Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  “Our time must be strange to you,” Rosa said. “If you were born on a ship, among the stars. The way we live must seem very alien.”

  “Oh, but I prepared,” Alia said. “In the course of my Witnessing. You don’t have to visit Earth to know what it must have been like!”

  “I don’t understand,” Tom said.

  Alia spread her arms wide, and her long hairs dangled like curtains. “There are things I like, and things I don’t like, that have got nothing to do with being born on a ship. I like open spaces, long prospects. I don’t like enclosed spaces or running water, or rats or spiders, or blood. I grew up in zero gravity, but I can be scared of heights! All these are responses ingrained deep into my system, and the systems of my ancestors, long before they left Earth. So, you see, even if I knew nothing of Earth, I could reconstruct it just from my own responses. In fact, that has been done a number of times, by cultures cut off from their origins—people who forgot where they came from. Even they can deduce something of Earth. . . .”

  “Astounding,” Rosa said. “You left Earth behind half a million years ago. You traveled across the stars. And yet you took the savannah with you, didn’t you?”

  Sonia said, “You mentioned rats. Are there animals where you came from?”

  “Animals? There are rats everywhere. They don’t all sing. There are bugs and birds.” Birds flocked on her starship, she said; I couldn’t think of a more exotic, charming image. “Earth’s biosphere shows more diversity than any other human world in the Galaxy, however. That’s one reason we know it really is Earth, the original.”

  “Like Africa,” Rosa said. “There is more genetic variation there, too. As Africa is for us, the home of mankind, so Earth is for these future people.”

  Sonia prompted, “And there are still animals on Earth?”

  “Birds. Snakes. Insects. Bugs. That’s all, really.”

  “They are the supertaxa,” Gea said. “Taxa have different evolutionary rates. Some speciate more rapidly than others; some lineages last longer than others; and some taxa—the birds, snakes, rats and mice, various weeds—have both a high speciation rate and a high longevity. And so when an extinction event strikes, the supertaxa provide the great survivors. What Alia describes is exactly what I would have expected to find on an Earth of the future, after our extinction event is done. Snakes and rats and birds.”

  “But no big animals?” Sonia asked wistfully.

  Gea said, “I want to show you something.” She produced a VR image of a lumpy-looking animal: a rhino, but covered in shaggy brown fur.

  Alia gaped. “Megafauna!”

  Tom said, “That’s a Sumatran rhino, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” Gea said. “An unusual form, adapted for living in hilly rainforests. It went extinct, earlier this year. The last of them died in a zoo in Germany.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like it.” Alia sounded as if this creature was as exotic as a dinosaur, to her. She glanced at me. “Michael, have you?”

  “I’m not a wildlife buff,” I said. “If you followed me around all my life you’ll know that.”

  Gea said, “The Sumatran rhino was a living fossil. It is the least changed of all large-mammal lineages since the Oligocene, thirty million years ago, halfway back to the dinosaurs. We live in extraordinary times. That species endured for thirty million years. Even the people in this room had the opportunity to meet it, to touch it, just months ago. And now it has vanished, a geological instant after its encounter with humanity. Just like that. As all the megafauna which survived the Ice Age have gone, one by one.”

  Sonia said wistfully, “And they never came back, according to Alia. You’d think they could have been brought back from the DNA.”

  “Perhaps there was never room,” Rosa said. “Not if the world remained owned by humans. For we would not allow anything bigger and hungrier than us to survive.”

  “Besides, evolution goes forward, not backward,” Gea said. “The mega-mammals, once gone, will never return.”

  Alia was watching us. “You all sound so guilty!”

  Tom said, “Do people in the future look back on our time?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And do they judge us?”

  “Judge you?” Alia laughed, a strange whooping sound, but then bit it off. “I’m sorry. I know this concerns you, in this age. If not, if you didn’t have this awareness, I guess you wouldn’t be attempting the hydrate stabilization project.”

  “You know about that?” I asked.

