Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Chapter 34

  I spoke to Rosa again. She told me, “There has been an upsurge in sightings—hauntings, poltergeist phenomena, you name it—all over the planet.”

  “Really? I had no idea.”

  She snorted. “Why would you? You would not look in the places where you might discover such things. Nor would I, in normal times. But, prompted by your experiences, I have been researching. You aren’t alone, Michael, for better or worse. The whole world is suddenly haunted! And this has happened before. History shows it; there have been previous plagues of ghosts. Now, what do you suppose this means?”

  I had no idea. I didn’t know whether to be reassured or terrified.

  I felt guilty about working on this stuff in the middle of the hydrate project. I kept it a secret from Tom, Shelley, and the others. It was like I was looking at porn. But I did it. I summoned Rosa, like raising a VR ghost, to my Palm Springs hotel room.

  In the flimsy gaudiness of the room, with its late-twentieth-century American tourist chic, Rosa was a dark, sullen mass, small and hunched, her priest’s robes so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air. When she first appeared she seemed disconcerted. She looked around as if finding it hard to focus. Then she saw me, and nodded, unsmiling. “Michael.”

  I asked, “Are you OK? You look a little travel-sick.”

  Her mouth twitched, a characteristically minimal expression from Aunt Rosa. But her response came a discernible fraction of a second after the cue, enough to remind me that this was not real, that we were not together separated by light speed delays. “I’m fine. But the older I get the harder it is for my system to accommodate multiple realities. As you will learn.” She looked down at her black eroded pillar of a body, spread her liver-spotted hands. “Just think! I do not actually need to look like this. I could have materialized as Marilyn Monroe—have you ever heard of her?”

  “Perhaps we should sit down.”

  Rosa rested her hands on something—it materialized when she touched it, a light, high-backed chair—and dragged it toward my table. “We may as well look as if we share the same universe,” she said.

  I walked to the table and sat stiffly. I described EI’s conference room to her. “It was a hell of a lot better than this. Really, you wouldn’t have known who was really there and who wasn’t, the interfaces were that good. Of course the illusion relies on the human factor, on protocols. You have to make sure you don’t break the rules, do things that are impossible in the consensual reality—”

  “Like this?” She reached out of shot and picked up a mug. Like the chair, it appeared out of nowhere, captured by her imaging system as a contiguous part of her extended self. “As a Catholic priest I spend an awful lot of my time on protocols, of one kind or another. I don’t imagine we could run our lives, or manage our souls, without them. I wonder if your apparitions follow their own protocols. Are they systematic, confined by rules? . . .”

  And so we were getting to the point.

  Rosa conjured up a VR reconstruction of those strange moments in Spain, as the dust storm had closed in. A miniaturized slab of the Reef coalesced out of the air over my tabletop, and I cleared the water jug and other junk off the table to save confusing the system.

  Lumpy and massive, the virtual Reef looked like the papier-mâché hillsides I used to build as a kid to drive my toy cars over. But the representation was finely detailed. I could see the glittering of crushed automobile hoods and smashed windscreens, and I picked out the crudely hewn stairs that led up to the cave where Rosa and I had eaten. And when I bent down to peer into the mouth of the cave, I saw two little figures sitting at a table. Each the size of my thumbnail, they were charming, like toys in a doll’s house; I had an impulse to pick up the tiny model of me and examine it more closely.

  “This is a reconstruction,” Rosa said. “The records are sparse. The Reef is thinly monitored, relatively. This is the best we can do, for now.”

  The projection ran forward. The dust storm descended, a crimson cloud descending in silence, like weather on Mars.

  Then she appeared—Morag, the visitor, on the slope of the Reef. I saw that toy representation of myself throw back his chair and dart out of his metal-walled cave in pursuit. The little Rosa and the burly landlady dragged him back, and Morag retreated into the dark shadows of the storm. All this was played out in silence. As Morag was on the cusp of vanishing into the dust cloud, Rosa froze the image.

  “Can you magnify this thing?” I touched the doll image of Morag; my finger brushed her, scattering tiny pixels.

  The image ballooned, but as it enlarged it became increasingly fuzzy. When the face expanded it was no more than a sketch, a default female-human. It could have been anybody. I was crushingly disappointed.

  “This is based on the available records, and on what I saw,” Rosa said. “My eyes are good, better than I deserve at such an age. But the figure was simply too far away, the dust swirling and obscuring.”

  “You are painfully honest,” I said.

  “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary validation.”

  “So you can’t be sure it was Morag.”

  “I’m sorry.” The magnified image of Morag dissipated. “And I wasn’t able to capture any of her speech—that strange high-speed monologue we heard.”

  I rubbed my chin. “So this is all we have. If only the surveillance density had been greater! Bad luck she showed up in a place like this.”

  “That might not have been a coincidence at all,” Rosa said. “If she, or whoever is behind the apparition, is determined to remain obscure—to tantalize rather than to reveal—then she would naturally do it this way, in a place where surveillance is sparse, in glimpses through dust clouds, retreating.”

  “Why do you call it an apparition? It’s a ghost—isn’t it?”

