Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “It takes some getting used to,” Denh said.

  “You can say that again,” said Seer ruefully.

  Alia asked, “How? . . .”

  There was a technology, she was told, or perhaps it was a biology, very ancient, that could link humans on some level deeper than words. Some even said this faculty derived from an alien species long assimilated by mankind. But its origin didn’t matter. The communication was not mind to mind, for that was impossible; mind was only an emergent property of the brain, the body. But it was as if the physical barriers between one nervous system and another became irrelevant.

  Bale said, “This is Unmediated Communication. There are no symbolic barriers. You will know what I am thinking as I think it—and I will know your thoughts, too, as if they were my own, as direct as an embrace, or a punch in the mouth.” He hesitated. “It is not yet fully developed in you. Even if you go further you will be able to pull back. Do you want—”

  “Yes,” she said, not giving herself time to think. “Do it.”

  Suddenly the mirror-minds in the room shone bright—all the barriers between them fell away—and she saw herself, not just in this moment, not just physically, but in the Rusties’ deepest perception. She could sense what they were thinking about her. She rummaged through their memories, of how she had been during her conversations with this group. She could see her body language, her shyness slowly giving way to enthusiasm as she talked—and the times when her words hadn’t contained the whole truth, and she had been evasive, breaking eye contact, turning away, laughing unnecessarily, fiddling with her body fur.

  She knew what these people thought of her. It was shocking, bewildering.

  But, as she looked at herself through her own eyes and others, the self she saw wasn’t so bad. Yes, she had sometimes been spiteful to her sister, driven by rivalry. But such incidents, spiky in memory, had taken up only a small fraction of their relationship. She was just a kid, promising, flawed, unformed. She hadn’t known any better.

  And, she realized to her surprise, she forgave herself. Suddenly she was crying, her vision blurred by tears.

  An arm spread around her shoulders: Bale’s great-aunt. “There, there,” she said. “We all go through it. Three steps. You have to see yourself; you have to accept yourself; and you have to learn to forgive yourself. But forgiveness is as hard as blame, isn’t it? There, there; this will pass.”

  So it would, Alia realized, even as she wept.

  This was Reath’s purpose, she saw. The Transcendents were linked as these Rusties were linked. The Transcendence was surely much more than this, in its antiquity, its complexity, its wisdom. But this extraordinary linking was enough for now: one step at a time.

  And now she thought she understood the strange community of the Rustball. There was no art, music, expression, individuality, because none were needed. Art was only a form of communication, and a symbolic one at that; who needed the imperfect channels of art or music when you could directly access another’s memories, thoughts, emotions? Why struggle to express yourself if you knew your own mind with a pitiless clarity? And why travel if you knew that wherever you went you would find nothing so fascinating as other people? People are more interesting than worlds: Denh had said it explicitly.

  But how limited this community was as a result, she thought. How introverted, how drab their lives were. Was this really the future of mankind?

  Bale watched her, a kindly concern mixed with pride. But, it struck her now, every second they had spent together, even those moments when they had embraced in the water, had been shared in the heads of his brothers and cousins. They had never been alone. She felt a qualm of unease, a stab of revulsion.

  Chapter 19

  Tom and I had twenty-four hours before our flight back to the States. Tom wanted to see London.

  I decided to go visit uncle George.

  George lived alone in a smallish dormitory town about a dozen kilometers southwest of Manchester. I took the train up from London. On arrival, consulting my softscreen map, I decided to skip the pod buses and rickshaws and walk the couple of klicks to George’s home.

  It wasn’t a terribly interesting place.

  When I was a kid George was fond of telling me that it’s foolish to imagine that the future is going to be disconnected from the present or the past, as if everything will be ripped down and rebuilt. He was right. In this town, all the old housing stock was still there, the boxy commuter houses crammed side by side into every available square centimeter. But now their wooden doors had been replaced by massive weatherproof steel shutters, their brickwork coated by silvery Paint, their windows bricked up. In the age of the automobile this had become just another dormitory suburb for the nearby big city, its historic roots swamped by residential developments. Now, sensibly enough, if you wanted to work in the city you lived in the city, but that meant places like this had lost what had been their primary function for a century or more.

  There was nobody around but me. It was eerie to walk through the quiet streets. Fifty years ago the place would have been carpeted by automobile metal, cars parked in every drive and bumped up on the sidewalks. Now the cars had gone, and the houses with their blanked-out windows were like backs turned to me.

  Tom and I had made peace, of a sort. Or we had agreed to disagree. Or something. But now I found myself obsessing about our arguments about the Stewardship.

  The Stewardship was a legacy of Amin’s administration, though it was set up after she died. It was a new international body, a “green UN,” assembled with the power and authority of the U.S. government. Its central task, the challenge of the century, was to feed everybody, to raise per capita food production while reducing our consumption of materials and energy.

  It had started with simple quick-return initiatives, like buying up land high in ecological value but in danger of overexploitation. Right now the Stewardship was working on two mighty flagship projects: to save what was left of the Brazilian rainforest, a hotspot of biodiversity and evolutionary innovation, and to stabilize China, so parched and overcrowded that the Yellow River was poisoned when it didn’t run dry, and whose vast lowlands were one massive hydraulic engineering project.

