Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  I don’t see much of his Happy kids. It doesn’t feel like much of a loss.

  I haven’t seen Rosa for some time. She gave up her ministry in Seville, and has, well, disappeared. As if into a hole in the ground.

  I suspect that the Coalescence has come back into her life, somehow. It was always a shadow behind her, a depth of darkness into which I could never pry. Maybe it called her back—but from George’s account that seems unlikely; it would have no use for her, a failed drone who did her job but got too smart for her own good. Maybe, on the other hand, she tracked it down, or some descendant of it after the great scattering in Rome. Maybe she’s at least able to figure out what the meaning of it all was for her. I hope so.

  Tom and Sonia are working on relief efforts in Siberia once more. Now that the Refrigerator project is rolling out there’s a lot to be done. Sonia has resigned her army commission to work with Tom. I keep a room in my apartment for them. They store some of their stuff there, so they have a permanent place in my life. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like, however. I don’t know what the future holds for them, but I think they’ll be happy together.

  We are all getting rich, incidentally.

  John moved fast to patent as much as he could of the information derived from images and scans of Alia, and indeed Morag, in the name of EI and ourselves; he was able to make a convincing case to the company’s lawyers that if not for us Pooles this windfall from the future wouldn’t have fallen into their laps anyhow. The genomic studies seem likely to yield fruit quickly. Longevity treatments may be the first big payoff: EI even has a trademarked name for their soon-to-be-announced product range, AntiSenescence, or AS. They are paying us for licences to investigate the material, and in future we’ll take a small but serious cut of the profits.

  I don’t have any qualms about profiting from my experiences. I suffered enough; I guess I’ve a right.

  Shelley has expressed doubts about polluting the timeline. After all we are patenting genetic and other enhancements that have been fed to us from the future; we will be introducing them centuries, millennia before they are “due.” I don’t worry about that, any more than about the nonexistence of the Kuiper Anomaly. I take my lead from Alia, who seemed to have a robust view of time paradoxes. The universe can take a few punches from us without disappearing up its own paradoxical fundament. Things will work out somehow—or maybe they already have.

  Anyhow when this all unravels the Pooles are going to be rich. We’ve always been engineers, we’ve always been meddlers, and now we will have money, and money means the power to do things. I guess my own race is run. But I wonder what the Pooles will do with all that power in the future.

  Sometimes I think all our adventures, we Pooles, are to do with a quest for God. Rosa’s Coalescence, if George’s analysis was right, was certainly superhuman, but no god, nothing but a mindless multiplication. Alia hinted that at mankind’s peak we went to war at the center of the Galaxy, and what we found there was very strange, unimaginably ancient, and powerful. So that generation found God, and, exultantly, used Him as a weapon. And in Alia’s time, we looked for God in the last place He might be hiding—deep within ourselves. But He wasn’t there either.

  As for me, I’ve returned to my work on the interstellar-probe application of the Higgs technology.

  You’d think that my exposure to the future might have crushed my confidence in what we can achieve. Alia, after all, was born on a starship, a ship that had been cruising for half a million years. How can my trivial little unmanned probe, a one-shot water rocket, compare to that? But I don’t feel like that at all. This is what I can build, this is what I can contribute. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without me.

  I love it. I feel like I’m playing. I feel as if I’m a kid on the beach once more, ten years old, throwing Frisbees with uncle George.

  Suddenly, though, the starship study has become a lot more urgent. NASA engineers have been poring over our results, and there is talk of some serious money being pumped our way. The motive is clear. The Kuiper Anomaly has vanished.

  That strange, tetrahedral object drifting among the dead comets and ice moons of the outer solar system, only discovered within my own lifetime, has suddenly disappeared. There’s not a trace of its passage; it just went. And so people want to find a way to get out there, to find out what the hell is happening. It’s ironic that the probe’s disappearance has created more interest and alarm than its presence ever did. But while the Anomaly was evidence that there had once been other minds, its removal is proof that those minds are still acting.

