Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Drea stirred in her half-sleep. Shame laced through Alia. In her Transcendental scheming she had once again forgotten her simple humanity. She held her sister, until Drea was still.

  At the start of the next day the six of them—the three Campocs, Reath, Alia, and Drea, gathered in Reath’s shuttle, and shared hot drinks.

  “Just like old times,” Seer ventured. Nobody responded.

  They talked desultorily of the menace of the Shipbuilders.

  “It’s hard even to resent them, hard to hate them,” Alia said dully. “Because they have no minds, no purpose. This is just what they do. But the menace is getting worse.”

  “It is?”

  “This is a time of peace, Reath. Once the Galaxy was full of warships; in those days the Shipbuilders were kept in their place. But now there aren’t so many weapons around.”

  “They will have to be dealt with,” Bale said.

  Drea said coldly, “Or welcomed into the family of mankind, to become a part of the awakening of the cosmos. Isn’t that how your friend Leropa would put it, Alia?”

  Alia studied her sister, shocked. Alia had never seen such a hard expression on her sister’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

  Drea stared at the Campocs; they avoided her eyes. Drea said, “I’ve been doing some thinking. Alia, doesn’t it strike you as strange that just as you swim off into the Transcendence, this horror should be inflicted on the Nord?”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences,” Drea said.

  Bale put down his drink and leaned forward. “Drea, you’d better say what you have to say. Are you accusing us of something?”

  “You bet I am,” Drea said fervently. “You set up Alia’s election to the Transcendence so you could use her as a tool to study the Redemption. Then you kidnapped me and threatened my life to force her to go on. And now she wanted to come home; you knew she was thinking about abandoning the whole cosmic mess. So you acted again, in your clumsy, vicious way—”

  Alia put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Drea, please.”

  Drea turned to her. “Don’t you see? The Redemption is about regret, about loss. So the Campocs have engineered this whole incident. They wanted to inflict loss on you, Alia. They wanted to give you something to regret. They took away your mother and your brother, to make you go back into the Redemption.”

  Alia felt bewildered. “But how—”

  “The Campocs led the Shipbuilders to the Nord.”

  It seemed unbelievable. Alia looked to Reath for support, but his face was expressionless. If it were true—

  Rage exploded in Alia. She stood and loomed over Bale, her fists bunching. “Is she right? Tell me. Lethe, I took you into my bed. If you have done this for your own twisted purposes, the truth is the least you owe me.”

  Bale met her gaze calmly. She thought he seemed calculating, but his thoughts were seamlessly closed to her. “Maybe we did, maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? If I tell you it’s true, you might think I’m just trying to manipulate you. And if I deny it, you won’t believe me.”

  Alia turned to Reath. “Do you think they did it? Did they lead the Shipbuilders here?”

  “I don’t know,” Reath said reluctantly. “But whether they did or not, they have worked out how to use it against you, haven’t they?”

  Bale said heavily, “But, whichever way—this is all your fault, Alia.”

  She gasped; she felt as if she had been punched. “My fault?”

  “You are the Transcendent-Elect. We are mere instruments. If not for you, none of this would have happened.”

  She remembered her own musings of the night before, her own deep hunger to know what might be found at the higher levels of the Redemption. Surely Bale saw this in her; all his scheming wouldn’t work unless there was something in herself that wanted this, too.

  She already knew far more about the Redemption than Bale ever had. She had seen the ultimate logic of the Restoration, the madness of infinity: if Bale was concerned that the Redemption would consume the resources of mankind in a vast but futile quest, he was right to doubt the Transcendence. She doubted, too. She was driven by curiosity and doubt—and, perhaps, by a hunger to know if the Redemption was possible after all, if it could somehow be achieved. And so she knew that she would do as Bale planned; she had no choice. She hated him for it.

  “You are monsters,” Drea said to the Campocs.

  Seer actually grinned. “Ah, but we’re charming monsters. Don’t you think?”