  But there were plans to go much further, to establish an ethical framework and new economic rules to rebuild the world—the kind of work John was involved in.

  It really was a new “Marshall Plan for a bruised world,” a bold interplay of environmental management, economics, diplomacy. Gradually even the religions had come on board, and a decades-long tide of conflict spawned out of aggressive and triumphalist tendencies in all the major faiths had begun to turn. The Stewardship had even been given a limited democratic legitimacy when the rest of the world was allowed to participate in U.S. presidential elections, a “fifty-first state” with as many electoral college votes as California—more than enough to turn close elections.

  I believed the Stewardship was the greatest achievement of statesmanship of my adult life. I was able to talk about this passionately. But Tom didn’t appear to agree with me, even about this. How could the two of us be so different?

  Well, I told myself, a relationship is a process; you crash through dramatic stages now and then but you never reach a conclusion, not this side of the grave anyhow. But I wasn’t sure how to follow it up with Tom, what to do next. Or what to do about Morag, come to that.

  As I walked, all the issues in my life churned around in my head, seeking focus, interconnection: work, the starship, Tom, Morag, the niggling issue of the gas hydrates. Also, though I didn’t quite want to admit it, it was faintly disturbing that everything seemed to center on me.

  I think I imagined that talking to George would help me get this straight in my head.

  George’s home was just another in a row of boxes of brick.

  George had kept a few windows as windows, even if the glass was dusty and his Paintwork, smart or not, had seen better days. And he still had a garden; little sprinklers watered
his lupins, asters, and delphiniums. His lawn looked healthy enough, but the holly bushes that had once separated the garden from the sidewalk had been replaced by a line of bamboo.

  He took a couple of minutes to answer my ringing. He greeted me with a broad, toothy smile. “Michael! So you turned up.” He led me into his hallway, and through toward the kitchen. “Come in, come in. I’m glad to see you. But then, old people are always glad of visitors. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

  The hallway was narrow, the walls coated with yellowing wallpaper, and there was a musty, damp, unmistakeably old-person sort of smell, despite the labors of a spiderlike cleaning robot that scuttled upside down over the ceiling. The place was noticeably flood-proofed. There were no carpets downstairs, just tiles and a few roll-up rugs and mats, and the electricity sockets had been reinstalled halfway up the walls.

  George was the same sort of build as me—compact or squat, depending on whether you’re looking out or in. He still moved pretty well, but his upper body was bent over, his neck jutting forward, and there was a kind of uneven fragility in his footsteps.

  The kitchen was clean and bright, and I could smell garlic. George once lived in Italy, and he picked up some good cooking habits there. But with its safety-conscious ceramic covers, rounded edges, and bright primary colors the kitchen looked oddly toylike. George had grumbled about that before: “The social workers turn your home into a chuffing nursery,” he would say. But in alcoves on the walls there was a collection of Catholic artifacts, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, a little plastic bottle labeled “Lourdes Water.” These were relics of George’s parents, I believed, who had been devout.

  George was eighty-seven years old. His wife, my aunt Linda, had died a few years earlier. He had actually remarried her after they divorced; at age twelve I was hauled over to England to attend the second wedding—“a joke,” my mother called it, “typical George.” As far as I could tell George and Linda had been happy. But then, a few years back, she had died. “That’s the trouble with happy endings,” he told me after the funeral. “You just live on and on, until you’ve sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.”

  He sat me at his small breakfast table and began to fuss with a kettle. “So what do you want, tea, coffee? A beer? Have a beer. Go crazy.”

  “A beer will be fine.”

  He rubbed his hands and cackled, his open mouth revealing even white teeth, probably regrown from buds. He bent stiffly, opened his refrigerator, and hauled out a couple of brown bottles.

  The refrigerator protested in a soft whisper. “George, are you sure that’s wise? It’s a little early, don’t you think?”

  “Chuff off,” he said cheerfully, and slammed the door shut.

  The beer was strong and gritty. I asked, “Wheat beer?”

  “The only kind I can afford. The hop harvest never recovered after that milt in the 2030s. Shame. But it’s five percent proof.” He took a long pull. “So,” he said, “tell me about your Kuiper project.”

  That was what I always liked about George, even when I was a kid. He never acted like an uncle, never like family. He wouldn’t ask you polite, bored questions about how you were getting on at school. Over the years he developed common interests with us—with me it was spaceflight and all things extraterrestrial—and so when he visited we always had something real to talk about.

  Not that my mother appreciated that, I don’t think. “You treat Michael as the son you never had,” she once yelled at him. “Bollocks,” George had replied succinctly, to my huge pleasure.

  George always said he was pleased I was working on Kuiper, even if it was just a small-scale design study. He found the Anomaly particularly fascinating, because, he told me, its discovery in the first decade of the century had come at a strange time in his own life. His father had just died, he had gone looking for a sister he had never known he had, and the discovery of Kuiper and the great philosophical transformation it had brought had seemed to him to parallel the upheavals going on in his own heart.

