Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  She glanced around the room. She rubbed a cautious finger along the back of a chair, pulled it out, and tried sitting on it. But she didn’t look comfortable, with her knees tucked up and her arms dangling to the ground. So with a lithe, graceful swing, she leapt up to the tabletop and sat in a kind of lotus position.

  She said, “I’ve Witnessed you all my life, but I don’t know much about your social protocol. Is it OK to sit on your table?”

  I shrugged. “It’s not even my table.”

  “You called me,” she said. The warmth in her voice was obvious.

  “Did you think I wouldn’t?”

  “I wasn’t sure.”

  “Would you have come anyhow?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “You had to call. You have to want this.”

  I wondered, Want what? “Listen, Alia, if you’re from the future, why don’t you help us?”

  “Help you? How?”

  “We’re struggling to get through this Bottleneck. Our hydrate-stabilizer scheme is a lash-up; you must see that. Why don’t you give us some help—some technology guidance, maybe?”

  She eyed me, and I thought I could see the true answer in her expression. Because it would be as useful as handing a laser rifle to an australopithecine. She seemed to understand tact, however. She said, “You don’t need our help, Michael. Not in that way. You’ll make it through without us. Isn’t that better?”

  Maybe. But I had to ask. “This means a lot to you, Alia. Your Witnessing of me, this visitation. I can see that.”

  “Yes—”

  “I mean a lot. Don’t I?”

  Her eyes, in that mask of fur, were bright as stars. “I grew up with you. When I saw you, especially when you were unhappy—” She reached out a strong, long-fingered hand toward me, then drew it back. “I wanted more. I wanted to touch you. Of course I could not.”

  Shit, I thought. I found myself pitying her. But if I had to be Witnessed, maybe I was lucky to have happened on somebody who was affectionate toward me. If I had found an enemy far down the corridors of time, the consequences could have been very different. Deep beneath these feelings of pity, though, I was angry, angry that my whole life had been fucked over by the carelessness of these future voyeurs.

  And then Alia made it worse.

  She leaned close to me. “Michael, once I was joined with your child. Your second son. In Hypostatic Union, which—”

  My son who died. I felt cold. “You Witnessed him?”

  “More than that. It was closer than Witnessing. I felt what he felt. I lived his life. He didn’t suffer. He even knew joy, in his way—”

  I moved sharply away from her. “Christ. What gives you the right?”

  She looked at me, shocked. “I wanted to tell you about him, to help you.” Then she dropped her gaze, humbly. “I’m sorry.”

  “I . . . Oh, shit.” How was I supposed to cope with this stuff? “Look, I don’t mean to hurt you. I know this isn’t your fault.”

  “You always wanted Morag. And that was what you always saw. And in the end she was returned to you.”

  “Yes. But we weren’t happy. Perhaps it was impossible we ever could have been.”

  “I was sad for you,” she said. She sounded sincere and I believed her. “But,” she said, “it was because you couldn’t be happy with Morag that I’m here now. And why I must ask you to help us.”

  “Us? I don’t understand, Alia.”

  “There is much I must tell you,” she said. “About the Transcendence. And Redemption . . .”

  And as she spoke, a doorway to the ultimate destiny of mankind opened before me.

  Chapter 56

  When Rosa saw the virtual record of my latest conversation with Alia, she seemed electrified.

  She called us together. Once again the Pooles gathered in another Deadhorse hotel room: me, Tom, John, and Aunt Rosa projected from Seville.

  This time Tom had wanted to bring Sonia, but she ducked out, for the same reason we had left her out before: “Poole family business,” she said. Somewhat to my surprise, Gea dropped out as well this time. She gave the same excuse: “Family business.” But by “family” Gea meant not just us Pooles but the human family. This was an issue for the species, and our artificial companions weren’t going to be able to help us now. A deep instinct, though, prompted me as usual to bring in at least one independent mind, in Shelley Magwood. She griped about how busy she was, but she came anyway.

  We all knew why we were there. They had all heard Alia’s strange invitation to me, recorded by the hotel’s security systems and by monitors Gea had left with me. We played it through again. The record was hard for me to listen to over again, however, in that room, with us all sitting around a scuffed tabletop, with cups of coffee and bottles of water and softscreens before us, common sense cut in.

  As she listened Rosa’s small body was hunched, her eyes glittering. Her hungry intensity scared me.

  “I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said abruptly, unable to bear the mood. “It’s a cold Alaskan day. A Monday. This morning I ate Cheerios and drank coffee and watched football highlights. Out there people are taking their kids to school and putting in the laundry and going to work. And here we are talking about how we’re going to deal with the far future of mankind. Are we all just crazy?”

  John grunted. “What do you mean, we? It’s you who’s being subpoenaed by the ape-people, as far as I can make out.”

  Shelley was tapping at a softscreen on the tabletop. She murmured, “Nobody’s crazy. I saw the records Gea has been making, and her analysis of Alia, the chimp-thing. I don’t know what the hell is happening here. But this is real.”

