Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  I passed the crucifix to Morag and leaned over her. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I can’t believe I’m putting you through this.”

  She took the pendant and smiled. Her face was only centimeters from mine, and I could smell the sweetness of her breath. “Everything is going to be fine. You’ll see.”

  I pulled away and sat down.

  Rosa turned to her book. “Let’s begin.” She began to read, rapidly, in a low voice.

  John listened for a minute. “Is that Latin?”

  “Prayers,” I said. “The Lord’s Prayer. The fifty-fourth Psalm. Latin is thought to be more effective.”

  John threw his hands in the air. “Who am I to argue?”

  We all sat in our horseshoe. Rosa’s quiet voice murmured on, the only noise in the room. Even Gea was silent. Morag just sat, her gaze downcast, her hands folded in her lap, the crucifix glinting between her fingers. She seemed calm, so still I couldn’t even see the rise and fall of her breathing. It struck me that it must have been many years since I was in an environment so empty, so denuded of electronic gadgetry, the rich and colorful texture of modern life. Here was this room with nothing but a row of chairs, a handful of people, a woman in black muttering prayers in a language none of us could understand. But it was extraordinary how the tension built.

  And suddenly Rosa stood up. We all flinched.

  Rosa pointed at Morag. “Who are you? Abandon your pretense. Tell me your true name. Who are you?”

  Morag gazed up at Rosa. Then she rubbed the little crucifix and smiled at me. She didn’t seem at all afraid. She mouthed, I’m sorry.

  I was too shocked to react.

  And then Morag began to change.

  Her body seemed to shrivel inside her clothes, the skin of her face to crumple. Some kind of fur was gathering on her skin, long, pale brown hairs, not sprouting but coalescing in place over her face and arms, like a morphing VR. She continued to implode inside her clothes, so her dress was collapsing like a tent with its ropes cut. But soon her arms were protruding out of her sleeves, as if they were growing longer. With an impatient spasm she kicked off her shoes, revealing feet with long toes, as long as a child’s fingers.

  All this took just seconds.

  She stood up. She had become so slim that her blue dress fell away around her. Wisps of underwear, a bra and pants, still clung to her, but she pulled them away, handling them curiously. Naked, she was only about a meter and a half tall. Her body was coated with the orange-red fur. She was slim, but she had breasts with hard, prominent nipples. Her arms were long, about as long as her legs. Her all-but-human face, with a long nose and prominent chin, was coated with that soft fur. Her skull seemed small, and was covered with that smooth, shining fur. I wondered what had become of Morag’s beautiful hair.

  Her eyes were human—pale gray, soft. She smiled at me, showing a row of perfectly white teeth. She held up her arm, with muscles like knotted rope beneath the fur. She was still holding the crucifix.

  I risked a glance at the others. They sat in their chairs, staring. Tom was grasping Sonia’s hand so hard his knuckles were white. The Gea robot just watched, its plastic eyes bright.

  Rosa was smiling.

  John said, “What—the fuck—is that? Some kind of ape?”

  Rosa asked again: “Who are you?”

  The Morag-thing spoke, but it was a burst of that rapid-fire speech. Somehow it didn’t seem so strange coming from her mouth.

  Rosa cut her off. “We can’t understand.”

  The creature was still looking at me. She hesitated, then spoke more carefully. “Sorry,” she said. She pronounced every part of the word with exaggerated care: “Shh-oo-rrh-yy.”

  I said, “Tell us who you are.”

  “My name,” she said, “is Alia.”

  Chapter 54

  Alia, the ape-thing that had been Morag, turned around slowly, those human eyes bright. She carefully put the little silver crucifix down on her seat. Then she bent down—she was very limber—and inspected the little tumbler of salt and the vial of wine beside her chair. She made no comment; maybe she thought that having salt, wine, and crucifixes around was normal for us. Then she straightened up, and studied us again.

  We all just stared.

