Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “It’s not my job,” he said. His voice was mild, as if I were no more than an irate client, which maddened me even more. “Michael, I understand how you are feeling—”

  “Oh, fuck off.” I turned on my heel and stalked off.

  He called after me. “If I hear anything about Tom I’ll let you know. Keep your implant switched on. . . .”

  I wasn’t even gracious enough to acknowledge that. It was not one of my finer moments. I stomped around the house, trying to calm down.

  In the yard, the kids were playing with their smart football again. Both of them wore masks, flimsy transparent things, presumably to guard them against the foul breeze from China. They welcomed me, and I joined in their game, volleying and heading. I was always lousy at football, and I always will be, but they were gallingly kind.

  So I was spending time with them, with Sven and Claudia, John’s beautiful kids, my niece and nephew. But I felt uncomfortable.

  At one point the ball rolled off the yard’s bare concrete floor and ended up in long scrubby dune grass. You could see it roll back and forth, trying to find its way back to the game, but its rudimentary sensorium was confused by the blades of grass that towered around it. After a time it started to sound its little alarm chime.

  Sven and Claudia stooped over the thing as it rolled about. “Look,” Sven said. “When it sees us it comes toward us.”

  “Get back out of its sight,” said Claudia. “Let’s see what it does.” They both stepped back out of the way.

  The ball resumed its rolling, utterly baffled. There was a fragment of sentience in there, of genuine awareness. The ball could feel pain, the way a simple animal can, perhaps. Why, even the plaintive way it rang its stupid alarm chime was enough to break your heart. But those kids just stepped backward and forward, experimenting with it.

  When I looked at Claudia, especially, I always felt a chill. It wasn’t so much what she did but what she didn’t do. There was nothing behind that pretty face, I thought, nothing but emptiness, like the endless black abyssal emptiness that lay between worlds. She made me feel cold, just looking at her.

  In the end I picked up the ball myself and threw it back into the yard.

  And John came running around the corner, wheezing. His assistant Feliz had called. It was news of Tom. My son was injured but alive.

  Chapter 6

  On this planet the clouds were tall, rising in soft mounds around the equator and gathering in immense creamy swirls toward the poles.

  To Alia this was a pretty view, but meaningless. She knew nothing about planets. She had never even visited one before. The only planet she had ever studied in detail was Earth, the root of all mankind, with its layers of archaic planetary defenses, its skim of ocean, its clustering city-covered continents.

  But there were no continents here. When the flitter dipped into the atmosphere of this world there was nothing but an ocean, a crumpled silver-blue sheet that spread to the horizon. Above, the clouds were heaped up in a vast three-dimensional array of sculpture. This whole world was water, she thought, nothing but water, water below, water in the air. And under the clouds the prospect was oppressive, gloomy, illuminated only by shafts of sunlight cast through breaks in the cover.

  She was here, under this dismal sky, because the Transcendence had willed it.

  The Transcendence: the godlike assemblage of immortals at the heart of human society, from whom all political authority flowed. Truthfully, Alia knew little about it, save that it was, so the creepy scuttlebutt had it, a project of ancients, of undying. But what was the Transcendence itself? In her head she vaguely imagined something titanic, superhuman, beyond comprehension, perhaps like the muddled light of the Galaxy Core occluded by its interstellar clouds. Nobody talked about it much.

  But now, it seemed, the Transcendence had taken an interest in her own small life. And it had already brought her far from home.

  With Reath, agent of the Commonwealth, she had already traveled thousands of light-years. This water-world’s sun was on the fringe of a giant stellar nursery, a huge glowing cloud of roiling dust and ice that was spawning one hot young star after another. The nursery was on the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm, one of the Galactic disc’s principal star-birthing regions, and the water-world itself was a moon of a massive gas giant. So the sky here was crowded and spectacular—but right now, through those clouds, she couldn’t see a trace of it, not even the primary giant.

