Transcendent dc-3

by Stephen Baxter

  Ahead, the road rose to cross the river at a bridge. I could see somebody on the bridge, I thought, a pale face looking back at me. She was too far away; her face was just a blur, a coin at the bottom of a pond. I was sure it was her, though. I wanted to shout, but I was aware of the sleeping town all around me, and somehow I couldn’t. Anyhow it would do no good. I had to get to her; that was the thing.

  The hell with it. I strode into the water. Soon I was wading. The water didn’t come much up my shins, but there was a lot of mud and garbage gathered in the bottom — maybe the road surface had collapsed here — and it sucked at my feet. Soon I was breathing hard, and my heart was hammering. At last I got out of the water. My feet and legs were soaked and muddy. I was exhausted.

  I couldn’t have come more than half a kilometer from my hotel.

  I could see the bridge, and the castle mound beyond with the tower on top, the relic of the old Norman castle, a gaunt silhouette against that blue sky. But she had gone from the bridge. Which way had she gone? Had she climbed the mound? If I could reach it maybe I could try to climb up after her.

  The bridge was closed at its far end, for some reason. The rivers curled around both sides of the mound, and the water was high, frothing, blue-gray. The bank was eroded and lined with sandbags. Under the bridge itself the water reached almost to the top of the arches.

  Maybe I should cross the bridge. Or maybe I should find some way around the other side of the mound. I couldn’t think my way through it.

  I couldn’t see her anymore. I just stood there, bruised, my feet sodden, panting.

  “Are you OK?”

  The voice seemed loud. I turned. I was facing a young man, maybe twenty-five. He was walking his bicycle. Under a fleece jacket he wore some kind of blue uniform; maybe he was a hospital worker on shift.

  He was composed as he looked me up and down. “You look as if you’ve had some trouble.” His accent was broad Yorkshire. I could see suspicion in his eyes. Not surprising; I must have looked strange.

  I heard a crow calling. I looked up. I could see the bird wheeling over the tower on the mound. Suddenly the sky seemed brighter; high clouds were laced pink.

  “Hey…”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You’re American?”

  “Yes.” I looked down at myself, at the filthy water leaking from my shoes. I tried to think of something to say, something that would normalize the situation. “Jet lag plays hell with your sleep patterns, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes,” he replied, doubtful. He turned away, continued walking his bicycle.

  I looked up toward the mound. It just looked like a hill now, the castle a ruin, not the center of some kind of maze as it had seemed a moment ago. There was no sign of Morag, but I knew there wouldn’t be.

  That young man was still looking back at me. If I didn’t want a police bot to be called out I should get out of there and clean myself up. I turned and faced that flood in the road. In the gathering light it didn’t look so daunting. I walked to the road’s centerline and just strode straight through the water. The road had given way; this pool must have been there a long time. But the water came no higher than my knees, and in a moment I was through it.

  When I woke the sun was high. It was around noon local time. I didn’t remember how I had got there, got back into my hotel from the flooded road. The whole thing was like a dream.

  But I was lying on my bed, not in it, and though I’d kicked off my shoes my trousers were muddy, my sweater smeared with green grass stains, and debris had rubbed off onto the bed’s top sheet. The management wouldn’t be pleased with me.

  Something had happened, however.

  A corner of the big wall softscreen was flashing. A message was waiting for me from John.

  I showered first, made a coffee, ate a cookie from the minibar. Then I sat in my armchair, faced the wall, and called John. Towering over me on the wall, he was furious — two-dimensional, badly colored, but furious. “Lethe,” he said.

  I was struck by his use of that word, but now wasn’t the time to talk about a stranger on a plane. “Lethe to you,” I snapped back. “What’s eating you?”

  “You are.” It turned out Shelley Magwood had called him last night.

  I felt cold, wondering how much she had told him. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

  “Why the hell not? She was concerned, asswipe, not that you deserve it. And wasn’t she right to be?”

  He tapped a screen before him, out of my sight.

