by barbecuing rats, either.”

  She said that gen-enged bacteria had been loosed on the Reef. Bugs that could eat oil were working their way through the contents of the leaking engine blocks and fuel tanks in the mound beneath me, cracking waste oil and gasoline into more useful hydrocarbons and other chemicals. Other bugs devoured polyurethane plastics and other “non-biodegradable” components of the car corpses. Even hydrogen could be harvested, she said. Collection plants had been set up around the base of the Reef, at the outlet of systems of drainage pipes through which all this reclaimed treasure was collected. “All very modern, don’t you think? We live in an age of margins, where there is money to be made from reprocessing the garbage of richer times.”

  As the population of Spain continued its precipitous decline there had been an obvious motive to open up this community: the families of the Reef were unusually fecund for the time and there were lots of kids running around, kids who might be employed usefully to keep the nation functioning.

  By now, Rosa said, the Reef was integrated into Spanish society. It even had zip codes. After a vast citizenship program, some Reef babies had grown up to become lawyers and doctors and engineers and politicians. Many had gone to live and work in more salubrious parts of the country, or even abroad—but not all; some had stayed to work for the strange community that had fostered them.

  Something scuttled over my foot, startling me. It was an insect. I bent down and grabbed it between my thumb and forefinger. It looked like a beetle, but it had an unfamiliar blue-green sheen to its carapace; I’d never seen anything like it. I showed it to Rosa.

  “Keep it. It might be a new species.”

  “Really?”

  “Garbage tips are the modern crucibles of evolution. And we created them.” She clenched a fist over her heart, ironic. “It gets you right here, doesn’t it?”

  I tried to make out Rosa’s fascination with this place. “You keep talking about the Reef—ecology, evolution, food chains—as if it’s one big ecosystem. And you talk as if the humans here are just part of the ecosystem themselves, just another kind of scavenger.”

  For a moment, as she peered out over the metallic slopes of the Reef, she was silent. I had time to smell the food cooking, an aroma of hot butter and seafood.

  Rosa said slowly, “An ecosystem. So it is. In a way, now that the government has moved in, the place has lost some of its fascination for me. It’s safer, yes, and life expectancy has shot up. But not so interesting . . .”

  Even when she had first come here, she said, the place hadn’t been as lawless as she had feared.

  “I imagined either simple chaos, or gangsters and warlords, chieftains wielding crude power based on threats and intimidation. There was some of that, of course. But from the beginning the Reef was simply too big to be governed in such a way. And the refugees were not a homogenous mass; they trickled here from all over. Chances were you could talk to your neighbor, but not to somebody on the other side of the mound. Without communication centralized power was impossible. Nobody knew what was going on; nobody was in overall charge.”

  Instead, she said, the nascent community had organized itself.

  If you worked on the Reef, struggling to survive, your best bet was to do what your neighbor was doing. If you saw her digging, you dug; if you saw her fleeing, you fled. “And that way,” Rosa said, “through local interaction and feedback, a community emerged, evolving bottom-up.

  “When the government first began to open up the place, they sent in sociologists and complexity specialists to study what was going on. They found a collective organization that made almost maximally efficient use of the resources of the Reef as a whole. And this was achieved by groups who shared no common language. They just worked it out as they went along.”

  “Like an ant colony,” I said, with faint disquiet.

  “And it worked almost perfectly. A perfect human machine.” She actually sounded wistful.

  It was a tone of voice I had heard from her before, when she had hinted at aspects of the Order in Rome that had taken her in. I put together the little I had gathered about it: Crowding. Underground. Swarming with people. I wondered what the Order truly was—and why it had expelled Rosa. Whatever the truth, it was evident to me that she had spent her life since seeking its reflection in other things, even in this extraordinary place, the Reef: she had spent her life longing to go back.

  Our lunch arrived, heaps of steaming food served on clean hot plates by our grubby-faced landlady. Rosa told me it was a local variant of paella, called fideos a la malaguena, peppers and shellfish, with spaghetti rather than rice. The pasta and peppers were fine. But the shellfish, mussels and clams, were dark and gritty. I wondered from what dark ocean they had come, and pushed them aside.

  Our lunch was cut short by an alarm. It was a mournful siren that sounded from far away, like the cry of some immense beast raising its head from the sea of garbage. The landlady came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands. She peered up at the sky and muttered.

  Rosa and I stepped outside the cavelike restaurant. The cause of the alarm was obvious. Coming from the north was a murky red cloud that towered high above the glinting shoulder of the Reef; its upper levels thrashed and writhed, purple. The light was already failing.

  “This wasn’t forecast,” Rosa said.

  Looking down the slope of the reef I saw people running for shelter, the shopkeepers and stallholders battening down and grabbing their wares. They swarmed everywhere, racing over their garbage heap like the ants Rosa seemed to think they were.

  In one open area, some youngsters were whooping it up. There were maybe fifty of them. Bottles and cigarettes were passed around; it was quite a party. They started jumping up and down and yelling at the approaching storm cloud, as if defying it. Beyond them I made out a line of police, la policia, clumsy in heavy gear. Some of them were fiddling with heavy-looking weapons, like batons, that hung from their waists. It was obvious the kids’ antics were making the police nervous. There were very few young people in Seville, and it could be these cops had never dealt with a drunken, high-spirited mob of kids like this before.

