Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “Alia, please—”

  She laughed at him. “Go back to your Rustball and bury yourself in the empty heads of your brothers. You will never be a part of my life again.”

  His broad face was full of loss, and she felt a faint stab of regret. But she turned her back on him and walked away.

  Reath walked with her. “Weren’t you a little hard on him?”

  She glared at him, refusing to answer.

  He sighed. “It is a time of change for us all, I suppose.”

  “What about you, Reath? What will you do now?”

  “Oh, there will always be a role for me and my kind,” he said wryly. “Many of the Commonwealth’s great projects will continue whatever the Transcendence decides to do next: the political reunification of the scattered races of mankind is a worthwhile aim.”

  “That’s noble, Reath.”

  They came to Drea, who was sitting, looking bored, on a block of eroded rubble.

  Reath asked, “And what of you two? Where will you go next?”

  “Back to the Nord,” Drea said immediately. “Where else? The Nord is home. Besides, I think my father needs us right now.” She reached up and took her sister’s hand. “Right, Alia?”

  But Alia did not reply.

  Reath turned to her. “Alia?”

  She found a decision formulated in her head, a decision she hadn’t known she had made. “Not the Nord,” she said. “Oh, I’ll miss Father—and you, Drea. I’ll visit; I always will. But—” But she couldn’t live there anymore. She had seen too much. The Nord and its unending journey were no longer enough for her. “I’ll find a role for myself. Maybe I can work for the Commonwealth, too. . . . Someday I’ll find a new home.” She pulled Drea to her feet and hugged her. “Somewhere to have children of my own!”

  Drea laughed, but there were tears in her eyes.

  Reath watched them more seriously. “Alia.” His tone was grave, almost reprimanding; it was just as he had spoken to her when he had first met her.

  She snapped, not unkindly, “Oh, what is it now, you old relic?”

  “If this is your true intention—just be careful.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of yourself.” He had seen it before, he said: in Elect who had failed, or even mature Transcendents who, for reasons of health or injury, had been forced to withdraw from the great network of mind. “You never forget the Transcendence. You can’t. Not once you have experienced it, for it is an opening-up of your mind beyond the barriers of you. You may think you have put it aside, Alia, but it always lurks within you.”

  “What are you saying, Reath?”

  “If you are going to roam the stars, be sure it is yourself you are looking for—and not the Transcendence, for that is lost to you forever.”

  On impulse she took his hands; they were warm, leathery. “You are a good friend, Reath. And if I am ever in trouble—”

  “You will have me to turn to,” Reath said, smiling.

  “I know.”

  Leropa emerged from the flock of the undying. She approached Alia, as enclosed and enigmatic as ever. The others stood back, uncertain—afraid, Alia saw.

  Leropa said: “The Transcendence is dying.”

  Alia was shocked. Beside her Reath grunted, as if punched.

  Leropa went on, “Oh, it’s not going to implode, today or tomorrow.”

  Alia said, “But the grander aims, all that planning for infinity—”

  “All that is lost. Perhaps the project was always flawed. We humans are a blighted sort. Too restless to be bucolic, too limited to become gods: perhaps it was always inevitable it would end like this. The Redemption was our best effort to resolve the paradox of an attempt to build a utopia on shifting bloodstained sands—an attempt to mold a god from the clay of humanity. But we succeeded only in magnifying the worst of us along with the best, all our atavistic cravings. And so the Transcendence will die—but at least we tried!

  “This is a key time in human history, Alia, a high watermark of human ambition. We’ve been privileged to see it, I suppose. But now we must fall back.”

  “And what about the undying? What will you do now?”

  “Oh, we aren’t going anywhere. We will get on with things in our own patient way. We still have our ambitions, our plans—on timescales that transcend even the Transcendence, in a sense. And even without the power of the Transcendence behind us, the issues of the future remain to be resolved.”

  “Issues?”

  Leropa’s leathery, immobile face showed faint contempt. “Alia, you and your antique companion Poole indulged in some wonderful visions about the evolutionary future of mankind—the purpose of intelligence, all of that. Perhaps we can all find a safe place, where we can give up the intelligence we evolved to keep us alive out on the savannah, and subside comfortably back into non-sentience. Yes?”

  “It happens. Like the seal-men of the water-world—”

  “It’s a bucolic dream. But unfortunately the universe cares little for our wishes, or our dreams.”

  Mankind sprawled across the Galaxy it had conquered, speciating, variegating, gradually reunifying. But the wider universe was empty of mankind. And in those vast spaces beyond, enemies circled, ancient and implacable.

  Leropa said, “We are still out on the savannah of stars. And there are ferocious beasts out there—beasts we have driven out of the Galaxy altogether—but they are still there. And they are aware of us. Indeed they have a grudge.”

  “They will come back,” Alia breathed.

  “It’s inevitable. It might take another million years, but they will come.”

  “And you undying are planning for war . . .”

