Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  He sat in the room’s single armchair. He was bundled up in a tired-looking hotel dressing gown, watching news that bubbled quietly from one wall. His hair had been shaved at some point during his brief hospitalization. He looked cadaverous, ill; he probably looked worse than he was. He had an aspirator in his hand, the only sign I’d seen of continuing medical treatment.

  I sat on the bed, and he gave me a whisky from his minibar. It was midnight, but both our body clocks were screwed. With nobody else around, you make your own time.

  There we were, the two of us, sitting side by side in an alien country, neutral territory.

  “We need to talk,” I said tentatively.

  “Yeah, we do.” The words came out as a growl. He leaned over and tapped the wall.

  To my surprise, an image of the Kuiper Anomaly came up. It was a tetrahedron, an electric-blue framework that rotated slowly. Every so often starlight caught one of its faces, and it would flare up, iridescent, as if soap films were stretched across the frame.

  “What’s this?”

  He said, “I’ve been hacking into your logs, Dad. Seeing what you’ve been up to, the last few days.”

  “You always did do your homework,” I said.

  “Still this shit with you, isn’t it? Starships and alien beings.”

  I folded my arms—I know, a defensive posture, but he had gone straight on the attack. “How can you call it shit? Look at this thing, obviously artificial, the only artificial object we know of in the universe not made by human hands. We’re facing the biggest mystery in human history—and the answers may deliver the greatest change in human consciousness since—”

  “Since we came out of the caves? Since we walked on the Moon? Since Columbus or Galileo, or the invention of the sentient toilet bowl?”

  “But—”

  “Dad, will you just stop talking? You’ve been talking all my fucking life. I remember when Mom left you that time. I was six—”

  “Seven, actually.”

  “She told me why she was taking me away from you for a while.”

  “She did?”

  “She always talked to me, Dad, in a way you never did. Even though I was only a little kid. She said you had two modes. You were either depressed, or else you were escaping from the fucking planet altogether. We would come back to you, she promised me, and we did, but she needed a break.”

  I said grimly, “It might have been better if she’d had that out with me, not you.”

  “She’s dead, Dad,” he reminded me. He snapped his fingers, and the image of the Anomaly scrunched up and whirled away. “So you think it would have been better if I’d followed you, and devoted my life to this kind of blue-sky shit rather than the Library of Life?”

  I still had my arms folded. “If you had, you wouldn’t have got yourself nearly killed by some burp of toxic gas in a godforsaken place nobody ever heard of. At least I’d know where you were, instead of having to hear that you’d nearly died through some friend of a friend . . .” I hadn’t meant to say any of that. All this stuff, the resentment, the sense of abandonment, the hurt, was just tumbling out, having been penned up inside me since I’d heard the bad news.

  Tom said, “So it’s not the danger to me that bothers you. It’s the effect on you. You’ve always been the same, Dad.”

  “Just don’t get yourself killed,” I blurted. “It’s not worth it.”

  He looked at me, almost curiously. “Biospheric capture isn’t worth it? Why not? Because we’re through the Bottleneck? Is that what you think, that the worst is over?”

  I spread my hands. Here we were, with a kind of dreadful inevitability, arguing about the state of the world, rather than our relationship. “We’re dealing with it, Tom. Aren’t we? We gave up the damn automobile. We gave up oil! Some people will tell you that was the most profound economic transformation since the end of the Bronze Age. And then there’s the Stewardship.”

  He actually laughed. “The Stewardship? You think that the Warming, the Die-back, are somehow fixed by that vast instrumentality? Dad, are you really that complacent?”

  “Tom—”

  “We are fundamentally different people. Dad, you were always a dreamer. A utopian. You dreamed of space and aliens—the future. But I think the future in your head is a lot like the afterlife, like Heaven. Both impossible fantasies of places that we can never reach, and yet where all our problems will just go away. And, like the afterlife, those who believe in the future try to control what we do in the here-and-now. There has always been a kind of future fascism, Dad. But the future is irrelevant.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes! Not if we can’t get through the present. I’m different from you, Dad. I’m no dreamer. I go out there, into the world, and I deal with it like it is. And that was always beyond you, wasn’t it? You never liked the present. It’s just too complicated, too messy, too interconnected. There’s nothing you can get your engineer’s teeth into. And not only that, it’s depressing.”

  He rubbed his bald scalp. “I remember you once worked with me on a homework assignment on cosmology. You always were good at that stuff. Do you remember trying to prove to me that the universe must be finite? You spun me around on an office chair, fast enough for my legs and arms to go rising up. You asked me how I’d know if it was me spinning around in a stationary universe—or if the universe was spinning around me. The two situations seem symmetrical; how could I tell? But if I was stationary, what was pulling my arms away from my body, and making me feel nauseous? It had to be the universe, the whole of it, a great river of matter and energy circling around my body, stars and planets and people, and as it spun it was tugging at my legs, through gravity, relativity, whatever. I thought that was a wonderful thought, how I was connected to everything else.

