Transcendent dc-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “Jeez,” Shelley said. “No wonder we can’t figure it out.” She sounded daunted, even humbled.

  It wasn’t a comfortable thought for me either. The bright new artificial minds, such as Gea, would surely have scored more highly than us on a scale like this — but at least we made them. This was different; this was outside humanity’s scope altogether. Suddenly we were going to have to get used to sharing the universe with a different order of intelligence than us.

  “And,” I said, wondering, “it’s coming out of the mouth of my dead wife.”

  Again my words sparked Tom off. He stood up, pushing back his chair. “No,” he shouted. “It’s not her.That’s the point — can’t you see? Whatever is animating that fake shell, whatever is producing these alien words, it is not her. ” And he stormed out of the room, without looking back.

  Sonia hurried after him, with a mouthed “Sorry” to me.

  The meeting broke up. I was left with the patient VR image of Rosa, and the graphs that scrolled in the air around her.

  I apologized for Tom.

  “Give him time,” Rosa said. “After all it is a strange business. His mother is trying to talk to you…”

  “If it is Morag.”

  “You believe it is, don’t you? But we face this odd mixture of emotional power — she is your wife, after all, and Tom’s mother, there can hardly be stronger emotional bonds — coupled with this strange symbolic overcomplexity. She has something she needs to tell us, that seems clear, but she doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

  I had no answer. I just sat there, my head and limbs heavy; I felt simply overwhelmed by all I had learned.

  Rosa watched me carefully. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so. It’s all a lot to take in.” I rubbed my temples. “So much is going on, so fucking much. I’m trying to push forward the hydrate project. I’m trying to deal with Tom, and John, and everybody else. Even Shelley. Even you. And I have this business of Morag, which only seems to get stranger and stranger. I don’t want to hurt anybody, Rosa. Especially not Tom.”

  “I know that,” Rosa said gently. “You think you are weak. Don’t you, Michael?”

  I shrugged. “What else should I think?”

  “You are buffeted. You are surrounded by epochal events in our history; you are at the center of an extraordinary storm. And at the same time you are being subjected to these extraordinary manipulations and messages.”

  I forced a smile. “Messages from beyond the grave?”

  “From somewhere else, certainly. We may yet learn there is some connection between all these different sorts of strangeness in your life, and things will get more complicated still.”

  Just as her brother had hinted, I thought uneasily. But I had enough conspiracy theories in my life.

  Rosa said, “But in the middle of the storm you keep going, Michael. You keep trying to do your best for everybody. You know, you remind me of Saint Christopher.”

  I tried to remember my Catholic lore. “The patron of travelers?”

  “Yes. The story is he offered to carry the Christ child across a river. But the child got heavier and heavier. The child told Christopher it was because he was carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. And yet Christopher kept on going, one foot after another, until he completed the crossing. That is exactly what you are doing, Michael, and you will continue to do so, until you reach the other side.” She smiled. “I don’t think you are weak at all.”

  There was a soft chime. Evidently Rosa heard it, too, for she was disturbed in her sanctum in Seville, as I was.

  The call was from John. My uncle George, Rosa’s brother, was dying.

  When Alia emerged from her Hypostatic Union, Reath brought her away from the claustrophobic antiquity of Earth and back to the comparatively familiar confines of his ship, which patiently followed its slow orbit about the old planet. The six of them, Alia, Drea, Reath, and the Campocs, sat in a huddle in Alia’s cabin, as she tried to describe her experience.

  “How fascinating,” Reath said. “You begin even without a sense of self. Then comes a feeling for events, disconnected in your awareness. You have to learn sequence, order, separation. How remarkable that time comes before space! Does phylogeny recapitulate cosmology?”

  Drea had her arm around her sister. “Reath, can’t you shut up? Alia, you say you saw Michael Poole’s face?”

  Alia sighed. “I think so. But I was looking out from inside a prematurely born baby’s head. A dying baby.”

  Reath said, “In Poole’s era even very young babies were innately programmed to respond to human faces. An evolutionary relic of obvious utility. It’s not impossible you made out his face.”

  “I recognized the event,” Alia whispered. “The birth. I’ve seen it many times, in the tank. I even Witnessed it again after I came out, to check.”

  “The child was Poole’s,” Drea prompted.

  “His second son. Killed by a heart defect. The mother died, too — Morag. It was an incident that shaped Poole’s whole life, subsequently. I’ve seen it many times.”

  “But never from the inside,” Reath said grimly.

  “No. Not that way…”

  Alia understood now. She had lived out the child’s life, its whole life from conception to death. She felt as if she had been away for eight months — though only eight hours had passed for the others. This was the Second Level of the Redemption. At this higher level, you didn’t watch a life from the outside, unlike the conceptual simplicity of Witnessing; you saw it from the inside. You lived it through heartbeat by heartbeat from the moment of conception to the finality of death, and you shared every scrap of sensation, every feeling, every thought. All you didn’t have was will.

  “It wasn’t much of a life,” Alia said. “Less than eight months — not that time meant much at first. But I lived through it all.”

