Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Alia snapped, “Everybody knows that. Because carbon can form multiple bonds. Carbon can make molecules that are complex enough to store a genetic code.”

  “True, true. But you can form complex structures of silicon, at least in its crystalline form . . .”

  “So what?” Alia knocked his hand, scattering the sand grains. “Reath, I’ve had enough of this. What are we doing in this sculpture park?”

  Reath’s face was as expressionless as ever, but he seemed a little lost. He looked about at his feet, as if the grains she had spilled were the only ones on the planet. “It was the Campocs who brought you here,” he reminded her.

  Alia was distracted by a spark of light that shot over the arc of the sky. It was a ship, she saw immediately. Moving gracefully it descended toward this plain of sand, and as it neared she made out its details, complex, fragile, beautiful.

  It was undoubtedly a shuttle from the Nord.

  As soon as it landed a hatch popped open and a woman climbed uncertainly out. It was Drea. Alia ran.

  Drea stumbled a little in the unfamiliar gravity, and she coughed as the Mist kicked in. But then she ran, too, heavy-footed across the sand toward Alia. The two of them collided in a tangle of limbs, laughing.

  Alia felt unreasonably joyful to see her sister. “Thanks for coming all this way,” she said.

  “I’m not sure if I had a choice.” Drea smiled. “A summons from Reath is pretty forceful. Anyhow I missed you.”

  “And I you. You’ll never know.”

  A dusty breeze stirred Drea’s hair; she pushed it out of her eyes. “I’ve got to tell you—on the Nord they’re having a constellation naming ceremony.”

  This happened every decade or so, as the stars, slowly shifting across the Nord’s sky by the ship’s sublight crawl, adopted new configurations. The names of the new patterns were chosen by popular votes, amid much friendly rivalry.

  Alia winced. “I wish I could be there.”

  “They are going to name a constellation for you, Alia! It will be called ‘The Skim Dancers.’ Everybody voted for it.”

  Alia grabbed her sister’s hands. “So you’re in it, too!”

  “But it’s you they are proud of, Alia. Everybody is. Although nobody’s quite sure what you’re doing out here.” She glanced around. “Not much of a place, is it?”

  Alia said, “Mostly I’ve been finding out unpleasant things about myself. I’m sorry.”

  Drea looked mystified. “Sorry for what?”

  Alia smiled. “For pulling your hair when I was three . . .”

  “And I’m sorry, too.” It was Bale; he had come to stand a couple of meters away from the sisters.

  Alia introduced him quickly, and the other Campocs. But the Campocs didn’t acknowledge Drea, who suddenly seemed lost, turned in on herself. Alia’s unease quickly deepened. She glanced at Reath. He looked deeply uncomfortable now, but he stared at the ancient sand at his feet.

  She turned back to the Campocs. “What’s going on here, Bale? Why is Drea here? And what are you sorry for?”

  His smile was thin. “For what we have to do.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Drea staggered.

  Alia grabbed her sister’s shoulder to support her. Suddenly it was like handling a doll; Drea’s limbs shook loosely, her head lolled, and a line of spittle leaked from the corner of her mouth.

  Alia turned on Bale. “What have you done to her?”

  “Alia, you must understand that—”

  She hit his shoulder. With her long space-dweller’s arms she was capable of delivering a powerful blow, and she sent him sprawling in the dirt. He gaped up at her, his mouth a round circle of shock.

  Denh and Seer came to stand between her and Bale, and stared at her warily. “Don’t hit him again,” Denh said. “She isn’t being harmed.”

  “But you’re doing this to her.” This was the other side of their interconnection, she thought, the dark shadow of the cosy family gatherings she had seen on the Rustball—this power to reach into the head of a stranger.

  Bale got shakily to his feet. “She’s in there. She’s safe. It’s just that she can’t—connect.”

  Alia stared at Drea’s slack face. “Safe? She must be terrified.” She turned on Reath. “Did you know about this?”

  He looked shocked. “Of course not. They asked me to bring Drea here, but for you, not for this. I knew of this world, the statues—I thought this would be educational. I didn’t anticipate this!”

