Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

“But I am resentful, you asshole. Who spoke to you?”

  “Shelley Magwood, if you must know. And through her, Ruud Makaay.”

  Of course I had to expect that John would hook up with a man like Makaay. They were of a type.

  John said, “All this is a distraction. You have work to do, Michael. Responsibilities. This hydrate-stabilization proposal you’ve initiated seems to have some genuine merit. I think there’s every chance it will gain some support, and maybe even do some real good, if presented in the right way.”

  “But if I disappear up my own backside in pursuit of the spooky stuff, I’ll be harming that process. Right?”

  “Of course you will,” he said irritably. “You’re talking about a very expensive engineering project here; it’s a hard enough sell as it is without hints of flakiness from its initiator.”

  Rosa watched us both. “You two really do have a deep-seated rivalry, don’t you?”

  I said, “You have to remember that when we were kids John was a couple of years older than me. Now we’re in our fifties, and he’s still a couple of years older than me.”

  Rosa laughed softly.

  John glared at us. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t forget who’s been bankrolling you. And look, Michael, it’s not just the project.” He clearly tried to soften his tone; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You have to think about the effect you have on others. Tom, particularly. Your pursuit of this”—he waved a hand—“this chimera is hurting him. She was your wife, but she was his mother, you know.”

  “You’ve got no right to talk about my relationship with my son.”

  He held up his massive hands. “OK, OK.”

  Rosa had an air of amused suspicion. “What is really going on here, John?”

  “I’m concerned for Michael.” He glowered back.

  “Oh, perhaps there is truth in that. But I am pretty sure you would be quite happy to see your little brother take a pratfall, as long as no permanent harm was done. So why are you interested in this business of Morag?”

  Characteristically he went on the attack. “And what’s your angle, Rosa? What’s your motive in messing with my brother’s head?”

  “Will you believe me if I say I actually want to resolve this issue, to help my nephew, that I have no higher motive? Other than simple curiosity, of course; I always did like a good ghost story . . . No, you probably won’t, will you?”

  I was obscurely pleased that she wasn’t fazed.

  John stared at her. “Do you actually believe in ghosts?”

  It was a simple question that, in our increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the mystery of Morag, I’d never quite framed that way, and I was interested in her answer.

  She thought for a moment. “Do you know what Immanuel Kant said about ghosts? ‘I do not care wholly to deny all truth to the various ghost stories, but with the curious reservation that I doubt each one of the sightings yet have some belief in them all taken together. . . .’ As a priest you soon learn that there is a whole spectrum of credulity, that the poles of total acceptance and utter denial are merely two poles, two choices among many.” She smiled. “Or to put it another way, I have an open mind.”

  John seemed angered by this. He stood up. “You’re full of shit.”

  I said, “John, watch your mouth. She’s your aunt, and a priest. She’s a priest who’s full of shit.”

  He turned on me. “You really ought to get your head clear of this garbage, Michael. For your own sake, and the rest of us.” He clapped his hands and disappeared, like a fat, business-suited genie.

  Rosa stared at the space where he had been. “So many issues, so many conflicts. Even for a Poole your brother is unusual.” She turned to me, her gaze direct, probing. “Michael, I think your brother is hiding something from you—something that’s troubling him about all this more than he’s telling you. You have to resolve this, the two of you, whatever it is. You are stuck with him, you know. Stuck with each other for life. That is the doom of family.”

  I stared, surprised. I’d had this feeling about John before; it was disturbing to hear it confirmed. But in this dense, dark tangle of me and Morag, Tom and a ghost, what secret could John possibly hold?

  Rosa stood up. Her chair vanished in a haze of pixels. “Perhaps that is enough for now.”

  “OK. But our ghost story—what next?”

  “I am sure you will agree that we need more data. I suggest you wait for another visitation. Or, if you have the courage, seek one out, as you did in York. But this time, make sure you record everything you can—especially that strange rapid speech.”