  Drea shook her head. “What’s the point of going through all that pain? It’s so morbid. ”

  “I think I can see the theory,” Reath said. “At the heart of the Redemption is a desire for atonement, bringing the past into oneself. Perhaps that can be achieved through a reconciliation, a unification of oneself with a figure from the past. Witnessing was a first step. But by going to this Second Level, by suffering with that figure, by living through such a life, the anguish of the past can be” — he waved a hand — “internalized sufficiently.”

  Bale said skeptically, “Sufficiently for what?”

  “To make this strange superhuman guilt go away.”

  Seer laughed. “So is that the truth behind our glorious Transcendence, our superhuman future? It’s all just a grim nostalgia for the womb?”

  “I still say it’s morbid,” Drea said.

  After a day in orbit Alia descended to Earth. She met Leropa once more in the attenuated shadows of the ruined cathedral.

  “Reath speaks of atonement,” Alia said. “He says that perhaps by joining with a figure from the past you can expiate its pain.”

  “Reath is a wise man,” Leropa said.

  “So I was united with Poole’s lost son.”

  “Yes. The Second Level is a Hypostatic Union with the past, a union of substances beneath external differences, the trivialities of locations in space and time. You felt that poor child’s small joy, his pain. And you will never forget, will you?”

  “No,” Alia said fervently. “And this is the redeeming?”

  “It is the beginning,” Leropa said.

  Alia frowned. “I have to do this again?”

  Leropa seemed surprised by the question. “Of course—”

  “I have to live through a whole human life, again?”

  “It isn’t so bad,” Leropa said. “Subjective time, the time of the hypostasis, passes more rapidly than externally. To join with Michael Poole himself, for example, a life spanning nearly a hundred years, would take only a few days.”

  “But a hundred years,” Alia said, “for me. A hundred years of
being trapped, helpless, in some tormented body of the past. How could I survive that?”

  “Oh, but you would. You’re strong, I can see that. And then of course—”

  Alia saw it immediately. “I would have to do it again. Another life to be endured. And again and again.” But the present was a surface surrounding a great ocean of past; the dead far outnumbered the living. “How many lives must I live through, Leropa?”

  Leropa frowned. “If you have to ask that, as I told you, you don’t understand the nature of the Transcendence.”

  “How many?”

  “All of them,” the undying said simply.

  It was the ultimate logic of Redemption. The purpose was atonement not for some of the past, for some of the human suffering it contained, but for all of it. And how could that be achieved piecemeal? So Alia, like every witness, would have to live through every human life that had preceded hers: Michael Poole, his second son, his family, his ancestors, and their ancestors all the way back to the point where humanity was lost, perhaps a hundred billion of them — and, looking forward, all his descendants, to the mighty Galaxy-spanning Exultant generation and beyond. And in the future, all those watchers would themselves have to be watched — and then there would be watchers to watch the watchers — on and on, a recursive chain of watchers upon watchers.

  The ultimate logic was that every human being, undying, should live through the lives, and absorb the pain, of every other.

  “No doubt the process will be made more efficient,” Leropa said, unperturbed. “But the number of encounters is always finite. And finitude withers to nothing in the face of infinity.”

  Alia remembered Reath’s grave, sad voice: To understand the Transcendence, you must understand infinity, Alia. “But all that pain, multiplied over and over, combinatorially, forever—”

  Leropa spread her hands. “This is atonement. Atonement must hurt. To a creature of infinite capacity like the Transcendence, what can serve as atonement but to pay an infinite price?”

  Alia backed away. This is insane, she thought, but she dared not say it. “I don’t want this.”

  Leropa’s frown deepened. “You choose death over life? Smallness over infinity? Are you sure?”

  “I’m not ready.”

  Leropa bowed her head. “Take all the time you need. But I will be here, waiting for you. Forever. And remember,” she called. “Redemption has more Levels you’ve yet to glimpse…”

  Alia turned and ran for the shuttle.

  It was a huge relief once more to get back to orbit. But Drea had some news from the Nord — bad news.

  We got together to discuss what to do: George’s surviving family, John, Tom, my mother, me, even Rosa, all huddling like VR witches, muttering behind his back.

  We’d been told that none of us were to fly out to England. George made it abundantly clear that us all going to such a fuss and expense would embarrass him. He didn’t even want VR visitors, he said. We all had our own lives to lead, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t think it fooled anybody. But then the guy was eighty-seven and he was dying; I guess he had a right to a little muddle.

  We had to see him, of course, virtually at least. John agreed to dig into his pockets once more. But we decided we weren’t going to go over in a mob, VR or not, like a presaging of the funeral the doctors were saying wouldn’t be more than a year away. We would visit one at a time, or in pairs. Tom went first, with Sonia. George would surely want to meet her, but he had his pride; we knew he would feel happier about facing her while he was still able to put on a show.

  While Tom visited I carried on with my work in Alaska, on the hydrate project. Rosa and Gea continued to analyze the Morag visitations, but for a while I spent no more time on that. The Morag business had always tended to make us fight, me against John, Tom against me; it drove us apart. At such a time as this it all seemed trivial, a sideshow, whatever its astounding implications.