  “OK,” said Tom. “But even if you buy all that stuff, now we have to go one jump further. We have to believe that this—Transcendence, this mish-mash of superbrains—wants my dad to save them. My dad, sitting there like a barrel of goose fat, is going off to the far future to save mankind.”

  “Nicely put, son,” I said.

  “It’s another cliché, Dad. Like those old stories you used to read me as a kid. The decadent humans of the far future need our primitive vigor to save them.”

  “You enjoyed that stuff at the time,” I said defensively.

  “Yes, but as stories. Not as a career move.”

  Rosa, dark, intense, solemn, said, “Shelley is right. We all saw Morag—so did the world. And we Pooles all saw Alia. Our best strategy is to assume that everything we have been told is real. Suppose, then, that Alia is telling the truth. Suppose that all of human history, folded back on itself, really is funneling through this moment, into the conscience of one man, of Michael Poole. Suppose it is true! The question then is, what must we do about it?”

  John surprised me by being constructive.

  “In my business the key to success is to work out what the other guy really wants—your client, your legal opponent, the jury, even the judge. You may not be planning to give him what he wants, but if you know it you have a chance of manipulating him. So I think we have to consider what this ‘Transcendence’ of Alia’s, this vastly advanced composite entity, might want.”

  Shelley was scanning through material on her softscreen. “That’s not so easy to answer. Since Michael asked me to join in with this, I’ve been digging up old references on how we thought far-future beings, or maybe advanced aliens, would behave, what they would do. And you know what? All we ever did, it seems to me, was to project ourselves up into the sky.

  “Look at this stuff.” She displayed some tabletop VRs for us. “Here you have Dyson spheres, cultures taking apart worlds to enclose their suns and so trapping every bit of energy. And for what? Living space, uncountable trillions of square kilometers of elbow room. This isn’t the future,” Shelley said, “not any kind of future. These are the concerns of the mid-twentieth century, energy supplies, demographics, population explosions, painted over the sky. And all Dyson was talking about was the infrastructure of a civilization. He didn’t seem to have
much to say about what an advanced culture would do with all its power.”

  Tom nodded. “Except to fill up the Galaxy with endless copies of its own kind. Just as we do.”

  Rosa said, “But there are other precedents in our intellectual history of attempts to analyze the motives of more-than-human minds.”

  John pulled a face. “I have a feeling you’re going to get all theological again.”

  Rosa smiled, aloof. “Isn’t that why I’m here? There can be no more superior intelligence than God’s. What is Christian theology but a two-thousand-year-old quest to read His Mind—what is all our devotion but an effort to understand His desires and to act accordingly?

  “Believe me, the universe Alia comes from, a universe that may soon be dominated by a superior consciousness, really isn’t so different from the universe imagined by Christians. For example the old Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism. Russell said he would ask God why he should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor.”

  “And we want to break the silence,” Shelley said.

  “Yes. We long to talk to the aliens, as we have always longed to talk to God.”

  John glared at her. “I can’t make you out, Aunt Rosa. You’re a priest, but you seem to put the subject matter of your own faith into the same box as wacko UFO stuff. I can’t tell what you really believe.”

  She wasn’t fazed. “I didn’t have to check in my cerebral cortex at the door of the seminary, John. It’s possible to have a mind, to be able to think, and to have faith. And even if the premises of my religion, of all our religions, have been wrong, perhaps all our thinking about God has served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.”

  “Even if they are our own future selves,” Shelley said, her voice small.

  Rosa said now, “I believe that everything about this strange situation is summed up in the two key words Alia used in her pitch to Michael: Redemption, and Transcendence.”

  Transcendence: what could it possibly mean?

  Rosa said, “It’s a word that has various definitions in philosophy. But Kant’s notions have the ring of prophecy, I think. Transcendent: beyond the sphere of human knowledge or experience, above and independent of humanity, indeed independent of the material universe itself.”

  Shelley said, “Alia told Michael she has been drawn into this Transcendence, that she has had some kind of direct experience of it. But when she comes out of it, she can only remember fragments.”

  Like memories of a dream, she had said to me, fleeting, elusive, evapo-rating even as you turn the warmth of your attention on them. And we knew that everything Alia said to us had been translated, and vastly simplified.

  Rosa said, “Yes. Through what Alia had to say to us we can only glimpse, barely, the vaster concepts of the Transcendence itself. But it’s all we have. From Alia’s hints it certainly sounds as if the Transcendence will have many of the attributes we traditionally ascribe to our gods. But it is arising from humanity; it has embarked on a journey whose final end, perhaps, isn’t clear even to it. And so it is an evolving god.”

  She talked of a nineteenth-century German philosopher called Schelling, who had been responsible for the introduction into philosophy of “evolutionary metaphysics.” What if God can grow, can change? And if so, what must He change into?

  John said, “I thought God is eternal, and hence unchanging, as measured by our petty notions of time. How can an eternal God evolve from anything into anything else?”