  “I’ll try,” I said dubiously. “I don’t know how easy it will be.”

  She smiled. “You’ll have help. Another of your friends contacted me.”

  I frowned. “I really hate the idea of everybody talking behind my back. Who this time?”

  “Gea,” Rosa said simply.

  Even given the context of the conversation that surprised me. “So a sentient artificial intelligence is investigating the ghost of my dead wife. Could my life get any weirder?”

  She leaned forward. The VR illusion of her presence was so good I thought I could smell her musty, exotic scent, a mix of old lady and priest, perhaps through some synesthetic confusion in my muddled head. “But we are all on your side, Michael. You are the hub of a wheel, you see. We are all connected to you. Even if we bicker among ourselves.” She stood straight and tucked her hands into her black sleeves. “We will speak shortly.” And she disappeared.

  Chapter 35

  Alia had never cared much where she was. She grew up on a ship, sailing on an endless journey; she had been born in transit. And through Skimming she had learned that all differences in space could be banished with an act of will.

  But now she was coming to the one place in the Galaxy where she couldn’t help but know exactly where she was. As Sol itself loomed out of a sparse Galaxy-rim dusting of stars, she was already seeing a sky Michael Poole himself might have recognized, even though the constellations had shifted and morphed since his day, and the stars themselves showed signs of the passing of mankind: some of them greened by orbiting shells of habitats, others lined up in rings or belts, still others detonated and scattered in the course of one war or another.

  And soon she would come to the very center of it all: Earth, the home world of mankind—the place where, it was said, in the end all the undying flocked.

  Reath’s ship cut across the plane of Sol system, like a stone rolling across a plate. The sun’s planets, so significant in memory and legend across the Galaxy, were scattered in their orbits about their star. Alia was disappointed; she had no instinct for the dynamics of planetary systems, and somehow she had expected all the solar worlds to be lined up in a neat row ready for inspection.

  One world did swim by to become bright enough briefly to rival the still-distant sun. They all crowded to the windows to see. The planet remained a mere point of light to an unaided eye, but they used the ship’s enhancement features to see better.

  It was a giant, a ball of murky gas that swathed a rocky core larger than Earth. The planet’s color was a dull, washed-out yellow-brown, but you could see streaks and whorls in the cloud tops, sluggish storms curdling that thick blanket of air. Reath pointed out moons, balls of rock and ice that were minor worlds in their own right. And, strangest of all, the planet was circled by a ring, a band of light centered on the planet.

  This planet, Reath said, was called Saturn. It was the system’s largest surviving gas giant; there had been one larger, but that had long been destroyed, and was anyhow hidden on the far side of the sun. Saturn had once been central in the planning for the defense of Earth itself. “It’s a fortress,” Reath said, “a vast natural fortress circling on the boundary of the inner system.”

  Alia asked, “And what about the rings?”

  “Orbital weapons systems, very ancient. They break down, collide, smash each other up. In time their fragments have be
en shepherded into those ring systems by the perturbation of the moons’ gravity. It’s odd,” he said. “Once Saturn was one of Sol system’s most spectacular sights, for it had a natural ring system—fragments of water ice from a shattered moon. When mankind came here, bringing war, those rings didn’t last long. But now Saturn’s rings have been reborn in these bits of smashed-up weaponry.”

  On the planet itself, huge machines of war had been constructed beneath the cover of the eternal clouds. But the war had never come here; those immense machines had never been activated.

  “But the machines are still waiting for the call to arms,” Reath said.

  Bale said, “I wonder if they will know who to fight for, after all this time. Would they recognize us as the heirs of their builders?”

  None of them, not spindly Reath or the squat Campocs or furry, long-limbed Alia and Drea had an answer. Saturn swam away into the dark.

  It was half a million years since mankind had first ventured to the stars. For much of that time humanity had been locked in war—and although in the end a Galaxy had been won, it had always been Sol system, even Earth itself, that had been the principal mine for the resources for that war. So the system was left depleted.

