Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

To my relief a hovering bot approached bearing food and drink, and I had an excuse to switch off. Jack Joy pulled off handfuls of sandwiches and began to feed.

  Chapter 12

  To introduce her to the next Implication, of Unmediated Communication, Reath brought Alia to a new world.

  As Reath’s ship slid into orbit, Alia peered down reluctantly. Orbiting a fat yellow star buried deep in the rich tangle of the Sagittarius Arm, this was a rust-brown ball surrounded by an extravagant flock of moons. It was an unprepossessing sight, even for a planet. The air was dense and thick and laden with fat gray clouds; it was like looking into a murky pond. The land was rust-colored and all but featureless, the only “mountains” worn stubs, the valleys the meandering tracks of sluggish rivers. There were oceans but so shallow that the world’s predominant ruddy color showed through. And there were still more peculiar landscapes, such as huge circles of some glassy, glinting material.

  There was life, though. It showed up in patches of gray-green flung across the face of the crimson deserts—managed life, as you could see by its sharp edges, and the neat bright blue circles and ellipses of reservoirs. Alia made out the grayish bubbling of urban developments around these agricultural sites.

  The planet had a catalog number, assigned to it on its rediscovery by the Commonwealth. And it had a name: Case, a blunt title that, it was said, dated back to the days before the Exultants’ victory, when this place, close to the outer edge of the spiral arm, had been a significant war zone. Alia wondered vaguely if “Case” had been a hero of that forgotten war. But, Reath said, the locals didn’t use either the official name or the catalog number; they just called their world, reasonably enough, the “Rustball.”

  As they orbited, Reath patiently taught her to read this planet.

  The thick air, and the worn, low mountains, were symptoms of high gravity, he said: though this world was only a little larger than Earth, its surface gravity was much higher than standard, and so it must be denser. And that rust color was the color of iron oxides—literally rust.

  If the world looked old, so it was. The Galaxy, mother of the stars, was at its most fecund before Earth’s sun was even formed. So humans moving out from Earth had found themselves in a sky full of old worlds, like children tiptoeing through the dusty rooms of a dilapidated mansion.

  As for those glassy plains, said Reath, they were not strange geological features but the relics of war, a bloody tide that had washed over this world again and again.

  After a day, a ship came climbing sluggishly out of the planet’s steep gravity well. The shuttle, fat, flat, round, had the rust color of the planet of its origin, and reminded Alia of a huge insect, a toiling beetle. Even before it arrived, Alia felt a deepening disappointment.

  The two crafts established an interface, and a tunnel opened up between them. Three men came drifting through into the roomier confines of Reath’s ship. “Welcome to the Rustball,” one of the visitors said. He introduced himself and his companions as Campoc Bale, Campoc Denh, and Campoc Seer. “Reath has asked us to host you.”

  Reath nodded.

  The Campocs were squat, all of them a head shorter than Alia, with thick, powerful-looking limbs. Though their costumes were a bright blue, their skin seemed to have something of the murky crimson-brown color of the Rustball itself, and their heads were as hairless and round as the planet of their birth. When they smiled Alia saw they didn’t have discrete teeth but enameled plates that stretched around the curves of their jaws.

  Alia said, “I’m guessing that ‘Campoc’ is a family name? And so the three of you—”

  “Two brothers and a cousin,” Bale said. But he didn’t say which was which. “And I know what you’re thinking. You’ll have trouble telling us apart.”

  “Most visitors do,” said Denh.

  “But we don’t get too many visitors,” said Seer.

  “And don’t worry,” Bale said, “I’ll do most of the talking.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  In the cluttered cabin, they made a strange collection of disparate human types: the long, elegant frame of Reath, the stubby, hairless Campocs, and Alia with her long arms and golden fur. And yet something united them, Alia thought: a curiosity about each other, a deep genetic kinship.

