Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  By the time we reached the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a new mood, a notion that humans could better themselves by our own efforts—and therefore we ought to live in a universe where that is possible. Now Jesus’ sacrifice was not any kind of ransom or payment; it was an example to all of us of how we could grow closer to God, through love and self-sacrifice. “Exemplary atonement,” Rosa called this one.

  “So we’re no longer in debt,” Shelley groused. “Now we’re just too dumb to see what we ought to be doing.”

  John asked, curious, “And what do you believe, Rosa?”

  She considered. “I don’t believe the purpose of Jesus’ life was to be any sort of sacrificial lamb,” she said. “The true legacy of His life is His message, His words. But historically the more sophisticated theories of atonement certainly completed Saint Paul’s great project of turning the cross from a symbol of horror to an icon of love.”

  “Quite a trick,” John murmured.

  I said, “And you think somewhere in this there is a lesson for us, for me, in dealing with Alia’s Transcendence.”

  “There may be,” Rosa said. She leaned forward, gazing at me, and I realized she was coming to what she had called us together to say. “I have tried to interpret what Alia said to you, Michael. And I have come to believe that the network of linked human minds she describes has not yet passed through its singularity. It is on the cusp of Transcendence. For now, they are still human, or as human as Alia is. But soon they must shed their humanity. And they know that with godhead will come remoteness.”

  “Ah,” Shelley said. “So we aren’t falling away from God. God is receding from us.”

  “So that’s it,” Tom said. “The Transcendence can’t bear the coming separation from humanity.”

  “Not with unfinished business hanging over it, no,” Rosa said. “It is remorseful, perhaps. Regretful. Who knows?”

  I said, “I still don’t see what is has to do with me.”

  Rosa said patiently, “The Transcendence wants redemption, Michael. In the Christian mythos, the redemption of mankind was achieved through the sacrifice of one man—”

  “Oh,” I whispered. “And this time it’s me.” I was numb, neither hot nor cold. I wondered if I was dreaming all this, if I was delusional somehow.

  Everybody started talking at once.

  Rosa said to me, “Think what this means, Michael. I listened carefully to the way Alia described all this to you. You would be a ‘representative’ of mankind, in some way.”

  Shelley said, “That sounds like the feudal stuff. What did you call it?”

  “Substitutionary atonement, yes. Michael will be our champion before the Transcendence, somehow able to deal with it as an equal, as Anselm imagined Christ negotiated with God over mankind’s sins.”

  “But what does it want me to do? Apologize?”

  “Oh, I don’t think you have to apologize for anything,” Rosa said. “It is the Transcendence that is seeking redemption—not the other way around.”

  “So it wants to apologize to me? For what?”

  “You will have to find that out.” Her face was close to mine; she stared at me, intent, hungry. “But this is why you must become elevated to the Transcendence yourself, Michael, so that you will be worthy of absolving the Transcendence, as no mere human could be, if you deem it the right thing to do.”

  My sense of unreality deepened. “I don’t know what to say. Why couldn’t I be a normal crazy?” I whispered to Shelley. “Why couldn’t I just think I was Napoleon Bonaparte? Why did I have to go all the way to the big JC?”

  Shelley grabbed my hand. “Michael, I’m not about to let some posse of superhumans nail you to a metaphysical cross.”

  “But there may be no choice,” Rosa said.

  I said, “This is insane, Rosa.”

  “Yes,” she said urgently. “That is precisely what it is. Insane. The Transcendence may be reaching for godhood, but it is somehow flawed, Michael. Otherwise, why would it put itself through such anguish, such contorted apologizing? Yes, it is probably insane.

  “But it is powerful, remember. We know it can reach around the curve of time. We know it can bring the dead back to life. An insane god is unimaginably dangerous. That is why we must find a way to deal with it.”

  John stared at her, and burst out laughing.

  “I feel like laughing myself,” I said.