  She sat back in her chair. “Not necessarily. Michael, I’m afraid to deal with this we will have to delve into the pseudo-science of the supernatural. . . .”

  Humans stick words on things, like bright yellow labels. It is our way of dealing with the universe. And even phenomena that are not part of our consensual reality have accumulated a vocabulary of their own.

  “An apparition is just that, an appearance of something,” Rosa said. “If you want an even broader label for what is happening here, you can talk of a haunting as an interaction between an agent and a percipient—your Morag-figure is the agent, you see, and you the percipient. The agent could be some external phenomenon, either natural or supernatural, or maybe something emanating from inside your own head: all of these are agents, you see. The language is nonjudgmental. Now, a true ghost is something more specific: a ghost is one class of apparition, a manifestation of somebody deceased.”

  “Morag is dead.” Absurd how difficult it was to say that, even after all these years.

  “Yes,” Rosa said. “But we don’t know if this is Morag in any sense. And there are other types of apparitions.”

  You could also have visions of people who were still alive: there were “wraiths” and “crisis ghosts,” manifestations of living people going through some trauma. You had ghosts of the specialized kind, like poltergeists. You had animal ghosts. And so on.

  Hauntings of all kinds had a long history, she said. Arguably you could trace the idea of ghosts all the way back to the tale of Gilgamesh, four thousand years back. The ancient Greeks and Romans told each other ghost stories, and the more rational of them tried to investigate hauntings and other spooky phenomena.

  “The early Church accepted the idea of ghosts, of spirits that could be detached from the body. This was bound up with competing theories of the nature of our immortal souls. In the end the early Church fathers came up with the notion of Purgatory, a place somewhere between Heaven and Hell, where restless souls could lodge. Such ideas were attacked by later thinkers—during the Reformation, for instance. But they, or rationalized versions, remain part of the Church’s corpus of beliefs.

  “And the
apparitions seem to keep up with technological advances,” she said with her characteristic dry humor. “As soon as photography was invented ghosts started showing up in images—never clear enough to be used as proof of the ghosts’ existence, of course.”

  Thomas Edison had tried to invent machines to detect apparitions. I was intrigued by that; after all it seemed no more fantastic a thing for Edison to try than other astonishing things he had succeeded in doing, such as lighting up cities with electricity, or capturing human voices in wax.

  “When the Internet spread that was immediately haunted, too; people received spectral e-mails from senders who never existed.”

  “And now they show up even in virtual reality,” I said ruefully.

  “But still leaving no trace,” Rosa said.

  Talking this way helped me deal with the whole issue, I think. It wasn’t so much that Rosa took me seriously but the reassurance I derived from her patient analytical probing. As Rosa analyzed and classified, and picked apart cause and effect, motive and design, she was breaking open the mystery and arbitrariness that had baffled and distracted me from the start. This needn’t be overwhelming, a nightmare: that was the subtext of her dialogue with me.

  But I felt more uneasy to be discussing ghosts and hauntings in that gaudy Palm Springs hotel room than I had in Spain. A place like Seville, steeped in millennia of blood-soaked history, was a place where it had felt right to contemplate deeper orders of reality. Palm Springs, bless it, was a monument to the trivial, the sensual; defiant in its own shallow reality it seemed to consume the whole universe, leaving no room for mystery.

  Or maybe I was just feeling guilty about spending time on all this “spooky stuff,” as Tom persisted in calling it.

  “Complicated thing, guilt,” Rosa had said when I tried to tell her about this. “We Catholics have been thinking about it for two thousand years, and we still have not figured it out. My advice is to embrace it,” she said dryly. “Good for the soul.”

  Now she told me that whatever was happening to me, I evidently wasn’t alone.

  There had been a huge upsurge in sightings of apparitions of all kinds, all over the world. The trend had been upward since the first few decades of the century, and was now going “off the scale,” she said.

  “Even if each and every one of these sightings, including yours, is in some way bogus, their simultaneity is surely telling us something.”

  I shrugged. “Yes. But what?”

  She waggled a finger at me. “You are making progress, Michael, but you still have some way to go. If this were an engineering problem you would not be so helpless in your thinking. You would be looking for lines of attack, wouldn’t you? Such as seeking out more data.”

  “And that’s what you’ve been doing?”

  She had been digging into historical records, she said. She had hoped to find records of incidents there which might shed light on what was happening in the present.

  And she had succeeded.

  There had been similar waves of “hauntings” in the past. In the crisis of the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, when perhaps a third of the population was lost, there were many accounts of hauntings, visitations, and other manifestations. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols had erupted out of central Asia, plundering and massacring as they drove into China, Southeast Asia, and Europe—and, it seemed, they had driven a wave of ghost sightings and supernatural events before them.

  Some of her examples were drawn from the archaeological rather than the historic record. “Take the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas,” she said. “In the few decades after Columbus’s first landfall they suffered a massive implosion of population numbers, through disease and overwork, massacre and dislocation at the hands of the colonists.”

  “And they saw ghosts?”

  “Recent archaeology shows a huge rising in occult symbolism and practice—and this in societies obsessed by the occult anyhow. Carvings on doors. Sacrifices. Corpses dug up and reinterred.”