  Alia stood more upright than any chimp, although her body was undeniably apelike, with a high chest, and arms as long as her legs. There was something odd about her hips, too, narrow with an odd geometry. Maybe she was like our remote ancestors, I thought, the australopithecines, the early sort not longer after they split off from the chimps.

  John looked the most horrified, but then he had a lot to be horrified about. John’s world had always been a very orderly place; he’d had enough trouble getting used to the idea of ghosts and reincarnated dead wives. And now this. But even Rosa, who I had thought would never be fazed by anything, was clutching her prayer books, clearly shocked.

  And Alia stared at me, as if she was as stupefied to see me in the flesh as I was her.

  Suddenly Alia ran a few steps toward Sonia. We all flinched back. Tom and Sonia clutched each other.

  Alia stumbled after a couple of paces and stopped. “Sorry,” she said, in that elaborate, slowed-down manner. “High gravity. Better to walk. Forgot.” She took a more cautious step, two, not very gracefully; I got the impression walking was not what she was used to.

  She stood before Tom and Sonia. I was proud of them that they just stared back. She said, “Sonia Dameyer.”

  Sonia was rigid.

  Then she turned to Tom. “Thomas George Poole. Tom. I have seen you grow up. Variant pigmentation.” She reached out again and, to my horror, ran a fingertip down Tom’s cheek.

  Tom slapped her hand away. “Back off, Planet of the Apes.”

  Alia’s mouth dropped open. She looked shocked—suddenly her face looked very human, under that mask of fur. “Have I given offense?” She bowed. “I apologize. I am sure it will not be the last time I get something wrong.”

  Sonia said, “What’s the problem, don’t they have white people where you come from?”

  Alia thought about that. “Before the First Expansion the homogenization of culture on Earth eliminated the already minor differences between human racial groups. Skin pigment is one of the most heritable of human genetic features, and differences diluted quickly.” Her voice was getting better, I thought, her grammar a bit more precise, her tone more controlled. But this stuff about skin pigment sounded stilted, as if she was accessing some data store. She smiled brightly at Sonia, and pulled at the fur on her own face. “Some of us don’t have skin pigment at all!”

  Tom asked, “What’s the ‘First Expansion’?”

  “The future,” John hissed. “She’s talking about the future. I think.”

  Perhaps he was right. But, I thought, if there had been a “First Expansion” there must have been a second, at least, maybe a third. In that one phrase I caught glimpses of a towering history.

  Alia moved on from Sonia. When she got to the Gea robot she bent down, reached out—and picked her up. She turned the robot over and over, while Gea’s tiny wheels whirred.

  I was stunned. Alia had shown she was “real,” as real as Morag had been, by handling the exorcism objects, by touching Tom’s cheek. But she seemed to be just as “real” in Gea’s VR world. Maybe they had different categories of reality, wherever she came from.

  Alia put the robot down, squatted down, and faced it. “You are Gea. An artificial mind.”

  Gea rolled back and forth experimentally, as if checking her wheels still worked. “You already know all about me.” Somehow Gea’s pompous B-movie-robot voice fit the situation.

  “Yes, I do.”

  “May we scan you?”

  “Of course,” Alia said cheerfully. “In fact you already are.” She patted Gea on the head. “You are delightful. And so well crafted. We will talk later.”

  Well crafted? This was one of the planet’s most advanced artificial sentiences. Alia s
ounded like a patronizing museumgoer admiring the artistry of a Neolithic flint hand axe.

  Alia walked past John, who flinched back.

  And now, at last, she came to me. She was a creature the size of a ten-year-old child, her fur shining where it lay in layers over her flesh. I could hardly read the expression in her squashed-up face, she was too alien for that. But I thought I saw warmth in her eyes.

  I said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

  John snorted. “Christ, Michael. How can you joke?”

  “I like your humor, Michael Poole,” Alia said. “Not that I always understood it.”

  “You did?” My head was spinning; I tried to make sense of this. “You’ve, uh, studied me?”

