Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “George, if this is true, what should I do about it?”

  He shrugged. “Just accept it. I mean, it makes no difference. You just have to do your best even so, don’t you?”

  “I guess.”

  We just sat for a while. Then I said, “It’s morning in Alaska. I ought to go to work.” I stood. “Can I come visit tomorrow?”

  “Of course.” As my VR broke up, as his room turned transparent around me, I saw him in his chair, smiling, waving a gaunt hand, his fingers bent over and stiff.

  As it happened the next day we hit a problem with the Higgs-field power plant of the moles, and I was kept too busy to get away. The following day was worse. By the third day I was putting off going to see George; I didn’t want to get immersed in all that difficulty again. Tomorrow, I told myself. Or the day after that.

  I never saw him again. A week after that last visit, John called to tell me George was dead.

  Chapter 43

  Even at full speed the journey back to the Nord took two full days.

  The sisters spent their time alone, shut away from the Campocs and from Reath. Alia didn’t want to talk to anybody else but Drea. She didn’t want Bale; she couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her. And she certainly didn’t want to join in the Campocs’ group consciousness, that pale echo of the Transcendence. She didn’t even want Poole, in his Witnessing tank.

  To get through this, she felt, she had to retreat into herself, become again the woman she had once been. She had to be Alia. So the sisters sat together, limbs entwined, as they used to when they were small.

  But her feelings were complicated.

  Alia found herself thinking that if Drea had not been here, then her sister would surely have been on the Nord and shared the still unknown fate of her parents. And if that had happened, Alia would be alone. Then she was wracked by guilt that she seemed to spend so much time thinking of herself, rather than about those who had been hurt. If she was so shallow, so self-obsessed, then how could she possibly imagine she could deal with a Transcendence?

  It made it worse that they had no real news. The fragmentary reports from Nord were little more than a cry for help. As the long hours wore on, that uncertainty was impossible to bear.

  Drea thought Alia could ask the Transcendence.

  “You could talk to the Campocs,” Drea whispered. “They might be able to contact Leropa. Or Reath might have a way to contact another Transcendent community, nearer to the Nord. For all I know there might even be a Transcendent or two on the Nord . . .”

  Alia knew that was too simple. Drea still thought of the Transcendence as a kind of comms network, as if the Transcendents themselves were nothing but monitoring stations, their eyes cameras. But the Transcendence was more than that. The Transcendence was literally beyond human imagination. Indeed Alia herself didn’t have the words to express it. The only way to understand the Transcendence, she thought sadly, was to be part of it, as she had been, and even if she never went back to it again, there would always be a gulf between herself and her sister.

  But, she felt instinctively, the Transcendence was not a place to seek help at a time of human crisis.

  At last Reath alerted them that their journey was over.

  The ailing Nord was surrounded by a multitude of craft, compact or slender, robust or delicate. The crowding visitors had come to give aid, Reath assured the sisters. “Your Nord has many friends.”

  “But at least one enemy,” Drea said bleakly.

  As they approached, cautiously picking their way through the crowd of ships and darting shuttles, their view became clearer. And even from a distance, Alia could see the Nord had been grievously harmed. The squat cylinder that was the core of the Nord’s architecture had survived—it would take the outright demolition of the ship to destroy that—but huge energies had been splashed against the hull, leaving blackened scars and deep notches cut into the Nord’s blunt symmetry. Away from the ancient core the superstructure of habs, antennae, sensors, and manipulators was tangled, as if a great wind had torn through that fragile artificial forest.

  Some of the Nord’s ports were still functioning, at least. The semi-sentient machinery of the dock interfaced with the shuttle routinely, but a bit hesitantly, Alia thought. Perhaps machines could suffer shock, too.

  The shuttle wouldn’t let them out until they donned face masks and gloves. Inside the Nord there were stretches of vacuum, and even where there was air it was likely full of toxins. With dread Alia pulled on her mask, the mask she had once worn to go into a Coalescence; it was terribly hard to have to don protective gear to enter your own home.