  “Of course. I Witness you, Michael Poole. But why should you be judged? Look—if one species of bird out-competes another, are you going to talk about morals? Of course not. It’s just a question of competition for space in an ecology.”

  “And is that how you see us?” John asked bitterly. “Are we just animals in an ecology to you?”

  Alia seemed genuinely puzzled by this line of questioning. “How else would you want to be thought of?”

  I said, “There is much debate about geoengineering projects. You must know that. We aren’t sure if we have the right to meddle on a planetary scale.”

  Alia seemed baffled by this. “But you are already, umm, meddling.” She paused, as if accessing more data. “Consider the Earth. Twenty percent of the land and a good proportion of the sea is covered by artificial ecosystems, each containing a small number of species, selected and bred for one consumer—”

  “Farms,” Sonia said.

  “Yes. You have changed the very geomorphology of the planet: you have carved vast chunks out of mountains and landscapes, you have built new lakes, and reclaimed other lands from the sea, and you have created entirely artificial land forms of a type never seen before.”

  Gea interrupted, “But all this must be trivial compared to the great transformation of your time, an age when mankind has covered a Galaxy.”

  “Oh, of course. In the future we do it bigger and better. But planet-shaping, geoengineering, meddling, is what people do. Human history has always been a tangle of environmental changes, human responses, accidents. . . . Human will is only one component. Just accept it!”

  “There she goes again,” John groused. “Talking about us as if we’re nothing but animals. Like beavers, mindlessly building dams.”

  I understood his resentment. But I remembered that this wasn’t the “true” Alia. She was deliberately slowing her speech, speaking to us as if we were children. To her, I thought, maybe we really were as busy and mindless, as productive and destructive, as bower birds or beavers.

  Sonia leaned forward, as fascinated as John was on edge. “You must know the future.”

  Alia said, “In a way.”

  “What happens? What happens to us? Do you know how we die?”

  “Not all of you.” She said brightly, “I know how Michael Poole dies. I have seen his life, the whole of it—like a book, complete from beginning to end—”

  I snapped, “I don’t want to know.”

  She bowed her head.

  “But the future,” Sonia pressed. “The bigger picture. Just the fact that you are here, you exist, says that we’re not going to go extinct any time soon.”

  “So mankind will make it through the Bottleneck,” John said.

  Sonia asked, “And then what?”

  “And then, expansion,” Alia said brightly. “Off the planet. To the stars!”

  Sonia frowned. “Yes, but what happens? . . .”

  It soon became clear she knew little in detail about the unraveling of history beyond our present—indeed, beyond my own lifetime. But then, why should she? If I were dropped, say, into the middle of the last Ice Age, what could I say to curious hunter-gatherers who asked about their future? It will get warmer. A lot warmer. And then, expansion. Out of your refuges, all the way to the Moon! . . .

  And besides, she seemed to imply, the future wasn’t as fixed as all that.

  Rosa asked, “And are there other cultures out there? Extraterrestrial aliens, civilizations
among the stars?”

  “Oh, yes,” Alia said. “Or there used to be. Some of their biologies have merged with ours. And you can still find ruins.”

  Sonia said, “Ruins? What happened to them?”

  “We did,” Tom said dryly. “Ask the Sumatran rhino.”

  There was a long silence.

  Rosa leaned forward and faced Alia. “I think it’s time we got to the point. Don’t you?”

  “The point?”

  “There is a reason you are here,” Rosa said. “You have a purpose. And it is to do with Michael.” She turned to me.

  I said, “I have seen—apparitions—of Morag all my life. Morag, my wife. Since before I met her even, since I was a kid. You must know this. I want to know what that haunting meant. Was it to do with you, Alia? Your Witnessing?”

  Again Alia looked oddly crestfallen, as much as I could read her small face, her apelike body language—as if she was actually jealous of Morag. “Yes,” she said. “It was the Witnessing.”

  As a Witness she had access to my whole life. She could dip into it at will, like a random-access file. She was naturally drawn to the key events of my life—and for her, that meant the times invested with the most emotion, the most joy, the most pain.