  “So much for the formalities,” Reath said brusquely. He began to shepherd all of them toward the tunnel to the Rustball ship. “Go, go! I’m sure you’ll have much to talk about. As for me I’ve plenty to catch up on here.”

  Alia followed the Campocs into their ship. Her luggage trailed after her. Inside, the beetlelike ship was as cramped and unadorned as the outside.

  Reath said, “Alia, if you need me, call. But you’ll be fine.”

  “We’ll make sure she is,” said Bale.

  The shuttle detached itself from Reath’s ship with a noise like a broken kiss, and ducked without fuss into the thick atmosphere of the Rustball.

  Alia had never felt so stranded.

  On the ground, when she stepped out of the shuttle, the heavy gravity immediately plucked at Alia, and she staggered. The air was thick and hot and smelled of ozone. The clouds overhead were lowering and oppressive. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean; she felt as if she would be crushed. But a couple of moons sailed high, fat matching crescents identical in phase.

  Bale was at her side. He took her arm. “Give it a minute,” he whispered. “It will pass.”

  So it would. As soon as she had set foot on the planet, the Mist had swarmed into her, through her mouth and nose, and through the pores of her skin. Soon she could feel a subtle tingling in her bones and muscles and lungs, as the pain of existence on the Rustball began to recede.

  The Mist lingered on every colonized world. The little creatures who comprised it were neither machine nor living; after half a million years the distinction between biology and technology was meaningless. As she stood here the invisible machines were busily swarming through her body, reinforcing and rebuilding and supplementing, equipping her to cope with the sheer work of survival. Alia didn’t think much about this. The Mist just worked.

  The shuttle had landed on an apron of some durable black material, with crimson dust scattered thinly across it. A settlement of some kind clustered at the rim of the apron. Remarkably, the squat buildings seemed to be constructed of sheets of iron. There was dust everywhere, on the ground and on the buildings, even in the air, which had a pale pink hue. The hot air felt dry and prickly, though she suspected precipitation was imminent from those heavy clouds—rain, she thought, digging out the planet-dwellers’ word.

  The Campocs were watching her.

  Though Alia towered over the Campocs, like an adult among children, these strange little men were not children. There was a calm seriousness about them that was like nothing she had experienced before. It was as if they were listening to voices she couldn’t hear. But then she was here for a purpose: to be made ready for the second stage of her training, the Implication of Unmediated Communication. Though she didn’t yet understand how, these odd little men must have qualities beyond her; they must be at least one step closer to true Transcendence than anybody she had met before.

  And beyond that uneasy realization, she thought the three of them seemed calculating as they studied her, as if they had their own purposes for her visit. Bale, especially, stared at her. Bale’s face was like his world, she thought, his nose small, his mouth a colorless line; his eyes, though large and watery, were like waveless pools.

  Bale asked, “Do you feel better yet?”

  “I think so. She felt uncomfortable to show him weakness, or nervousness. “Are we going to those buildings?”

  “Yes—”

  “Then let’s do it.” She ran forward, across the apron. To her astonishment she tired within a few paces. She looked back at Bale, baffled.

  Gently he told her that she had to learn how to function in a high-gravity field. Here, as on old Earth in fact, gravity was so high that it was actually energe
tically more efficient to walk, to clump along on one foot after another, than to run. In low gravity it was easier to run, spending most of the time in the air as you paddled across the ground. This struck her as absurd, but she hadn’t had to walk far enough on the water-world to learn this subtle lesson. Bale showed her how to do it, and a few experiments proved he was right.

  They walked, then, to the township.

  The buildings were just cubes and cylinders, squat and massive as the people who had built them. None of them was large, just collections of a few rooms jammed together. Servitor machines toiled in scraps of garden, bright green amid the predominant rust color. And all the buildings were boxes of iron, mined from the ground.

  “Welcome to our home,” Bale said. He pointed at one nondescript building. “That’s where we live, where you will stay.”

  Alia had come here to study; she had expected something more formal. “Where’s the seminary?”