  The sky grew darker. Bits of loose garbage began to blow about on the surface of the Reef.

  And then, as the light failed, I saw her. She was standing at the foot of the Reef proper, where the lowest stratum of doomed cars was sinking into the ground. She was staring up at me.

  I had never seen her so close. It was her, no doubt about it; I could make out her eyes, her nose, the laugh lines around her mouth. I could even hear her voice, though I could make out no words. It was typical of her to come to me now, in the storm, in a time of confusion.

  Rosa stood beside me. I dared take my eyes off Morag for a second—I was fearful she would just vanish back where she had come from if I looked away—but I saw that Rosa was staring in the same direction as me, her small mouth open.

  “Rosa—you see her, don’t you?”

  Rosa took my hand; her leathery grip was reassuring. “I think so.”

  I was overwhelmed. It was the first time anybody else had shared my visions. “Can you make out what she’s saying?” All I could hear was a kind of jabber, very rapid; Morag almost sounded like a speeded-up recording.

  Rosa li
stened closely. “No words,” she said. “But it sounds like information. Structured. Very dense. We should have brought a recorder.”

  “Yes . . .”

  Morag turned away, took a step further down the slope, and looked back at me. I thought her expression was pleading.

  “I have to go to her.” I looked down, seeking the staircase. It was getting very dark now, and windblown sand scraped the back of my neck, a premonition of what was to come.

  The landlady gabbled agitated Spanish.

  Rosa said, “She says we must go inside. The storm—”

  “No! Morag’s down there. Let me go!”

  But they were surprisingly strong, especially the landlady, and they began to drag me back toward the shelter of the restaurant.

  Morag was walking away, her hair whipping around her face. Still she looked back at me. But she was blurring into the darkness, becoming indistinct again, and I could no longer hear her voice.

  Further down those kids seemed to be getting more excited as the storm approached; they were dancing and jumping and whooping, some of them stark naked. One cop drew his weapon. Laser light flashed, charging the air, and then lightning-like bolts gushed. Kids fell, convulsing. The other revelers’ exhilaration turned to anger, and they closed on the police.

  But I saw no more of the battle, or of Morag, for the dust descended on me. Suddenly it was everywhere, in my eyes, mouth, ears, hair, and the world was full of the wind’s stupendous bellowing. Rosa and the landlady hauled me backward into the cave, and a door slammed, shutting out the storm.

  We sat in that darkened cave, illuminated only by a lamp that burned Reef methane. The landlady gave us water to wash the dust out of our hair and mouths and off our skin, and we drank a hot, flavorless tea. Rosa had to pay for all this, of course.

  “So,” Rosa said gently. “I feel privileged. I’ve encountered many ghost stories, Michael. I told you that. But I’ve never seen somebody else’s ghost before.”

  I felt powerful, confused emotions. I was disoriented to be in the Reef at all, and disappointed to have lost Morag, when she had seemed so close. But I clung to that electrifying understanding that Rosa had seen what I had seen: whatever was going on, I wasn’t crazy or delusional. I was relieved, I guess. But I was even more scared of the whole thing than before.

  “I have to get this straight in my head, Rosa. It’s in the way.”

  “In the way?—ah, yes. Your gas hydrate project.” She touched my hand. “You are trying to balance your own needs, the issue of Morag, with the wider needs of us all. You feel confused. But that’s because you are a good man, Michael.”

  I snorted. “Good? Me?” I thought of my relationship with Tom, that terrible flawed mess. “Believe me, I don’t feel it.”

  “You don’t need to. Saint Augustine said that if you don’t feel you are good then you must pretend you are so. You practice, you do good things. And then, one day, you wake up and find you are good after all.”

  The landlady nodded, muttering; perhaps she picked up some of Rosa’s childlike sermonizing.

  “I don’t want to lose Morag again,” I said. “Not if I don’t have to. But I need to understand.”

  “Well, since I saw her, too, I now need to understand also,” Rosa said. “Let me do some research.”

  That surprised me. “Research? I expected you to say you’d pray for me.”

  “I will, if it will help.” She tapped her forehead. “But God didn’t give us brains for nothing. Let me see what I can figure out.”

  The landlady, muttering, opened the door a crack. But the storm was still howling, and a scattering of sand hissed on the floor.

  Chapter 29

  This time Alia and her uneasy crew traveled more than a thousand light-years away from the center of the Galaxy, and returned to the plane of the spiral arms, where the sky’s equator was a thick band of light, the compressed glow of the disc seen edge-on, and the Galaxy center itself was a huge sun that glowered behind scattered stars.

  They had come in search of the engine of the Redemption, Reath said enigmatically.

  They approached a world, another world with no name but only a number in the Commonwealth’s catalog. It was just another rust-red globe, a scrap of desert folded over on itself, calmly circling a shrunken sun.

