Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  But it was not enough.

  For one thing the present was an imperfect window of the past. Human records were always incomplete, and often full of lies anyhow. Of course there were physical traces to be retrieved, and legions of new archaeologists descended on all the worlds of mankind, and especially Earth. Some elements of the past were recorded in the genetic legacy of mankind itself, still carried within human bodies, even though they had been scattered across the Galaxy, morphing and changing as they went. But various catastrophic events, natural or otherwise, had left huge blanks in all such records.

  And no matter how complete the records might be, there was still the question of interpretation—of the meaning of the events, the motivations and intentions of the characters of the times, many so remote from the Transcendents as to be practically another species. A new generation of historians sprang up, arguing over differences of meaning great and small.

  It was all very unsatisfactory. So, even as the first dioramas were established, efforts continued to deepen and widen the Redemption. And at last a new way to excavate the past was discovered.

  On the Nord, only very small children thought the universe was infinite. Just because it looked that way didn’t make it so, any more than the apparent flatness of a planet meant it had to be an infinitely flat plane. The universe was finite: closed, folded over on itself. To Alia the finiteness of the universe was as obvious and intuitive as, to an Earthborn child, it was obvious that the sun was a star.

  And it was useful. As the Transcendence had sought ways to recover its past, it had fallen on the closure of the universe. For time and space were not separate entities but merged into one unity, spacetime. And so in a finite universe the closure must be complete in time as well as in space. Just as one side of the universe was connected to the other, so the very far future was connected to the very remote past.

  And that was how you could detect the past: by listening for its echoes.

  The finite universe had a topology, a connectedness imposed at the Big Bang, the instant of the initial singularity. Sitting inside the universe, you couldn’t see that topology directly. But there were ways to sense its presence.

  Alia had once had a toy, a virtual game. It was like a slab of sky inside a cubical box. Battling spacecraft, black alien bad guys and heroic Exultant greenships, would slide through the sky, firing cherry-red beams at each other. But the game wasn’t confined to the walls of the box. If a ship hit a wall, it would disappear—but would reappear on the other side of the box, heading the same way. So, even though they were separated in space, the points on each wall mapped precisely onto the corresponding points on the opposite wall. It was as if the whole of the universe were tiled, filled with identical copies of the game, joined side to side. Once you got used to it you could use the strange folded-over property as part of your tactics; you could send your greenships to sneak around the universe’s “curve” and fall on the aliens from behind.

  And you could play other games. You could imagine setting off an explosion somewhere in the box. A spherical shock wave would set off in all directions. It would stay a simple sphere until the front passed through the walls of the box, after which it would fold around and intersect itself, forming circular arcs all over the place. Alia could see that if you sat in the middle of the box and watched those shock-circles blossoming all over your sky, you could use the pattern to figure out the geometry of your box-cosmos. It was just as you could figure out the lattice structure of a crystal by studying the patterns in the way electrons were diffracted passing through it. The whole of spacetime was a lens, shaping the radiation that washed through it.

  The Listeners’ purpose was to explore this tremendous diffraction. They mapped gravity waves, ripples in spacetime itself, deep and long, spreading at light speed from the universe’s most titanic events: the explosive deaths of stars and galaxy cores, the collisions of black holes and galaxies. Gravity ripples passed further than any other, and they offered, indirectly, the clearest possible map of the universe, its structure, and its contents. “Remarkable,” Reath breathed. “And so these ‘Listeners’ watch the laser light with those big eyes of theirs. These long light beams are sensitive to disturbance by the gravity waves which wash through the core of the planet.” Strangely, some gravity wave frequencies were in the rages of a few thousand cycles per second: converted to sound waves, they were audible to human ears. The Listeners actually heard the chirp of colliding neutron stars, the warble of one black hole absorbing another.

  The gravity-wave echoes washed around the closed universe, from pole to pole—and from future to past. The information the Listeners sought from their gravity waves wasn’t just about the great physical events of the universe. It was about the history of mankind.

  The Transcendence had conceived a great project. It would build a probe that it would send into the furthest future, and thereby hurl it into the deepest past. And there, hiding in the dark at the rim of Sol system, this monitor from the future would witness the unfolding of mankind’s deepest history—and it would send the whole complex story back around the curve of the universe to the great entity that had constructed it. The Listeners recorded these whispers, sent from the deepest past to the furthest future. Once retrieved, the news from history was analyzed and stored in Coalescent archives, and disseminated to form the basis of the Witnessing.

  Thus the past was brought into the present of the Transcendence. And, buried somewhere in that immense lode of data mined from the past, was the wormlike thread of Michael Poole’s biography.

  Reath disturbed Alia from her absorption. It was as if she came back to herself, back to the dismal cavern of the Listeners, from a dream of cosmic unity.

  Reath studied her, analytical but uneasy. “Have you learned enough?”

  She frowned, thinking. “I’ve learned how we recover the past. But I’ve yet to learn how we use that information. It isn’t over yet, Reath.”

  “Then what next?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He sat beside her. “So we go on. Alia, I’m concerned you’re becoming sidetracked from your true purpose.”