  For the first time she saw truly how weak he was, and how little help she was going to get from him to resolve this sudden crisis. “Do you know what they intend?”

  Reath grimaced. “Don’t you?”

  She stared at him. Then she closed her eyes. She was aware of the minds of the three Campocs, but they were closed to her, hard black spheres in her universe of thought. And Drea was there, a tiny bright thing, trapped and struggling in a cage.

  She snapped her eyes open and took deep breaths. The Campocs were not Transcendents, but they were powerful beyond her knowledge, and they were malevolent. She was alone here, beyond help from anybody. And all the time she was aware of that frightened, trapped little creature in her sister’s head, who utterly depended on what she did next.

  She was trembling, as much from fear as from anger. Some Transcendent she was going to make! But she had to find a way through this. She clung to her anger; it would be more useful than fear.

  She glared at Bale. “All right. What do you want with her?”

  “Why, nothing. We want you. Or rather we want you to do something for us.”

  “Then why not just take me, rather than her?”

  “That wouldn’t be enough,” Bale said. “We need you to act freely.”

  “I’m not free if you are holding my sister!”

  “Then without our conscious commands. You have to want to work for us, Alia.”

  “How long are you going to hold her?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “For what?”

  Reath stepped forward. “I think I see. As long as it takes for you to join the Transcendence, Alia. Do you see? Through your sister they hope to control you, and through you they hope to gain some leverage over the Transcendence itself.”

  The thought seemed shocking to Alia, almost blasphemous. “How dare you challenge the Transcendence? And to do it in such a base way, through taking a hostage of a helpless human being—” The contrast between the audacity of their ambition and the shabbiness of their methods was astonishing.

  “We have no choice,” Bale said grimly.

  “We are frightened,” Denh said.

  “By the Redemption,” Seer finished.

  “The Redemption? Witnessing? What’s that got to do with anything?” She stared at them, baffled, angry, increasingly scared.

  Reath said with a trace of his old firmness, “I think we need to talk this out. But not here, standing in the dirt. Come. Let’s go back to my shuttle.” He looked uncertainly at Drea. “Can she—”

  Alia took her sister’s hand; her fingers were limp. “Come, dear. It’s OK.”

  Perhaps the Campocs’ grip on Drea’s nervous system relaxed a little. Her gaze was as unfocused as before, but in response to her sister’s gentle pressure she took one step, two, stumbling like a baby. Alia sensed that the trapped creature in its cage was a little calmer, slightly reassured.

  But Drea stumbled again. Glancing down, Alia saw urine trickling helplessly down her bare leg, and pooling on the sand of the Dirtball. “I’m sorry,” Alia whispered to her sister as they walked. “I’m so sorry.”

  Chapter 21

  I endured another flight back across the Atlantic, again at John’s expense. This time I mostly slept through the journey, though that seemed a waste of the facilities on offer. Back in Florida I slept off my jet lag over a night in a Miami hotel: rather that than face the family again so soon.

  Then I set off on a train journey to
Oklahoma City.

  I was taking George’s advice. Trying to find out about the impact of gas hydrates, I was going to consult the oracle, which was an artificial sentience called Gea, the “Global Ecosystems Analyzer,” being run out of the University of Oklahoma. Gea was the keystone of the Center for Climatic Modeling, which reported to a Stewardship agency called the Panel on Biospheric Change.

  It was a long ride. The train took me across the Oklahoma flatlands, vast stretches of scorched brown earth littered with abandoned farm buildings. Green things grew only where sprinklers sent sprays of water high into the air. This was the twenty-year drought, as the media called it. Old news. I turned away to read a novel on my softscreen.

  When I got to the end of the line, I was astonished to find Shelley Magwood waiting to meet me off the train.

  I’d booked myself a hotel room, but when I told her the name of the place Shelley tapped her ear, canceled my reservation, and booked me somewhere better at her company’s expense. “Call it an investment,” she said.

