Transcendent dc-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “If there is no possibility of symbolic communication, maybe. But if they have the capability to reach us then they will be the ones with the lawn mower…”

  “I don’t think aliens have anything to do with this,” I said firmly. “It feels too human for that.”

  “Then there seems only one possibility left,” he said.

  We both knew what he meant: that my Morag, with her high-density speech, was a visitation, not from the past, and not from some alien world, but from the future — our human future. In some ways I found that the most terrifying prospect of all, because it was the least comprehensible.

  “Rosa guessed this,” I admitted. “Even before we recorded and analyzed Morag’s speech.”

  “Well, she is a Poole.”

  We could only speculate; we didn’t know enough. George changed the subject. He asked me if I still flew Frisbees.

  When I was a kid, growing up on the Florida coast, I became fascinated with Frisbees. Everybody played with them. But try as I might I couldn’t find anybody, any book, to explain to me convincingly how the damn things actually flew — and especially how come they were so hard to fly right, why they dipped and flapped the way they did.

  So, aged about ten, I used to buy up old Frisbees to experiment with them. At first it was just kiddie stuff, painting them or adding spectacular, useless fins. But then I tried a more systematic series of modifications. I cut chunks out, or added strips of plastic to the rim to change the weight distribution, or scored the flat surfaces with new patterns of grooves to change the flow of air. I didn’t really know what I was doing, of course, but I was instinctively systematic. I kept logs and even little movies of how my Frisbees flew, before and after the modification. It didn’t last long — kid fads never do — but when George had visited in those days he had always shown an interest.

  “But what you don’t know,” I said to him now, “is that playing with Frisbees got me one of my first career breaks…”

  In my final year at college I happened to look up Frisbees on the Net. I found to my surprise that still nobody had figured out how a Frisbee flew. Not only that, there would be practical applications of such knowledge, for planetary probes targeted at airy worlds like Mars and Venus and Titan would be spun for stability — they were high-tech, hugely expensive Frisbees sailing into unfamiliar atmospheres, sent to their fates on the basis of a scary lack of knowledge of how they actually flew.

  “So I dug out my ten-year-old hobby,” I said to George. “And I looked up the theory, such as it was. A Frisbee gets its lift like a wing, but the front of the disc tends to get more lift than the back, which makes it unstable. But unlike an airplane wing it’s spinning, so that uneven lift is like a finger prodding a spinning gyroscope; it deflects a Frisbee’s course rather than making it flip completely. But I found that nobody had got beyond rough rules of thumb.

  “Anyhow I started trying to figure out how a Frisbee really flies,” I said. “I went beyond what I could do as a kid. I scrounged some parts from my college lab, and gave a Frisbee a black box recorder.” I had installed a small accelerometer to measure the forces on the disc, and a magnetometer and light sensor so I could track its position compared to the sun and the Earth’s magnetic field, and a computer chip. Soon I was able to record all the essentials of a flight, and reproduce it at leisure in a simple VR environment. Later, when my professors got interested in what I was doing, I went further, such as by coating a Frisbee’s upper surface with sensors to measure the pressure and flow in detail.

  “I quickly figured out the gross aerodynamic coefficients,” I said. “To optimize your flight you have to match your spin rate to your forward speed and angle of attack. But more important, I started to get an understanding of how pressure was distributed over the surface of the spinning disc, and was able to model ways how you might control this optimally, for instance with small flaps and holes to direct the airflow. NASA was doing the same sort of study, of course, but using spinning models in wind tunnels. I was able to get better results far more cheaply, just by smothering a Frisbee in sensors and flying it outdoors.” In the end the study turned from a hobby into a term paper, which NASA took up and sponsored. It was a great line on my CV when it came time for me to look for a job.

  “I didn’t know all that,” George said. He grinned. “So you managed to combine career advancement with throwing Frisbees all day. I’m even more impressed.”

  I shrugged. “You got to enjoy yourself.”