  Alia loomed over Bale. “Very well. If the Transcendence is what you want, let’s call it now.” He quailed, but she descended on him. With a strength fueled by anger she grabbed his shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

  And she slammed her awareness into his mind. He cried out, but he could not escape. Her force of will poured along the interconnections to his relations’ consciousnesses, and they screamed and writhed. Peripherally she was aware of Reath and Drea pulling away, shocked.

  With the minds of the Campocs wrapped around her own like a cloak, she called for Leropa. “Take me back. I need you now. Oh, take me back!”

  Chapter 44

  A month after George’s funeral, Ruud Makaay announced that he believed that the trial hydrate stabilization project off Prudhoe Bay was “mature” enough to be presented to the world’s decision-makers. A day was set.

  It would be a key moment for us. After weeks of construction and development we now had a properly interconnected prototype network, dug out by the moles and extensively tested. All that remained to do was to start pumping liquid nitrogen through the veins we had burrowed into the methane-laden sediments of the seafloor: all we had to do, in other words, was switch on, and we ought to be able to reduce the temperature of Arctic seafloor strata across a rough circle kilometers across. “Serious chilling,” as Shelley Magwood said.

  And we were going to do it in the full glare of media attention, and in the presence of every key agency of governance from the state government of Alaska up to the Stewardship itself. I tried to be confident. I’d pored over EI’s test results, analyses and modeling. I saw no reason why anything serious should screw up. I was optimistic; I usually am. And I expect people to behave rationally and for the common good. John always said I was an idealist, and he meant it as an insult; he was probably right.

  For sure I was wrong to be confident, that particular day.

  In a way, it all started to go wrong the moment I saw Morag.

  On the morning of Makaay’s sales pitch I was late rising. Still staying in that dreadful sanatorium-like hotel in Deadhorse—and now plagued by visitations—I hadn’t slept well. Alone, I took a pod bus from the hotel, and rode in silence to the coast.

  The layout at Prudhoe Bay was much as it had been before, when Makaay had tentatively launched the project’s integration stage before a crowd of engineers, employees, and one former vice president. You had the rig out at sea, clearly visible under a very pale, very cold blue sky, and on the shore once more EI had set up a marquee for the visitors. But the marquee was much larger and grander than the tent they had put up the last time. When I stepped inside into dry air-conditioned warmth, I was immediately immersed in a pleasant buzz of noise, of crowds. Somewhere music discreetly played, a warm bath of sound.

  The marquee was actually several stories tall, like a transparent apartment block, its walls so clear you could barely see them except when the wind off the sea made them ripple. There was a fine view of our rig, and of the other old oil facilities that littered this part of the coast. The floor was carpeted wall to wall with a pale green-brown weave, colors sympathetic to the tundra colors of the North Slope. Above my head flags hung, a Stars and Stripes, the UN flag, banners bearing the EI logo and the cradled-child symbol of the Stewardship. All very classy: the EI folk had a lot of experience of this sort of event, and they knew how to impress without overwhelming.

  There were cameras, microphones, and other s
ensors everywhere, and as I walked in big drones descended on me, and an animated cloud of electronic dust swirled around. Given there were plenty of VIPs, it was faintly disturbing such a chunk of that electronic attention was turned on me. I was one of the movers of the project, one of the faces that EI had presented to the public, so I suppose I should have expected it. But it was an eerie feeling to be so watched, as if I was stuck inside a giant eyeball.

  And I tried not to think about George’s speculations that I might be under even more intense scrutiny by a curious future.

  We had attracted quite a crowd. Throughout the marquee expensively dressed people mingled confidently, and there was a hubbub of loud conversation as acquaintances were made and renewed, and, no doubt, deals were done, few of which would have anything to do with our hydrate project. Serving bots hovered in the air, bearing trays of drinks and exotic-looking snack foods. Here and there I saw subtle imaging imperfections: expensively shod feet suspended mysteriously a centimeter or so above the carpet, a gown billowing in a non-existent breeze, a shadow across a beautiful face cast by an invisible light source. I imagined only ten percent or so of these movers and shakers were here in person.