  “We say Witnessing,” she said. “I’ve Witnessed you, Michael Poole, all of your life. All of my life.”

  “Then you really are from the future,” Tom said. There was an edge to his voice. “My father is dead to you, isn’t he? He’s a fossil you dug up. You can read his whole life the way you can read a book. From birth to death. We are all dead to you—”

  John touched his arm. “Tom, take it easy.”

  “It isn’t like that,” Alia said. “Thomas George Poole, to Witness isn’t just to watch. It is to appreciate. To share. Michael Poole, I have shared your life, your triumphs, your woes. And now I meet you at last. It is more than an honor. It is—fulfillment.”

  Rosa pursed her lips and nodded. That I was being watched by the future was one of the possibilities she had guessed at. She looked almost satisfied, the puzzle resolved.

  But I felt deeply uneasy. It was more than self-consciousness. I was a bug trapped beneath a microscope slide, my whole life had been splayed open for inspection. I snapped, “And what about Morag?”

  Alia’s smile faded. “I stand before you, and you ask for Morag?”

  I couldn’t believe it. She sounded hurt.

  Rosa spoke, for the first time since this new apparition had come to us. “Tom is right, isn’t he? That you are from the future?”

  Alia turned to her. Her small face was creased, comically quizzical. “It depends what you mean. Can you rephrase the question?”

  Tom asked cautiously, “Were you born on Earth? . . .” His nerve seemed to fail him. “Oh, hell. I can’t believe I even asked a question like that! This is like something from that old stuff you used to read, Dad, it’s a cliché—”

  Sonia touched his arm. “Tom, it’s OK.”

  I said, “This is difficult for all of us.” So it was. I was calmer than Tom or John, but inside I was screaming at the idiotic strangeness of the whole setup.

  Tom took a breath, and tried again. “OK. So were you born on Earth?”

  Alia snorted. “Do I look like I was born on Earth? . . . Sorry. I was born on a ship, called the Nord.” She hesitated. At times it seemed to take her a while to find the right word, as if she was accessing some nested data store. “Umm, a starship.”

  “Ah,” said Rosa.

  John turned on her. “What do you mean, ah?”

  “That explains the long arms, the high chest. Like our primate ancestors, Alia is evolved for climbing—or for low gravity.” She smiled. “Our ancestors were apes, and so will our descendants be. Bishop Wilberforce must be turning in his grave.”

  “Descendants?” That was too big a leap for me. “Alia—are you human?”

  “Of course I’m human.” Again she seemed hurt, upset I’d even asked.

  Oddly, at times she seemed very young, even adolescent, and easily rebuffed, especially by me. I decided I was going to have to be very gentle, tactful. Or as tactful as you can be with an ape-girl from the future. What a mess, I thought.

  Alia said, “But in my time it’s different. Humans have spread out. We have become a family.”

  “Across the stars?” Gea asked.

  “Across the Galaxy.”

  “This is the Expansion you mentioned,” I said. “Or Expansions.”

  “In a human Galaxy, there are lots of different sorts of humans. Just as there are in your time.” She frowned. “Or not. Are there? I’m sorry, I should know.”

  Rosa said gently, “It’s some thirty thousand years since the last nonhuman hominid died. Homo sapiens sapiens is alone on Earth.”

  “Thirty thousand years? Oh, well.” Alia said this in a flip way, as if thirty thousand years was nothing, her mistake forgivable. Her manner was playful, almost coquettish. But there was a bleak, chilling perspective behind her words, a vastness of empty time.

  I said, “All right. Then you are from the future. What date are you from?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What date were you born?”

  “I can’t say!” She flapped her hands, agitated. “These are slippery concepts. I want to give you answers, but you have to ask the right questions!”

  Gea said, “Of course she can’t answer questions about dates.”

  John growled, “What are you getting at?”

  “Relativity.”

