Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  And when her lab results started coming back the army officer and FBI agent started to look at her very quizzically. I could understand why. She had given them the DNA of a woman seventeen years dead.

  When they had done with their examinations, the medics insisted we get a little rest before the authority types started in on their interrogations. The FBI guy and the army officer agreed to a couple of hours. We weren’t going anywhere, the search through the debris at Prudhoe Bay, by fingertip, sniffer dog, and microscopic robot, was only just beginning—and I was sure our little private room would be saturated by surveillance technology, our every word and gesture monitored, recorded, and analyzed. Odd how you start to think like a criminal in situations like that.

  But they left us. And for the first time since her return, I was alone with Morag.

  We lay side by side on cots in a small private room, holding hands. As we calmed down, out of the rush of events, I had time to think, to feel. And I tentatively began to explore, in my head, the possibility that all this might be real.

  “I wonder what they’re making of me,” she said. “Not only should I be dead, that’s bad enough. I should be seventeen years older than I am. I’m probably freaking them all out.”

  “Maybe they think you’re a clone,” I said. “There are simpler explanations than—”

  “Than the truth?” She turned on her side and looked at me; her strawberry blond hair fell across her face. “And what about you? Is the truth freaking you out, too, Michael?”

  “What truth?” She had no answer.

  “I don’t know how I feel,” I said. “I feel like I’m waking up. You know? That it’s just sinking in.”

  “I know. I don’t know what to say. We’ll just have to give it time.” Her voice had that light lilt that was a legacy of her childhood, and her tone just the right frisson of humor. She was just as I remembered her, and more; she had even brought back things I had forgotten about her, things that had once been so precious.

  For seventeen years I had been storing up all I had longed to say to her, all I had longed to tell her I felt, after I thought I’d lost the opportunity for good. But somehow, with her there beside me, none of that stuff mattered. It was as if the intervening seventeen years had never existed. I was taken back to the immediacy of her death, how I had felt in the first days and weeks, and the wound was as raw as it had ever been. It made no sense, emotionally. But then the situation we were in made no sense. My heart wasn’t programmed for this, I thought.

  Morag was watching me. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.

  That made me laugh. “I’ve been through a lot. . . . You know, I think the doctors’ tests have started to make it more real for me. I mean, ghosts don’t have DNA, do they?”

  “I’m not a ghost,” she said faintly.

  “OK. But I think you’ve been haunting me all my life.”

  “All your life?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

  “Since I was a kid.” I’d never told her this before she had died. Now, though, I hesitantly ran through the strange story for her.

  She blew out her cheeks. “On any other day that would be a hell of a story.”

  “Do you remember any of this? Like those times on the beach, when I was nine or ten—”

  She said, frowning, “I feel like there are gaps. I don’t know, Michael.”

  I asked her the basic question bluntly. “How did you get here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why has it happened? Why are you here?”

  She had nothing to say.

  I propped myself on one elbow and looked at her. Now that I had started asking questions, more occurred, as if my brain was starting to work again. “Why should you be the age you are?” As far as I could tell from what the doctor had hinted, she was precisely the age she had been on the day of her death.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It just is.”

  “And how come you weren’t fazed to find out what date it is—seventeen years in your future?” I rubbed my own jowly jaw. “How come you weren’t horrified to find I’d turned into the oldest man in the universe?”

  “I just seemed to know where I was. When I was. The way you know such things anyhow, without thinking about it.”

  “But that must mean you were set up, somehow. Prepared for your return.”

  “Rebooted? Is that the word you’re looking for?” There was fear in her voice, doubt, but there was an edge of humor, too. “You were always such a tech-head, Michael. Believe me, I want to know, too. But I think you’re just skirting around the big questions.” She shook her head. “Seventeen years and you haven’t changed a bit.”

  She was right. Only a couple of hours after her reincarnation, metaphysics just didn’t matter. I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of my bed, and faced her. “All right, let’s get to it. There’s no sign of the pregnancy, is there? Or of the labor, the birth?”

  “So that doctor said.”

  “But you remember it all.”

  She frowned. “I went into labor too early. It hurt like hell. You rushed me to hospital, in the car.” I remembered; what a ride that was. “I was taken in for a C-section. I was drugged to the eyeballs, but the pain—I knew something was going wrong—” Suddenly she was weeping, even as she spoke; her shoulders shook, and she wiped angrily at her eyes. “Damn it, Michael, for me this only just happened.”

  My heart was being ripped apart. I longed to hold her, to comfort her. But a spasm of anger stopped me. “What else happened in between? A white light, a guy with a beard and a big book at a pearly gate—”

  “I don’t know.” She hid her eyes with her arm, a gesture I suddenly remembered so well. “Something . . . I can’t say. It’s not even like a memory. I didn’t ask for any of this, Michael.” Then she lowered her arm and faced me. “Just as I didn’t ask to have a relationship with John. You must know about that by now.”

