Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Morag wasn’t given her full freedom, not for now. She was released into my custody, but even that deal took some swinging, as the authorities had decided I was somewhat flaky myself. What saved the day was a surprise intervention from Aunt Rosa, who used the authority of the Church to back me up.

  Anyhow after that week, we were all “released back into the wild,” as Shelley put it—all, to my astonishment, save John. He was sent to a more secure FBI facility down at Anchorage. There were “connections” the G-men wanted to investigate further. His legal status was dubious, but I wasn’t too concerned. If anybody could look after himself in a situation like that it was John. And anyhow, I had enough spite in me to be glad that the feds were giving him a hard time; I knew it was ignoble, but I felt he deserved it.

  The rest of us were asked not to leave Alaska for the time being. We all went back to Prudhoe Bay.

  What a strange crew we were.

  Shelley and I threw ourselves back into the work. I was guiltily glad to have a distraction from the strangeness of Morag.

  Tom and Sonia agreed to come back to the project, too. Tom said he didn’t want to see the bombers win, as he had seen for himself the damage the destabilization of the undersea hydrates could do. It pleased me deeply that we were going to continue working together, even though I knew the return of Morag was bound to put us under extraordinary, unprecedented strain.

  The rebuilding of the Refrigerator itself had already begun, even before Shelley and I got back to the coast. Many of the techs working on that project were very young—just like the suicide bomber, a technician himself—and a good number of them had been killed. But the deaths seemed to have welded the survivors together; there was a determination about them that “the bad guys” would not win, that we who remained would see this thing through as a memorial to those we had lost. Maybe that was a predictable reaction: we had all grown up sharing a world with terrorists, with the dreary knowledge that with every step forward you took there was somebody waiting to drag you back. But it was moving even so.

  The work proceeded quickly. The network of tunnels we had already built, burrowed through cubic kilometers of the seabed, was intact save for the area beneath the rig itself. Shelley needn’t have worried about our moles; most of them still functioned, just as I had hoped. Once the signals stopped coming they just sat patiently in their tunnels, waiting for we contrary humans to figure out what we wanted to do next.

  The oil rig we had used as the base of the project was wrecked beyond usefulness, however. A whole new project to dismantle it safely was soon under way, an enormous undertaking in itself. A new nitrogen liquefaction plant would be set up on a platform not far from the site of the rig, anchored to the seabed. Once that was in place and attached to our network we would start her up again, and finish the analysis of our prototype system, work we had barely begun on the fatal day of the explosion.

  And after that, with our proof of concept in place, we would go cap in hand to the authorities for backing for a wider rollout. The loss of Barnette had been a huge shock, but the whole incident had raised the profile of the project, and we had every reason to hope that in the end the bombing would do us more harm than good.

  As we began to move forward again, the work was pleasing. We were all helping each other recover—and we were, maybe, saving the world in the process. It was deeply satisfying and thoroughly absorbing.

  In the middle of all this, I found Morag a distraction. Can you believe that?

  We ate together, walked, slept together.

  It was a joy, of course, to hold her, to immerse myself in her scent, her warmth, the way her hair curled against my chest—sensations my mind had forgotten but my body remembered. It was as if I was suddenly made whole again.

  We didn’t have sex, though. I wasn’t sure why. My body responded to her closeness, and I thought hers did, too. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something to do with the strangeness of her new body, a density I could feel when I touched her. But the truth may have been simpler. I was seventeen years older since the last time, though she hadn’t aged at all; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her.

  Morag wasn’t freaked. “Give it time,” she said. “It’s not as if either of us is supposed to know how to handle this. I mean, how many support groups are there for husbands whose dead wives have come back to life? We’ll find our way through. . . .”

  Just as I’d said to Tom. But soon I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

  When we talked we did fine, so long as we talked about the past, the years we had in common. She was interested in my work, because she was interested in me.

  But if we talked about the wider world she quickly grew confused, and even, I feared, bored. She had been out of the loop for seventeen years, after all. She had no memories of 2033, for instance; she was like a coma victim who had slept through the whole thing, and the transformation of global society wrought by the Stewardship and the Happy Anniversary strike was something she was learning about, not something she had lived through, as I had.

  I was ripped up by guilt to feel this way, as if I somehow wasn’t deserving of the strange miracle of her return. But being with Morag was—a dislocation. I really was relieved to get away from her, to get back to work, to normality.

  She continued to be subjected to examinations by federal-agency scientists and doctors. I think they might have left her alone if not for that strange anomaly of her weight.

  Rosa, too, or anyhow her VR presence, was a frequent companion for Morag, and so was Gea, manifested in the form of her little rolling robot. Charmingly, Morag remembered the toy that had gathered dust on uncle George’s shelf for decades. They would sit with her, hour after hour, the bent-over little old woman in black and the absurd robot, gently interrogating her. I was happy about this; I suspected they had a better chance of figuring out some aspect of the truth behind Morag’s reincarnation than any number of government doctors.