  “We don’t have a seminary,” Denh said, or maybe Seer.

  Bale put a massive fist over his heart. “It’s what’s in here that we’re interested in. Not buildings.”

  Alia sighed. “Fine.” She walked forward, trailed by her sluggish baggage, looking for her room. She had to duck to avoid the ceilings.

  Chapter 13

  We flew into Heathrow.

  The huge airport was much diminished, as all airports were. Our plane was a gnat flying down onto an immense carpet of tarmac, where once a plane had landed every three minutes, day and night, and now nothing moved but the mice, and the grass in the wind. But on the fringes of the site I glimpsed some construction. The developers were putting up a theme park. Eventually the contents of all Britain’s aviation museums would be emptied out here, Jaguars and Harriers and Tornadoes, venerable World War Two Spitfires and Lancasters and Hurricanes more than a century old but still flying, even a Concorde or two. From the air the old planes looked like birds forever pinned to the ground.

  As we made our way through the terminal buildings, and more ferocious security checks by British immigration, Jack Joy approached me. He asked if I’d like to go into London with him; he had a hotel booked, he was sure he could squeeze out another room, maybe we could have a drink or take in a show, and so on. My plan had been just to wait for Tom to fly in—he was due in a couple of days. But now that we had been released from the confines of the plane I was eager to get away from Joy and his “realism.”

  And besides, I’d already decided not to stay in London. As I had sat there in the humming quiet of the plane, mulling over past and future, deeper concerns had surfaced. I did take a train into London, but only to cross the city to King’s Cross, one of the big rail terminals for the lines to the north of the country.

  I’d decided to go in search of Morag. So I was going to York.

  I don’t remember when her visits started.

  Maybe she even came when I was very small, a time now lost in the shining mist of childhood memories. She was always just part of my life. I don’t think it was until I was a teenager, thirteen or fourteen, that I realized that other people didn’t have this kind of experience all the time, that it was just me.

  When I finally met Morag, I suffered a shock of recognition.

  It was during a work trip to England. I was at a party, thrown by an Irish family, old friends of my mother’s. I just made a beeline for Morag, as if drawn by some invisible force. I think I actually frightened her with my intensity.

  When I’d calmed down, we got along fine. With a strong streak of Irish in her, she was witty, bright, funny. Even her job was interesting. She was a bio-prospector; she spent her time searching for new species of ascomycete fungi, a key source of antibiotics. It turned out she was actually a friend of John, whose legal career had taken him in a similarly “modern” direction, as he made money from the great shifting of wealth and population caused by the climate change. In some ways Morag had more in common with John; after all at the time I was turning myself into that old-fashioned beast, a nuclear engineer. But Morag was always “greener” than John; later I always thought that side of her had carried on to Tom.

  And with that flame of strawberry-blond hair, she was beautiful.

  As our relationship developed, she quickly became herself to me: Morag, not the fleshed-out version of my personal ghost. During the years of our relationship I didn’t see any of my apparitions. After a time, and especially after Tom was born, other, more real concerns crowded into my head. I began to dismiss my visions.

  I never told Morag about them.

  I always meant to. I just never really figured out how to say it without spooking her. How are you supposed to tell your wife that she has haunted you since you were a kid? In the end, as the visions receded in memory, the thought of even trying to talk about it came to seem absurd, and I put it all aside.

  Then she died, and it was too late.

  And the hauntings began again. The first, cruelly, was in a bleak hospital corridor where I sat with Tom, just moments after we had learned we had lost her, and the baby.

  They were infrequent at first, maybe once or twice a year. They still didn’t frighten me. But after I lost her they became unbearably painful.

  In the last year or so, in the months leading up to Tom’s jeopardy, they had been more frequent. Just in the last few days I had seen her on the beach in Florida, and even in my VR trip to Siberia. It felt worse than ever to be haunted. Maybe it was my shock over Tom that did it. A lot of stuff, deep disturbed emotions, had come welling up out of the frozen depths of my mind like Tom’s methane burping from its hydrate deposits.

