Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  I found a dune that was resisting the ravages of time with the help of some toughly bound grass. In its shelter the sand was clean and even reasonably dry. I squatted down and began to scoop sand into my sacks. It was late afternoon by now. I was looking into the sun, which was declining to the southwest, to my front right.

  That was when I saw her.

  It was just something in the corner of my eye, a bit of motion that distracted me. I thought it might be a rare sighting of a seabird, or maybe it was just the sun playing on the lapping water. I stood up to see better. It was a woman. She was a long way down the beach, and the light reflected from the sea behind her was bright and sent dazzling highlights stabbing into my eyes.

  Morag?

  I was never frightened by these encounters, or visitations. There was no sense of fear, or dread. But there was always ambiguity, muddle, uncertainty. It might have been Morag, my long-dead wife, or it might not.

  I also felt a certain irritation, believe it or not. I’d had such visitations all my life, and was used to them. But in recent months the frequency had increased. I’d been plagued by these visions, apparitions—whatever. Their incompleteness hurt me; I wanted resolution. But I didn’t want them to stop.

  I took a step forward, trying to see better. But I was holding a three-quarters-full sandbag, and it started to spill. So I bent down to set it on the ground. And then I had to step over the hole I had dug. One thing after another, in my way.

  When I looked up again she was still there, bathed in light, though she seemed a bit further away. She waved at me, a big hearty wave, her arm right over her head. My heart melted. There was more warmth in that simple gesture than in any of the responses I had had from John and his Happified kids. It was Morag, dead seventeen years; it could only be her.

  Now she cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. But the waves crashed, echoes of some remote Atlantic storm, and only a splinter of sound reached my ears. John, she said. Or it might have been bomb. Or Tom.

  “What did you say? Something about Tom? Morag, wait—” I blundered forward. But away from the line of the dunes the sand quickly got muddy, and soon my feet and lower legs were coated in great heavy boots of sticky sea-bottom ooze. Then I came to one of those big reefs of seaweed, piled high and deliquescing to a stinking mush. I cast back and forth, looking for a way through.

  When I looked beyond the heaps of rotting weed she had gone.

  Back at the house, the kids had gone inside to join in an immersive virtual drama on Grandma’s huge wall-mounted softscreen. The rising tide had caused water to bubble out of the ground around the house and lap over the yard; even their smart soccer ball had been defeated.

  As the sun went down, I joined John at his patient Paintwork.

  We applied the Paint laboriously. It was heavy, sticky stuff, full of lumps, kind of like Artex, and difficult to work to an even coat. Silver in color, it looked odd on my mother’s clapboard walls, making the house look like a mocked-up stage set. And as we scraped on the Paint it started to thank us, in a whispery voice that wafted from the wall: Thank you, thank you for complying with all local sentience ordinances, thank you. . . .

  “Oh, screw you,” said John.

  The dubious color scheme was one reason my mother hated this stuff. But it was silver, which deflected much of the sunlight, thereby cutting down on air-conditioning costs, and it was laden with photovoltaic cells to make the whole house a solar-powered sink.

  And the Paint was dense in processors, billions of tiny nanofabricated computers each the size of a dust speck and about as smart as an ant. As we applied it the little brains linked up with each other through the conducting medium of the Paint itself, and burrowed their electronic way into the house’s systems, seeking connectivity with power points and actuator controls. Artificial intelligence in a can: when I was a kid it would have seemed a miracle. Now sentience was a commodity, and this was just a chore.

  For a while we worked together in stolid silence, my brother and me. The light leaked out of the sky, and my mother’s porch lanterns, big cool bulbs, popped into life. Mosquitoes buzzed and swarmed.

  John made small talk. “So how about the digital millennium, huh? You’re the engineer; tell me if I need to worry.”

  I shrugged. “We’ll survive. Just like Y2K. It won’t be so bad. They’ve done a few trial system excavations to check.”

  John laughed at my choice of word. Excavation.