  “Absolutely.”

  I knew what I had to say next, even though it was difficult for both of us. “George — you always took an interest in my stuff, a proper interest, back when I was ten or eleven.”

  We both knew what I meant. My dad was always faintly bemused by such stunts as experimenting with Frisbees. He would always throw a Frisbee or two with me. But he always spoke to me as a kid, if you know what I mean, which wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, even if I was a kid. George spoke to me as a junior engineer; he took me seriously.

  “It made a difference. To my whole life.”

  George just nodded; he knew what I meant, and he knew it had to be said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “I guess you were never going to be a Steve Zodiac. But you would have made a good Matthew Matic.”

  “Who?”

  “Fireball XL5… Something else that will disappear from the world with me. Never mind.”

  George started to tire, so I called for a pod bus, and we found a bench and sat. Sitting there, breathing hard, I thought he looked ill for the first time during the visit. I could see the skull under his flesh, I thought, the skin drawn tight beneath his cheekbones, his mouth drawn in, his eyes perhaps creased in pain. A row of blank-walled modern houses, eyeless without windows, loomed before us, uncaring.

  To my surprise George said he was thinking of selling up and moving away from England altogether.

  “I’m going back to Amalfi,” he said. This is a small town on the Sorrento coast of Italy. “I went there after Rome, you know, after I went in search of Rosa. Once I found her I needed some time to recover, to get myself together again. The weather is still better there than here. I know it will be hard to sell up. Hell, it will be awful having to fly again. But I think I will be able to rest there, you know? That’s the way I’ve always thought of Amalfi, a place I could rest.”

  Maybe that was true. Or maybe he simply wanted to be that bit nearer to Rosa, the sister he had lost for so long.

  The pod bus arrived, sighing smoothly over the silvertop, its tiny noise a ghost of the roar of the monstrous torrents of traffic that had once poured this way.

  When I emerged from the VR it was early morning, Alaskan time. I napped, showered, ate, worked for a few hours.

  Then I put in a call to John. We had got into the habit of talking more regularly, after the George situation landed on us. It seemed the right thing to do.

  John predictably thought a move to Amalfi was a bad idea. “It will kill him,” he said bluntly. “What’s the point? It’s a waste of time and money.”

  “He’s dying anyway, John! Now he’s got this idea in his head, he has an ambition, a plan. It gives him things to do, arrangements to make. What else is he supposed to do with his time, dig his own grave? And as for the money, he’ll have more than enough when he sells the house. He isn’t asking anything from us, John. Let him do what he wants.”

  John, a massive-shouldered VR looming in my Deadhorse hotel room, shrugged his shoulders. “OK. I doubt if we could stop him anyhow.”

  As so often, John was subtly off-key in his dealing with George’s illness, to my ears anyhow. I appreciated his emptying his pockets to reunite us all in glorious VR immersive detail, but he also had a habit of reminding us constantly that he was doing it. He always lacked something in these situations, as if he didn’t quite feel what the rest of us were feeling.

  I didn’t want to say any of this to him, but he saw some of it in my face, I think. Sour, deflated, I
didn’t want a fight. “I said I would go back tomorrow. That is, tonight. I think there’s something else he wants to talk over.”

  “Fine. I’ll alert the service provider.”

  I stood up, meaning to break the connection. But John still sat there, on a crudely sketched upright chair, watching me.

  I sat down again. “Is there something else?”

  He glowered at me. “I’m wondering if you’ve done any more thinking about the other business.” By which he meant, of course, Morag.

  “Gea and Rosa are progressing it. I guess I’ll get back to it later.”

  “I still think you should give it up.” His face was always more massive, more obviously strong than mine; his expression had never looked so intense, I thought.

  Suddenly it was obvious that he cared a lot more about the business of Morag than George’s illness. “John, why?”