  Once, between Jupiter and the inner rocky worlds, there had been a rich asteroid belt: now it was impoverished, mined out, and scattered. The iron of the innermost world, Sol I, called Mercury, had been dug out and shipped away for so long that the little world had been left misshapen by quarries and pits. Earth’s two neighbors, Sol II and IV—Venus and Mars—had been used up, too. Mars had been stripped of what volatiles it had retained from its chill birth, and even Venus’s thick air had been transformed to carbon polymers and removed. Now, abandoned, both worlds looked remarkably similar, two balls of rust-red dust, naked save for only a thin layer of air, and with no signs of life save the abandoned cities of a departed mankind. It was a strange thought, Alia reflected, that in a mere half-million years after the humans arrived, all these worlds had suffered a greater transformation than any in the vast ages since their births.

  At last the ship made its final approach to Sol III: Earth.

  Even from afar the planet didn’t look quite as it did in Poole’s time. The planet’s crisp horizon was blurred by a deep, structured layer of silvery mist: in this age, Earth was surrounded by a cloud of life.

  The ship cut through this community. Alia watched, bemused, as translucent animals, all amorphous bodies and clinging tentacles, attached themselves to the ship, spraying acid to get at whatever lay inside. The ship was forced to charge its hull to repel these swarming, vacuum-hardened creatures.

  This unlikely community was an unintended consequence of mankind’s long colonization of near-Earth space. Once, many engineering structures had lifted up out of Earth’s atmosphere to provide access to space. There had even been a bridge that had spanned many times Earth’s own diameter to reach to its Moon—but the Moon itself was lost now. All those mighty engineering projects had long since fallen into ruin, but they had lasted long enough to provide a route for Earth’s tenacious life-forms to clamber out of the atmosphere and at last to leak out into space, where, hardened and adapted, their remote descendants still remained.

  At last the ship descended toward the planet itself.

  The world that came spinning up out of the dark was still recognizably Earth. Alia could even name the continents, so familiar from Poole’s maps. She knew that the continents were rafts of rock that slid around the surface, but even half a million years was but a moment in the long afternoon of Earth’s geology, and the essential configuration was unchanged.

  The continents’ shapes had subtly altered, though, she saw. The land had pushed out to sea, and where the great rivers drained into the oceans, fat deltas crowded into the water. The oceans, steel gray, had receded since Poole’s time. Not only that, there was no trace of ice, at either North or South poles; in the north there was a cloud-strewn ocean, and the southern continent, Antarctica, was bare green and gray. A good fraction of Earth’s water must have been lost altogether.

  In the temperate regions most of the lowland was inhabited. The ground was coated by a silver-gray broken by splashes of vivid green. The habitation was so widespread, crowding from mountain peaks to river valleys, it was hard to distinguish individual cities or communities. But in the sprawl of urbanization there were distinctive patterns—circles, some of them huge, which shaped the development around and within their arcs. Roads like shining threads cut across the plains of habitation, linking the circular forms, and Alia could make out the sparks of flying craft.

  Reath pointed to the ground. “See those circular forms? In the time of the Coalition, they built all their cities that way, low domes on circular foundations. Conurbations, they called them.”

  “They were copying alien architecture,” Drea said. “And they gave their cities numbers, not names. They didn’t want anybody to forget that Earth had once been occupied.” It was a familiar story, a legend told to children across the Galaxy.

  When the Coalition fell the great domes had been abandoned, mined for materials, left to rot. But the first post-Coalition cultures had established their towns and cities inside the old circular foundations. That was half a million years ago, and since then Earth had hosted a thousand cultures, and had fought numberless wars; the people thronging its streets probably weren’t even the same species, strictly speaking, as the folk who built the Coalition. But still the circular patterns persisted. On Earth, Alia thought, everything was ancient, and everywhere reefs of a very deep antiquity pushed through the layers of the present.