  “Earth will endure, you know. One day even all this, even the traces of the Transcendence itself, will be nothing but another layer in Earth’s stratified layer of rocks and fossils, just another incident in a long and mostly forgotten history. But we will still be here, taking care of things.” Her face was hard, set, her dry eyes like bits of stone.

  She had never seemed more alien to Alia. And yet, she knew, this grim, relentless inhumanity might in the end be the saving of mankind.

  “You frighten me, Leropa.”

  Leropa grinned, open-mouthed, showing teeth as black as coal. “But I think you understand why we undying are necessary. Perhaps even we are an evolutionary recourse, do you think? But you aren’t going to take your immortality pill, are you? You aren’t going to join us.”

  “No,” Alia said. She had no need of endless life, to become one of these sad old people. And she had no need of Transcendence. She would embrace her own humanity with two hands—that would be enough . . .

  She staggered. The world pivoted around Alia, as if the wind had changed, or gravity had rippled.

  Drea took her arm. “Alia? Are you all right?”

  Reath asked anxiously, “Is it the Transcendence?”

  Leropa said, “It is nearly over.”

  Drea grabbed Alia’s hands. “Then we must hurry. There is something I want to show you while I can. Come. Skim with me. Like when we were kids, before all this.”

  “Drea, I don’t think it’s the time for—”

  “Just do it!” Laughing, she Skimmed, and Alia had no choice but to follow.

  She found herself suspended over the head of Reath. His upturned face shone in the light, his mouth round with shock. Leropa had turned away, uninterested, already absorbed by her own long projects. They had traveled only a fraction of the height of the great exotic-matter cathedral.

  Drea was still laughing. “Again!” she cried. “Three, two, one—”

  Clutching each other, the sisters Skimmed again, and again.

  Chapter 60

  I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping into the sea.

  I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the
sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.

  The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.

  Alia told me stories of the far future, of her time. Her stories come back to me in dreams.

  A half a million years from now, she said, children can Skim. It’s like teleporting, I think, “beaming,” but you don’t need any equipment, any fancy flashing lights and instrument panels and stern-jawed engineers. You just do it. You just decide you don’t want to be here anymore, you would rather be over there, and there you are. Literally.

  Children are born this way. Babies learn to Skim before they can walk, or crawl, or climb. Teleporting babies: imagine that. Their parents have to chase them down with butterfly nets. And the problem of droppings is awesome. But nobody minds: on Alia’s starship, people like having a sky full of babies.

  Older children use their Skimming in play. These are smart post-human super-kids who can teleport; their games are elaborate, endlessly complicated. One game Alia tried to describe to me sounded like an aerial combination of football and chess.

  Adolescence comes late for kids in Alia’s time; you live a long life, and you get to enjoy a very long childhood. But when the hormones do kick in, the Skimming games get sexual, morphing seamlessly into elaborate courtship chases that can thread their way from one end of the ship to the other. The older adolescents are trained up for more formal dances, endlessly complicated quantum ballets.

  And then, when you finally grow up, the ability to Skim atrophies.

  I got the feeling Alia was close to this age of transition, but she didn’t want to think about it. All your life distance has been irrelevant, and you have been flitting over the static crowds of lumpen adults. Now you are dragged down to join them, and you are going to be stuck in a spacetime suddenly as thick as glue, forever. What a growing-up present, like all the trials of age hitting you at once.

  Sometimes I dream of writing this up, of spinning fiction out of it. I could use it as a metaphor for growing up. Or for the plight of the Transcendence, on the point of deity, and yet unable to put aside its human past. I could add to George’s ancient science fiction library. Nobody would ever know I had stolen it all.

  I came out of my contact with the Transcendence shattered. Drained. It was like the bombing of the Refrigerator project, the very instant of the explosion, the world suddenly turned to chaos, the blast’s tremendous punch in the chest. It was like that moment, but going on and on.

  I don’t remember much of the weeks that followed. Tom and Sonia looked after me during that time. I wasn’t so bad. I was able to get dressed, take myself to the bathroom. I even kept working, after a fashion, on the hydrate project. I have notes that prove it, though to me they read like they were written by somebody else. But I’d forget to eat, for instance. I’d forget what time it was and stay up through the night, and be startled by the dawn. That kind of thing.

  It was a time when I needed my mother, I guess. But she died not long afterward, not so long after her brother, George. Ironic, one of life’s little jokes. I miss her, of course.

  The family rallied around. I think there were rows between Tom and John about who should be responsible for me: “You’re his brother.” “You’re his son.” But they kept this away from me. I don’t mind; if I’d been capable of it I’d have been rowing, too. We were never again quite as close again as we were during the crisis days. Maybe it’s enough to know we’re there for each other when we need it. Funny lot, we Pooles.

  I was put into therapy. Except they don’t call it therapy now but “consciousness reengineering.” I was assigned a robot companion, a cybernetic quack the size of a footstool that rolled enthusiastically around after me. A robot, but no black leather couch, no notebook, no bust of Freud. I spent a lot of time sitting alone in a room, with a VR representation of the state of my own brain, trying to explore my innermost sensations of my memories, my self. I was innately suspicious of the whole process.