  “I understand,” Rosa said. “Really, I do. This is too big for us to imagine. But this strange responsibility has descended on us nevertheless.” Earnest excitement showed in her face. “We truly find ourselves at the fulcrum of history, Michael. You do.

  “I know you are full of doubt. I know that you don’t feel you are up to this challenge. You think you may be carried away by megalomania; you don’t even trust yourself. But you will do this, Michael. You will call Alia again. You will let her take you into the Transcendence itself. You will do it, won’t you? I can see it in your eyes. It isn’t in your heart, your soul, to turn away from this. . . .”

  I hated myself for it. I couldn’t bear even to look at Tom, or John, or Shelley, those representatives of my common sense, my conscience. But Rosa was right. She knew me too well. Even if the ghost of Morag hadn’t been involved, I would have gone in there.

  Rosa said, “Just remember the Transcendence isn’t omnipotent.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “We know that. The substitutionary atonement it is seeking proves that much: we surpassed that in the sophistication of our thinking centuries ago. We are small, slow, stupid, weak compared to the Transcendence. But there is at least one way in which it is inferior to us. Michael, you can deal with it.”

  As we broke up, John had one more question for Rosa. “Suppose all this is true. That the future folds over onto the present and the past, that our far-future descendants will become godlike. What chance will you Catholics have then? The game is up, isn’t it?”

  Rosa smiled thinly. “The Christian Church survived the fall of Rome, and the science of Aristotle and Newton, Galileo and Copernicus and Einstein. Catholicism even survived Martin Luther. I think we will survive this.”

  And she disappeared.

  Tom came to me. He didn’t bother even to ask whether I was going to do it. “Just when,” he said. “Tell me when, Dad.”

  I shrugged. “Tomorrow, maybe. Why not? I’m not getting any braver.” Not that I was sure if I needed courage; if something is so far beyond your imagination, it’s hard even to fear it. “You aren’t going to call me an instrumentalist again, are you, Tom?”

  “No. I can see you aren’t doing this for yourself, not at any level. You’re doing it for the same reason you went straight back to the hydrate project after the bombing. You’re going to do it because you think you have to.”

  “The Transcendence chose me. . . .”

  “I know.”

  “But I’m sorry, Tom.”

  “For what?”

  “Because I’m going off and leaving you again. Same old story.”

  “OK. But at least I have warning this time. Have you got any dinner plans?”

  That took me off guard. “I guess not. What are you thinking, a Last Supper?”

  John and Shelley joined us. John said, “A last beer may be a better idea.”

  Shelley put her arm around my waist. “Do you think it will make any difference if you have to go off and slay demons in the far future with a hangover?”

  “It might actually help,” I said. “OK, first round on me. What do you prefer, water or wine?”

  Chapter 57

  Leropa and Alia walked in the lengthening shadows of the cathedral’s titanic ruin.

  “So you visited him.”

  “It was—strange. Difficult.”

  Leropa made no comment.

  Alia said, “I believe Michael Poole will do what we ask of him.”

  Leropa eyed her. “And that pleases you?”

  “Shouldn�
��t it?”

  “There is one corollary to our discussion I didn’t want to raise in front of your sister,” Leropa said.

  “Corollary,” Alia said dismissively. “The Transcendence believes it is a creature of love. But its language is all logic.”

  Leropa raised a hairless eyebrow. “Let us talk of logic, then. You are not the first to have pointed out the ultimate logical flaw in the Redemption program.”

  Alia nodded. “No matter what you do, even if you change history to eliminate every element of suffering, the suffering will still exist—”

  “In a wider universe of possibilities. Yes.”

  “So Redemption is impossible.”

  “Not necessarily,” Leropa said. “Your sister was right to intuit that the Redemption is not for those who suffered long ago; it is for the Transcendence itself. It is hoped—but it is only a hope—that somewhere in the Levels of Redemption might be found sufficient solace. At some point we might be able to say: this is enough. And with the past redeemed it will be possible to look to the future—to look outward, not inward.”