  A corner of my wall filled up with an image, grainy, badly lit. But you could see the castle mound, the flooded street, a figure standing there in muddy water up to his ankles. John had used his contacts to hack into the town’s security cameras. He shouted now, “You call this a responsible way to behave? For this I paid a small fortune to send you to Europe? Are you crazy?”

  “If you listened to what Shelley told you,” I said stonily, “you’ll understand that this is about me and Morag. It’s got nothing to do with you. You have to let me work this out my own way, John.”

  “Oh, do I?”

  I studied him, growing curious. I’d rarely seen him so angry. “What’s eating you? Why are you taking this so personally?”

  “I’m not.”

  Despite his denial, I could see something was going on here. If I had felt lobotomized last night, today I was sharp. Was he angry I just hadn’t told him about my haunting by Morag first? Or was there something more? “You’re hiding something. Is it to do with Morag? Damn it, John, she was my wife. If you know something you have to tell me.”

  He faced me again. “I know I shouldn’t have made this fucking call. Off.” The screen turned to sky blue.

  So John had had a connection to Morag I knew nothing about. Another unwelcome ghost from the past, I thought. I sat in my armchair, in my hotel dressing gown, and sipped coffee that quickly grew cold.

  On Alia’s second day on the Rustball, Bale took her to the sea.

  If they went overland it would take a whole quarter of a day to reach the ocean. Bale offered to Skim there with her if she preferred. But she wanted to see more of this world.

  So she rode with him in a ground transport along a road that gleamed, metallic, running straight as an arrow across the gravity-flattened plain. The landscape was all but featureless, the towns they passed identical to the one where the Campocs lived. It was like passing through a sparsely sketched simulation.

  Much of what she saw was dictated by geology. When the Rustball had formed it had been a rocky world, rather larger than Earth, with a massive iron core and a mantle of lighter rock. In the usual way of things it had suffered multiple impacts during its formation — including one final collision with a second monstrous proto-planet. Alia learned that Earth itself had suffered a similar collision, a great rocky splash that had resulted in the formation of its Moon. The Rustball had been stripped of most of its rocky mantle, and had been left as a lump of iron as big as the Earth, with a flock of moonlets made of its own mantle rock. But iron was more dense than rock, and so this world was more massive than Earth, its gravity strong.

  Over time, comets delivered a skim of water and air, and the naked iron rusted enthusiastically. Without a rocky mantle there was none of the magmatic churning that characterized Earth’s dynamic geology. Still, simple life had come here, brought by the comets, settling into oceans that gathered in impact-basin hollows.

  And later, humans arrived.

  Alia was discovering she wasn’t interested in planets. She had grown up on a ship, a human-made environment. The Nord was a small, liveable place, built to a human scale, where everybody knew everybody else. And the Nord was fluid, every aspect of its design shaped by human whim. As a small child she had loved to spend time in the Nord’s museum, where there was a display of all the ship’s morphologies since its launch long ago, reconstructed from records, or archaeological traces in the Nord’s fabric. As the millennia ticked by the vessel had mutated and
morphed like a pupa writhing in its cocoon, every aspect of its geometry shaped by its crew.

  But a world was different, weighed down by its own vast geological inertia. Why, most of its mass was locked up in its interior, useless for anything but exerting a gravity field you could have replicated with the most basic inertial adjustor! And it was static in time. A through-the-ages diorama of the Rustball would have been very dull, she thought: nothing but rocks, broken here and there by the transient flickering of green.

  If the Rustball had started out dull, its human colonists hadn’t done much with the place, Alia thought. The plain drabness of the human world here was striking. The different towns, though separated by hours of surface travel, were very similar in their bland, squat architecture; there was no sense of local identity. And there was no art that she could see, nothing beyond the functional.

  She probed Bale gently about all this. He would only say: “If everywhere’s the same, why bother traveling?”

  “Lethe, I hate planets,” she said. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” Bale said blandly.

  It was a relief when they reached the ocean.