  “We’ve been over why. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for Tom. It’s bad for all of us. I don’t know what’s going on, the meaning of those strange recordings. But it’s morbid, Michael. You must see that. It’s like a hole you’re digging yourself into, deeper and deeper. Morag is dead. Whatever is happening with these images isn’t going to change that.”

  I stared at him, trying to figure him out. I remembered what Rosa had had to say, that John seemed to have his own agenda in this — that he was hiding something. “Images.What images? This visitor, whatever she is, is real, John. She left footprints in the dirt! She’s real, and we have to deal with her.”

  “Whatever she is, she’s not Morag.”

  “Now, how would you know that? Why are you so concerned, John? Why do you want me to keep away from this?” Fishing, I said at random, “What are you scared of?”

  That got a reaction. He stood up, knocking back his chair, which disappeared once it wasn’t in contact with his body. “I’m scared of nothing.”

  “Then tell me what’s on your mind.”

  For a moment he hesitated, as if on the verge of spilling something. Then he drove a fist into his palm. “Damn it, I wish I hadn’t sent you over to Rosa. That old witch is responsible for all this.”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “Just drop it,” he said now.

  I said coldly, “Why should I do what you tell me? And if you think you can somehow pull the plug by cutting off the money, it won’t make a difference. Other people are involved now. Gea is funding the studies now from her own resources. Rosa, too. It’s out of your control, John.” I took a step toward his image, deliberately trying to provoke him. “It can’t be stopped, no matter what either of us wants. Is that a problem for you, John? What are you afraid of? ”

  “You really are full of it, Michael,” he said with disgust. “You’ve blighted my entire life, do you know that? Are you going to keep this up until one of us is in the grave? Ah, to hell with you.” He waved a hand, cut the connection, disappeared.

  He left me alone in my room, staring at empty space, shaking with anger, utterly baffled.

  I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can’t face going back to Britain — not yet — and to be here is a great relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome.

  I’ve taken a room in a house on the Piazza Spirito Santo. There is a small bar downstairs, where I sit in the shade of vine leaves and drink Coca Light, or sometimes the local lemon liqueur, which tastes like the sherbet-lemon boiled sweets I used to buy as a kid in Manchester, ground up and mixed with vodka. The crusty old barman doesn’t have a word of English. It’s hard to tell his age. The flower-bowls on the outdoor tables are filled with little bundles of twigs that look suspiciously like fasces to me, but I’m too polite to ask…

  “You don’t have to read it if you want to,” George said.

  We were sitting in his living room, my VR presence expensively projected so my ass seemed to nestle gratefully into one of George’s slightly overstuffed armchairs. The room had some mementos, photos and ornaments. Maybe that kind of clutter is inevitable when you get older, as the years pile up. But the equipment, the softscreens and the like, was modern, the furniture not too decrepit. There was little of the old man about the room.

  George had given me a manuscript, a heap of six, seven hundred pages of word-processed text, dog-eared, bound together by bits of string. I couldn’t touch it, of course, or turn its pages. George said he had already sent me a data file with its contents, but he wanted me to see the manuscript itself. After I was gone he’d throw it in the fire.

  I glanced again over the first page. “Who’s the I? You?”

  “Of course. I wrote this out in Amalfi. One reason I stayed there so long. I wanted to get it all off my chest, to tell the story, even if it was only into the memory of a computer.”

  “It’s the story of how you tracked down Rosa, to Rome.”

  “Yes. And what I found there.”

  “You’ve never shown this to anybody?”

  “No. Who was there to show it to? But I don’t want it to disappear into the dark.” He shrugged, his shoulders like bony wings under a loose woolen sweater. “Do with it as you will.”

  I could tell this meant a lot more to him than his casual tone implied. “George — what did you find, in Rome?”

  “It’s all in here,” he said.

  “I know. But I want to hear what you felt about it. You tracked down Rosa to the Order, I know that much…”

  He had found his way to Rosa, who had taken him into the headquarters of the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. The Order ran a vast subterranean complex, located beneath the Catacombs, the ancient underground Christian tombs on the outskirts of Rome. “It was nuclear bunker and Vatican crypt rolled into one,” George said.