  John paid for all this privately. From the beginning it was John’s instinct to keep all this strangeness away from the authorities, and despite the fact that some oddities showed up on public records, like Morag’s incarnation before the bombing, we succeeded, with some subtle help, I think, from Gea. Even the conspiracy theorists with their super-powered search engines and cross-correlation machines didn’t get a sniff of me.

  So I saved humanity, perhaps, in past, present, and future, but nobody knows. Astounding when you think about it.

  But what was it I did? Trying to remember the Transcendence is like recalling a dream. The more you think about it, the more it eludes you. Or it is like my haunting by Morag: glimpses, remoteness, that you try to break through, but never can. I was vaguely comforted by Alia telling me that it was the same for her. She had only ever been a semi-detached member of the Transcendence, a part-qualified new recruit. It was just as hard for her to hold onto as for me.

  It was frustrating not to be able to recall all I had seen. I felt as if I had glimpsed a vast, rich landscape through a pinhole, just for a second. But as time passed, and the direct experience of the Transcendence receded, I was left with memories of memories, like polished pebbles. In time, even the sense of frustration has passed away.

  Gea’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations went remarkably well. Gea spoke about the urgency of the hydrate-stabilization proj-ect, and more generally on how it ought to serve as a model for the way we manage the planet in the future.

  She even put in a short plea on behalf of her fellow artificial sentiences, and herself. We humans weren’t alone on the planet anymore, she said. We had a duty of care for our children. After all, Gea said, an artificial like herself was not limited by human biology as we were. Potentially she could be immortal. But all that potential would be destroyed if the fabric of our culture fell apart, if the technological substrate on which she depended broke up.

  You would think such an appeal would alarm us. The conventional wisdom has always been that humans won’t share the future with anybody else. That even seems to have been the truth of the future I glimpsed through my contact with Alia. But according to the snap polls, the response to Gea’s appeal was warm, sympathetic. This is an age when, conscious of the past, we feel guilty about it. Gea judged our mass psychology just right.

  The Refrigerator won the backing of the Stewardship agencies, and was rushed through its final stages of technical validation. Now the rollout has begun. Our pilot plant off Prudhoe Bay is the seed of what is still the largest single field, but other bases have started operating all around the Canadian Arctic, and across Siberia. Next year, Antarctica.

  EI are continuing to advance the technology, even as the rollout is continuing. They hope to develop a new generation of moles that will be able to make copies of themselves. Each of these super-moles will be more pricey than the originals, but you’d only have to pay for the first generation of them, if you think about it, and the long-term costs of the project will drop away to zero.

  Of course it’s expensive. But the cost of not stabilizing all those strata full of greenhouse cocktails would have been far more: potentially infinite, if the worst case had come about.

  That isn’t all EI are doing. Shelley Magwood is working on high-level concept designs of a whole range of ambitious new geoengineering proj-ects.

  The one that catches my eye is a direct challenge to the dreary modern paradigm of sea-level rise and flooding. At the end of the Ice Age, as the great ice sheets melted, swathes of landscape were drowned. There was “Doggerland,” which is now under the North Sea, and “Beringia,” which bridged between Alaska and Asia, and “Sundaland,” between Australia and South-East Asia, once the home of the larg
est belt of tropical rain forest in the world. Now there are strong proposals to turn back the sea, to reclaim some of those vast stretches of lost terrain. It seems outrageous, but the geography of the seabed will allow it, in places. The new lands, opened up for refugees, will be farmed or given over to forest land, so sequestering some of our excess carbon out of the air, and improving things long-term.

  The Stewardship authorities are already talking about a model for the administration of the new provinces. There will be local democracy and chains of accountability all the way up to the planetary level, just as there should be. But there will be no new “nations” planted in Doggerland. We haven’t always lived in nation-states, and they aren’t always very constructive entities to share our world with. Maybe with the new territories as models of a different kind of governance, the old nations will at last wither away.

  Shelley Magwood is in heaven with all of this. She’s even becoming a media star. An engineer as modern hero: who’d have thought it?

  Of course there are still risks ahead, difficult times. We may have fixed the hydrate problem but there is plenty left to do. We’ll just have to get through this damn Bottleneck one step at a time. But we’re starting to believe we can achieve great things. And after the Bottleneck, who knows?

  There will be costs. There are costs in anything you do. Alia’s vision of mankind spread across the Galaxy, an arena for trillions upon trillions of human lives, was magnificent, but it was a Galaxy we emptied out along the way. And in a sense it all started here. But the future isn’t fixed; I’ve learned that. So maybe even the downside isn’t inevitable. Maybe we can have it all. Why not?

  I’m starting to believe what Alia told me, that people of the future really will look back on our age as a time to admire, a time you’d wish you’d lived through.

  John has a house not far away from me. But he is often off in New York, Washington, or Geneva, pursuing his own projects, heroic in his own legalistic way. And he’s at last writing his book on his new ethics-based economics paradigm, his new kind of money.