  It was the latest scare story to sweep the planet. Next year’s date, 2048, was an exact power of two, in fact two to the power eleven, and so it would require an extra binary digit to represent it in the memory of the world’s interlinked computer systems. Nobody quite knew what that was going to do to the “legacy suites,” some many decades old, crusted over with enhancements and embellishments, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, grisly old codes rotting in computer memory like the seaweed on my mother’s beach.

  “So,” John said, “just another scare?”

  “We live in a time of scares and wonders.”

  “It’s not a rational age.” As the Paint continued to thank him, John sighed. “Listen to this damn stuff. Lethe, maybe it’s rational not to be rational.”

  Intrigued, I asked, “What do your kids think of the millenium?”

  “Nothing, as far as I know. I try to get them to watch the news, but it’s a losing battle. But then, nobody watches the news nowadays, do they, Michael?”

  “If you say so,” I snapped back.

  This conversation, tense, on the edge of fencing, was typical of us. It was the thin surface of an antagonism that went back to our late teens, when we had started to become aware of the world, and we had begun to shape our attitudes to the future.

  I had aimed to become an engineer; I wanted to build things. And I was fascinated by space. After all, when I was ten years old they discovered the Kuiper Anomaly: an honest-to-God alien artifact sitting at the edge of the solar system. For those of us who cared about such things, our whole perspective in the universe had been changed. But we were in the minority, and the world continued to turn, and I was out of step.

  John, though, became a lawyer, specializing in environmental-damage compensation suits. I thought he was cynical, but in the wake of the vast political and economic restructuring that had followed the Stewardship program he was undoubtedly successful. By tapping into the vast rivers of money that sloshed to and fro in a destabilized world he had become hideously rich, and was now aiming for greater ambitions—while I, an engineer who built things, could barely pay the bills. That probably tells you all you need to know about the state of the world in those days.

  We really got along remarkably bad, for brothers. Or maybe not. But still, this was my brother, the only sane person left who had known me all my life, with due respect to my mother.

  And I longed to tell him about Morag on the beach.

  I’d never told anybody. Now I felt I should. Who else to tell but my brother? Who else should know about it? He would mock, of course, but it was his job to mock. Standing there working with him, as the lights grew brighter in the gathering gloom, I plucked up my courage, and opened my mouth.

  Then the lights fizzed to a silver-gray nothingness. Suddenly John was a silhouette against a darkling sky, holding a useless paintbrush. We heard cries of disappointment from the kids inside the house.

  “Damn it,” John snapped.

  The house, or anyhow the Paint, was apologizing. Sorry, sorry for the inconvenience.

  It was a cooperative brownout, as the sentiences dispersed in the neighborhood houses and bars and shops and streetlamps, and in the water pumps and buses and boats, responded to symptoms of alarm coming from the local power microgrid—usually a glitching in the main supply frequency—and shut themselves off. It was better this way, better than the bad old days of stupid systems and massive blackouts, everybody said. But it was a royal pain in the butt even so.

  My mother stuck her head
out of the window. “And that’s another reason I don’t like that silver stuff.”

  John laughed. “We’ll have to finish tomorrow, Ma. Sorry.”

  “You’d better come in; the mosquitoes will be at you in minutes now that the electric fences are down. I’ve got no-brain-chicken slices, and cookies, and cards to keep the kids quiet.” She shut the window with a bang.

  I glanced at John. I couldn’t see his face, but glimpsed the whiteness of his teeth. “Gin rummy,” he said. “I always hated fucking gin rummy.”

  “Me, too.” It was one thing we had in common, at least.

  He clapped me on the back, a bit more friendly than before. Side by side we walked into the house.

  That was when I got an alarm call in my ear so loud it hurt.

  There had been some kind of explosion in Siberia. Tom, my son, was out of touch, maybe hurt.