  Alia nodded. It was a valid hope. But—“If that point is never reached? If there is no solace to be found? What then?”

  Leropa sighed. “If suffering exists, no redemption may be possible. But need it have been so? What if humans had never existed at all? What if the Earth had remained lifeless, like the Moon? Then there would have been no suffering to atone, no evil to redeem—no sin to expiate. Perhaps that would be a better state of affairs than to allow ineradicable suffering to exist, without the possibility of healing.”

  Alia stopped in her tracks. “Are you serious?”

  “It is the final stage of Redemption, its ultimate logic. We call it the Cleansing. It is not that mankind will cease to exist,” said Leropa quietly. “It never will have existed. And it could be arranged quite easily. Remember, the Transcendence can restore the dead to life, with a mere gesture. This final solution is almost elegant. Economical.”

  A cold anger burned in Alia. “Is this where the logic of love has led the Transcendence—to love mankind so much that it must be eliminated?”

  “This is only a possibility,” Leropa said. “But in what is to come, you must always remember that this dark possibility is there—if Michael Poole fails.”

  She raised her hand, curling fragile fingers. And Alia imagined consequences flowing from that gesture, flowing out across space and time, to the far future and into the deepest past. Leropa was a small, hunched-over woman in a worn, shabby robe, shuffling through the debris of an immense ruin. And yet she held the fate of all mankind in her bony fingers.

  Chapter 58

  The first shock of Transcendence is—

  I can’t say. The words don’t exist in my head. What is it like, then?

  It is like stepping off a cliff. Or it is like suddenly plunging into a shocking new medium, like ice-cold water. Or it is like the instant your first child is born, and you hold him in your arms, and you know your life isn’t your own anymore, and never will be again.

  It is like waking up.

  When I looked back on my entire life up to this point, it was as if I had been dreaming. I saw all my perceptions of the world, and even my experiences of my inner world, for the partial fantasies that they truly were. But I knew that if I ever got out of this strange state of new consciousness, it would be this that seemed like a dream. But I felt oddly confident, even though I knew I had come to a place beyond my comprehension. I could cope with this, I thought.

  But where had I come to? If I had awoken from the dream of human existence, if I had truly opened my eyes for the first time—what did I see?

  For now, nothing. It was not as if I had my eyes closed, but more as if I had my gaze averted, my head full of thoughts of other things. I couldn’t see anything because I wasn’t looking; it was a matter of will. But it was waiting for me.

  I lifted my metaphoric head. I focused my metaphoric eyes. And I saw—

  Light. It flooded into my mind, brilliant, searing hot. All my brief confidence disappeared immediately. I was nothing but a mote of awareness, scorched, shriveled, blasted away. I tried to scream.

  The light faded. I was back in my state of unseeing again.

  “I know what you would have said if one of your junior engineers, or your students at Cornell, had gone plunging in like that.” The voice, gentle, dry, came out of nowhere, with no source. I wasn’t hearing it, I couldn’t turn my head toward it. Yet it was there even so, a voice in a dream.

  “Morag?”

  “Alia,” she said, a gentle regret shading her tone. “I am Alia. I am here with you, to help you.”

  “I’m glad,” I said fervently. “So tell me what I’d have said.”

  “You’d say, Walk before you run.”

  “Quite right, too. Is this the Transcendence, Alia?”

  “What did you see?”

  “It was like looking into the sun. It burned me out.”

  “I blame myself,” she said. “When I was first immersed in the Transcendence, I had had months of training—of mental discipline, and of development of various faculties. Also I have half a million years’ evolutionary advantage over you, Michael. No offense. And I found it overwhelming, that first time. For you it is all but impossible.”

  “So teach me how to walk, Alia.”

  “One step at a time.”

  I felt a gentle pressure, as if a hand had cupped my chin to lift my head, as if I were a child. Metaphor, metaphor. But metaphors are fine if they help you understand.

  “Look now.”