  At last the hatches and locks slid open. A smell of burning washed over them, unfiltered by their face masks. And in the corridors, people in masks and gloves swarmed everywhere, cutting, patching, moving bits of equipment. The place was unrecognizable.

  The sisters clutched each other. Alia had been determined to be brave, but even in that first moment her strength seemed to drain away. Drea was wide-eyed, unnaturally still, not even trembling—in shock, Alia thought.

  There was no welcome for Alia and Drea: no message, no news, no words of reassurance, or confirmation of their fears. It was as if this damaged place had forgotten they even existed.

  Reath tried to keep them focused. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “The Nord’s in chaos. It’s only three days since the disaster. People are just too busy. . . . Don’t worry. I know the way. Just follow me.” As he made his way out of the shuttle he stumbled and drifted until he got hold of a rail: his body plan was designed for planet-living, not for this microgravity scramble. But he gamely got his orientation, beckoned to the sisters, and began to make his way through the corridors.

  Alia followed. Drea moved mechanically.

  The damage inflicted on the Nord had been internal as well as external. Corridor walls had been sliced through and rooms had burst open, their contents scorched and smashed. Great energies had been loosed here, Alia saw with a sense of outrage, vast clumsy mechanical energies poured out in this fragile human place. And if it was distressing now, it must have been a lot worse before, she saw from the ripped-open walls, the splashes of blood on the floor: those first few hours must have been dreadful indeed.

  But she was being selfish again, she thought with a stab of shame, thinking only of herself, and how she had been spared the worst of it. If she had been here, where she was supposed to be, perhaps more lives could have been saved.

  They clambered up through the Nord’s levels, heading for their home. Activity throbbed through the ship as partitions were patched, debris removed, fresh goods brought in. In emergency hospitals the wounded were arrayed in stacks, through which medic machines and human nurses drifted. The ship was badly hurt, Alia thought, but it was already recovering. But there were mortuaries, too, more arrays of bodies but full of ominous stillness.

  Reath murmured, “I admit this is beyond me. I’m planet-born, an earthworm. Even on a planet the odd catastrophe strikes—an asteroid impact, a volcanic eruption, a quake. But at least the world survives; you can rely on that. Here, though, on this fragile ship, even while you were trying to save those around you, and cope with your own injuries, you had to try to stop the very fabric of your environment from unraveling around you. For if you failed . . .”

  If they had failed, Alia thought bleakly, the Nord might have cracked open altogether, and tens of thousands of humans would have been sent scattering into the vacuum dark.

  “You can see the patterns,” Drea said suddenly.

  “What patterns?”

  Drea pointed to an irruption through the roof of this corridor, a hole surrounded by smashed and distorted panels, and a matching hole at the angle of floor and wall. If you looked into one of those mighty gashes you could see how a crude tunnel had been cut through deck after deck, in rough straight lines. Peering down Alia thought she could make out the green of the Farm, even the hulking machinery of the Engine Room, far below. />
  Drea said, “They just came blasting through here, right through the fabric of the Nord.”

  Reath said, “The Nord must be riddled with these wounds. The scars of energy weapons, perhaps?”

  “No,” said Alia. “Oh, weapons were surely used. But these tunnels are too wide.” Any ship-born, in any ship across the Galaxy, would have recognized such signs.

  “The Shipbuilders,” Drea whispered.

  For ship-born children across the Galaxy, the Shipbuilders were bedtime monsters. But they had at last come here. And in their voracious machines they had eaten their way through the soft body of the ship.

  Reath watched this exchange, excluded from their tradition, his eyes narrow.

  At last they arrived at the upper level, just beneath the hull, where their home had been. The delicate superstructure of the Nord had taken even more of a battering than its robust interior. Alia and Drea picked their way through a tangle of melted and snapped struts, fragments of smashed dome, bits of broken furniture and machinery. Debris floated about, unrestrained in the absence of artificial gravity, contained by an emergency force shield that shimmered over everything like a huge soap bubble. People picked their way through the rubble, searching, inspecting. The regular light globes had failed, and the few emergency lanterns cast long shadows everywhere, making the place even more of a visual jumble.