  “How do you expect me to feel about that?”

  “It just happened,” she said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. You were away so much. . . . John and I worked together a lot. We just sort of fell into it. And then the pregnancy.”

  She had chosen not to terminate, she told me, even though the baby was obviously John’s, even though she knew how much hurt it would cause everybody—and even though the doctors had advised her to abort for the sake of her own health, I learned now—she couldn’t bear to lose it.

  “So you let me think it was mine.”

  “We didn’t know how to handle it. John and me. We didn’t know what to do for the best.”

  “Did you love him?”

  “Yes,” she said bravely. “But I loved you more, Michael. I always did. So did John. Neither of us wanted to hurt you. And then there was Tom to think about. I never planned to leave you, you know, to go to John. Our relationship was just a, a thing, and then we got caught out there. We didn’t know what to do. I’m not expecting you to sympathize, Michael, but we were both in a hell of a state.”

  It was hard to imagine John, my competent older brother, having got himself into such a mess.

  “We put off telling you,” she said. “We decided I’d wait until I had the baby—as much as we decided anything. Once it was born, once it existed—”

  “He,” I said. “The baby was a boy.”

  She took that in, and nodded carefully. “OK. Once he was there, it would all feel different. You remember how we were before Tom was born, frightened and elated all at the same time? But then once he was born things sort of clarified.”

  “I remember.”

  “So when the new baby came, when it was real, a person, we would see how we all felt. And then—”

  “And then you’d tell me that this wonderful bundle of joy was not mine but my older brother’s?”

  Anger flared in her eyes. “Is that all you think about, that it’s John’s child? If it had been some stranger’s, would you feel better?” She shook her head. “You’ve suddenly g
otten so old your face looks like it’s melted. But you’re still a little kid inside, still competing with your brother . . .”

  Maybe she was right. After all my fist still hurt from where I had punched John in the mouth. But I wanted to be careful not to think that way, not to go down that road, because I didn’t want to draw the conclusion, on any emotional level, that my brother had killed my wife. How could I live with such a thought in my head?

  We seemed to run down. We sat there facing each other.

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “We’ve only been together a couple of hours. You’ve been returned to me from the dead, for God’s sake, like fucking Lazarus. And we’re yelling in each other’s faces.”

  “You started it,” she snapped back.

  “No, I didn’t. You slept with my brother.”

  We stared each other out. Then we laughed, and fell together. I held her in my arms, and pressed her face to my neck. Her skin was smooth, astonishingly soft. It was young skin, I thought, young compared to mine, anyhow.

  “What about Tom?” she asked, whispering into my neck. “It’s going to be hard for him.”

  “I told him we’d get through this together.” I squeezed her hand. “And John. We’ll get through it somehow.”

  “Yes. But what a mess. A funny lot, you Pooles.”

  I pulled back and looked at her. I wondered if she knew George was dead. “How are you feeling now?”

  “I just came back from the dead,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”

  I was scared to ask it, but I had to. “Do you remember dying?”

  “No. I remember the table, the anesthetic, the pain. I remember a feeling that things were going wrong. It was like losing control, like a car going off the road.” That wasn’t a metaphor that anybody would use nowadays. She pulled back a bit and looked at her own hand, flexing her fingers. “I feel as if I’ve had a close shave. As if I nearly got caught by the ocean current, or nearly fell off the cliff. My heart is thumping. You know? I feel as if I nearly died.” She stared at me, helpless, looking for guidance. “But I did die, didn’t I?”

  And we were both weeping again.

  But there was doubt in my heart. At first none of this had seemed real at all. Then, as we floated into the hospital here through the equally unreal experience of a Chinook flight, I guess I had just accepted the whole thing as a happy miracle. Now, though, as my head started to work again, the glow seemed to be fading, and questions began to press me.

  The fact was, whatever mechanism had brought her back and whatever reason it had for doing so, since her death seventeen years of life had gone by for me, a life I had lived without her, which she had never shared. So there was a barrier between us, seventeen years deep. That thought made me cry even more.

  We stayed that way, crying and hugging, until the FBI agent came to ask us hard questions about the events at Prudhoe Bay.

  Chapter 48

  Drea came to Earth, to offer Alia some support. They met in a small hut near the center of the Transcendents’ community beneath the cathedral. The cabin’s walls were translucent, and if Alia looked up she could see the monumental tetrahedral arching scraping at the sky.

  Leropa sat with them, a chill, motionless presence.

  They had to sit on pallets; there were no chairs in this little room, and its floor was just a woven carpet scattered over the dirt. Somehow this was typical of the Transcendence, Alia thought, its ambition soaring out of this external shabbiness. She wondered now if the drabness of the worlds she had seen, the Rustball and the Dirtball, even Earth itself, had something to do with the stupendous distraction of the Transcendence: unhealthily introverted, obsessed with the past, it was not sufficiently engaged with the present—and it neglected the impoverished worlds of its human subjects.