  Here was the other side of the vast collapse in transportation infrastructure which Edith Barnette had, in part, overseen. Few governmental agencies, few corporations or other organizations actually “existed” anywhere meaningfully, except in cyberspace; and few crowds were ever as populous as they seemed. Well, on this occasion it was probably just as well that people projected rather than traveled. If so many VIPs had descended on Prudhoe Bay in the flesh, that dismal hotel in Deadhorse would have been overwhelmed, temperamental en suite bathrooms and all.

  However, somewhere in that crowd, Edith Barnette was here in person once more. And so was my brother John, and Tom and Sonia, and Shelley, and Vander Guthrie—all the core team who had driven the project, in their different ways, from the beginning. I walked through the crowd, trying to pick out familiar faces, and to hold my nerve.

  That was when I saw Morag.

  She was moving through the crowd, some distance from me. I saw her out of the corner of my eye. I helplessly turned that way, as I always did. I thought she was turning toward me, I thought she smiled—but before I was even sure it was her, I lost her behind a knot of gabbling VIPs.

  I didn’t want this to be happening. In the last few days I had suffered this kind of visitation over and over—and suffered is the word. There had been no repeat of that close encounter out on the tundra I had had before, when she had smiled, and let us take her picture, and record her words, even if we couldn’t understand what she had to say. I was back to a world of glimpses, a flash of strawberry blond hair in my peripheral vision, a soft voice. And there were more of these visitations than ever before, many more of them, sometimes more than one a day. I didn’t want to deal with her, not this way, not if I was going to be so tantalized, and certainly not on a day like today.

  But then I saw her again, on the far side of the marquee this time. And when I looked away, there she was again, this time close to the small podium at the front of the marquee. It was as if she were teleporting around the place.

  I grabbed a vodka and tonic off a floating bot’s tray and downed it quickly.

  John approached me, a tumbler of whisky in his hand. A small, dark, intense figure was at his side: Jack Joy, I recognized after a moment, the Lethe Swimmer. John seemed uncomfortable to be tailed by the guy. But he had got Jack involved in the first place, and since the Swimmers had put money into the project Jack had a perfect right to be there.

  Jack Joy held out a hand, but his unreal fingers just brushed my sleeve; he grinned apologetically. “Sorry I couldn’t haul my ass here in all its glory. Commitments, pressures—you know. Actually I really am sorry. Look around, the sky is full of free booze! . . .”

  Distracted by the glimpses of Morag, I wasn’t interested in anything the man had to say. I looked at John. It was the first time we had been together in person for weeks. I felt that usual complicated emotional tug toward my brother, a mix of rivalry and helpless love.

  “So here we are,” I said.

  John shrugged. “We’re a strange family. We gather in person for a function like this, but we send VR projections to a funeral.”

  I shrugged. “George always said, We Pooles are a funny lot.”

  “If you say so. Anyhow you’re the Poole, I’m a Bazalget, remember.” He stared at me hard, and I thought I knew what was on his mind: Morag, the whole phenomenon that had become such an issue between the two of us. But we couldn’t talk now, not with Jack Joy there.

  Jack said to me, “I was just saying to your brother—don’t you think it’s an impressive place? Prudhoe Bay, the whole oil complex. I mean, look around. For the United States it was a historic achievement to be able to establish an oil industry up here, in a place of Arctic dark and cold and thousands of kilometers from civilization. You may as well have had to develop an oil industry on the Moon. In fact it might have been easier on the Moon, because here you have all this fucking tundra all around. You know, you make a wheel track on that stuff and it’s there forever . . .” His tone was clipped, his speech rapid, and he kept flashing nervous grins. He was sweating, a small virtual incongruity in the air-conditioned comfort of the marquee.

  I said, “So you don’t approve of all that eco-protection, Jack.”

  “Approve, disapprove, it was the flavor of the times. It still is.” He bunched a fist. “In this day and age, a person who wants to achieve something is hedged around by bleats about don’t hurt this, don’t disturb that. I always say, if God hadn’t wanted us to shake up the planet He wouldn’t have given us the mechanical excavator.” He nodded, as if trying to convince himself. “And in the end it’s all bullshit.”