  This world was old, far older than Earth. The whole stellar system was old. Billions of years of collisions had scoured it clean; it was a long time since even the sparkling flowers of comet impacts had disturbed the slumber of this world’s worn plains. It was all a bit depressing to Alia, but she was learning it was typical.

  Reath’s shuttle slid low through dust-laden air. The landscape was unprepossessing, worn away—and dominated by mounds that pushed out of the sand, low but neatly circular. They were just heaps, the same dull crimson color as the rest of the landscape, but they were regular, like perfect spheres buried in the dirt. The mounds were everywhere, peppering the shadows of worn-down continents, the filled-in seas. Some of them were kilometers across.

  Life had never advanced far on this shrunken world. But humans had come here, of course; in time they had been everywhere. Those low mounds were their signature.

  Reath said, “Water is the key to our kind of life—and most kinds of post-human life, too. On a world like this any surface water or ice has long since been lost, disassociated in the higher atmosphere. When the first colonists came, only the very deepest aquifers remained—so deep they hadn’t been dug out even by asteroid impacts, and so very difficult to reach—and there was more water bound into the mineral structures of the deeper rocks, perhaps hundreds of kilometers down.”

  “So if you wanted to live, you’d dig,” Drea guessed.

  “And that’s what the colonists did. Their settlements were mostly subsurface, with deep stalks going down hundreds of kilometers in search of water. Such settlements are always going to be cramped, confined. . . .”

  They all knew the story, the fate of such enclosed societies. And they knew what the mounds must conceal.

  The shuttle hovered over one of the larger mounds. Commonwealth monitoring posts ringed it in a loose circle. There were no landing facilities, no docks, but Alia could see the scars of previous landings splashed over the dirt. The breeze of the shuttle’s descent blew sand in snaking ripples over the surface of the mound. Alia thought she saw hands, small human hands, push out of the mound to pat the dirt back into place.

  “This mound will do,” Reath said. “Coalescences are different in detail, but all essentially the same. I don’t think it makes any difference which we pick.” To Alia’s surprise he started handing out face masks. “You’ll need these.”

  Alia had never worn such a thing; she had to be shown how to put it on. “Why? The Mist—”

  “The Mist doesn’t work in a Coalescence,” Reath said. “The air in there is special. Many Coalescent types use the air to communicate. Biochemicals. Scents, pheromones.”

  Bale adjusted Drea’s face mask for her, making sure it fit snugly all the way around. “And you don’t want stuff like that in your lungs,” he said, his voice muffled by his own mask.

  They faced each other, Alia and her sister, Reath, the three Campocs, their faces obscured by their translucent visors. Drea said, “We look like bugs!”

  They stepped out onto dirt that crunched softly under their feet. The gravity was low, only about a third standard, and Alia felt comfortably light on her feet. The pale brown sky was cloudless, and the stale air didn’t stir. Alia had the impression that there was little weather here. Theirs were the only footsteps to be seen.

  The mound rose up before her, as if growing out of the dirt; the Commonwealth monitoring stations, boxes of bright blue and yellow, sat impassively before it. “How do we get into this thing?”

  Reath said, “I don’t imagine it’s hard.” He faced the mound, spread his hands, and called into the empty air, “This is Alia, a Transcendent-Elect. You are here to serve her. She wants to speak to you
.”

  For long heartbeats nothing happened. Then the curved surface of the mound dimpled, and sand hissed away. A doorway opened up, a low archway, revealing a corridor that led off into darkness.

  Reath glanced at Alia. “Will you take the lead?”

  Alia could think of nothing she’d rather do less than walk into that mouth of strangeness. But she had her duty—or maybe it was just that she didn’t want to lose face.

  She stepped forward, into the archway. Loose sand trickled down over her, pattering on her faceplate.

  The dark corridor led to an inner door, like an airlock. When all five of them were inside the outer door closed. Alia glanced back at the closing door; she saw nothing but sand shifting into place, an unobtrusive technology.

  For an unpleasant heartbeat the six of them were locked in darkness, the silence broken only by the scratch of their breathing behind the masks. Then the inner door slid open. They all crowded through the hatch.

  They emerged into another corridor, low-roofed and with rounded walls of what looked like ceramic. Illuminated dimly by lamps inset into the walls, the corridor curved out of sight. They had to duck to avoid the low ceiling, even the squat Campocs.

  A few paces from the door a figure was waiting to greet them.

  Alia stepped forward. This was a woman, she thought—but slim and sexless, and dressed in a bland white robe. She was without hair; the naked skin of her face and scalp was blotchy. It was hard to tell how old she was, though her smallness and a certain delicacy about her features made her look young. Her eyes were her most striking feature, large, watery orbs with wide, watchful pupils: eyes adapted to twilight, Alia thought. She was expressionless.

  Reath nudged Alia. “Ask her who she is.”

  “I am Alia. Tell me your name.”

  The woman had to think it over. “My name is Berra.” Her accent was strong, but easily comprehensible. But she spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable separately: Be-rra. It was as if it were the first time she had heard the name herself. “You are the Transcendent-Elect.”