  The only exception to the general pattern of habitation and cultivation was South America. On its descent toward its landing site in Europe, Reath’s shuttle cut south of the equator and swam across the heart of this continent. The land was covered from mountain peak to shore by a bubbling carpet of crimson-red; only the bright gray stripes of great rivers cut through the dense blanket.

  Alia pointed this out to Reath. “It looks like vegetation,” she said. “Like wild vegetation. But there’s no green.”

  Reath shrugged. “It probably isn’t native. Why should it be? Earth is the center of a Galactic culture. For half a million years life-forms from all across the Galaxy have been brought here, by design or otherwise. Some of them found ways to survive.”

  Bale said, “So it’s an alien ecology down there. Why don’t they clear it away?”

  “Maybe it’s too useful,” Reath said.

  “Maybe they can’t,” Seer said with a cold grin.

  The shuttle cut across the Atlantic, sweeping from south to north. In the last moments of the flight Alia peered down into a great valley that she found hard to identify from her memories of Poole’s maps. Then she realized it was the basin of the sea once called the Mediterranean, now drained of water. As elsewhere the urbanization crowded down from the higher lands, but much of the basin floor was colonized only by wild greenery. Here and there she made out lenticular shapes, stranded in the dried mud and grown over by green. They might have been the remains of sunken ships, she thought fancifully, wrecks that had outlasted the sea that had destroyed them.

  The shuttle left the basin and flew north over the higher land. They were somewhere over southern Europe—Alia thought it was the area Poole would have called France. They came to a densely developed area that straddled a river valley. Here those circular patterns of development crowded closely, and the ground was textured with buildings and roads, as if carpeted by jewels. The shuttle descended, and Alia found herself falling through a sky that was full of buildings—impossibly tall given Earth’s gravity, surely saturated with inertial-control technology.

  Drea peered out in awe at one vast aerial condominium. “Look at that. It’s bigger than the Nord!”

  Bale said dryly, “They don’t believe in economizing on energy, these Earth folk, do they?”

  The shuttle found a clear area to land, and dropped without ceremo
ny to the ground. They all clambered out and stood still a moment, allowing Earth’s Mist to interface with their bodies’ systems.

  This landing pad was just a clear, shining floor. There were no facilities, nothing like a dock or replenishment station. The nearest buildings looked residential—and, further away, more buildings floated, huge and glittering.

  Bale sniffed. “Funny air. Not much oxygen. Lots of trace elements, toxins.”

  Reath said, “This is an old world, Campoc. . . .” He fell silent.

  The little party was being studied. A small girl had popped into existence a few paces from Alia—literally popped, Alia could hear the small shock of the air she displaced. She was wearing a jumpsuit of some substance so bright it shone. She stared at Alia, then disappeared again.

  Alia whispered to Drea, “Skimming?”

  “I think so—”

  Another visitor Skimmed in, this time a man, grossly fat. He glanced at them all, spied Drea, and walked up to her. He leered at her breasts and said something Alia couldn’t hear. Drea snapped, “No.” He shrugged and disappeared.

  But he was soon replaced by another, a younger man who gazed at them curiously for a few seconds before disappearing. And then another, an older woman—and then a party, a family perhaps, adults and children hand in hand, who Skimmed in as one.

  All around the shuttle people flickered in and out of existence. Alia could feel the air they displaced washing gently over her face. The party clustered together nervously.

  “They’re just curious,” Reath said. “Come to see the visitors—us.”

  “They have no manners,” Seer said nervously.

  “Or attention span,” Denh said.

  “Then ignore them,” Alia said.

  “Quite right.”

  The voice was a dry scratch. Alia turned.

  One of the visitors remained while others flickered around her, evanescent as dreams. It was a woman, though her figure was all but masked by a shapeless brown robe. She was small, dark, somehow very solid, Alia thought, as if she were made of something more dense than mere flesh, blood, and bone. She walked through the shimmering throng toward Alia. Her face was round and worn, and her head was hairless, with not so much as an eyelash.