  It is a strange consequence of Einstein’s special relativity that time is fragmented. Information cannot travel faster than light, and that finiteness makes it impossible to establish true simultaneity, a universal “now.” And so there is a sort of uncertainty in time, which increases the further you travel. If Alia was born halfway across the Galaxy, that uncertainty could be significant indeed.

  “How strange,” Rosa said, “to live in a geography so expansive that such effects become important.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” John snapped.

  Gea said to Alia, “Suppose your ancestors had stayed on Earth.”

  “Yes?”

  “That would eliminate relativity ambiguities. In that case, how long would have elapsed, on Earth, between Michael Poole’s birth and your own? Do you know that?”

  Alia said, “Round numbers—”

  “That will do.”

  “Half a million years.”

  There was another stunned moment, a shocked silence. The human race in my day, as I now had to think of it—was only, only, maybe a hundred thousand years old. Alia was remote from me indeed, the species itself many times older than in my time. It was hard to take in such a perspective.

  Tom said, “So how did you get here? Did you travel in time?”

  Alia cocked her head. “I hate to be boring. Here we go again! Can you rephrase the question? . . .”

  With Gea giving us the lead, we managed to extract a little more.

  The universe was finite. It was folded over on itself in spatial dimensions—modern cosmologists knew that much—but also in time, so that the future somehow merged with the past. So to get to the past, you would think, all you had to do was travel far enough into the future—just as Columbus had once tried to find a new route to the east by traveling far enough west around the curve of the Earth.

  It wasn’t as simple as that, however, as Alia tried to tell us. “It is a question of information,” she said. “Spacetime is discrete, it comes in small packages, particles. Therefore a given volume can only store a finite amount of information. And that information can be fully described by information stored on the bounding surface of the volume.” She frowned at me. “Is that clear?”

  Not to me. But Gea said, “Like a hologram. You have a two-dimensional surface that contains information about a three-dimensional object, the hologram, which is reconstructed when you shine laser light on it.”

  “Or like Plato,” John said. “We are prisoners in a cave and all we perceive is shadows cast on the wall outside, shadows of reality.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But now Alia is saying the shadows are the reality. I think.”

  Gea said to me, “This is like the holographic principle. An early attempt at quantum gravity theory.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It was abandoned, decades ago.”

  “Maybe that was a mistake . . .”

  Alia’s time was like a surface boundin
g the past—bounding all of history, including our own long-vanished time. And everything that could be known about the past was contained in her time, in each successive instant. That wasn’t so hard to grasp; geologists, paleontologists and historians, even detectives, have to believe that the past can be reconstructed from traces stored in the present.

  But Alia went further: by manipulating events in her present, she was able to change the information in the past—to project herself here, into what was to her history. It was as if you could tinker with a few dug-up dinosaur bones and change the lives of the creatures of which they were relics.

  Something like that.

  I was struck, though, by a resonance with something I’d read in uncle George’s manuscript: If time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the furthest future, would you at last touch the past? . . . George, or anyhow his strange friends, had intuited something of the truth, perhaps.

  Tom laughed, an explosive giggle. “Sorry,” he said. “Every so often I just lose it. I mean, it’s just,” he waved a hand, “you’re asking me to accept that this is a superhuman being from the far future. This ape. Where’s the disembodied brain in a jar? I mean, what can she do but swing on tires?”

  I think we all knew how he felt.

  We talked on. It was a difficult dialogue. We were the ignorant talking to the uneducated. I got the impression Alia really didn’t know much about all this, and cared less—as a modern teenager wouldn’t know anything about the implants in her body, as long as they worked. And we knew too little to make much sense of what she said anyhow; we had to translate it into terms we understood, interpret the information she gave us in terms of our own modern theories, which might have been as partial, falsely based or just plain wrong as notions of planet-bearing crystal spheres.

  And every so often, as we worked our way through these miasmas of interpretation and guesswork, we were confronted by vast conceptual gulfs.