  “Ah—look at that.” Reath pointed to the horizon, where a column of darkness, writhing visibly, connected the ocean to the sky. “Do you know what that is?”

  “Is it weather?”

  “Alia, that is a hurricane. A kind of storm, a vortex of air. It is fueled by heat from the upper levels of the sea. It twists and moves, you see—chaotically, but not unpredictably.”

  “It is a phenomenon of a water-world.”

  “Not just world-oceans. Any planet with extensive seas and a respectable atmosphere can spawn such twisters. Even Earth! If there is land, of course, the storm can track away from the sea.”

  Alia had grown up in a bubble of air less than two kilometers wide, every molecule of which was climate-controlled and cleansed by the Nord’s antique, patient machines. She tried to imagine such a monstrous storm slamming into a town or a city on Earth. Her imagination was unformed, filled with images of catastrophic breakdowns of environment control systems. “How terrible,” she said.

  “Oh, humans mastered hurricanes long ago. All you have to do is cut off their energy supply before they do any damage. And of course by tracking on to land they detach themselves from the ocean that feeds them, and die of their own accord.”

  “But not here, for there is no land.”

  “Not here, no. Here a twister can live on and on, sucking up energy, spinning off daughters, tracking around the world. One twister system here—I’m not sure if it is that one—reaches right up to the top of the atmosphere. You can see it from space, like a glowering eye. And it has persisted for thousands of years.”

  This was terribly disturbing for a ship-born girl like Alia. She was relieved when the storm receded from sight behind the horizon.

  It was a month since she had agreed to follow Reath, to leave her home and begin the program of training that might, ultimately, remarkably, lead to her becoming that unknowable entity—a Transcendent, to become one of the host of godlike post-humans who governed mankind. A month since she had placed herself in the care of an agent of the Commonwealth.

  The Commonwealth! Before she had left the Nord it had been little more than a name to her, a shadowy authority that arched over human civilization, as lofty and remote and beautiful as an interstellar cloud, and as irrelevant. Now she was beginning to get a sense of the reality of it—and it was much more than she had ever imagined.

  The Commonwealth was based at the most logical place for a Galactic capital: on a cluster of worlds that drifted amid the millions of crowded suns of the Core, where mankind had always anchored its Galactic empires.

  The most visible sign of the Commonwealth’s presence was the Clock of Humanity. Lodged in the Core, this was a machine the size of the star. It used the decay of certain types of subatomic particles, called W and Z bosons, to produce pulses of neutrinos. These were the fastest known physical processes; no conceivable clock could be more precise. And as neutrinos passed like ghosts through all normal forms of matter, the pulses washed through the stars and dust of the Galaxy and never occluded or dispersed, so you could pick up the clock’s chiming wherever you were. Once, it was said, human clocks had been devised to fit the natural rhythms of Earth, its days and years. Now humans had scattered over millions of disparate worlds, and so the Clock was calibrated to a standard human pulse rate. Thus a civilization that encompassed a Galaxy marched in step to the rhythms of a human heart.

  “And all of it,” Reath told her, “is driven by the Transcendence—a Commonwealth within the Commonwealth, a center within the center, the innerm
ost heart of everything.”

  The Transcendence was the source of all authority. As far as she could make out, it was itself a meshing of minds, a titanic superhuman mass around which human affairs pivoted, much as the Galaxy itself wheeled about the unmovable black hole at its very center. But the Transcendence needed agencies to carry out its will in the human world: it was a god embedded in bureaucracy.

  The Commonwealth was more than a collection of dusty agencies, though, Reath said. The Commonwealth itself was an aspiration. As it worked on a Galactic scale, bit by bit, humans were drawn closer together, knit more integrally into the whole. Reath liked to say that whether you knew about it or not, if you were of human descent you were a citizen of the Commonwealth already. “And one day, it is hoped,” Reath said, “we will all be drawn in, not just into the Commonwealth, but even into the Transcendence itself—and then a new kind of human history will begin.”