  “But, you said, that showed the universe had to be finite. Because if it was infinite, it would load me down with an infinite inertia. I wouldn’t be able to spin at all. I’d have been trapped like a bug in amber. You see, that’s how I think you are in the world, Dad. You see the complicated real-world problems of ecology and climate and politics and all the rest like an infinite universe that pins you flat. No wonder you’d rather believe it’s all been fixed. By the Stewardship, for God’s sake, the last word in bureaucracy and corruption . . .”

  Well, maybe so. I did wonder if Tom would have preferred me to be a brutal realist like Jack Joy, the Lethe Swimmer.

  I got up, walked around a few paces, turned away until I was calmer. “Maybe we ought to keep it down. We might wake the other guests.”

  He didn’t smile. “What other guests? Nobody here but us ghosts, Dad. Which reminds me—” Reaching out, he tapped another part of the wall screen.

  He brought up a picture of me, standing in that puddle in York in the middle of the night, taken from some security camera. So, suddenly, things had got even more messy.

  I sat down. “Who sent you this?”

  “Uncle John. Does it matter who? I know what you’ve been doing, Dad. I know about the fucking—ghost. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

  “Believe me,” I said fervently, “it’s not by choice.”

  “Oh, isn’t it?” I couldn’t read his mood. He sat back, apparently relaxed. But one fist clenched and unclenched.

  And so suddenly my haunting was messing up an already complicated emotional situation. We were entering uncharted territory in our relationship, I thought; put a foot wrong and I could do damage that would last a lifetime. “Tom—I don’t want this. But I see her. Or I see something. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m trying to figure it out myself. But this has been happening to me for a long time . . .”

  “I. Me. Myself.” He said the words in a dead tone, like a metronome, but his gaze was on the floor. “Do you ever listen to yourself, Dad? Do you remember the funeral, when we buried her, and the kid? Did you know I snuck into the church early?”

  I hadn’t known.

  “I went to her coffin. It was in t
he aisle, before the altar. I tried to open that fucking box. I wanted to climb in with her. I didn’t want to be left with you. Because I knew that all you would think about was yourself. You even gave more thought to the kid who killed your wife than to me.”

  “Tom—” I spread my hands. “Please. I don’t know what to say. Everybody’s fucked up, you know.”

  “Oh, I understand that.” He actually smiled. “You know, I forgive you. I’m an adult now, I can see you couldn’t help it. But you should have tried to protect me, even from yourself. You should have tried.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “And now you come to me and tell me you’re being haunted by my mother. No, worse, you don’t even tell me, I have to find it out from somebody else.” He was still, rigid with anger. “How am I suppose to deal with that?”

  I had no idea what to say.

  At last he sat back. “So what now?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You dragged me home, Dad. You insisted on seeing me, talking to me. Fine. I guess I owed you that much. Have you got what you wanted?”

  “I don’t want you to put yourself at risk again.”

  He laughed, contemptuous. “You think you can stop me?”

  “Not if you don’t want to be stopped. Any more than you can stop me from designing starships . . .” I shook my head. “You know, the irony is, we’re both right.”

  “We are?”

  “Sure. I’m right to believe in an expansive future for mankind. The Kuiper Anomaly is proof that it’s possible: somebody else got through their Bottleneck and hung that thing up there. But you’re right to try to deal with the problems of the present, because if we don’t get through the Bottleneck there won’t be any future at all. I’ve had enough of hearing about the differences between us. We should try to find some common ground.”

  That took him by surprise. He seemed to think it over. In those few seconds I could feel some of the tension between us drain away. We’d both said what we had come in to say, we had both landed blows.

  “All right.” He stood up. “Anyhow, we’ll try not to fight.”

  “Amen to that.”

  “Dad, I think I need to do some physio, sleep a bit more.”

  I took the hint. I stood and headed for the door. “Maybe I’ll see you in the morning?”

  “Yeah. Look, Dad—you may be an asswipe, as Uncle John says, but you’re still my dad, and I’m stuck with you.”

  “Ditto,” I said fervently.

  “But give up on this haunting crap, OK? Get some therapy, for Christ’s sake.”

  I sighed. But we had crashed through the barriers to an island of truth; it wasn’t a time for lies or bland reassurances. “You’ll have to tell your mother that. Goodnight, son.”

  I closed the door behind me.

  Chapter 18

  On the third day on the Rustball, Alia’s inquisition resumed—for so she had come to think of it.

  And today she finally learned what this strange, drab world had to offer her.

  She was brought back to that dark, iron-walled room. The three Campocs were here again, Bale, Seer, and Denh, surrounded by a subtly different sample of their relatives. Once again they asked her to talk about her sister. She went back over what she’d said before, and tried to dig out more memories, tease out more meaning.

  But the exercise made her feel increasingly uncomfortable. Her jokey stories of how she’d tricked her sister, or out-competed her, or left her embarrassed, no longer seemed so clever.

  “There is always a rivalry between siblings,” said Bale’s great-aunt. “It is part of the human condition, no doubt exported from old Earth itself.”

  Perhaps. But again and again down the years, Alia had indulged that rivalry at her sister’s expense. It was a kind of bullying, Alia thought now, for Drea had been helpless: Alia was her sister, and no matter what Alia did to her, dear stolid Drea would always come back for more. On some level Alia had known that, and had exploited Drea’s loyalty.