  Also, he told me once, it was particularly appropriate that I should work on Kuiper. He didn’t elaborate. George could be a bit mysterious at times. Well, he was a Poole.

  As we sat there talking about Kuiper a toy robot came rolling into the room. It was a real antique, all shaped tin and plastic and little glass eyes, and as it rolled along a flywheel sent friction sparks shooting from a grill in its belly.

  George snapped at the robot, “What do you want?”

  “Well, George, you aren’t following your routines. Normally you take a walk to the shops this time of day. I wondered if you’d forgotten.” The robot’s voice was comically melodramatic, intended to intone interplanetary dangers, devoted to domestic trivia.

  George said to me, “You see what I mean? They turn your home into a nursery.” He barked at the robot, “No, I hadn’t forgotten. I’m just not a chuffing robot like you. I have free will.”

  The robot said, “Well, so do I, George, but we can discuss philosophy later. Wouldn’t you like to take your walk? Perhaps your new friend could go with you.”

  “It’s not a friend, it’s a nephew. And we’re drinking beer and talking. So clear off.” He aimed a kick at the robot. His foot passed clean through it, scattering it to pixels that quickly coalesced. The robot, grumbling, rattled out of the room. “Little prick,” said George.

  The design turned out to be a VR copy of a toy from George’s long-gone childhood, a representation of a robot from some forgotten TV show.

  “I never imagined you as a nostalgia buff, George.”

  “Well, you have to have a personal care assistant,” George said, spitting out the words. “You should have seen the other designs. But if it didn’t play a mean game of chess I’d have scrambled it long ago. Little prick.”

  As we talked, and George made me lunch—a light Italian dish of pasta with baked fish, good if a little heavy on the garlic—the house and its contents continued to fuss around him. George responded to most of this with a cheery curse, but he took his pills and obeyed the rules.

  He only had to live like this because the family, I, wasn’t around to look after him any better.

  The population of the elderly had hugely expanded during George’s lifetime. He liked to say that the commuters who had once journeyed daily out of here had all come back in their old age, “like a flock of elderly gulls returning to their nesting cliff.” But there weren’t enough youngsters around to look after them all, even if our hearts had been in it. So it was up to the robots. Without artificial sentience, if the machines hadn’t been able to fulfill the state’s duty of care to its citizens, George said he didn’t know how we would all have coped. “Maybe put us all to work, in the Sunny Vales Gulag of the Twilight Years. Although euthanasia would be simpler.”

  I was silently thankful for the empathetic intelligence of the designers who had made George’s mandatory companion a chess-playing, bickering toy robot rather than a bland, soulless nurse.

  After lunch we took a walk. George said he would show me the new managed forest that was growing up on the outskirts of town. “Off the Stockport Road,” he said. “Only a mile or so. Used to be a golf course. Nobody plays golf anymore.”

  So we walked. The day was mild, the sunlight hazy and washed out. The air seemed reasonably fresh, with only a faintly polluted tinge to it, an acidic smell like crushed ants.

  The hike wasn’t that easy. The road surface was mostly silvertop to allow the pod buses and rickshaws to pass, but the sidewalks, or pavements, as George called them, were little used: cracked and weed-infested, you had to watch where you stepped. George had been supplied with exoskeletal supports, but he said he had locked the “clanking splinty things” in a spare bedroom. He walked with a stick well enough, however.

  That robot tailed us, grumbling to itself.

  As we walked our talk gradually spiraled out from my work on Kuiper. I began to tell George about Tom and his accident. Actually Geor
ge had known all about it. He used his house’s resources to follow news about Tom and other family members; in a wired-up world nobody is far from a camera.

  I tried to tell him how we’d got together in that dismal hotel in Heathrow. George listened, and though he didn’t say much he seemed to understand.

  He dug into the issue of the waterspout and the gas hydrates. “How are these gases stored? Is there a critical temperature at which they will be released? How much is there exactly? . . .”

  He asked smart questions, having once been an engineer himself. He had worked in software, until he had been made redundant by Moore’s Law, he liked to say, the relentless expansion of computer capacity. His career had spanned the milestone time when the first human-level sentience systems came on the market at a budget an average household could afford. Now, nobody designed software anymore; for many of its generations it had designed itself. And there were no more analysts, programmers, or software engineers; instead there were “animists” and “therapists” who sought to understand the strange new kinds of minds that permeated the world. George had been too old for any of that. But there had been plenty of work for him to see out his career on the “legacy suites,” some decades old, that still lay at the heart of many major systems, and were now threatening us with the digital millennium. As George said, the present is built on the past, even in software; he said he finished his career feeling more like an archaeologist than an engineer.

  Soon his questioning about the hydrates exposed the limits of my knowledge. But he agreed with me that Tom’s experience might be a bellwether warning about more serious dangers.

  “Michael, if you’re concerned about this, you should go find out what the implications are. I find it hard to believe nobody’s thought of this before.”

  “Find out from who?”

  He could be sarcastic sometimes. “Forgive me for stating the obvious. But maybe you could start with the Center for Climate Modeling. You’d think they would have some handle on it all since it is their job. They’re based in Oklahoma, aren’t they? We can check it out back at the house.”