  So I’d decided to do something about it before I had to face Tom in the flesh.

  The journey was only a few hours. The train was smooth, clean, comfortable. We shuttled through Peterborough and Doncaster and Leeds and a host of lesser places whose names I knew from similar journeys in the past, but about which I knew little or nothing.

  The countryside had changed since the last time I made this trip, though. In the vast fields of swaying wheat and rape and gen-enged biofuel crops there was hardly a tree or a bush to be seen; I saw more robot tractors than birds or animals. The biodiversity of countries like England flatlined when I was a teenager, and isn’t likely to recover any time soon.

  And then there was the water.

  You could see it everywhere, abandoned roads now permanently flooded to serve as drainage channels or as canals, and artificial flood plains that served as makeshift reservoirs. Much of South Yorkshire was now covered by a new lake. As we crossed it on a raised levee, the water receded to the horizon, and the waves that scudded across it were white-capped; it looked more like an inland sea. I could see the roofs of abandoned houses, the foliage of drowned trees, and the unearthly shape of the cooling towers of dead power plants looming above the water line. The sun was setting, and the water glimmered, reflecting the sunlight in gold splashes. It was all so new the lake didn’t even have a name—or maybe giving it a name would somehow confirm its reality. But geese flapped across the water in a neat fighter-bomber V formation. The geese, at least, seemed to know where they were going, and didn’t seem spooked by this new geography.

  I glided across that drowned landscape in smooth silence, as if we were riding on the water itself, as if it were all a dream.

  By the time we reached York it was growing dark. I joined a line at the rickshaw rank outside the rail station, and soon I was being hauled around the outskirts of the city by an unreasonably athletic young woman. In this post-traffic era, in their wisdom the city authorities had repaved many of the streets with cobbles. It might be fine for pod buses, but by the time we reached my hotel my ass felt like tenderized steak.

  The hotel was where I remembered it. It is a small place just off the A-road that snakes south from York toward Doncaster, overlying the route of an old Roman road. The hotel itself is old, some kind of coach house, eighteenth century I think. Because it’s within a reasonable walk of the city center
it’s stayed profitable where many similar businesses have folded. It’s modern enough, but there’s nothing glamorous about it. Friendly place, though; the only security check I had to go through was a DNA scan verified by Interpol.

  The room I was given was just a bland box with the usual facilities, a minibar and a dispenser for drinks and a big softscreen showing muted news. I couldn’t remember which room we’d taken, back then. Anyhow the interior looked to have been knocked around since those days, nearly thirty years gone. Maybe our room didn’t even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense.

  Of course the staff here didn’t know anything about me. I was just some guy who’d called to make a reservation from Heathrow, and I wasn’t about to tell them why I’d come back here, why I remembered the hotel so well: that this was where I had stayed, with Morag, at the start of our honeymoon.

  I sat in the one big armchair, with my suitcase sitting unopened on my bed, and meaningless news flickering on the wall. It was late evening, but to my body it was the middle of the afternoon, Florida time. I felt restless, perturbed. I didn’t want to face anybody, not even a room service robot.

  Why was I here? For Morag, of course. I had come here, on impulse, to our honeymoon hotel, a place of great significance for the two of us. Fine. Here I was. But what was I supposed to do now?

  On impulse I placed a call to Shelley Magwood.

  I brought up her image on my big plasma screen. She was in the middle of her working day, but to her eternal credit she took time out to talk to me, a confused loser in a hotel room in England. But as I sat there, awkward, inarticulate, unable to broach the subject that was dominating my mind, she seemed to grow faintly concerned. Her background shifted around her; I saw that she had moved to a private office.

  “Michael, I think you’d better come clean. I can see something’s on your mind. So you’re in York, because you had your honeymoon there. Right? . . .”