  But old Schelling, it seemed, had had an answer to that. His God was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega state was in some sense contained within the Alpha. The only difference was in the expression of that potential. Rosa spoke of the unevolved God as deus implicitus, and His final state as deus explicitus; the two states were different expressions of the same identity. “Schelling imagined that the universe evolves along with its god. In its final state the cosmos will be fully realized, every potential fulfilled—and it will be at one with its god. It is as if God realizes His own true potential through the vast self-expression of the universe. Perhaps these ideas foreshadow the entelechy of the Transcendence Alia described to Michael. . . .”

  I was starting to get rolling-eye signals from Shelley.

  “I don’t know if this is helping us any,” I said to Rosa.

  She nodded. “Then consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Paleontologist, theologian, Catholic mystic.”

  John grunted. “A regular Swiss army knife among wackos.”

  Teilhard had imagined that the goal of mankind was to cover the Earth with a new layer of mind, of consciousness, which he called a noosphere. With time the coherence of the noosphere—the organization of a kind of psychic energy—would grow, the “planetization” of mind would proceed, until at last a new plateau of integration would be reached.

  “A singularity,” Tom said. “The noosphere would emerge through a singularity.”

  “He didn’t use that language,” Rosa said. “But, yes, that’s the idea. So de Chardin spoke of humans becoming gods. And there have been thinkers who have imagined a different sort of transcendence for mankind, a transcendence through an escape to the stars.”

  She told us about a Russian tradition of thinking, dating back to a nineteenth-century thinker called Nikolai Fedorov. He had drawn on Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a “Cosmism,” which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe. Space travel was thus a necessary evolutionary step en route to our merging with the cosmos.

  Fedorov’s thinking had fed into the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “father of astronautics.” Tsiolkovsky had tried to turn Fedorov’s cosmic theology into the precepts of an engineering program: all the way to godhood with hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors. These strange, deep ideas had actually translated themselves into imperatives for the real-world Soviet space program. To Americans space was a frontier, a place you went to explore, to colonize; to the Russians, space was a place you went to grow, as a spirit and a species.

  Shelley started to argue with Rosa about some of the details.

  Tom got out of his chair, poured himself a fresh glass of water from the dispenser at the back of the room, and came to stand by me.

  I asked him, “So what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. Tsiolkovsky knew his thermodynamics better than Teilhard.”

  “Yes. But maybe Teilhard was ahead of his time, too. He might have had some intuition of modern ideas of network theory, of complexity. Just as maybe all we have is intuitions of the kind of truths Alia knows—or will know . . .”

  There was something compelling in all these old visions, I thought, these strange hybrids of theology and futurology and astronautics, of Christ and Marx and Darwin. Maybe they were products of their time, the struggles of thinkers born in an age dominated by religious thinking to cope with the great empirical shock of evolutionary theory, and the dreadful lesson of the geologists and astrophysicists that the universe was vast and indifferently old.

  And maybe, just maybe, Rosa was right, that in all this muddled thinking done in the past we had discerned, dimly, the patterns of the future. Alia’s Transcendence sounded like nothing so much as a mixture of Teilhard’s noosphere and Tsiolkovsky’s Homo cosmicus, mankind projected into the stars, laced with a touch of Schelling’s evolving deity. “After all, if you aren’t aiming up, you’re heading down, for extinction. And if you do aim up, what limit is there but the sky itself—what limit but infinity?”

  “Dad?” Tom sounded vaguely concerned.

  I hadn’t realized I had said some of that out loud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  He shrugged, turned away, and sat down. He was unde
r control, his emotions unreadable. But I had drifted away from him. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him again.

  John was interrogating Rosa. “All this antique fluff doesn’t matter a damn,” he said. “Let’s cut to the chase. We’re talking about what an advanced culture, an advanced superhuman mind, might want. What does this Transcendence want with Michael?”

  Rosa said, “I believe that’s where Alia’s second key word comes in. Redemption.”

  John said, “Another oppressive old Christian concept.”

  “It’s an old idea, certainly,” Rosa said. “But oppressive? That depends on the theologian you follow.”

  In Christian theology mankind had become distanced from God by our primordial sin, the sin of Adam. “And so we need redemption,” Rosa said. “The goal of which is atonement—which means, literally, to make as one, to unite us once more with God. And that, some would say, was the purpose of the life of Jesus Christ.”

  From the moment Christ died, it seems, His followers have been debating what exactly His death was for. Why did Christ have to die? If it was to achieve atonement with God, then how, exactly?

  The earliest theories, dating from the first fathers of the Church, were crude. Perhaps Jesus was a sacrifice—and after all in His time Jewish temple rituals had been big on sacrifices. Maybe Jesus was a kind of bait to trap the devil, a triumphant moment in God’s long war against Satan. Or maybe Christ was even a kind of ransom payment for our sins, paid not to God, but to the devil.

  In the eleventh century Saint Anselm had come up with a more sophisticated idea. It was called “substitutionary atonement,” Rosa said. We still owed a ransom, but now the debt was to God, a “satisfaction” for the great insult of our sins. But the trouble was we were too lowly even to be worthy to apologize. So God recast Himself into human form. Christ was a kind of ambassador for mankind—a “substitute” for our lowly selves—and, being God Himself, He was able to deal with God as a kind of equal.

  I think we all bristled. John said, “It sounds feudal to me.”