  “The Spaniards scared the hell out of them. Maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria.”

  She shook her head. “This occurred before Columbus landed. In those last decades there was a crisis coming, certainly, a terrible, culture-terminating, genocidal crisis. But they couldn’t have known it yet—not by any causal chain as we understand it.”

  She quoted more examples, still more obscure to me.

  “I’m impressed,” I said. “I never heard of most of this.”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said tartly. “But then I have access to records which are not available to the general public . . .”

  I wondered what she was talking about. The Vatican and its old, deep libraries? Or perhaps, even more sinister, she meant the strange community that had brought her up, the Order; I wondered what records were kept there.

  But I could come up with confirming examples of my own. I vaguely remembered uncle George’s talk of UFO scares. Born in 1960, he had actually missed the crest of that particular wave of witnessing of preternatural visitations, but he had been briefly fascinated by the lore of it all when he was a teenager. But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the threat of massive nuclear war faded, the UFOs went away. The pattern was the same, I saw uneasily. It was another wave of visitations in advance of an impeding crisis, if interpreted in twentieth-century terms, in a science-fiction-informed language of aliens and spacecraft rather than specters and ectoplasm. It just happened that in this case the feared crisis, the glare of the Bomb, hadn’t come about.

  Rosa said, “And if you accept the premise that waves of apparitions occur when mankind faces a bottleneck—”

  “Then there should be a wave about now, as we face the Warming.”

  “Yes. With the hydrate release, perhaps, as the killer punch. A wave of haunting—a world full of experiences exactly like yours—is exactly what one should expect.”

  “OK,” I said. “Suppose I accept your argument that I’m in the middle of some kind of global presaging of disaster. What I can’t see is why. What’s the point?”

  “Ah,” she said, smiling. “Now that is an engineer’s question. What’s the function of all this? Oh, I can think of a whole range of interpretations . . . Try this. Everything about us, from our toenails to our most advanced cognitive functions, is shaped by evolution. You’ve heard me argue this way before. If a feature didn’t give us some selective advantage it wouldn’t have emerged in the first place, or would have withered away long ago. Do you accept that?”

  I wasn’t sure I did. “Go on.”

  “If that’s true, and if these visitations, and their timing coinciding with great crises, are real phenomena, then one must ask—what’s the evolutionary advantage? How can these visitors help us?”

  “By providing continuity?”

  “Perhaps. A linking of the better past to a hopeful future, through a desperate present . . . Perhaps an intelligent species needs some kind of external memory store, an external mass consciousness, to help it ride out the worst times.”

  “That sounds very fishy to me,” I said. “I thought selection wasn’t supposed to work at the level of the species, but the individual, or the kin group.”

  “Maybe so. But wouldn’t it be an advantage if it did emerge? If there were lots of bands of intelligent animals running around the planet—and a global crisis hit—wouldn’t the pack with the cultural continuity offered by a halo of ghosts, no matter how imperfect the information channels, have a clear advantage?”

  She was smiling. I could see she was enjoying the speculation. But right now I felt I was floundering.

  “So Morag could be a ghost of some kind. But not a ghost from the past. A ghost from the future. Is that what you’re saying? But how is that possible?”

  Rosa said, “A Catholic thinker would have no real trouble with that idea. Theologians don’t believe in time travel! But we do imagine eternity, a timeless instant outside time altogether, like the constant light that shin
es through the flickering frames of our movie-reel lives. So a visitor from eternity, an angel, can intervene at any time, historically, she chooses, because it’s all the same—it is all one to her, all in one moment, like a reel of movie film held in your hand. There is no difference between past and future to God.”

  “You think big, don’t you?”

  With her right hand she pointed up to Heaven. “There’s nowhere bigger than Up There.”

  We were disturbed by a chime, the VR equivalent of a knock on the door. I was almost relieved to take a break from all this spookiness.

  It turned out to be my brother, John, who had logged on to give me a hard time.

  Projected from his office in New York, John’s VR was of an altogether higher quality than Rosa’s. It was the middle of his working day, and he was dressed in a dark business suit. I was struck by how big and solid he looked, just like Ruud Makaay.

  John greeted Rosa civilly enough. He even cracked a joke. “If you shared my VR protocols I could give you a kiss.” But their manner with each other was watchful.

  I realized that I had no idea what contact there had been between the two of them. After all she was John’s long-lost aunt as well as mine. Was it possible this was the first time they had “met”? But I felt intimidated even to ask.

  You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, VR or otherwise. Two brothers and an aunt, suspicious, wary, facing each other down like rival gangland bosses: what a cold family we were, I reflected, what a damaged bunch.

  “What do you want, John?”

  He sighed. “It’s a little tricky. I saw you were logged on, and I saw who you’re speaking to. I don’t mean to snoop but I am paying for the calls. Can I speak freely?”

  Rosa said sharply, “As long as you get to the point, fine.”

  “Michael, people are concerned about you.” He waved a hand. “About all this. You know what I mean.”

  “And they spoke to you, right?”

  “Don’t be resentful,” he snapped. “I’m trying to help.”