Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  Tom touched my arm. “For God’s sake, Dad. Take it easy on him.”

  I didn’t really want Tom to see me in this black mood. “I’ve got a lot I have to forgive John for right now, Tom. I guess I’m not big enough to do it.”

  Tom sat back. “You’re talking about Mom.”

  And there it was, the issue that divided and united us, out in the open.

  John raised his head, and I saw true misery in his eyes. “Michael, if you want to know, if it helps you at all, I’m ripped up inside, too. And at least I told you what happened between us before—”

  “Before her ghost came back to life to tell me herself? Do you think that makes it OK, what you did?”

  “You have to see, Michael, that we, Morag and I, had reached a kind of settlement between us. We had decided what to do. She would have the baby, we would see how we all felt after that, and then we’d talk to you. It was all going to be OK; we would fix everything.”

  A settlement, I thought: a verbal contract, a lawyer’s way of rationalizing away pain.

  “But she died,” John said. “Death came down on us like a blade. After that everything changed, all the threads of our life cut short.

  “And in all the time since then, I’ve had to deal with this in my head. Michael, nobody knew the truth about that pregnancy, nobody but me, once Morag was dead. I knew how much you had been hurt—and how much more you would hurt if you knew what I had done—and I couldn’t tell you. And, with time, we settled down to a new way of being in each other’s lives, you and me. That was my way of coming to peace with myself.”

  “Some peace,” I snapped. “You found Inge, you had two kids. And she left you, didn’t she? Maybe you were just as haunted by Morag as I was.”

  His eyes blazed angrily. “I didn’t choose any of this, Michael. But I had to cope with it. But now Morag has returned, she hasn’t lived through any of this, she can’t understand it—”

  Tom blurted, “I’ve spoken to her, too. Mom.” His voice was strained. He was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, hands neatly folded on his lap.

  I hated to see him like that, to think how John and I had put him in this position—how we’d failed to protect him.

  He said, “With me it’s the kid, the damn kid. My little brother who killed my mom.”

  I said, “I know—”

  “I always felt second best to a fetus. To the ghost of a fetus. I grew up feeling that way. I always imagined she must have loved it more than me. Because she let it take her life, right?”

  “And you talked about this to Morag?”

  “She doesn’t listen. Or she can’t. To her it’s yesterday,” he said. “All that stuff when the baby was born. There’s something inside her that knows I grew up, I think, that knows all that time has passed, something deep down that recognizes me. But she doesn’t know how to talk to me. She remembers me as a happy kid of eight. She asks me about my life, about Sonia, like I was still a kid at grade school. She doesn’t know anything about how I spent seventeen years trying to cope with all this. I don’t want to hurt her. It isn’t her fault. And she’s my mom. But at the same time she isn’t.” He looked at John. “Do you know what I mean? My mom coming back hasn’t helped,” Tom said emphatically. “I’m sorry, Dad. That’s the way I feel.”

  He was right, I thought. It was strange: a year ago, the fondest wish you could have granted me was to have Morag back in my life. And now she was back—and it was making nobody happy. It was as if Morag was a bomb that had been dropped into the middle of our tangled, multilayered relationships.

  “Look at us, the three of us. What a mess.” I stood up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Now you’ve got your implants reprogrammed you can buy us both a beer, John.”

  John stood, rapped on the door, and we were let out into the town.

  Chapter 50

  Drifting through the mind of the Transcendence, Alia and Leropa explored the Redemption, and how it had touched Michael Poole’s life.

  “This is the Third Level of the Redemption,” Leropa said. “It is called the Restoration. It is the beginning of a new age, in which the Transcendence will assume full responsibility for the past. If you have the power of a god, you have a responsibility to use it. Can you not see the magnificence?”

  To touch the past was easy for the Transcendence, Alia could see now, for it had a mastery of the finitude of the universe. If you saw correctly the chains of causality wrapping around the curve of the universe, you only had to make the slightest adjustment, and your touch would cause ripples that would wash out to the furthest future, and then around the arc of time to the deepest past, and up through the long prehistory of humanity: ripples at last focusing on one woman and her unborn child. A flawed gene which might have expressed itself this way no longer did so—and a child was born safely, a mother survived to a healthy long life. That was all that was needed.

  And Morag Poole, her death averted, could walk through the walls of reality and back into the life of her astonished, still-grieving husband. Suddenly this part of Michael Poole’s life, embedded in the past and viewed many times through the lens of Alia’s Witnessing tank, was not as it had been.

  It was a magnificent vision, Alia thought, as all of history, past and future, shifted and waved like a curtain in a breeze.

