That won me a laugh. “Perhaps I do. Am I morbid, do you think? But I still have work to do here. You asked me about experiences beyond the natural. . . .”
She told me a story.
She said that the city authorities were working their way through the depopulated districts, trying to make them safe. There was some demolition, but usually, more wistfully, what was called “mothballing,” as buildings were secured and sealed against the day when the people would return. And sometimes, in this patient cleaning-out, they found things that induced the firefighters or police officers or environment managers to call on the services of a priest like Rosa.
“In one case, as they approached a ruined old house, the workers thought they heard children singing, in harmony, like a school choir. But there were no children there. Then they found a cellar. It turned out that it had been used by a man who had taken children over a period of years. You don’t need to know the details. His crimes had never been discovered, not until now.
“The workers would not, could not enter that cellar. It wasn’t because of rot or decay or the danger of disease; their equipment would take care of that. But there was a deeper blight which they hoped I would confront, with my prayers.” She paused. Her small, closed-in face was quite unreadable now. “Have you ever been in the presence of evil, Michael?”
“I don’t think so—”
“You would know. In fiction, evil is portrayed as stylish, clever. The devil is a gentleman! But in fact evil is banal. In that cellar, the dirt, the blood, the bits of hair and clothing, even the scattered toys—it was nauseating, literally revolting, in a way a place of animals could never be.” She turned to me; her body stayed motionless while her head swiveled like an owl’s. “Your ghost. Your Morag. Is she evil, Michael?”
“No,” I said with certainty. “Whatever it is, she’s not that.”
She seemed to relax, subtly. “Good. At least we will not have to face that. Then we must seek out another explanation, a different interpretation. Perhaps you are a necromancer, Michael, in this capital city of necromancy; perhaps you are a man who speaks to ghosts to discern the future—what do you think?”
I thought I needed some more of that seawater wine.
Rosa had promised me that the next day she would take me to see the sights of Seville. We would climb La Giralda, a Moorish tower stranded in the middle of a Gothic Christian cathedral, and view the city. Or, better still, perhaps we would ride up the Sundial, the symbol of Spain’s number one export industry, electrical power. I thought it was interesting that Rosa’s ideas for a day out were all about going to high places. She sought out isolation and height, a contrast, it seemed, to her strange early life, which, as far as I could make out, had been in conditions of crowding, and deep underground.
I looked forward to seeing the Sundial, though. It was a solar-power tower a kilometer tall, rising from gleaming hectares of solar-cell farms, a modern wonder. Air heated at its base rose up through the tower and drove turbines. It was a simple design, if horribly inefficient—but who cared about efficiency when the sunlight was to be had for free?
But in the end we didn’t go anywhere, for the next day was a “dust day.”
I was woken by a rumble of traffic that wouldn’t have seemed unusual save that it was here. It wasn’t long after dawn. Looking out through the closed balcony windows I saw robot water lorries rolling down the street, spraying water over the street surface. They were broadcasting warnings in precise, clipped Spanish. In the middle distance the whole skyline was obscured by an orange-red haze, and the rising sun was a pale disc that threw only faint shadows on the empty road surface. We would likely be stuck indoors for the day, Rosa said.
We had breakfast, watching the storm. I sat beside the closed window, with cups of coffee made of desalinated ocean water, and watched the dust roll in. It was coming on a wind from the north, from out of the peninsula’s desiccated interior, blowing the last of the country’s topsoil into the sea. When it hit us we were sunk in darkness.
The day after that, the dust still lingered. Holed up in Rosa’s apartment, we heard the buzzing of planes. They were seeding clouds over the reservoirs, Rosa said, spraying liquid nitrogen and silver iodide, trying to magic up some rain. Rosa was cynical. She said the planes were just a stunt, designed to reassure the populace that the government was doing something. There was a regional election coming, she said; that was why they were seeding the clouds.
At times it got so dark it was like being under the sea. I looked up at waves gathering and breaking on top of the layer of dust that overwhelmed the city, vast waves towering between earth and sky.
Chapter 27
There was no true night on this world of Transcendents.
Enclosed within the opaqued walls of her cabin, with her sister sleeping soundly nearby, Alia was restless. In the silent dark, with no distractions, it was even harder to shut out that unending roar outside the shuttle, and outside her own head.
But as she drifted between sleeping and waking, she found at last what she had been brought here to discover.
It was like a dream. She was aware of herself, lying comfortably on her pallet. She even knew that her sister lay still in the corner of the room, her body a warm mass, her mind folded over on itself.
But the nugget of consciousness that always lodged behind Alia’s eyes seemed to have dislodged, to float freely through the rooms of her mind. And the walls of those rooms were porous—flimsy, translucent—so that a brighter light shone through them, and she heard voices, many of them. It wasn’t the formless clamor that had upset her before, but like distant singing, a massed choir perhaps, the merged voices sweet but scattered by the winds. The glow out there was warm and welcoming, the voices gentle and harmonious.
With an effort of will she pushed her way out through the walls of her head.