  She returned his gaze blankly. “What does it matter to you? I thought you said it’s up to me to find my own way into the Transcendence. Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?”

  “You have tasted the Transcendence, but you are still alone, still Alia. And it is Alia’s curiosity you are indulging. If you only gave yourself up to the Transcendence, all your doubts and questions would wash away. I’ve seen it many times before.” He clearly meant that to be reassuring, and perhaps it would have seemed so once, but now his bland assurances chilled her. “And besides,” he went on, “are you sure these questions you have come from your own heart? Don’t forget these Campocs blackmailed you into this whole line of questioning about the Redemption.”

  She said coldly, “The Campocs’ methods were primitive. Brutal. But the questions they raised are valid. Reath, I want to resolve all my doubts before the Transcendence swallows me up. Is that so hard to understand?”

  Reath frowned. “Your language of ‘swallowing up’ is inappropriate. The Transcendence is an augmentation, not a diminishing.”

  But I’d rather be alone and sane, Alia thought darkly, than conjoined into a vast insanity. I have to be sure. But she couldn’t possibly say that to Reath, of course.

  “We go on,” she said firmly.

  “Yes, but where to?” Drea asked uneasily.

  The Listeners seemed to be getting used to the visitors’ presence. They scuttled back and forth across the floor of their chamber, their huge eyes capturing the flickering of their light beams.

  Drea stared at them in disgust. “This is a terrible place.”

  Suddenly Alia felt confined, trapped, buried under this great mound of tunneled-through dirt. She turned to Reath. “Let’s get out of here—”

  Berra gasped. She staggered and reached out to Alia, who recoiled.

  Reath took
Alia’s arm. “Try to be calm,” he murmured. “Don’t alarm Berra further. We need her guidance to get out of here before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Before she fulfills her final duty to the hive.”

  “What final duty? What’s wrong with her?”

  “Why, don’t you see? She needs to keep us here, as long as she can. She needs you, Alia.”

  Berra had been born with the potential for intelligence. But she had probably never been fully conscious, self-aware—not before Alia arrived.

  “Because,” Alia said slowly, “it’s best if a drone doesn’t know she’s a drone.”

  “Yes. Which is why in most hives, drones shed their higher cognition. But there are circumstances when intelligence is too useful to lose altogether—when the Coalescence is attacked, for example, or has to be moved.”

  “Or when a Transcendent-Elect comes asking questions,” Alia said.

  “Yes. Alia, Berra lucked out. She was just the interfacer who happened to be closest when we came calling. She may not even have known our language before she was needed. She probably didn’t even have a name before, because it was better that she didn’t. It was as if she woke up, for the first time in her life, the moment you walked through the door.”

  “But now we’re leaving,” Alia said. “She can go back to the way she was. Can’t she?”

  Reath shook his head. “Alia, Berra has served the hive well. But now she knows too much: she knows who she is, that she is a drone. And she has nowhere else to go. Alia, she will be dead before we leave the planet.”

  Alia stared in horror at Berra. The little drone seemed to be folding over on herself, as if imploding, still staring at Alia.

  Alia couldn’t stand it. She Skimmed away, right out of there, out of the heart of the hive. She found herself standing on the rusty plain once more. She ripped off her face mask and sucked in the dusty air.

  Chapter 32

  While we worked with Ruud Makaay on fleshing out EI’s involvement in our gas-hydrates project, Shelley and I stayed in Palm Springs.

  We were guests of EI in a grand, somewhat faded hotel. Its outer shell had been Painted so that it glittered silver in the dry sunlight like a vast, complicated Christmas-tree bauble. Inside there was a gigantic pool, and an even bigger bar, where a robot pianist gently played Chopin. But no guests.

  Shelley had a lot of work to do, as always. She worked eight or nine hours in every day, some of it with Makaay and the EI staff. But she also kept in contact with clients, suppliers, and contacts all around the world, and those nine work-hours were scattered randomly through each twenty-four. She worked in the hotel’s small computer-aided-design booth, in her swimsuit or a fluffy hotel bathrobe, surrounded by VR visitors, or ghostly circuitry plans, or mock-ups of intricate mechanical assemblies. She had an admirable capacity to function well at three in the morning, and catch up with a catnap at four in the afternoon.

  So I spent some time alone. It was close to midsummer and off season, but even so Palm Springs had an echoing, empty feel. The twentieth-century wealth and ease of transportation that had built the place had drained away, leaving a glittering bubble in the desert air. It wasn’t so bad for me. I felt as if I’d been through a lot, and Palm Springs, big and depopulated, was a good place to let the tension drain away. If only I played golf the place would have been perfect, I thought.

  Shelley and I did spend our spare time together. We ate, swam, walked, talked. I was always extremely fond of Shelley. Competent, engaged, humorous, at ease in her life and her work, she was the kind of human being that I’d always aspired to be. And I think she was fond of me, too, even though compared to her I was a no-hoper—never reliable, always inclined to flakiness. But I was “never short of ideas,” she would sometimes say. You needed somebody around to come up with the impulse to do things, and I was a source of that—as witness our hydrate stabilization project itself.