  I know, as very few others do, that the true purpose of the Kuiper Anomaly was to mediate the linking of the future with the past; it was the channel through which the Transcendent generation was able to reach us—reach me. When the Transcendence collapsed, its great projects abandoned, the construction and launch of the probe in their future was aborted—and so it never reached our past.

  I think reality has changed. I think the probe never existed, and I don’t think that exploring astronauts are going to find any trace that anything was ever out there at all. Of course that begs the question of how come I remember the thing, how come there are libraries full of forty years’ worth of space-telescopic records of its presence. I try not to think about that.

  I’m glad it’s gone, though. The Kuiper Anomaly was a physical mani-festation of the meddling of the Transcendents in our time. The more I think about the vast scope of their ambition, the more I resent their galling instrumentalism. Maybe I have more of Tom in me than I imagine.

  But we have options.

  Think about it. They are up there in the far future, off in the highest branches of a great tree. But we are at the tree’s roots. And if we cut off the tree at the trunk, the highest branch will come crashing to the ground. If nobody was to have another child ever again, for instance, then not one of the Transcendents could ever be born. There are no doubt less drastic ways to fight a war with the future.

  I’m not advocating any of this. But perhaps we should wargame options.

  If the future ever attacks us again, we should fight back.

  Today is January 1st, 2048. The digital millennium has come and gone, and all those date registers in all those antique processors have absorbed the extra binary digit without so much as a squeak; there is no news of any problems anywhere. Another disaster averted. Happy New Year.

  Sometimes, however, I despair.

  I look around at the world, I follow the news, and I count up all we’ve lost even in my own lifetime. And I know, from my contact with Alia, that Earth’s ecology won’t recover from the tremendous shock we have inflicted, not even in half a million years.

  Once I tried to express all this to Gea. She told me to go outside, to the scrap of garden I share with the other tenants of this block, and to find an old piece of rotten log. I did as she asked. I found a chunk of crumbling wood, and turned it over. Roots and strands of fungi pulled apart, as if the ground didn’t want to let it go, and a damp, cold, musty smell rose up from the thick dark earth that had been hidden beneath.

  There was a whole shadowy world in there. A spider, her belly heavy with a white silk egg case, scuttled away to the shade. Millipedes coiled up into tight little spiral. A centipede squirted its slow way through a heap of bark fragments. But these naked-eye critters were the megafauna of Log-world. Following Gea’s advice, I hacked off a chunk of the log with a knife, shook it out over a white handkerchief spread on the ground, and examined what fell out with a magnifying glass. I saw worms and mites and a dozen other sorts of creatures, wildly diverse in their body plans, all crawling around on my handkerchief. And even that wasn’t the end of it. Gea showed me magnified images of droplets of water, each one just swarming with billions of bacteria. The deeper you dig down the more tiny ecologies just keep popping up.

  OK, we humans have made a mess of the biosphere at some levels. But the big, visible living things up h
ere on Earth’s surface are only a scraping of the planet’s true cargo of life. Nothing we can ever do is going to make much of a dent in that crude, overwhelming fact.

  Such reflections are humbling. But they also comfort me. We shouldn’t feel so bad about ourselves. We’re just animals in an ecology, too. Gea says she is trying to promote this kind of “microaesthetic,” to help us humans get a sense of perspective about themselves. Vander was right; she does care about us.

  Gea is a surprisingly good companion. She is smarter than me after all, and she will, with any luck, live forever. Also the way she rolls about on my tabletop shooting sparks from her belly makes me laugh.

  So here I am. I listen to the sea lapping at the bottom of my avenue, and the laughter of children, and I watch the sunlight dapple on the drowned roads, and I dream of starships. Things could have turned out a lot worse for me, I guess.

  But I’ll always miss Morag.