  She said, “We are so far apart in time we don’t always communicate very well. Not in language, in symbols.” I thought of our failure to decode her speech; I knew that was true. “But emotion comes through,” she said. “Raw, powerful emotion can punch through species barriers, even through time. But Witnessing is always leaky. . . .”

  The Witnessing was a muddling-up of future and past. She talked about her information surfaces again, her holograms. All that Witnessing had damaged the holograms, somehow: it had worn holes in the fabric of my life. And through those holes I glimpsed other times, other places.

  “Like the pages of a much-loved book,” Rosa said. “So worn through by a tracing finger they become transparent, and you can read the next page.”

  At an intensely Witnessed moment you could get leaks, she said, traces of events from other times in your life showing through. And since Morag had been associated with the most intensely joyful and painful moments of my life, and it was those instants that had been rubbed through and linked up, what I mostly glimpsed was her. It was as if all my life with Morag had been joined together in a single eternal moment.

  Alia said, “I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better.”

  Rosa nodded, as if satisfied. “So Witnessing muddles future and past. I wonder if this rationalizes away every ghost story in the past—the few which were not simply delusional.”

  Alia said to me, “In fact Witnessing is supposed to be neutral. You aren’t supposed to perturb your subject. Not many people know it has this kind of effect.”

  John laughed. “So even in the far future we are polluters! If you need a good compensation lawyer, Michael—”

  “Shut up, John.”

  Rosa said coldly, “And since from Michael’s perspective you are a creature from eternity, from outside his life altogether, your intrusion has damaged his whole life.”

  Alia said, “But Michael’s case was special.”

  “How?”

  “Because I am here. I had to push hard to break through, to be here. The distortion of your timeline was—exceptional.”

  Rosa murmured, “Michael, what are you thinking?”

  I shrugged. “I thought I was seeing Morag. I always imagined she wanted to come back to me. I’m disappointed that it was all just some jerky time-traveler fuck-up from the future. I’m pissed that it was nothing but you all the time.” I spat the words at Alia. I wanted to hurt her.

  Her face crumpled further. But she said earnestly, “Michael, she was there, in the hauntings, the visitations. Yes, I was the Witness. But what you saw was her. And the revenant, the flesh-and-blood resurrection—that was Morag, too, Michael, in every way that it could be her.”

  “Ah, yes,” Rosa snapped. “The revenant. And why was she brought back?” She used her sharp exorcist’s voice again. “You told me your name, but you have yet to tell me the full truth. What is your purpose, creature?”

  Alia turned to me. “You are special, Michael Poole,” she said. “You must know that by now—it is true, whether you like it or not. You are truly a pivot of history, in this age, and your name is known into the far future.”

  “Here we go,” Tom said, and he linked his hands behind his head. “The really nutty stuff.”

  I turned away. I really, truly, did not want to hear this. Maybe every kid dreams that she is special, that her name will be known forever. It’s just a fantasy, an expression of adolescent yearning and uncertainty, something you grow out of. But now this Alia, this strange being from the future, was saying that for me, Michael Poole, it was so. It was as if every paranoid, grandiose dream I had ever had were folding down into this moment. But I did not want to be a fulcrum, famous for all time.

  Gea said, “To be clear, you believe that Michael’s great contribution will be the hydrate project. The Refrigerator.”

  “Yes. But there is more.”

  “What else?”

  “The restoration of Morag was part of it. I have more to ask of you, Michael Poole, a grave responsibility . . . You will see.” She glanced around at us all, our bewildered, angry faces. “But this is not the time. I will return.”

  Rosa snapped, “When?”

  But Alia would only speak to me. “When you call me, Michael.”

  And she disappeared. There was nothing left but the chair where Morag had sat, with the little vials of wine and salt, and a small heap of crumpled, abandoned clothing.

  We all sat back. Tom blew out his cheeks. Sonia was wide-eyed, silent—delighted, I thought, full of wonder.