  The water pooled in a complicated multiple basin cut in the iron by a series of impacts. On a shore of hard, red-rusted iron, waves broke; driven by the higher gravity the waves were low but fast-moving.

  She was surprised to see people here, gathered in little parties along the shore. Bicycling vendors sold food, water, souvenirs, and simple toys. It was a happy place, as happy as she had seen on the Rustball; people were enjoying themselves. But as she walked through crowds of running children, harassed parents, and languid lovers, something was lacking, she thought. It took her a while to realize that there was no music to be heard, not a single note.

  Following Bale’s lead, Alia walked to the edge of the water and stripped down. Alia couldn’t help studying Bale’s body, the broad limbs, the banks of muscles on his belly.

  He caught her staring.

  “I apologize,” she said. “It’s just that our bodies are so different.”

  So they were. She was so much taller and slimmer, her arms almost as long as her legs, and her fur was languid in the heavy gravity. By comparison Bale was squat, broad, shaped by a lifetime of battling the relentless pressure of gravity. His arms were short, massive, but inflexible at the shoulder and joints. His spine was rigid, too, a pillar of bone. This wasn’t a world where you would do much climbing, she thought; Bale was actually more truly bipedal than she was.

  “We’re different because we live on different worlds,” Bale said.

  “So we do.”

  “But Reath sent you here because we aren’t too different, because we are similar.”

  “He did?”

  Bale smiled. “Unmediated Communication is challenging enough without a dose of alienness on top.”

  She wondered, then, about how strange a human could get.

  Naked, side by side, they walked into the ocean. The water was fast-moving and turbulent. Her fur, soaked, drifted around her. Alia had swum before, but only in zero-gravity bubbles on the Nord, where it was no more than a hundred meters or so to the nearest meniscus. It was very strange to slide into a body of water orders of magnitude more voluminous, a bottomless pit of it. Bale’s cursory warnings about treacherous currents and undertows did nothing to reassure her. It was an unexpected relief, though, when the water was at last deep enough for her to lift her feet from the bottom and float. She felt her bones, her muscles relax as they welcomed their first respite from gravity since orbit.

  All around her the stocky bodies of Rusties, adults and children, bobbed in the water. They laughed and played. Even on this drab world the ocean was a place of pleasure. Perhaps, she thought, even after hundreds of millennia of adaptation, the people’s bodies were responding to deep cellular memories of a primordial ocean that lay far away and deep in time. But when the water got into her mouth, it was very salty, with the bloodlike taste of iron.

  Bale floated beside her, watching her.

  “Bale, you said you don’t travel much because everywhere is the same. Maybe that’s true, here on the Rustball. But aren’t you curious about other worlds?”

  He shrugged. “People are more interesting than worlds. Anyhow, we Witness. We find out about other people that way.”

  “Everybody Witnesses, all across the Galaxy. It’s another thing we have in common. It is the mandate of the Transcendence.” This was what Reath had told her.

  “Yes.” But Bale was watching her, suddenly intense. “What do you think about the Transcendence?”

  “I don’t know enough about it,” she said. “It’s just there. Like the weather, on a planet like this.”

  “Yes. And the Witnessing, the Redemption?”

  “I don’t know. Why are you so interested in that?”

  “There are people,” he said carefully, “who question the value of the Redemption.”

  “There are? Do you?”

  He studied her a moment more, then seemed to come to some conclusion. “You are innocent. I like that.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes. And I like Witnessing — the act of it, anyhow, if not the implications of the program. I told you I am interested in people.”

  She asked impulsively, “And are you interested in me?”

  He smiled. “Sex would not be out of the question. I would take great care not to crush your ribs, snap your limbs, or inflict other harm.”

  “I’m sure you would.” She moved toward him, not touching yet, just staring at him, feeling his massive presence in the water. She had been with non-ship-born before. There was always a fascination between different human breeds, a deep longing for some kind of genetic exploration. Or maybe it was just simple curiosity.