  At the hotel she gave me an hour to unpack and shower. Then Shelley hired us a big two-person rickshaw and took me through the city.

  The center of Oklahoma City turned out to be quite attractive. It was a mixture of lakes, parks, landscaped hills, and quite stylish buildings, all connected at the very center of the city by a peculiarly elaborate system of walkways and tunnels. The place seemed to work on a human scale, which meant that it had survived the disappearance of the automobile pretty well. But many of the buildings were twentieth-century stock, and they showed their age in crumbling concrete and cracked fascias. There was plenty of Paint, too, glittering silver or gold in the sunlight.

  And the scouring of the twenty-year drought reached even here, the heart of the state capital. Sprinklers spun and spat, and many of the green spaces were roofed over with filmy plastic envelopes. The city was a vision from an old science fiction novel, I thought, a domed colony stranded on a desert world.

  Shelley kept up a kind of tourist patter as we traveled; it seemed she had spent a year here on a consultancy assignment, and she seemed fond of the place. “You ought to go see Route 66,” she said. “Have you ever heard of that? Once the most famous road in America, the Mother Road—who said that, was it Steinbeck? Now stretches of it are an automobile-age theme park.” She grinned. “They actually have working gasoline cars, and motels and roadside diners. They even have halls where they pump in toxic fumes so you can smell how it was when we were kids. It’s a long, thin museum. You have to see it to believe it.”

  She took me to a frontier-age restaurant and ordered us T-bone steaks, rectangular stabs of meat so vast they literally covered the plates they were served on. “But don’t worry,” she told me as she dug in. “The cows are cube-shaped and engineered. You can eat this stuff all day and you won’t get fat.”

  She was good company, small, neat, bright, her cropped-short dirty blond hair gleaming with gel. Her energy and enthusiasm for her life and her work always lifted me. But she hadn’t answered any of my questions.

  “Shelley—what the hell are you doing here? I’m not sorry to see you. But why?”

  “What you told me about the gas hydrates made me think. It does sound like we’re all sitting on a time bomb, doesn’t it? I’d like to know what Gea, the big computer suite, has to say about that. I’m curious.” She grinned and wiped her mouth; she’d reduced her steak to a few shreds of gristle. “Also I’d like to see Gea herself.”

  “Herself?”

  She shrugged. “Her choice to be female, apparently. She, it, is one of the most powerful software suites in the world, after all. Computer science could be revolutionized, if they ever figure out how she works.”

  “And that’s all,” I said heavily.

  She took a mouthful of her gen-enged steak to stall answering. Then she said, “Well, Michael, there are a lot of people out there concerned for you.”

  “Oh.” I sat back. “I get it. The airwaves have been buzzing with chatter about me again. Who called you? John? Uncle George?”

  “If you don’t like people talking about you, you ought to make your address books private.”

  I felt impatient. “Shelley, I’m not meaning to offend you. Really, I’m glad you’re here. But I’m fifty-two years old, for God’s sake. I don’t need nursemaiding.”

  “I’m not offended. If you offended me I wouldn’t be here. OK, your uncle asked me to keep an eye on you. But I wouldn’t have come just to babysit. Anyhow I like the steak,” she said pragmatically.

  Hovering trays came scooting silently over the floor, and long killer-robot tentacles snaked out to clear away our plates. Shelley waved her hand over the tabletop; a small embedded softscreen glowed with numerals, showing our tab, and she tapped the screen a couple of times to add a tip.

  From the capital we took a pod bus south to Norman, the base of the University of Oklahoma.

  On the edge of the campus we were met off the bus by Dr. Vander Guthrie. He was a software animist by profession, and, it turned out, a kind of customer liaison officer for the facility of which Gea was the heart. Aged maybe thirty, he was tall but stocky, powerfully built. He was plainly dressed in a check shirt, jeans, and cowboy boots. And he had a startling, completely inappropriate shock of sky blue hair.

  Vander embraced Shelley, a bit stiffly. Of course they had worked together before; sometimes I got the impression that Shelley had worked with everybody on the damn planet. Vander led us to a small electric bus that would take us to the computer center.