  It was in this environment that Rosa had been brought up.

  “They called themselves sisters.”

  “Like nuns?”

  “No. Sisters. ” The Order had been like one vast family, he said. They were mostly women in there, very few men. “Everybody was everybody else’s sister or cousin, aunt or niece.”

  “Or mother or daughter,” I said.

  “Oh, everybody was a daughter. But there were very few mothers. I called them the queens. Not that that was the language they used. Matres — that was the word.”

  One advantage of reading too much old science fiction is that your head becomes stocked with concepts to help make sense of such obscure hints. Suddenly I saw it. “Shit,” I said. “You’re saying that the Order was a hive mind. Is that it?”

  “There wasn’t much mind about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell it was. I’m no sociobiologist. But I can tell you this. It wasn’t a human community. ” He tapped his manuscript again. “It’s all in there. And you know what? It was all an off-shoot of our family, from a deep root that seems to go back to the time of ancient Rome itself. Our family. That’s how Rosa got drawn into it. That’s how I did, I guess.”

  No wonder Rosa had been intrigued by the strange collective organization of the Reef, I thought. I forced a grin. “You do always say we’re a funny lot.”

  “And so we are.” His face was dark. “And now it’s happening again.”

  “What is?”

  “I once had a friend who helped me figure this stuff out. It’s in here.” He leafed through the manuscript, looking for a passage toward the end. “Here it is. The great events of the past — the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War — cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that the future has echoes in the present, too?… I thought I saw the future of mankind in that hole in the ground in Rome, Michael. Or a future. I can’t say I liked what I saw. And maybe now it’s happening again, with you and Morag. Echoes of the future in the present.”

  “But why now? Why us?” I didn’t quite want to say, why me?

  “Maybe because we seem to be at a dangerous time in our history, Michael.” He looked at the back of his hand, poked at skin stained brown by age. “You know, when I was a kid
I think I never believed I would grow old, like this. I was never interested in gardening, because I thought I would never live to see a tree grow tall. You know why? The threat of nuclear war, of extinction in a flash. It hung over my whole childhood like a black cloud. But the hard rain never fell, and eventually the cloud went away.

  “Now a new cloud has gathered over us, every bit as dark and threatening as before. We’re at another tipping point in human history. And who is here trying to show us how to keep our balance? You are, Michael. A Poole. Who else?”

  “And you think that’s why I’m getting these visitations?”

  He reached out to touch my hand, but my VR presence made that impossible, and he pulled back. “Think about it. If you’re right about this hydrate threat — and if you manage to lead the drive to stop it wiping us out — then you will be remembered as one of the most important humans who ever lived. Now, if I was a time traveler from the future, this would be exactly the kind of era I would be drawn to, and you would be exactly the kind of person I’d long to meet.”

  “Shit.” I remembered that Gea had said something similar, so had Rosa — so had George himself, when he talked about the strange circumstances of my birth, the coincidence of the discovery of the Kuiper Anomaly. Suddenly I felt extraordinarily self-conscious, as if a corridor a thousand centuries long had opened up before me, and a million eyes were fixed greedily on my every move.

  “George, if this is true, what should I do about it?”

  He shrugged. “Just accept it. I mean, it makes no difference. You just have to do your best even so, don’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  We just sat for a while. Then I said, “It’s morning in Alaska. I ought to go to work.” I stood. “Can I come visit tomorrow?”

  “Of course.” As my VR broke up, as his room turned transparent around me, I saw him in his chair, smiling, waving a gaunt hand, his fingers bent over and stiff.

  As it happened the next day we hit a problem with the Higgs-field power plant of the moles, and I was kept too busy to get away. The following day was worse. By the third day I was putting off going to see George; I didn’t want to get immersed in all that difficulty again. Tomorrow, I told myself. Or the day after that.