  I was also keen for Tom to spend some time with his mother. He was very reluctant at first. He surely didn’t want to get hurt again. Or maybe some deeper instinct was operating, some aspect of Tom’s humanity blocking her out, because this couldn’t be her. But he accepted he had to deal with the situation. And so they spent time together, away from me, away from Sonia. I knew it wasn’t making him happy, though.

  After a couple of weeks we got a call from John in Anchorage. He was to be released at last, and the FBI had reconstructed the story of the bombing. So Tom and I flew down to Anchorage to collect him, and to learn the truth.

  Tom, John, and I sat in a small room in the Anchorage FBI field office.

  John looked healthy enough. He was clean-shaven; he had even managed to get his hair cut. But you could tell he had been living in the same set of clothes for a couple of weeks, even though they had been laundered and repaired; there were faint traces of bloodstains on one jacket sleeve.

  And there was a hunted look in his eyes, almost indefinable, but there. After all he had spent fifteen days in custody at the whim of a vast system, without charges, without information on the process he was being put through. “Did me good to see the other side of the bars for once,” he told me when we met up. But I could see that was just a front, that he was never going to sleep so easily again. My stab of unholy glee when I first heard he was going to be detained now made me ashamed.

  But I knew that Morag had spent some time with John, as a VR projection from our base at Prudhoe Bay. When I turned up in Anchorage I had no idea how those sessions had gone. All John had said was how awkward she seemed with the VR technology, which had moved on hugely since she had disappeared from the world. I had yet to work through my issues over this; we didn’t discuss it.

  We studied VR images of our bomber. His name was Ben Cushman. He had been twenty-three years old. I hadn’t known him personally, but his personnel file described him as one of EI’s best and brightest young talents. Not only that, I was shocked to learn, he was married.
He even had a kid, a three-year-old girl, a cute little button. His young wife, a college sweetheart in her pretty newlyweds’ house in Scranton, was now a widow, and that little girl would probably not even remember her father.

  Tom said, “My God, he was younger than me. And he seems so normal. I thought he’d be some kind of zealot, or so stupid he was easily manipulated, or else he’d just be crazy. But he was none of those things, was he?”

  No, he wasn’t. Cushman was intelligent, from a reasonably secure background, successful in his own career. There were none of the usual risk factors of suicide in his background: no mood disorders or schizophrenia, no substance abuse, no history of previous attempts on his own life.

  “And he had a kid,” I said. “Who kills himself if he has a three-year-old daughter? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

  John said grimly, “But you don’t need to be crazy, or ignorant, or desperately poor, or blinded by ideology, or in any way disturbed to become a suicide bomber. They are just like you and me—like Ben Cushman, here. The feds understand; they’ve had to figure it out. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve learned more about it than I ever wanted to know . . .”

  There had been suicide bombers throughout history, he said, all the way back to Jewish Zealots who had attacked the imperial Romans back in the first century, and the Islamic Assassins in the Middle East in the eleventh century, even the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. The modern wave of suicide attacks had begun with a truck-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the 1980s. Since then the psy-chologists and anthropologists and others had had sixty years of experience in figuring out the patterns behind such attacks, and the individuals behind them.

  “Except it’s not usually the individuals that count,” John said. “It’s the organization.”

  Tom leaned forward. “What organization?”

  Cushman, it turned out, had been a member of a radical anticonservation group who called themselves the Multipliers. John showed us a VR clip of Cushman himself, speaking brightly, standing at attention, a smile on his face. “Be fertile and multiply. Fill the Earth, and instill fear and terror into all the animals of the Earth and birds of the sky. . . .”

  “This is from his ‘suicide note,’ ” John said.

  “Biblical,” Tom said.

  “Yes. God’s mandate to Noah.”

  The Multipliers were an extremist group who embraced the changes the world was going through. Let the climate collapse, they said, let the Die-back finish off the animals and plants and birds and fishes. After all there was no likely scenario in which people would go extinct. We should follow Noah’s mandate to be fertile and multiply—even if the end result was that we would finish heaped up in vast domed arcologies on an otherwise uninhabitable planet. And so they opposed organizations like EI with their vast ambitions to change the course of events, to save things.

  It was hard to understand how a kid like Ben Cushman had got involved with a bunch like the Multipliers. But when you looked a bit closer, Cushman’s background was a bit more complicated than it appeared. His father, and the Cushmans for a few generations back, had worked in the steel industry that had imploded when America gave up on the automobile. A deep sense of failure, of abandonment and betrayal, had lodged itself in Ben’s head at a very young age.

  He was a bright kid, of course. He had gone away to college; in fact he had won a scholarship from EI. With one part of his head he was attracted to the scale and ambition of EI programs. But there was a contradiction, for EI was a product of the world that had grown up after the collapse of the industries that had provided income and self-respect for Cushman’s family. There must have been a level on which he felt deeply uncomfortable with what he was doing.

  “Like the child of a peacenik going to work on weapons systems,” Tom speculated. “The work might be fascinating. But you just know it’s wrong.”

  So there was a deep conflict in Cushman, so far below the surface nobody was aware of it, not his family or employers—maybe not even himself.