  “I’ve been awful,” said Alia.

  As she reached this conclusion the Rusties’ faces were watchful, interested, engaged, sympathetic: analytical, not judgmental.

  “You’re flawed,” Bale said. “We are all flawed. But it’s best to know about it, to look inward, to see honestly.” There was something intense in the way he said that. He was guiding her, she saw, to a new insight.

  Alia looked inward. And she started to understand.

  Something was different: something about her perception of herself. Her own memories had never been sharper, more accurate; it was as if she had a scholar inside her head, refurbishing the muddled archives that made up her recollection of the past, her picture of herself. And at the same time she was seeing that picture with a pitiless clarity she had never known before.

  She had crashed through a barrier. She had changed, subtly, internally.

  “How are you doing this? Is it the Mist? Or some chemical transfer when you touched me—”

  Bale said, “How doesn’t matter. Anyhow you’re doing it to yourself. Consciousness is the awareness of self, and self is recorded in memory. You are becoming more conscious, for the quality of your awareness is increasing. Your memories are more precise, and your perception of them is clearer.”

  “But I hate it! I see myself better than ever before, but I don’t like what I see. I feel like sticking my fingers in my ears, shutting my eyes, turning away. Distracting myself until I forget.”

  Bale’s great-aunt said, “We have all been through it.”

  She sighed. “But turning away won’t work anymore, will it?”

  “No. But,” Bale said, “would you prefer not to know yourself?”

  “Right now, yes!”

  That night she lay awake, alone in the dark. She had turned away Bale’s gentle invitations to share his bed.

  Even hours after the inquisition she couldn’t stop looking inward, couldn’t stop thinking about herself. She tried to immerse herself in her Witnessing, but right now not even Poole’s antics and endeavors seemed able to distract her.

  And anyhow she envied him, she realized reluctantly. Poole had been unusually clear-sighted for his time. But even so he had walked around in a kind of dream. Like every human his memories were imperfectly stored in the biochemical mishmash of his nervous system. And he had endlessly edited the story of his life, unconsciously, to make logic out of illogical situations, to put himself at center stage and in control of events. There were sound reasons for this. A human memory had never been meant to be an objective recording system but a support for ego: without the comforting illusion of control, Poole’s mind might have crumbled in the face of an arbitrary universe.

  But all that was different now.

  Her consciousness had already been superior to Poole’s, even before she had come to the Rustball. A half-million years of evolution and environment had seen to that. And now the subtle re-engineering initiated by the Campocs, as it gently knit and re-knit her neurones, or whatever it was doing in her head, accentuated the gap. Her memory was as perfect a recording instrument as any technology could deliver. And her self-awareness was so clear, the mists banished, that the comfort of delusion was no longer an option.

  Her knowledge of herself was accurate, and utterly pitiless.

  She called Reath, in orbit.

  “Don’t worry,” he said. “It isn’t, ah, permanent. You aren’t stuck with this new self-knowledge, any more than you have yet taken what you call an ‘immortality pill.’ I have brought you here so you can feel how it may be to immerse yourself in this Second Implication. But you have taken no irrevocable step on your road to Transcendence.”

  “I can see why it’s necessary,” she said. “This cold self-awareness. You can’t make a super-mind out of a crowd of dreamers.”

  “But it’s uncomfortable, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve no idea.”

  “When you see your sister again, what will you do?”


  “Apologize,” she said fervently.

  “Perhaps that’s enough. Alia, your time on the Rustball is nearly over.”

  “It is?” she asked, surprised.

  “The Rusties have only one more development to show you—or rather, to help you discover in yourself. But you must decide if you want to take that final step.”

  “Is it up to me?”

  “It always has been, child. You should know that by now. Try to get some sleep.”

  But try as she might, alone with herself in the dark, sleep didn’t come.

  Another day—her last day on the Rustball—and another session in the gloomy room with the Campocs and their extended family.

  But today it felt different. She gazed around at their faces, which seemed to glow gently in the soft pink glow of the room. They were all turned to her, all their expressions open. They were looking at her, they were thinking about her, and what she had revealed of herself since coming to this community.

  And suddenly she was looking back at herself.

  It was a view from many angles, as if the eyes around her had turned to mirrors. She had gone through another sharp transition, another expansion of her awareness, as if a door had opened, admitting light. She quailed, battered.

  Bale touched her hand. The shock of physical contact was there, but it was not as it had been before, just one more link in a web of connecting. And besides, since her intimacy with him there was tenderness in his touch.

  “Do you feel it?” he asked.

  “I think so . . .” As he held her hand the sense of an extended perspective wavered, but did not collapse.

  He said, “Now you can see yourself through my eyes. You can look into the memories, even of yourself, stored in me. The others, too. It is as if we are all one mind, in this room, one nervous system united, memory and thought processes distributed and yet joined. You can look at yourself, not just from within your own head, but through the minds of others.”

  This was necessary, she was told, necessary for her mind to grow. If her consciousness was founded on the ability to look into herself, now she could see herself through the eyes of others, too—and so her consciousness was enhanced by an order of magnitude.