  She moved closer. He opened his mouth, and she ran her tongue over the edge of his teeth-plate. His arms were as powerful as she imagined, his hands as gentle. And in the water her zero-gravity litheness pleased him.

  I booked Tom into a hotel at Heathrow.

  A day ahead of his arrival, too anxious to hang around in York anymore, I took a train journey back to Heathrow myself. I was the only passenger in a pod bus that rolled in a stately fashion over abandoned kilometers of roadway. The hotel was a long way out from the terminals, a measure of how busy this airport had once been. The hotel itself was a kind of extension of a vast multistory parking lot dating from the second half of the twentieth century, the age of monumental automotive architecture. It was as if the areas set aside for humans had been an afterthought. Now the cars had gone, but the hotel lingered on.

  There were no lines at check-in. I had the distinct impression that I was the only guest. It was an uneasy feeling, as if the whole hotel was a sham, an immense trap for unwary travelers.

  The next day I met Tom at the airport.

  I held back, unsure how to handle the situation. He seemed angry, at me, at Siberia, at gas hydrates; I supposed that to him this return was a defeat.

  He let me hold him. It was like hugging a statue. But then, after a few seconds, he melted. “Oh, Dad—” Suddenly we were embracing properly, all barriers down, no more bullshit, just father and son reunited.

  He was grimy, covered in stubble, and exhausted by his long flight. He actually stank a bit. But he was Tom, the reality of him, in my arms. Standing there with Tom in that half-empty airport concourse, I felt as happy as it’s possible for a parent to feel, I think. I guess the genes were calling.

  But the moment passed, too quickly, and Tom pulled back. I knew we had words to exchange, words that were going to be like bullets flying. But not now, not yet. I took him to the hotel, checked him in, and let him go to his room alone.

  While Tom rested up, I went for a restless walk around the old car lot. It was immense, a cathedral among parking facilities. There were ten, twelve floors, and there was parking space even on the roof. It was an open concrete frame, and from the outside you could look right through it to see daylig
ht coming through from the other side. It was like a huge concrete skull.

  I walked inside, past barriers that no longer raised, tollbooths with broken glass and rusting ticket machines. Only a few bays on the ground floor were occupied, by electric utility vehicles nuzzled up against power sockets. The rest were vacant, bay after bay still marked out in fading white paint, all neatly numbered, now plaintively empty. A halfhearted attempt had been made to extend the hotel itself into this vast area, but the conversion had apparently been abandoned.

  Once elevators and escalators took you to the higher floors, but they no longer worked, and the stairs smelled of damp and rot. I chose to walk up the ramps which had once borne the cars. It was a long steep walk through that gargantuan architecture, exhausting for a mere human.

  On the roof it was breezy, and I approached the edge cautiously. I looked out over the airport. The runways were neat straight-line strips, surrounded by the vaster acreage of the roads. Standing there on that parking-lot roof, I was the only human in sight in square kilometers of concrete and tarmac, stained by rubber and oil, now turning gray-green as it crumbled.

  The cars and planes had gone, and I remained; and on the breeze I could smell, not the dense stinks of carbon monoxide, gasoline, and rubber I remembered from my childhood, but the poignant scent of spring grass. One day, I knew, the car lot would vanish, too. The small blind things of nature were already eating into the concrete fabric. Eventually the decay would reach the cables that held together this stressed-concrete structure, and when they gave way the whole place would explode, scattering concrete dust like dandelion thistle.

  I turned back and wound my way back down the huge exit ramps, and returned to the hotel.

  Tom slept, showered, whatever, for twelve hours. Then he called me through my implant. I went to his room.

  He sat in the room’s single armchair. He was bundled up in a tired-looking hotel dressing gown, watching news that bubbled quietly from one wall. His hair had been shaved at some point during his brief hospitalization. He looked cadaverous, ill; he probably looked worse than he was. He had an aspirator in his hand, the only sign I’d seen of continuing medical treatment.