  “It is?”

  “Of course! Look at the precious tundra that those roughnecks weren’t allowed to take a piss on. When the permafrost melted it just became a swamp! So what difference did all that effort to preserve it make? None. It just got in the way of getting the job done, is all.”

  I turned to John. “So is this the way all Swimmers think?”

  He looked increasingly uncomfortable. This guy isn’t with me. “The Swimmers are a broad church, Michael. We live in complex times, with challenging, interconnected problems that may demand out-of-the-box thinking. You have to have a forum where radical opinions can be expressed. . . .” But all this sounded like a party line; he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself.

  Jack Joy said, “I didn’t mean to disturb you, Mike. I see some people I know. I’ll catch you later. This is your day, enjoy it, I wish you success, et cetera et cetera.” Sweating and grinning, he sidled away from us.

  John eyed me. “I’m sorry if that guy upset you.”

  “He didn’t.” I found Jack Joy faintly disturbing, I guess, but I didn’t take him seriously. How wrong I was.

  John was studying me. “You look like shit.”

  “Oh, thanks.”

  “You haven’t been sleeping.” He stepped closer to me, and said more quietly, “You’ve been seeing Morag, haven’t you?”

  I glanced around, at the hovering dust drones, the crowding VR VIPs. “Keep your voice down, John. All right. Yes, I see her. I keep seeing her. It’s driving me crazy. Even if I fall asleep, I hear her voice, smell her breath, she’s there, but when I wake she’s gone, and I can’t sleep again.”

  “But she isn’t speaking to you,” he said. “Not like that one time.” He stared at me intensely, hungry.

  In that moment I was struck by how he had aged—the thickened neck and jaw, the burly body, the flesh of his face slowly crumpling, the marks of a man in middle age. But there was a passion in his eyes I had rarely seen before. My brother didn’t do passion. “This really matters to you, doesn’t it? The whole business with Morag. Why, John?” And I made another leap of intuition. “Do you think you know what she’s trying to tell me? Is that it?”

/>   I expected him to deny this, but he just stared at me, that strange, vulnerable mix of anger and longing all over his face. He said grimly, “We have to get this resolved.”

  “Fine,” I said, scared, bewildered.

  I think we were both relieved when we heard a soft chiming, much amplified; it was Ruud Makaay rapping a pen against an empty glass, calling us to attention.

  Barnette and Makaay stood alone on a plain stage, with a view of the offshore rig framed in the big clear wall behind them.

  Technicians performed last checks on the big nitrogen-liquefaction plant we’d installed on the rig. And, more importantly, we saw maps of the network of tunnels the moles had already dug out through cubic kilometers of the fragile seabed strata. Now the wall began to fill up with images from the project. We saw a mole’s eye view of a tunnel being dug into the undersea rock. “Although actually,” Shelley had pointed out to me, “since the tunnel is being constructed behind the mole as it burrows along, that’s actually a mole’s-ass view . . .”

  Makaay said, “We call this project the Refrigerator. It isn’t a fancy name, but then I’m not a fancy guy, just an engineer who likes to get the job done—and I’ve never worked on a job of more significance than this. I’m very proud of what we’ve achieved so far, and I hope to persuade you to support us in the future, as we seek to extend our technology through all the threatened hydrate strata around both the north and south poles. . . .”

  As Makaay spoke, John and I drifted through the crowd toward the podium. Here we found Shelley, with Vander Guthrie, Tom and Sonia, other project people. There was no seating plan, no front row—in fact there were only a few seats of any kind. Ruud Makaay, an expert at crowd manipulation, didn’t like obviously stage-managed events. He believed in what he called “choreographed informality.” He was aiming for a human warmth that would belie the usual accusations of arrogance that stuck to projects like this. There would come a point when I, like the other key players on the project, would be invited to come forward to be presented to Barnette, like the winner of some VR-soap award. But, happily, I wouldn’t be called on to make any kind of speech.