  Chapter 4

  As she had grown up and become aware of her world, Alia had always known that the Nord was a ship, an artifact, everything about it made. And that implied it had an origin, of course, a time before which it hadn’t existed. She had never really thought about it. The present was the thing, not some discontinuity in remote history; wherever you grew up you always assumed, deep inside, your world had existed forever.

  Nevertheless, it was true. This ship had once been built, and named, and launched, by human hands.

  The Nord had once been a generation starship. Crawling along at sublight, it was designed to journey for many generations, after which the remote grandchildren of its builders would spill onto the ground of some new world. It was believed it had been launched from Sol system itself, probably built of the ice of a remote moon, perhaps of Port Sol itself—and perhaps even by the legendary engineer Michael Poole, descended from the subject of Alia’s Witnessing, an earlier Michael Poole who had been doomed to live in a much drabber time.

  But that was probably just a story. The truth was the Nord’s port of origin was long forgotten, its intended destination unknown. Nobody even knew who its builders were or what they had wanted. Were they visionaries, refugees—even, it was whispered deliciously, criminals?

  Even the ship’s name was a subject of intellectual debate. It might have derived from nautilus, a word from old Earth referring to an animal that lived its life in a shell. Or perhaps it derived from North or Northern, an earthworm’s word for a direction on a planet’s surface.

  But whatever its target had been, the Nord had never reached it. Long before it completed its voyage it had been overtaken by a wave of faster-than-light ships, a new generation of humans washing out from Earth and rediscovering this relic of their own past. It must have been a huge conceptual shock for the crew on that day when the first FTL flitters had come alongside.

  But when that generation had passed, the crew had accepted their place aboard a bit of bypassed history. They had begun to trade with the passing ships—at first with the Nord’s reaction-mass ice, billions of tons of which still remained, and later with hospitality, cultural artifacts, theater shows, music, elegant prostitution. The Nord was no longer a vessel, really; it was an artificial island, drifting between the stars, locked into a complex interstellar trading economy. Nowadays nobody aboard had any ambition for the voyage to end.

  Of course if you lived on a spaceship there were constraints. The Nord’s inner space was always going to be finite, and the population could never grow too far. But two children were enough for most people: indeed most had fewer. Alia knew that she was fortunate to have a sister in Drea; siblings were rare. Her parents, though, had never made any secret of the deep and unusual joy they had derived from their children.

  And anyhow if you didn’t like it here in this small floating village you could always escape. You could pay for passage aboard one of the Nord’s endless stream of FTL visitors, and head for any of the worlds of a proliferating human Galaxy. And likewise some of those visitors, charmed by the Nord’s antiquity and peace, chose to stay.

  Thus the Nord had sailed on, its crew rebuilding their ship over and over, until it had passed through the dense molecular clouds that shielded the Galaxy’s Core from eyes on Earth, and had broken into a new cold light.

  And half a million years had worn away.

  The sisters’ home was a cluster of bubble-chambers lodged just underneath the Nord’s ceramic hull. Windows had been cut into that ancient surface, so that from Alia’s own room you could see out into space. The room was small, but it was a pleasant retreat she had always cherished.

  But today there was a visitor here. An intruder.

  It was a man, a stranger. He stood quietly in the center of the floor, hands behind his back. Her mother, Bel, stood beside the visitor, her hands twisting together.

  The stranger was tall, so tall he had to duck to avoid the ceiling. He was dressed in a drab pale gray robe that swept to the ground, despite his angular tallness. His face was long, a thing of planes and hard edges of bone, as if there wasn’t a morsel of spare fat under his flesh. His arms were short, too stiff for climbing; he was a planet-dweller. His expression was kindly, almost amused, as he looked at her. But Alia thought he had an air of detachment, as if she were some kind of specimen. He kept subtly away from the furniture, her bed and chairs and table and Witnessing tank, all heaped with clutter and clothes.

  She didn’t like this judgmental stranger in her room, looking at her stuff. Resentment flared.