  Then, a week after Tom’s visit, I went over myself.

  George was glad to see me. That was obvious, gratifying, painful.

  He wanted to take another walk, which surprised me. So we stepped out of his house, trailed once more by his Gea-robot care assistant. George guided me away from the maintained silvertop roads, and I soon found myself walking down the greened center lane of one half of an immense dual carriageway, as they call them in England.

  The road was a mighty ribbon that curled between banks of houses, shops, and factories. Traffic lights and road signs, the clutter of the roadside, mostly survived, but the green and white paint of the signs had long faded to illegibility. The tarmac itself was giving way to green. For long stretches it was broken up by weeds, grasses, and a few bright wildflowers — “pioneer species,” George said, nuzzling into the pores of the road surface.

  It was the middle of the night for my body in Alaska, and I felt dislocated, faintly jet-lagged. The experience of that fresh English day, the quality of the virtual sunlight on my virtual cheeks, was enough to make my body respond, to wake me up. But it was strange to see that carpet of green unrolling before me like a long, thin stretch of parkland, completely empty, save for ourselves.

  George was in a nostalgic mood. “Sometimes I miss the traffic,” he said. “When I was a kid — why, when you were a kid — the towns and cities were full of cars day and night, and there was this dull, continual roar. I used to think about the roads, how they joined up the country. You could drive your car out from your own garage, and then expect to be able to roll all the way to wherever you wanted to get to, from Cornwall to Scotland, without your tires ever leaving the tarmac. It was as if some great volcanic eruption had flooded the whole country with asphalt. And then it went away, just like that. Christ, Spaghetti Junction is a world heritage site now.

  “All that noise went away, the roar of the rushing cars, the honking of horns, the sirens, brakes squealing, music blasting. I miss the noise, I think. I miss it the way I miss the smell of the stale cigarette smoke my parents would leave around the house; you know it’s bad for you, but it still reminds you of home. You know, if you’d told me as a kid that in my lifetime people would give up the car I’d have laughed at you, that would have seemed much more fantastic than going to Mars…”

  Green kilometers slowly piled up behind us. George seemed to have plenty of energy, but he walked stiffly, in an ungraceful, asymmetric way. Walking had become an awkward, mechanical action he had to think about.

  There was a tumor in his belly “the size of a tennis ball,” he said.

  It might have been caught earlier if George had allowed the medics to insert the appropriate implants and nano-monitors. Like many people his age, though, he had a deep distrust of having such gadgetry inside his body; he had lived through an era in which technology had betrayed as much as it had delivered. So he lived, and died, with the consequences of his choices. “But at least they are my choices.”

  He had been gratified by Tom’s VR visit, and he had been glad to meet Sonia. “She’ll be good for Tom. We need somebody to inject a little sanity in our lives, we Pooles… Speaking of which, how’s this business of Morag coming along?”

  He knew about the language analysis, as far as it had got.

  “We’re still trying to break down the encoding of Morag’s signal,” I said. “We meaning Gea and Rosa. It’s a scary thought that the combined resources of the top biosphere-modeling software suite and one of our most ancient religions are being devoted to figuring out my little ghost story.”

  “And do you still think it’s just a ghost story?”

  I thought it over. “No. I don’t think I ever did. Not even from the beginning.”

  “What beginning?”

  So, walking along the empty road, I told him about the prehistory of my haunting, back to when I was a kid in Florida. I think he felt hurt I’d never shared this with him at the time. But then I’d never told anybody about it at all before confiding in Shelley, only a few weeks ago, and he got over that quickly. />
  “George, I believe that in some way this is Morag, it really is. Of course I fully accept she died, all those years ago. So something is going on here which isn’t normal, rational. It’s acausal for one thing. But I don’t believe she’s a ghost, with all the connotations of that word. There is no quality of—” I hesitated, unwilling to finish the sentence.

  “Evil?” George asked softly.

  “None of that, no. And it is Morag. Does that make sense?”

  “No. But then, rainbows would make no sense if you had never seen one. If she’s not a ghost, then what is she, do you think? That language is obviously not human — or at least, not twenty-first-century human.”

  “No.”

  “Then what? Some kind of alien?”

  “I suppose it’s possible. It seems a strange way for them to communicate, though.”

  He shrugged. “What’s a good way? I’ve speculated about this stuff over the years. Look at it this way. I still cut my lawn.” It was just a scrap, overgrown by clover and weeds, but George seemed to like it that way. “Now, my evolutionary divergence from the grass is, what, half a billion years deep, more? And yet we communicate. I ask it if it wants to grow, by feeding it phosphates in the autumn and nitrogen in the spring. It answers by growing, or not. It asks me if I want it to grow over five centimeters, or if I want it to start colonizing the verges. It tells me this by doing it, you see. I say no, with my mower and my strimmer. So we communicate — not in symbols, but with the primal elements of all life forms, space to grow, food, life, death.”

  “And you think it might be that way with intelligent aliens?”