  “But the Multipliers spotted it,” John said sourly. “It seems they have become expert at rooting out people like Ben Cushman. They are predators, the feds say, feeding on emotional vulnerability.”

  Tom said, “I still don’t understand what made him blow himself up.”

  “I told you it was the organization,” John said. “The Multipliers. Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon, not an individual one. It’s as simple as that.”

  If the authorities had decades of experience in dealing with suicide bombers, so organizations like the Multipliers had decades of expertise to draw on in turning a confused kid like Ben Cushman into somebody prepared to kill himself for a cause he probably hadn’t heard of a year before.

  John said, “They draw you in gradually. They present their case as a noble cause on behalf of a community—in this case, all those disenfranchised and impoverished by the Stewardship and other global projects. They argue you step by step into more extreme positions. They show you martyrs—nothing breeds a suicide bomber like previous bombers—who are made into heroes you would want to emulate. And they praise you, they make you part of the group, they get you to aspire to a certain kind of heroism.

  “And then you make a public statement, on record.” Gloomily we watched as the tiny VR Cushman, smiling confidently, mouthed his selective quotations from the Bible. “This was really the moment Cushman killed himself,” John said. “Because once he had recorded this statement of intent, there was no way he could back down. Given the psychological investment he’d made in that recording, it was actually easier for him to die rather than suffer the loss of face of not following through.”

  I said, “And he did all this while working on the project he was planning to destroy.”

  John shrugged. “VR links make it possible to be with your brothers, your teachers, right under the nose of your enemy. Odd how advancing technology only makes it easier for us to hurt each other. . . .”

  “OK,” I said. “But whatever this kid’s motivation, he still needed backup.”

  As I had suspected it wasn’t easy to turn a Higgs-energy pod into a devastating bomb. Cushman had needed to use a tailored virus to break through the pod’s layers of protective sentience, and even then he had needed an elaborate triggering device to make the thing go bang. Cushman had been one of our best engineers, a bright kid, but there was no way he could have put this stuff together himself; he must have had support.

  John wasn’t meeting my eyes. Tom looked from one to the other of us, uncertain.

  I said, “And that’s where you come in. Isn’t it, John?”

  He waved his hand. Cushman disappeared, and new VR images coalesced. “They found traces of DNA on bits of the bomb-making gear left behind in Cushman’s room, up in Prudhoe.” We saw faces in the display on the tabletop, faces extrapolated from the DNA traces: an embryo, a baby, a young child, a boy, growing to adulthood.

  I wondered if this technology was something else that would startle Morag after her seventeen-year absence. It was now possible to take a DNA sample and compute how that genome would have expressed itself as a fully grown adult—or indeed any age you cared to choose. Thus the criminologists had been given the ability to re-create the faces of the victims or perpetrators of crimes from the slightest human trace, a fleck of spittle, a flake of skin under a fingernail.

  I recognized who it was long before the reconstruction was finished: those broad features, the deep, eager eyes, the prominent teeth.

  “I know him,” Tom said. “I saw him at the launch event.”

  So had I. The image was of Jack Joy.

  “You were his first contact,” John said to me defensively. “After he met you on the plane. He looked you up, found out what you were doing, decided it was something his destructive little band might be interested in. It’s the way they work. Opportunistic, probing, looking for a way in.”

  “I didn’t know he was in the M
ultipliers,” I said, “or anything like them. Obviously. He told me he was in the Lethe River Swimming Club.”

  Tom asked, “So how did he get through to the project?”

  John sighed. “He got in through me. I’m a Swimmer, too.”

  Tom just gaped.

  “Jack cross-checked the Swimmer membership with EI and the hydrate project, and out popped my name, as neat as you like. Couldn’t have been easier for him. Opportunism, you see. And that was the in he needed. He called me to introduce him to the project; he was talking about the Swimmers backing it financially. I couldn’t see any harm. It was only when he actually showed up, as a VR anyhow, that I started to feel uneasy.”

  “I don’t get it,” Tom said. “If this guy wanted to destroy the project, why would he put money into it?”

  “As a way in,” John said. “If you invest, you’re inside; the more you invest the closer to the center you get. And once he was inside it wasn’t hard for him to find Ben Cushman, who was already being groomed by the Multipliers.

  “I couldn’t see the harm in the Swimmers,” John said miserably. “There is a whole spectrum of us, Michael. It helps you cope with a difficult world; you accept things, you find a way to make a living, you get on with your life, you try to enjoy the ride. There’s a lot of humor in there, you know—black, but it makes life a bit more bearable. . . .”

  I wondered if he knew about the Last Hunters, another group in his “spectrum,” and what he would think of their expression of black humor.

  “And because of this stupid indulgence of yours,” I snapped at him, “a suicide bomber got through to the heart of my project. Because of you, we nearly all got killed.”

  “The FBI cleared me,” John said, still defensive.

  “But the moral guilt is all yours,” I said heavily.

  He looked at me for a heartbeat, as if he were going to fight back. But then he hung his head, beaten.