  Her mother’s face was flushed, and she seemed tense, agitated. It took a lot to get a bicentenarian so visibly excited. “Alia, this is Reath. He’s come to see you, all this way. He’s from the Commonwealth.”

  The man, Reath, stepped forward, arms outspread. “I’m sorry to intrude on you like this, Alia. It’s all terribly ill-mannered. And I know this will come as a shock to you. But I’ve come to offer you an opportunity.”

  She couldn’t tell how old he was. But then, you couldn’t tell how old anybody was past the age of thirty or so. He was different, however, she thought. There was a stillness about him, as if he had weightier concerns than those around him.

  She said suspiciously, “What kind of opportunity? Are you offering me some kind of job?”

  “In a sense—”

  “I don’t want a job. Nobody works.”

  “Some do. A very few,” he said. “Perhaps you will be one of them.” His voice was deep, compelling, his whole manner mesmeric. She felt he was drawing her down some path she might not want to follow.

  Her mother had gone, she noticed, slipped out of the room while Reath distracted her.

  Reath turned away and walked around the room, his hands still folded behind his back. “You have windows. Most people would prefer to be hidden away, buried in the human world, to forget that they are on a starship at all. But not you, Alia.”

  “My parents chose the apartment,” she said. “Not me.”

  “Well, perhaps.” With an elegant finger he traced faint shadows on the wall, a cross-hatching of rectangles, hexagons, ovals, and circles. As the occupancy patterns of the Nord had changed, windows had been cut here, then filled in and cut again, each repair leaving a ghostly mark. “And these usage scars? They don’t bother you?”

  “Why should they?” In fact she liked the sense of history the faint scarring gave her, the idea that she wasn’t the first to live here, to breathe this air.

  He nodded. “You don’t mind. Even though it must give you a sense of transience, of the evanescence of all things—of youth, of love, even of your own identity. I don’t mean to patronize you, Alia. But I suspect you’re still too young to understand how rare that is. Just as they would prefer to forget where they are in space, most people would rather not think about their position in time. They would certainly prefer not to think about death!”

  She felt increasingly uncomfortable. “And that’s why you’ve come here? Because I think too much?”

  “Nobody thinks too much. Anyhow you can’t help it, can you?” He approached her Witnessin
g tank. It was a silvered cube half his height. “May I?”

  She shrugged.

  He tapped the tank’s surface.

  It turned clear to reveal a softly translucent interior, filled with light that underlit the planes of Reath’s face. And through the light snaked a pale pink rope, looping and turning back on itself. If you looked closely you could see that the line wasn’t a simple cable, but had small protuberances and ridges. And if you looked closer still you could just see that it was actually a kind of chain, with its links tiny human figures, one fading seamlessly into the next: there was a tiny baby at one end, fingers and toes pink, and at the other end of the sequence an old man, bent and gaunt.

  Reath said, “Your subject is Michael Poole, isn’t it? I envy you. Though it’s no coincidence you’ve been assigned such a significant figure, historically.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Oh, no. We—I mean, the councils of the Commonwealth—have had our eye on you for a long time, Alia.”

  That chilled her. And she still didn’t know what he wanted.

  “I am certainly pleased to see you keep up your Witnessing.”

  “Doesn’t everybody?”

  “Sadly, no. Even though we all have our duty: to Witness is to participate in the Redemption, which has been mandated by the Transcendence.” When he said the name, Reath bowed his head.

  Alia knew this was true. She had always been fascinated by her assigned Witnessing subject; others, even her own sister, thought that was a bit too earnest, and in the interests of popularity she’d learned not to talk about it.

  Reath reached into the tank and touched the flesh-colored chain, close to one end. That “link” was cut out, magnified, and became animated, and the tank filled up with the light of a distant sun, a vanished beach. A boy played, throwing brightly colored discs to and fro through the air. There was a contrail traced by a spark of light climbing in the sky, maybe a rocket; the boy quit his playing to watch, his hand peaked over his eyes.