  Through the hut walls she could see others of the community, other Transcendents. They were just a bunch of very old people, making their slow and cautious way through the ancient rubble of the cathedral, trailed by their serving bots and a few human attendants. But there were patterns in the way they moved, subtle interactions. It was a kind of flocking that was a shadow of the sparkling constellations of thought she had glimpsed within the Transcendence itself. But it was a grotesquely diminished shadow.

  And today the Transcendents’ movements were disturbed, edgy, as if something was troubling them.

  It is doubt, Alia thought uneasily. A vast doubt embedded in the cosmic mind, folding down into the fragile bodies of these Transcendents. That is why they seem so disturbed. And perhaps I am the source of that doubt.

  Drea was watching the undying, too. Boldly she asked Leropa, “Why aren’t you like them?”

  Leropa looked out of the hut at her peers. She sat with her legs crossed, in no apparent discomfort. “One thing, perhaps. I never had children.”

  Alia sat forward. It was the first time Leropa had told her anything of her own past. “You didn’t? Why not?”

  “Because I am undying, of course. If I had had children, I would likely have outlived some of them. Even if they bred true and were undying themselves, accident statistics dictate that some would have gone before me. We humans haven’t evolved to outlive our children. Can I not be spared that?”

  Drea said, “But they would have had children of their own.”

  “Yes, and then what? You feel a bond with your great-grandchildren, I’m told, or even a generation or two later. But after that the genes are diluted by a muddy tide of the semen and estrus of strangers. Occasionally in the great crowd of your descendants a chance gathering of features will remind you of you, or your children, of what once was. But mostly, whatever there was that defined you is simply washed away, like everything else in this transient universe of ours.

  “And still they breed, your descendants, on and on. Soon they are so remote they don’t feel as if they have anything to do with you at all. After a thousand years their belief systems will have changed utterly. Chances are they may not even speak the same language. Your genetic contribution dilutes further, diffusing through the population like a disease. Given enough time, nothing is preserved, Alia, nothing you build, nothing you pass on, not even your genetic legacy, save only in a cold biochemical sense. How crushing that is, how desolating, how isolating! And of course, it’s all quite irrelevant.”

  “Irrelevant to what?”

  “To the great project of immortality—of personal survival. Alia, if you choose not to die then you are doing it for you, not your descendants—because you are choosing not to clear the stage for them.”

  “So you compete with your own children.”

  “You must. That is why only individuals muddled by sentimentality and doubt would choose to have children; it is contradictory to the basic goal of longevity.”

  And even the impulses of the genes were served, in a sense, Alia thought. The genes strove for their own biochemical survival. If they could not be passed on to the young, then their only means of survival was in the body of their undying host. This was the final logic of immortality: an immortal must displace her own children.

  If we were animals, Alia thought, we would eat our young. She said, “And you have no regret?”

  Leropa looked at her scornfully. “Have you not listened? There is nothing to regret. Better to be alone than to be abandoned. No wonder all those out there are flattened by time! This is a choice you will soon have to make for yourself, Alia. To have a child is to open the door to death, for it means the dissolution of self.”

  How cold, Alia thought, how selfish. So much for the love of the Transcendence.

  They sat in the shabby tent, displaced in time and space, while the undying shuffled in the dirt.

  Chapter 49

  We were all held for a week, in the secure but smothering confines of the hospital at Fairbanks. We weren’t even allowed out to attend the funerals of Makaay and the others—not even the state funeral of Edith Barnette, a vice president assassinated like the pr
esident she had once served.

  Morag was an unresolvable problem for the authorities.

  As far as they were concerned she had just appeared out of nowhere. In their endless stocktaking of orderly births and deaths her sudden appearance was as jarring an event as a disappearance would have been, the mirror-image of a murder or an abduction. Immigration also needed an explanation for her presence on American soil. And they needed to understand how it could be that she had the DNA of an American citizen seventeen years in the grave.

  Shelley muttered darkly about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind. “They’re bothered about a few anomalies in records of births and deaths. But Morag appeared out of nowhere. What about the conservation of mass? Shouldn’t we all be arrested for breaking that little law?”

  There was certainly nothing Morag herself could tell them. She seemed to have a reasonably complete set of memories up to the moment of her death, seventeen years before. Past that point she seemed to have some partial information—impressions, not memories. On some deep level of her mind she seemed to know that seventeen years had worn away, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. The doctors hypothesized about parallels with amnesiac cases. I doubted that was going to lead them anywhere.

  The FBI seemed eventually to settle on a hypothesis that she was an illegal clone of some kind. I was happy for them to lose themselves in that fantasy; I knew there was nothing else to find. Her legal status remained a puzzle. She certainly wasn’t Morag Poole, the person who had died so long ago, not in the eyes of the law. So she was assigned an open “Jane Doe” file—“like a faceless corpse fished out of the river,” as she said herself.