  We crowded into the bus, facing each other, knees touching. The bus jolted forward and carried us through the campus. Vander was nervous, his movements abrupt, even clumsy. But he seemed genuinely glad to see us. It turned out that meteorology had been a specialist study of this place for decades, even before the Warming had kicked in at the end of the twentieth century. Back then they used to think the big problem was tornadoes.

  “So this was a logical place to found the world’s premier climate-modeling software suite,” Vander said. “However most of our visitors are politicians looking for an excuse not to sign up to some treaty or other, or else media types looking for yet another gosh-wow end-of-the-world story. Not that we don’t come up with plenty of those here,” he said with bleak humor. “So to have a couple of engineers come visit is a vacation for me.”

  Vander Guthrie was a mass of contradictions. When he moved I could see the bones and muscles working under his checked shirt, as if he were some over-engineered simulacrum of a human being. But his diction, vaguely Bostonian, was very precise, academic. And he had that shock of sky blue hair, which I couldn’t help staring at. He was obviously an early casualty of cosmetic genetic engineering.

  His eyes darted nervously; his character cowered within that huge body.

  If this was a prime choice for a customer liaison worker, I wondered what kind of meatballs they must have behind the scenes here. Some things about software projects never changed, I supposed.

  The bus decanted us at a fancy-looking theater. Inside was a brightly lit auditorium, with banks of seats, a deep stage that looked capable of displaying big three-dimensional VRs, and a rich new-carpet smell. “I have to put you through our orientation session,” Vander said apologetically. “Federal law.” He ushered us to the middle of the front row, and with an odd spurt of athleticism he vaulted over the seat backs to take a place in the second row. Then he clapped his hands, and the lights began to dim.

  On the stage, a huge imaged-from-space portrait of the Earth assembled, finely detailed, heartbreakingly beautiful. I could see the big swathes of spreading desert around the midlatitudes, the peculiarly spangled effect over much of South America that showed the breakup of the rain forest, and the deep blue of the North Pole, a spinning ocean without a trace of ice. A grave voice began to intone, reeling off statistics about changes in forest cover and ocean temperatures.

  “You say it’s the law that we have to sit through this,”
said Shelley sarcastically.

  “Well, so it is,” Vander said defensively. “For one thing your reactions to the displays are being monitored, noninvasively. There are plenty of crazies out there who seem to think climate change is a good thing, or anyhow something ordained from on high. To them Gea is a kind of quantum-computing Antichrist. Also the indoctrination stuff might actually help you figure out Gea’s results, assuming she actually produces something in response to your query about those methane hydrates.”

  “She doesn’t always?”

  He seemed offended I asked. “She isn’t a calculating machine, you know. You don’t just turn the crank. Anyhow the overview is often useful. You wouldn’t believe the fantastic ignorance of some of the pols and other celebs we get trooping through here.”

  Before us, the automated presentation was getting into its stride.

  The Global Ecosystems Analyzer was the pinnacle of efforts to model and predict the Earth’s dynamic natural systems that dated back to various pioneering turn-of-the-century studies. Gea was sponsored and run by a consortium that included the World Resources Institute, the World Bank, and UN development, education, refugee, environment, agriculture, and other agencies. All of this was coordinated by the Panel on Biospheric Change, a central committee of the Stewardship itself.

  “The politics behind Gea are a mess,” Vander said ruefully. “It’s nearly as complicated as the climate modeling, and a lot less useful. . . .”

  Data poured into Gea from a whole range of sources. There were real-time downlinks from satellites, and from a mesh miniaturized system embedded in the fabric of the planet. “Inside every softscreen sold since 2040,” Vander said proudly, “there is an environmental monitor with a direct link to the Gea suite.” Then there were streams of data, slightly less current but no less vital, on demography, biodiversity, and agriculture. Even relevant peer-reviewed science papers were thrown into the mix. Thus Gea monitored every aspect of the world’s climate and geography, the oceans and atmosphere and the global circulation patterns—and, not least, the impact of humanity.