  John seemed angry, resentful. “I wish they had left us alone. These future ape-people, whatever they are. This is the Bottleneck, for God’s sake. Don’t we have enough to do without dealing with the future as well?”

  “I imagine we all feel like that,” Rosa said. “But we may not have a choice. It is precisely because this is a time of crisis that Alia has come here. It seems we are important enough to merit visitors from the future—or at any rate, Michael is.”

  John said, “I don’t want to know about the future. I don’t want to think of my life as just an archaeological trace, locked in stone. It’s my life. It’s all I have.”

  “I understand. But it can’t be helped.” Rosa stood. “This has been a long session. I suggest we break, sleep, eat. We will talk tomorrow.” She eyed me. “And then you will summon back your admirer from the future, Michael.”

  “If I must,” I said.

  “I think you do. For it appears you have a mission. How exciting,” she said dryly. And, with a flourish like a stage magician’s, she vanished in a mist of pixels.

  Chapter 55

  That night I lay down in my room, alone for the first time since the bombing. Morag was gone—if she had ever been there at all.

  The exorcism and all that had followed had been a roller-coaster ride for me. I was battered, bewildered, and resentful at everybody: Rosa for setting the whole thing up, Alia who had somehow engineered all this with her “Witnessing” from the far future—and Morag, for returning into my life in such a remote and agonizingly incomplete way, and then leaving me again. None of which was fair, of course. Shit happens, I told myself, even such astounding shit as this. Even Alia wasn’t to blame. She might look like a stretched orangutan, but I had seen in her eyes, in the way she looked at me, that she was a person, fully conscious, fully formed emotionally. She was no doubt a product of her times and her society, just as I was. And I had seen, inexplicable as it was, that she was fond of me. It was as if I had developed a crush on Wilma Flintstone. What a joke.

  As I drifted toward sleep, exhausted, my thoughts softened. It was in just this sleeping-waking condition that I had had so many glimpses of Morag in the past. But I knew that this time she would not com
e to me.

  The next day I woke feeling drained. When I ordered the curtains to open, they revealed a day that was harsh even by Alaskan standards, with a sky like a steel prison roof clamped down over Deadhorse.

  I had a sudden, sharp memory of a contrasting morning on Florida, a winter’s day full of bright cold sunshine, when I had gone out, at age ten or so, to fly a kite or a Frisbee or a water rocket or some damn thing. I could hear the boom of Atlantic breakers kilometers out, smell the sharp salty brine, feel the texture of the sand under my feet and on my skin. Every sense open to the max, I was fully locked into the world, and I never felt so alive, so joyous. But even then, I think I knew I wouldn’t always feel this way. I would age, my eyes would glaze over, my hearing clog, my fingertips crust over with dead flesh, and my body would become like a space suit, insulating me from the world. I knew it even then, and I dreaded it. And in time it had come to pass: this was my reality, my own aching, aging body, a face like old leather, a head stuffed with cotton wool.

  When I thought back over the events of the day before—an exorcism, for God’s sake, the strange appearance of Alia, all that allusive gabble about the future—it seemed foolish, an indulgence, like the memory of a dinner party where the talk got out of hand. It seemed to me that morning that Alia’s future was a bright and shiny bubble that had somehow burst in my head overnight. And reality was responsibility: responsibility to my real work, the hydrate project.

  So I went to work.

  I grabbed some breakfast at Deadhorse’s one and only coffee shop, and made my way to the offices EI had set up in a small three-story block. I picked a cubicle, started up a softscreen with a tap of my fingernail, and put in a call to Shelley. While I waited for a reply I ran through my mail and other progress reports, trying to get a sense of where the project had gotten to while I had been absent in other realms.

  Technically the project was going well. In a way the bombing had done us good; the heart of our prototype setup had been swept away, and Mark Two was proving to be a much sounder beast. We were starting to look further afield, too. We had started to talk to the Canadians about spreading our work out along their Arctic coast, and the Russian government had already given us permission to set up another pilot off the Siberian shore.