  When the sisters reached their home, their worst fears were confirmed.

  The ship’s hull had been smashed open here, leaving only a few drifting bits of translucent ceramic. The sisters pulled themselves through the wreckage, searching. Alia felt fragile, edgy. The conjunction of all this wreckage with shards of the familiar, with bits of stuff, fragments of furniture she thought she recognized, made this whole experience seem unreal.

  On one section of floor she found a splash of dried blood, not yet cleaned up. It looked exactly as if a sack of the sticky stuff had been dropped and splashed open here. A sack about the size of a baby. Her stomach clenched. Suddenly she was vomiting. She got her face mask out of the way just in time to keep it clear of the bile that spewed out of her mouth.

  A voice called her. “Alia . . .” She looked around wildly.

  It was her father. He was waiting for her just outside the broken hull. Drea was already with him, her face buried on his shoulder. Alia launched herself up through the murky air.

  Surrounded by a constellation of debris fragments, the wreckage of his home, Ansec lifted his arm around Alia. The three of them floated together, their arms wrapped around each other.

  Gently Alia disengaged herself. “My mother—”

  “She’s dead,” Drea said. “Bel is dead.” Her voice was raw with weeping.

  Suddenly all Alia could see was her mother’s face, its fading beauty, sometimes weak, always full of helpless love. “And the baby?”

  “Gone, too,” said Ansec. “It happened so quickly. . . .”

  More conflicting emotions swirled in Alia. You drove me away so you could have this kid. And now you’ve lost him anyhow. It was a hard, savage thought that deeply shocked her. What kind of monster am I? But as she stared at her sister and her father, the complex muddle of these emotions washed away, leaving only regret, and an elemental anguish.

  Reath touched her face, his long fingers useless for climbing but gentle and sensitive. “Are you going to be all right?”

  “I’ll cry later,” she said. It was true. She clung to thoughts of Michael Poole, whose family had been ripped apart by a similar tragedy. Not for the first time in her life, she sought comfort from his endurance.

  Reath said grimly, “I think you’d better tell me what you know about these Shipbuilders.”

  The Shipbuilders, like Alia’s own people, were relics of the deepest past.

  In those early days, even after the discovery of the earliest faster-than-light drives, generation starships had been a common way to reach for the stars. Sailing on into the dark, traveling much slower than light, these ships were worlds closed over on themselves, with whole generations living out their lives between launch and landfall. Alia knew this lore well, for it was the heritage of her own people. But it wasn’t a reliable way to travel.

  Most generation ships failed en route—or so it was believed, for many of them simply vanished into the dark. It wasn’t hard to see why. Since most generation ships had been launched at a time when mankind was still better at taking ecologies apart, rather than building and managing them, it wasn’t a surprise that so many expired long before their intended journeys were complete.

  There were other hazards. Alia’s own ship had been overtaken by a friendly bunch of FTL travelers, and reconnected to the worlds of mankind. Other ships were not so lucky. Fat, helpless, resource-rich, they had fallen foul of pirates and bandits; there had been terrible tragedies, massacres in the silence between the stars.

  But there were other sorts of survivor.

  Sometimes, by accident or design, a ship would simply plough on into the dark, never making landfall. Things might go well for centuries—even after the deaths of the original crew, when nobody was left alive who could remember the point of the mission. Much longer than that, though, and things started to drift.

  Over millennia languages changed, ethnic compositions drifted. Those few ships that lasted so long became like monasteries, with cowed, constrained crews laboring endlessly over tasks they barely understood, seeking to preserve a purpose set down by unimaginably remote ancestors, all for the benefit of descendants who would not be born for millennia more.

  And some ships went on even longer.