  “We gave Michael Poole his Morag,” Leropa said. “Not a copy—she was Morag! Restored, identical in every way philosophy can identify. Morag was selected for the sake of Michael Poole. And for you, Alia . . .”

  But Alia had learned that nothing the Transcendence did was for her, but only ever for itself. And she knew that if you wanted to understand the Transcendence, you had to think things through, to think like the Transcendence itself.

  “History was changed,” she said.

  “A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way.”

  “But Poole knew Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality. He remembered her dying.”

  “Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole’s loss if he isn’t aware of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death.”

  But that wasn’t the end of it. “In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been, was, terminated at a premature birth.”

  “Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration.”

  “But there’s a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities . . .” A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.

  And even that wasn’t the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence’s infinite ambition. If this goes on . . .

  Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then all of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.

  It wasn’t as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if every possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might ever have lived under any contingency was to be born—and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.

  “Hi
story will be meaningless,” she murmured. “The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored. . . .”

  “All wrongs righted,” Leropa declaimed. “All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!”

  Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?

  But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite—and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.

  But getting Morag back wasn’t making Michael Poole happy.

  That one hard fact cut through her chain of thought, and suddenly the bewildering madness of it all overwhelmed Alia. Suddenly she was aware of her body, a distant scrap of flesh in the shadow of a ruined cathedral, that thrashed and curled over on itself.

  Chapter 51

  I startled awake, spooked.

  I turned over. Morag was sitting up in bed, a baggy T-shirt draped over her body. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her face lifted up. I could see her quite clearly, the smooth lines of her arms, the oval of her uplifted face, even though the only light in that pokey Deadhorse hotel room was the dial of a small alarm clock. It was as if she were bathed with light from some source I couldn’t see, a warm glow, like the glow from a hearth.

  Her lips moved and her tongue flickered. She started muttering, a kind of high-pitched gabbling. It was the high-speed “speech,” full of mysterious, unfathomable complexity, that we had been able to record before.

  “Light,” I snapped. The room’s lights cut on with a buzz, and the room filled with the washed-out glow of fluorescents.

  Morag stopped her rocking. In the flat bright light she just looked like a woman, like Morag, unreasonably sexy in my baggy T-shirt. But I could see the way the mattress was compressed under her weight. She smiled at me. “Are you OK?”

  “No,” I said. “You know how that stuff freaks me out. Shit, Morag.” I sat up, pushing a pillow behind my back, and pulled the duvet up over my chest, protectively. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

  “Not much,” she said. “We’ve been through this, Michael.” She was quite relaxed, her voice almost dreamy. She rocked gently, bathed in that light from nowhere. “I’m happy just to sit here. I like to watch you sleep.”

  “Well, it bothers me.” It was true; it stopped me from sleeping. I was always aware of her watching me, no matter how silent and still she was.

  She teased me. “We used to stay awake all night, once. You didn’t complain then. Remember that time in Edinburgh?” I did remember; as guests of a nuclear energy facility on the coast of the Firth of Forth we’d gotten to stay in Holyrood House, the seat of the old royals. She said, “You, me, a couple of bottles of champagne, a little baby oil—”

  She said this in a seductive, silky way she had always reserved for our most intimate moments, and the memory of it turned me on immediately. “OK,” I said. “It’s as if I can smell the baby oil. But—”

  But there was something wrong. She was Morag—I felt that deeply. But it was as if there were another presence in the room with us, another identity embedded in Morag. I had no idea how to express this. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were even clear to me.

  And besides, at that moment I felt like shit, my eyes gritty, my throat dry, my head heavy with that overfull feeling you get when you haven’t given sleep a chance to clear it out. “I’m getting too old for this,” I said feebly.

  “Then go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes, rocking gently.

  I lay back and closed my eyes. In my head I sought the elusive rhythms of sleep, tried to dig up fragments of the dream state I’d been in before I woke. But I couldn’t ignore that heavy rocking, back and forth, back and forth, as the bed tipped this way and that, creaking gently.

  I looked at her again. She had turned her face away, looking to the ceiling, as if seeking something I couldn’t see.

  “I can hear them all the time, you know,” she said softly.

  “What?”

  “Voices . . . It’s like a river running, but just out of my sight, beyond a screen of trees, maybe. It’s always there in the background, and if I let myself hear it, it sort of washes through me. I sometimes think that if I could just push through that barrier, step through the last trees to the river—”

  “What? What would you see?”