  For sure a life with Shelley, who was sane, engaged, and alive, would have been good for me—if not always for her. But it was never going to happen, because, as she had said herself, Morag was always there, for better or worse as attached to me as my right arm, and there was no point behaving as if it wasn’t so. I sometimes regretted that fact. I think Shelley did a little, too. But our relationship had its place in my notional spectrum of possibilities. So it goes.

  I talked to Rosa in Seville a few times. She was “digging up old ghost stories,” she told me a bit mysteriously. Sometimes she spooked me herself: behind her small face, so accurately reproduced by the hotel’s VR systems, I felt I glimpsed the shadowy conclaves of the Vatican, great mounds of knowledge that had accumulated for two millennia—and, perhaps, even stranger archives still.

  After seven days Ruud Makaay called us back to his Mojave headquarters, where, he said, he would be organizing a seminar on our proposals.

  We gathered in a conference room in the EI compound. The room itself was a clear-walled cube. There was a long table with a dozen chairs, evidently a mix of real and VR seamlessly joined. That was all there was; the room felt unfinished, a sketch. But in a virtual economy you flaunted your wealth by showing less.

  Makaay, Shelley, and I were the only flesh-and-blood attendees. Tom and Sonia Dameyer projected in from England. I took a seat beside Tom, real and unreal side by side at the same table. I was inordinately glad to see him; I still hadn’t got over that Siberia experience, if I ever would. Tom looked uncomfortable to be here, though.

  Vander Guthrie from the Global Ecosystems Analyzer facility in Oklahoma materialized out of the air. He looked as awkward as ever, his hair’s sky-blue tint ridiculous, and he grinned nervously at me. And he carried a little toy robot that he set on the tabletop. The robot rolled experimentally back and forth, friction sparks emanating from its plastic belly. In a tinny space voice it proclaimed, “A little slippery, but I think I can cope.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Tom groused. “Dad, what is this, a freak show?”

  “Gea is supporting us. It’s significant, Tom.”

  “It’s ridiculous, is what it is. What am I doing here?”

  I longed to touch his hand. “If not for you none of us would be here. Just take it easy and follow your heart.”

  Tom snorted, but sat still.

  On his other side, Sonia caught my eye and smiled faintly. He’ll be OK. I was grateful for the wordless message, and glad she was there, sane and calm. Sanity and calmness do seem to be in short supply in my bloodline.

  Ruud Makaay, sleek and competent as ever, pinged the water glass in front of him with his fingernail. “May I call us to order? Thank you all for being here, one way or another. . . .”

  Our purpose, he said, was to review the work done so far on fleshing out the hydrate-stabilizer scheme, and to decide on next steps.

  Tom was immediately suspicious, even hostile. “Next steps? Such as you taking the whole thing over so you can get rich drilling fucking great holes in the North Pole?”

  I said quickly, “Tom, take it easy. The EI people are helping us out here.”

  “Oh, sure.”

  If Makaay was perturbed by this unpromising opening he didn’t show it. “We’re here to review the work we’ve done on a problem we all accept as serious. So for now let’s build on what we have in common, rather than focus on our differences. Can we agree on that much?”

  The Gea robot rolled back and forth. I wondered what she made of all this interpersonal, typically human bullshit. And yet, I supposed, she depended absolutely on people, with all our imperfections, to get things done; she had to put up with us.

  Shelley took the cue. “Shall I start?” She stood, walked to the head of the table, and with waves of her hands began to conjure up VR images of complicated bits of engineering, gleaming and flawless. The core of it was a device shaped something like a bullet, with a complicated tracery of flanges and ducts engraved on its nose. At its heart I saw a spark, a soul in the machinery.

  Shelley pro
duced a variety of representations of this thing, some transparent, cutaway, or exploded. “We call this a mole,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of our design. But each mole will be small, no larger than a clenched fist. . . .”

  To stabilize the hydrate strata it would be necessary to thread it with coolant pipes, just as in our original back-of-the-envelope sketch. The teams Shelley had gathered to flesh out the idea were adhering to that basic design. And they were still assuming that liquid nitrogen, drawn down as a gas from the air and then cooled and liquefied, would be the working fluid. You’d pass the nitrogen through the underground pipes where it would evaporate back to a gas, in the process drawing in heat from the hydrate layers, and then it would be passed out of the pipes for recondensing. That way you would effectively pump heat out of the ground.

  But to stabilize a band of hydrates that passed right around the pole of the planet we would need hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipe. It just wasn’t practical to fabricate and implant so much.

  “Which is where the mole comes in,” Shelley said. “It will be like a self-propelled drill bit.” The flanged nose on the most solid representation whirred, its function obvious. “And it will lay tunnels, not pipes. It will simply burrow its way through the ground, just like a mole. But the tunnel it digs out won’t be allowed to collapse.” She indicated a range of little devices attached to the side of the mole. “We will shore up the tunnel as we go, using local materials. The precise technique will depend on what we find down there, which is going to vary according to the local geology. . . . The walls of the tunnel will themselves be smart, of course, and capable of some limited self-repair, though in case of major breaches such as through seismic movement we can always send down more moles.