  Given enough time the brutal scalpel of natural selection cut and shaped the ships’ hapless populations, as always working to make its subject populations fit for their environment. And in the closed spaces of a generation starship there was always one common sacrifice, cut away by that pitiless scalpel: mind.

  After all, on such a ship, what did you need a mind for? The ship would manage itself, more or less, or it wouldn’t have made it so far anyhow. With mind, the crew would only get restless, start to wonder what was beyond the walls—or, worse, start to tinker with the plumbing. In the first generation such activity would be against ship’s rules. In the hundredth it would be a sin, a taboo. By the thousandth generation it would be a selection pressure.

  This was the origin of the Shipbuilders. Their ships had sailed on, even though the descendants of the first crew had long lost the intelligence that had enabled the ship to be launched in the first place. They maintained their ships’ essential systems, if only by rote. They even grew inventive over such fripperies as external superstructure. Their ships became gaudy, impossibly impractical creations, their purpose being to attract other such crews—and to mate.

  And they remembered how to make weapons, for piracy—or rather, since piracy implies a conscious purpose, parasitism. It was necessary. No closed ecology was perfect; any starship required some replenishment. The Shipbuilders simply took what they needed.

  “They are brutal,” Alia said to Reath, “because they are mindless. They launch themselves on missiles that just rip through the fabric of their targets, scooping up stuff indiscriminately.”

  “And so they shot up your Nord,” Reath said.

  Alia said, “The Shipbuilders are the stuff of nightmares to us.”

  “Because they might come out of the dark to attack you at any time. An arbitrary horror.”

  “Not just that. The Shipbuilders come from the same place as us. We could have fallen, as they did. They are like us.”

  Unexpectedly Reath folded Alia in his arms. “No,” he said. “They are not like you. Never think that.”

  For a heartbeat she was rigid with shock. Then she softened against his musty robe, and the tears came at last.

  She spent the night with Drea, in a small compartment in Reath’s shuttle, orbiting the wreck of the Nord. They shared a bunk. Sometimes they held each other, and sometimes they just lay together, back to back, or n
estling.

  Alia wasn’t sure if she slept at all. Her head was full of pain, of inchoate longing and guilt and regret. She was still working through her muddled feelings about her mother and brother, the pain of the loss, her guilt over not being able to resolve their final argument. Underlying it all, though, was the simple flesh and blood reality of the loss. A family was never a fixed thing, she thought, but a process. Now that process had been cut short, leaving nothing but a bloody splash on the floor. It wasn’t just her mother who had died, not just a brother, but her family, too.

  It seemed strange that such things could happen in a Galaxy governed by a superior form of consciousness. And while the Transcendence agonized over the loss of all the ancestors of mankind, here she was trying to grieve over her own mother. Perhaps, in her anguish and muddled pain, she felt some ghost of the higher, more exquisite regret that had impelled the Transcendence to attempt the Redemption.

  And of course, she thought reluctantly, the Transcendence must be cognizant of the disaster, as it was of all of the past. The Transcendence must already, in principle, be seeking to redeem the suffering inflicted on her, as they did every scrap of pain and anguish right back to the dawn of human consciousness.

  If she wished, Alia could Witness the Nord’s disaster. She could, through Hypostatic Union, live through it. She could even ride around inside her own mother’s head, for instance, and live out her death. But this was her family, her own mother. Even the idea of delving into the Transcendence and using its superhuman powers to inspect their suffering made her recoil.

  And it wouldn’t be enough, she saw immediately. It could never be a true atonement for her, no matter how many times she lived through her mother’s life. For her mother’s suffering would still exist, for all Alia’s minute inspection of it.

  This must be the heart of the Transcendence’s dilemma over Redemption, she realized. But if it was not enough to watch the past, not even to live it out through Hypostatic Union, not even if that process were driven to infinity—then something more must be sought. And the Transcendence must know it, too. But what more could there be? Curiosity burned in her, and a vast longing for a relief from her own pain.