Her mind threw up analogies for what she experienced.
She was floating over a landscape. It was dark, but over that velvet ground lay patterns of light, like a system of roads, a glowing threadwork in multiple colors that connected a multitude of brilliant points.
She wanted to see more. She rose up effortlessly.
The floor below was like a starry sky, but inverted, with a vast constellation map written over it. Here and there the links gathered more closely around tightly connected clusters of nodes, which glowed like cities. She saw that the map was not infinite. It closed on itself—not like a sphere, that would be much too literal for this dreamy vision, but with every point connected to every other. The map was dynamic, the links sparking, twisting, reconnecting, and changing constantly. The constant flux was part of the pattern, too; this was a map in time as well as space.
And though the topology of the network changed constantly, none of those shining points was ever left isolated. Each was always joined by two, three, four links to its neighbors, and through them to the totality.
This was the Transcendence, the shining nodes human minds, the links that joined them channels of shared thought and memory. This visual map was a crude analogy, and incomplete, for the merged mind was greater than a simple aggregate of individuals. And yet it helped her to begin to see. Reath had been right: location in space or even time was irrelevant to the Transcendence. This abstract realm was where the Transcendence existed, this no-place, and it was governed not by time or distance but merely by an effort of will.
She saw nothing threatening in this warm interconnectedness. Suddenly she longed to be one of those nodes, to be joined forever in the tremendous friendliness of that topology. She sank down, out of the invisible sky. She passed into the netting, through layers of it, until she was surrounded by glowing mind-nodes. Tendrils of interconnection reached out, probing at her from all sides.
She felt unexpected fear, and for a moment she was back in her body, which turned and twisted on her pallet.
But then the metaphor changed.
There were no more stars and laser-beam threads. Face
s turned to her. They were all smiling. And they all looked like Drea, her sister, she thought—or even like Alia herself. As those familiar eyes shone, hands clasped hers, or rubbed her back, her neck, her arms. They moved in closer, until she was surrounded by a comfortable warmth. It was briefly suffocating, and she thrashed again, but the pressure eased. And that slow, reassuring approach began again.
Different metaphors now: hallways opened up all around her, as if doors were flung open to reveal them receding into the distance. Every way she chose to go was open, and every way looked inviting.
She picked a direction. She went that way—not walking, not even Skimming, simply traveling.
Now she was in a kind of library, a place where shelving and stacks receded in every direction as far as she could see, side to side, up and down. People worked here patiently, consulting records, moving them from one corner of this vast archive to another. The librarians’ forms were undefined, their attention devoted to their work. She couldn’t see how they moved about, as there was no floor to walk on—but that was irrelevant; it was only a dream. And though the archive stretched off to infinity in every direction, she could somehow see other archives beyond its remote walls, other centers of knowledge, remembrance, wisdom.
This was another obvious metaphor, constructed by her mind as it struggled to interpret the flood of new information it was receiving. This was memory, the pooled memory of the Transcendence. And all of it would be accessible to her, as accessible as her own memories always had been, whenever she willed it.
Now there was a change in the way the patient librarians were working, she saw. Some were making a space in one block of shelves, and others were bringing in a new stack of material, its details too remote to make out. She knew what they were doing. That was her own pitiful heap of memories, her whole life of a mere few decades dwarfed by the great banks of knowledge here. And yet she would be given a place here; she would be cherished. Others would be able to access her memories as easily as she could, just as she could reach the memories of others—and even the greater collective experiences of the Transcendence itself, which she perceived now as shadowy mountains of information looming beyond the bounds of the archive.
And, constantly remembered, the memories that defined her need not die with her—and so she need not die, not ever. She had no need of Reath’s “immortality pill”; in this chill, remembered sense, she was already an undying.
She rose again, lifting up through some impossible dimension, so that the whole of the Transcendence opened up around her. Now in her metaphoric perception it was as if she was in a starship, in a hold so vast she could barely make out its walls. Huge, dimly seen masses drifted through the receding gloom. But even this space was not the full extent of the ship, for corridors and walkways led away, receding in every direction, all around her, leading to hollow, silent spaces she could never reach, not if she explored for many lifetimes. This was the mind of the Transcendence. But all she saw was merely a fraction of the vastly complex infrastructure of this place, this mind.
Even now she was still outside the Transcendence, in a sense. She was still herself, still small and closed-over and complete. But there was a place for her here in this immense cathedral of mind. All she had to do was take one last step.
She had a final moment of doubt. It was as if she looked back at herself, her body lying peacefully now on its pallet.
And then she let the embrace of the Transcendence enfold her at last.
The Transcendence was a body. She could feel its limbs, the bodies of its human host already counted in the billions and scattered over thousands of worlds. And yet in another way she was barely more aware of the individual bodies that made up this great host than she was of the cells of her own tiny form.
And its consciousness was not just a network of pooled minds. It arose from that network, like a frost pattern emerging from the interactions of ice molecules. She, the spark that was still Alia, felt bewildered by the scope and grandeur of its thoughts. The Transcendence was a symphony orchestra overwhelming her with its mighty themes—and yet own lone piping was an essential part of the whole.