  I saw a black sky full of stars, all around me, above and below. It was as if I was a stranded astronaut taken far from Earth and left drifting in space. I had no sense of vertigo, though; perhaps that had been edited out. The stars were scattered deep through three dimensions, but they were all a uniform color, a kind of yellow-white. I began to make out patterns, groupings, tentative constellations.

  “Stars. But they aren’t stars, are they? Just another metaphor.”

  “A metaphor for what?”

  It was obvious. “The Transcendents. The individuals who contribute to this group mind. Like us.”

  “Like me,” Alia said. “Not quite like you.”

  “Am I not a star?” I felt unreasonably disappointed. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “But a special sort of star.”

  The stars began to drift around me. Now they were like fish in some vast dark aquarium. The patterns they made became clearer, swoops and whirls and sketches of light. And each of them was a mind, I marveled.

  I knew the principle. The Transcendence was not a simple pooling of minds but a dynamic network, of which these stars were the nodes. The greater awareness of the Transcendence itself was an emergent property of the network, arising from the community of minds, yet not overwhelming them individually. It had something in common with an anthill, I thought—or even uncle George’s strange Coalescence.

  So much for theory. I wanted to see the Transcendence itself. I looked up.

  I saw more stars, swarms of them flocking in patterns that elaborated scale upon scale, rising up as far as I could see. And at the very limit of my vision the shifting constellations seemed to merge into a mist, and then a bright point. That ultimate unity was the consciousness of the Transcendence itself, arising out of the interactions of the community of star-minds on which it was based.

  When I looked around I could see the same point-like unity whichever way I looked. An impossible geometry, of course, but a neat metaphor.

  At Alia’s subtle nudging, I widened my perceptual field further.

  Moving through the flocks of stars were darker shapes, more elusive. Sometimes the stars would settle on their velvet surfaces, and I would make out the glimmer of an outline, a complex morphology. But then the stars would rise up again like startled birds, and the form would be lost.

  “These are the structures of the mind of the Tran
scendence,” Alia said. “Ideas. Beliefs. Understandings. And memories—many, many memories.”

  I saw one form that was a little different from the rest—compact, almost glimmering, like a multifaceted jewel, but of jet-black. It was like a bit of polished coal. “What’s that?”

  Alia sounded as if she was smiling. “Take a look.”

  I didn’t know how to. But even as I framed the desire I felt myself falling toward the jewel-like knot of knowledge.

  I felt a surge of new understanding—a moment of insight, like a breakthrough after years of study in some arcane subject, or the sudden clarification when the solution of a puzzle becomes obvious. This glimmering knot of understanding contained all of physics—and I saw it all. I enjoyed a deep understanding of the fabric of the cosmos, from the minuscule symmetries of the fundamental objects from which space and time were ultimately constructed, all the way to the jewel-like geometry of the universe as a whole, folded over on itself in higher dimensions—although now I saw that those two poles of structure, large and small, were in fact one, as if all of reality were folded together again on some more abstract scale.

  But even as I wallowed in this joyous understanding, a part of me noticed features a physicist of the twenty-first century would have recognized—even an engineer like me. Our basic map of the universe’s composition was here, the proportions of dark energy, dark matter, baryonic matter, as determined by our space telescopes; and I made out the familiar milestones of the universe’s evolution out of the initial singularity, through stages of expansion and cooling, all the way to the matter-dominated age that had given rise to humans. Some of our theories to explain this universal structure had contained glimmerings of truth after all, I realized. They were all partial, all gropings in the dark, each tentative explanation like the light scattered from one facet of this ultimate jewel of understanding. And yet we got some of it right, I thought with a surge of pride, we primitives on our single, muddy, messed-up little world.

  But that sense of pride quickly dissipated when I saw that this jewel-like structure of knowledge, this “ultimate truth,” was ancient. The total understanding dreamed of by the physicists of my time, the limits of their imagination, had not only been achieved, but long ago—and it had been overshadowed by deeper mysteries yet.