  Chapter 61

  Alia found herself perched on a small platform, right at the apex of the cathedral’s mighty tetrahedral skeleton. The three great pylons of the frame swept away beneath her to touch the rust-red ground of Earth. Beneath the frame the undying community huddled in the ruined domes of Conurbation 11729.

  The air was cold, and a stiff breeze blew. The platform’s material shone brighter than daylight, and it underlit Drea’s face as the sisters clutched at each other, exhilarated by the Skimming.

  “Drea—what are we doing here?”

  Drea stepped aside with a flourish to reveal a blocky artifact. “We’re here for this,” she said. It was Alia’s Witnessing tank, her most precious relic of childhood. “Look.”

  Within the tank Michael Poole, a figurine no taller than Alia’s hand, sat quietly in a chair. From a window a warm light reflected from sun-dappled water poured into his room. Drea said, “When the Transcendence shuts down the Witnessing tanks won’t work anymore.”

  “I suppose they won’t.”

  “I thought you’d want to see him one last time . . .” Drea leaned over the tank. “This is a time in his life after his encounter with the Transcendence. At this point in his lifeline, he remembers you, Alia.”

  If he remembers anything at all, Alia thought uneasily, after his shattering self-sacrifice. “I grew up with Michael Poole. Through watching his life, I learned about mine. He was always a constant friend, even though he is half a million years dead. And then, through the Hypostatic Union with his son—”

  “You touched him.”

  “In a way. The Witnessing worked, you know. I got to know Poole, and I became a better person for it. I think so anyhow.”

  “I think you loved him, didn’t you? Perhaps you still do.”

  “But he never loved me, Drea. There was only ever Morag.”

  Drea said earnestly, “It’s best this way, that it ends.” She trilled a few notes. “Every song must end—and indeed an ending, if it is exquisite enough, is part of the beauty of the song itself.”

  But, Alia wondered, as she stared at Michael Poole’s empty face, must the ending of this particular song be quite so bittersweet? She felt huge forces gathering, as if the cosmos itself were focusing on this point-event in space and time. “It’s going to happen soon.”

  Drea clutched her hands, watching her face with concern.

  The Transcendence whirled around her, great clouds of anguish and determination. In a moment immense invisible muscles would flex—and a wave of difference would wash around the arc of the universe, from the furthest future and seamlessly into the deepest past. The universe would come apart, closed chains of cause and effect shattering, and when those chains knitted themselves up again, everything would be subtly different. And the powers the Transcendence had taken to itself, the power to meddle with the deepest past, would be put aside forever.

  But in these last minutes, those powers still existed. And suddenly she knew what she must do.

  Alia raised her face to the blue sky of Earth. Through the muddy daylight she thought she could see the Transcendence, the necklace-chains of minds, the drifting bergs of memory. “Do this one last thing,” she pleaded. “Spare him! Spare Michael Poole!”

  Maybe it would work out for him this time. At least this way there was a chance. And after all, what was the point of being a god if you couldn’t perform the occasional miracle?

  Spacetime flexed—she felt it, deep in the core of her being. And Drea gasped.

  Alia looked down. The Witnessing tank was no longer clear; the image was broken, turbulent, like a pool of water stirred up with a stick. But in the last instant before the link collapsed forever, Alia saw Michael Poole turn toward the door, and stand, a look of shock on his face.

  As Morag walked into the room.

  Also by STEPHEN BAXTER

  Manifold: Time

  Manifold: Space

  Manifold: Origin

  Evolution

  Coalescent

  With ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Time’s Eye

  Sunstorm

  Transcendent is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2005 by Stephen Baxter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Baxter, Stephen.

  Transcendent / Stephen Baxter.

  p. cm.—(Destiny’s children ; 3)

  Sequel to: Exultant.

  I. Title.

  PR6052.A849T74 2005

  823′.914—dc22 2005041401

  www.delreybooks.com

  eISBN: 978-0-345-45793-6

  v3.0