  But if it was to achieve such aspirations, the Transcendence had to grow. It had to recruit. Astonishing as it seemed, the Transcendence needed people like Alia.

  If her ultimate goal was barely imaginable, Reath reassured her, the training would come in easy chunks. There were three formal stages, which he called Implications: the Implication of Indefinite Longevity, of Unmediated Communication, and of Emergent Consciousness. Needless to say she had little idea what any of these terms might actually mean, though they all sounded scary. But as well as the formal steps they would enjoy some “fun” together, Reath said: notably, travel to exotic worlds like this one.

  She wasn’t happy.

  It wasn’t the distances that troubled her. To a Skimmer, distance was supposed to be meaningless anyhow. No, it wasn’t the distance but the company she had to keep: her only companion, in his austere, joyless tube of a ship was the silent and watchful Reath.

  Reath wasn’t bad company, really. He was attentive to her needs, and tolerated her moods, and much of what he had to say was even interesting. But his face was blank, expressionless, as immobile as if the nerve ends had been cut. He was a walking, talking emblem of the great severance she had undergone, her separation from the Nord, her whole world, and her rejection by her parents in favor of a baby brother she did her level best not to hate.

  Reath had done her one great favor, though. He had allowed her to bring along her Witnessing tank.

  She could watch Michael Poole any way she pleased. The basic wormlike chain of images, from Poole’s birth to death, was a simple four-dimensional representation, an index. She could allow a scene from his life to unfold inside the tank, with Poole, his family and friends, enemies and strangers, like tiny actors. Or she could magnify it and immerse herself in the scene, an unseen witness.

  All of this was utterly authentic, so she understood, though she knew nothing of the technology involved: this wasn’t a reconstruction, this really was the life of Michael Poole as he had lived it, five thousand centuries ago, all of it from birth to death embedded deep in the irrevocable past, and locked up inside her tank for her benefit.

  Reath reminded her it was the obligation of every citizen to keep up her program of Witnessing, as ordained by mysterious bodies at the heart of the Commonwealth, which he called “the Colleges of Redemption.” So he allowed her to believe she wasn’t after all being helplessly sentimental in clinging to Michael Poole, her childhood companion; it was her duty. Perhaps he was sparing her feelings, and if so she was grateful for his indulgence. But he did take the Witnessing very seriously indeed, for he said the Redemption was at the heart of the greatest ambitions of the Transcendence.

  And so, in the bowels of Reath’s severe ship, as the stars sailed by, she spent long hours immersed in the bright Florida light of Poole’s long-ago childhood. She wished she could be there now, gazing not on this dismal water-world but on the sparkling seas of Earth.

  Hundreds of kilometers of featureless ocean passed under the flitter’s prow.

  “Reath, what is this world called?”

  “Names are relative,” Reath said, smiling. “They depend on your viewpoint.”

  Any world had a multiplicity of names, he said. The Commonwealth maintained formal catalogs, numbering every star and planet, comet and asteroid, every object of any significant size in the Galaxy. Some of these catalogs were based on antecedents that went back hundreds of millennia, to the days when the whole Galaxy had been an arena of war. There were other viewpoints, too. Those near enough to see this world’s star in their sky would give it a more formal name, as part of some constellation, say; they might even name the world itself if they could see it. Thus the world might have a dozen, a hundred such names, assigned from different interstellar viewpoints. But a world’s primal name (or names) was that given it by those who lived here.

  Alia gazed down at the endless seascape. “So what do the locals call this world? Wet?”

  “You’ll see,” he said evasively.

  “And why is there no land here?”

  He smiled. “Because the ocean is too deep . . .”

  There was no world quite like this one in Sol system. This world was bigger than Earth, six times as massive. It had first formed far from its sun, so far out that water and other volatiles had not been driven off by its sun’s heat as it coalesced. As it cooled it was left with a rocky core about the size of the Earth, but that inner core was swathed in a blanket of water ice.