She didn’t lose herself. She was still Alia. She was even aware of her own body, lying in its pallet. When she became more adept she would be able to function normally, live a fully human life, while still engaging in the greater community of the Transcendence. It was like—more metaphors, Alia!—it was like doing two things at once with different levels of awareness, like walking and holding a conversation at the same time. It would be a life lived on two levels, just as she had seen of the Transcendents on this worldlet.
And now she glimpsed the mighty purposes of the Transcendence, the design behind this grand architecture. She felt its tremendous ambition of joining every human mind into its own grand confluence of thought, a gathering into the ultimate embrace of the Transcendence. Then would come the day when the Transcendence, arising out of humanity, would become the highest form of this cosmic age, and it would apprehend the form of the whole universe. This was the dream of a young, unformed god—a dream of power, but not what to do with it, not yet. There would be time enough, a literal eternity of it.
And in the meantime there was reflection.
She found memories. There were the firefly sparks of individual lives—she sensed birth, death, love, sex, tragedy, triumph. Rising above these small rememberings were the vaster memories of the young mass mind itself, as it emerged from a misty unawareness to a cognizance of itself. The most striking note was a huge joy, surprisingly simple, a joy to be alive: a triumphant shout of I am!
And yet there was a grace note of sorrow, she saw, a trill of regret.
She became aware again of the host of bodies, the heads from which the mass mind had sprung. The awareness of the Transcendence lay over those minds like dew on blades of grass. But she saw that there were knots in the distribution of minds—knots of density, of resistance, of a kind of stubbornness, of age. They were the undying, the ancient core of the Transcendence. And it was here that the regret was centered. Alia was drawn to the pain, wary but curious, like the tip of a tongue probing an aching tooth.
And suddenly she was bombarded by blood, by screams, trillions upon trillions of terrified and anguished voices calling out together. She screamed in response.
Even in her torment she knew what this was. This was the Redemption, the Witnessing of the blood-soaked past. This dark pit, right at the heart of the Transcendence itself, was the place to which all those carefully retrieved memories drained. It was superhuman. It was unbearable. She spun and thrashed. The Campocs were right. This was wrong, terribly wrong—
She was awake, only Alia again, lying on a sweat-soaked pallet. A face hovered over her like a lantern, full of concern. It was Drea. Her sister brushed her brow, and Alia felt her hair plastered to her forehead.
Drea said, “You were yelling! Was it a nightmare? Are you all right? . . .”
Alia grabbed her sister and held her close.
Morning came.
Beyond the walls of the shuttle the worldlet looked even drabber, the people even more dull. There may have been fire in their heads, Alia thought, but their bodies were impoverished. It was impossible to believe that such complex magnificence as the Transcendence could arise out of the shabbiness of this thinly populated rock.
Nobody spoke to her, not Reath, not even Drea. They all seemed frightened of her. She had touched the Transcendence, but it didn’t seem to be making anybody happy.
Alia went to her Witnessing tank. It lit up to show her the wormlike thread of Poole’s whole life. At least he wouldn’t turn away from her. Impulsively she picked out a single moment.
Here was Poole, with his son, in a hospital ward. Their faces slack, they sat side by side, holding hands, subtly distant from each other, frozen in time. Seconds ago they had received the news that Poole’s baby had died, after only moments of life, and that Morag, Poole’s wife, had died with him. Alia believed that
this was the crux of Michael Poole’s whole life—his personal singularity, his moment when the conic sections diminished to a point, a new quality. The moment when he lost everything.
In Michael Poole’s time, you were born alone and you died alone, but you spent your life trying to get through to others, through love, through sex—or even through violence, the bloody intimacy of killing. In his love of Morag, in the oceanic few months in which their baby had come to term, Poole had come as close as he ever would to reaching through the barriers to another human. But with the deaths he was already falling back into himself, even now, just heartbeats after hearing the dreadful news. And Alia, with her unwelcome knowledge of his future, knew he would never recover, never get so close to anybody ever again.
What would Michael Poole make of the Transcendence?
What would he have thought of her, as she sat hiding in the cabin of a shuttle, cowering from her destiny? Would Poole envy her this opportunity to reach out to the Transcendence, and to allow it to embrace her? Would he have longed to touch other people so closely? Or would he understand her deepest, most fundamental fear, which she hadn’t even been able to express to Drea—that in joining so closely with others, she would ultimately lose herself?
And what would he make of the terrible, obsessive, self-inflicted pain of the Redemption?
Absently she let the image in the tank run on. Poole and his son sat side by side, heads down. But now he looked up vaguely, as if searching for something in the air, a disturbance in his world that somehow broke through to his consciousness even at this terrible moment. Again Alia had the strange impression that somehow he knew she was watching him.
She waved her hand, and the images dissolved.
Reath approached her cautiously. “How do you feel?”
Alia frowned. “It’s as if I’m trying to remember a dream. But the harder I try, the more elusive it is.”
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