  She closed her eyes, concentrating, peering inward. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I can almost understand. Like when you are at school, and you’re struggling to grasp some concept. You see it in outline, you grasp a few steps of the chain of logic. But then you drop it all, like juggling too many balls, and it all goes away. Or maybe it’s like a download.”

  “A download? What are you talking about, Morag? Who is trying to download into your head?”

  “I don’t know.” She smiled faintly. “Maybe the answer is in the download itself, and I’m too dumb to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”

  “I really have no idea.”

  She faced me. She held out her hands, and I took them; she was relaxed, but I could feel the strength in her fingers, the strange density of her warm flesh. “But the trouble we have has nothing to do with my dream-talking. Has it, Michael? Or even me keeping you awake.”

  “It doesn’t help,” I said sincerely.

  “I know.” She rubbed the backs of my hands with her thumbs. “There’s a barrier between us. Something that’s stopping us from connecting the way we used to.”

  “Of course there is,” I said. “You were dead. I saw you die. You were dead for seventeen years. That can’t just be erased.” I was speaking more harshly than we had spoken before. But at that moment, under the cold hospital-like light of that dismal room, I felt too tired to care.

  “We’ll get there,” she said now, unfazed. “We’ll talk through this. We have to confront the truth, that’s all. We just need time.” But as she spoke she seemed distracted again. She lifted her face to the ceiling, her eyes half-closed. And her lips began to work, her tongue to flicker like a tiny pink snake in her mouth, as she started up her strange speaking-in-tongues once more.

  I felt excluded, even repelled. “Christ.” I tried to snatch my hands back. But I startled her, and she clenched her fingers. I heard the bones in my hands snap, and was screaming before the pain began.

  The Deadhorse clinic was basic, but the work they needed to do on me was simple. The doctor numbed me, set the broken bones in the back of my hands, injected nanomachines to help promote the bones’ knitting together, treated the bruising, and then shoved my hands into blow-up casts, like inflatable gloves.

  After that I sat in the out-patient area, waiting for Tom to come pick me up and take me back to the hotel. A clock on the wall told me it was still only five in the morning. “Shit,” I said.

  “Indeed,” said Rosa. Her voice appeared before she did. Her compact body gathered out of the air, her robes so black they seemed to suck in the light. In the bright antiseptic light of the hospital she looked totally out of place. She eyed the bench beside me. “If you don’t mind I’ll stand,” she said. “The VR facilities at this hospital are limited. I wouldn’t want to alarm anybody by slipping through the chair to the floor.”

  “You didn’t bring any grapes,” I said sourly.

  She bent to inspect my boxing-glove hands. “Oh, dear. You have been in the wars.”

  “It was fucking painful.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “Morag. It’s just she’s so strong. Her new body, whatever. She hasn’t got used to it yet. I’ve taken a few bruises before. We’re learning together, I guess. This is the first time she’s broken a bone, though.”

  Rosa nodded. “The simplest test shows her strength is off the scal
e, for a person of her height and size. Like her mass, there is, umm, more of her than there should be.”

  I looked at her reluctantly. “Do you think she’s even human?”

  “I don’t know,” Rosa said. “I believe that inside she thinks she’s human, and perhaps that’s what’s most important in the end. But her body is something more than human.”

  Gea’s and Rosa’s studies were bearing fruit, she said.

  “Gea will give you the physics. When we draw Morag’s blood, we find human DNA. Her molecules are made of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons every bit as mundane as yours and mine. And yet there is the mystery of this extra mass. Her weight is measurable, so the mass responsive to gravity, yet it is invisible to our eyes, all our senses. Gea tells me that there are many forms of invisible matter in the universe. Perhaps Morag’s visible body is like the bright swirl of a galaxy, cradled in a wider pool of dark matter.”

  “And what do you think?”

  She folded her hands neatly in her sleeves. “There are older ideas which may help. Theologians have a long history of distinguishing between the form of an object and its substance, its true nature. It’s an analysis that goes back to Aristotle, of course. The Church subsumed his philosophy to find a way to think about the Eucharist.”

  “The Holy Communion.”

  “Yes, the host that is at once a piece of bread, and at the same time the flesh of Christ. Morag’s remarkable new body may have something of the qualities of Christ’s resurrected body—indeed, the bodies promised to us all on resurrection. It is a body, but something more. The resurrected body is impassible, beyond pain, agile, so that you move as you like, and it has subtility, so it is totally subject to the desires of the soul. And in its glory, it shines like the sun.”

  All this was so much ancient bullshit to me. But I thought of Morag’s body in the dark of the hotel room, shining with a warm light of its own. “Oh, hell, Rosa. Do you believe any of this stuff?”