  After its formation was completed, this world had been gathered in as the moon of a gas giant. Thus things might have remained, if not for the fact that the parent Jovian, its orbit impeded by the remnant dust cloud from which it had formed, migrated steadily in toward its sun. And the ice moon began to melt.

  “At last almost all the ice went—there’s just a couple of islands of it at the poles now—leaving an ocean more than a hundred kilometers thick, over a remnant ice mantle. That’s, oh, ten times as thick as the oceans on Earth. And then a little outgassing created the atmosphere. Weather started, and—”

  “And that’s why there is no land?”

  “How could there be dry land, Alia? Even if the seabed was rock, you’d need a mountain a hundred kilometers tall to poke above the ocean surface to make an island. No such mountains are possible on Earth, let alone here, where the gravity is about fifty percent above standard. And besides the seabed is ice, not rock.

  “Because of the lack of land, it was difficult for life to get started here. There is life here, though: life that kick-started on other, more hospitable worlds of the system, and drifted here as spores—”

  “Panspermia.”

  “Yes.” He nodded approvingly. “And then, of course, people came.”

  People? But, she wondered, how could they live here?

  Reath pointed. “There it is at last. Our destination.”

  Adrift in the middle of the endless ocean was a scrap of bright orange—a rectangle, a man-made thing. Alia felt unreasonable relief to see this bit of human engineering in the immense emptiness of the sea.

  At first glance the platform seemed to be resting on a narrow stalk that protruded out of the ocean. But it turned out that the platform was studded with antigravity lifters, and the “stalk” was actually a cable anchored in the deep ice, under tension as the lifters endlessly tried to pull the platform into the sky. It struck Alia as a cheap and quick solution to the problem of stability on a watery world.

  The flitter slowed, and dipped toward the platform. Alia felt reluctant to Skim; she hadn’t done so since leaving the Nord. So she and Reath climbed down out of the flitter the old-fashioned way, through a door.

  The wind was strong and buffeting, and cold on her face, only a little above freezing. Reath seemed unperturbed, though he was so tall and skinny he looked as if he might blow away.

  The air was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide—scarcely a trace of oxygen; life was rare here. But of course there was Mist in the air, the invisible population of nanomachines and engineered bugs that infested the atmosphere and oceans of every human
planet. She stood still to let the Mist suffuse her. Her bones and muscles tingled as they were strengthened to cope with the heavy gravity, and the air she drew into her lungs fizzed with oxygenation. The cold was kept out of her body, but she could taste the salt-laden air in her mouth, the sharp, heavily salted tang of the global sea.

  She made her way cautiously to the edge of the platform. There was no rail, no barrier between her and the abyssal ocean. Near the edge the wind grew stronger, and in the ocean below waves growled back and forth.

  “I’m glad we’re out of reach of those waves,” Alia said.

  “So we are—most of the time. Remember there’s no land here, Alia, nothing to make the waves break. A wave system can just keep on traveling, gathering up more and more energy—”

  “Like the hurricanes.”

  “But we should be safe from being washed away for today.”

  Though the platform was high above the waves it rocked and tipped subtly, its anchoring cable creaking noisily. The motion was slight, but very unsettling.

  “Don’t worry,” Reath shouted over the wind, “we’re quite safe. It’s just that there’s a cable a hundred kilometers long beneath us! No matter how strong the tension in it is, you’re going to get vibrations, resonances. The cable is a string plucked by the ocean! Why, if the worse came to the worst and the cable snapped altogether, the antigravity lifters would just take us flying up through the clouds into space.”

  “I think I’d prefer it if it did snap,” she said. She looked around the platform. Aside from the sleek form of their flitter, glistening with spray, there was only a huddle of automated sensors. “Reath, why have we come here?”

  “Why, for the people,” he said. “Because people are here, we must come here. The Commonwealth, I mean. That is the mandate of the Transcendence.”