Transcendent

by Stephen Baxter

  But I wasn’t here for physics, but to confront mysteries of the human heart—and the superhuman. Reluctantly I pulled away. I tried to remember, to hold on to some glimmering of this ultimate understanding, but already it was melting like a snowflake cupped in my hand, its beautiful symmetries and unity lost. Already I was forgetting.

  Alia said gently, “Michael, I think you’re ready now. It’s time.”

  “Time for what?”

  “To meet the undying.”

  Dread gathered in my heart. But you have a duty, I told myself dryly. You asked for this, Poole.

  “Let’s get it over with.”

  “Hello, Michael Poole. I regret I was born too late to meet your most illustrious ancestor. . . .”

  This was Leropa, then. The undying spoke as if from shadows. I didn’t want to see her any more clearly.

  “I don’t understand how I’m talking to you,” I said. “Or Alia, come to that. We’re all part of the Transcendence—aren’t we?”

  “The Transcendence is a mind, Michael, but it is not a human mind. There is no reason why a mind must have a single pole of consciousness—as your pole of awareness feels like a mote lodged forever behind your eyes.”

  But, I thought uneasily, even in my time minds aren’t so simple. Maybe we three are like multiple personalities screaming at each other inside the head of a schizophrenic.

  “Or perhaps we are emblems,” Leropa said now. “We stand for certain traits of the Transcendence, as it tries to resolve the internal dilemma over the Redemption, which Alia so acutely identified.”

  “In which case I might be no more real than a character in a Platonic dialogue? Charming. What traits?”

  “I am the purpose of the Transcendence. Its will. And you, Michael, are its conscience. We are here to debate the Redemption.”

  And to understand the Redemption, she said, I had to understand love. Again I felt that feather-touch on a metaphorical chin, a ghostly finger lifting my gaze to new horizons.

  Through its completed cosmology the Transcendence was cognizant of the universe as a whole, of all of space and time, the whole of the human past. And now it showed the past to me.

  I was dazzled by the great portrait; I longed to turn my metaphorical head away. But I began to make out broad aspects. It all sprang from a deep root, the long prehistory of humankind on Earth, a root that emerged from down deep, rising through other forms of hominid and ape and animal—not lesser, each of them was perfectly adapted for the environment it found itself in, but steadily acquiring an elusive quality of mind. That deep dark Earthbound taproot culminated in my own time, like a shoot bursting out of the soil. History after my day was a tangle of foliage that sprawled across the face of the Galaxy—knotted, fecund, vibrant, full of detail, from the rise and fall of empires and even species, down to the particular experience of a small child wandering along a beach by the light of a blue-white star a thousand light-years from Earth.

  Again I longed to remember this. Just the fact that humans had lived so long, and come so far, would have been beyond the imaginations of most people alive in my own cramped and dangerous century.

  But it was a saga full of tragedy. I saw the scars of war, and of mindless natural disasters, where trillions of human lives had been destroyed like needles on a burning pine tree.

  Leropa said, “Look at it all, Michael Poole. Look at these particles of humanity trapped in the suffering of the past. And the Transcendence loves every one of them.”

  I thought I understood. “It is unbearable.”

  “Yes. How can the Transcendence face the infinite possibilities of the future, when its past is knotted up with blood and pain?”

  It was the paradox of a god born of human flesh and blood. To achieve full awareness the Transcendence had to absorb every human consciousness, even far into the past. And that meant it had to absorb all that pain. The Transcendence needed Redemption, a cleansing of the pain of the past, before it could advance to the mighty possibilities of the future.

  Leropa said carefully, “You see it, don’t you? You see it all. And you understand.”

  “Yes,” I breathed. Of course I did. I had shrunk from the hubris of the project. But here and now, surrounded by the vast echoing halls of the mind of the Transcendence, I felt swept up, seeing only the magnificence of this great ambition.

  The Transcendence was not infinite, not yet. But it believed it was approaching a singularity, a gathering-up of complexity and cohesion, which would drive it along asymptotic pathways of possibility to an infinity of capability and comprehension. Beyond that point it would no longer be human, for there was no commonality between the infinite and the finite. But unless it was able to resolve the dilemma of Redemption before that point of singularity, the product of that great phase change would be a flawed creation—infinite, yes, but imperfect.

  “It will be a wounded god,” I said. Just as Rosa had intuited. It was an unthinkable outcome.

  Through the Witnessing and the Hypostatic Union, it tried to bring the suffering of the past into its full awareness, and so to atone. But mere watching could never be enough. So the Transcendence went further. In the Restoration, every human that possibly could have existed would be brought into reality. It would be a stunning, shining moment of rectification. Such trivialities as causality and consequence would be abandoned—but the Transcendence would be infinite, I reminded myself; and to an infinite being even infinite tasks are trivial.

  But still it wasn’t enough.

  Leropa said, her voice silky, “One way or another the Redemption must be completed. And if atonement cannot be achieved then it would be better to make a simplifying choice.”

  I knew what she meant. “If you don’t exist, you can never suffer.” The ultimate simplicity of extermination.

  “The Cleansing is within our grasp, if we will it to be done.”

  She was right. It was right. And at that moment even the dreadful notion of the Cleansing didn’t dismay me. I was within the Transcendence, yet I was the Transcendence. For a brief moment I shared its huge ambitions, and its limitless fears—and I faced its dilemma. I felt as if I were trapped under an immense weight.

  And, in that moment, I fully accepted Leropa’s logic. History must be cleansed, one way or another. And it must be done now . . .

  But Alia whispered in my metaphoric ear. “Michael. Wait. Think. What would Morag say?”

  Morag? . . .

  “You always were a berk, Michael Poole.”

  I imagined I could see her, a kind of elusive shadow glimpsed from the corner of my eye.

  “A berk? Charming.”

  “You always have to meddle, meddle, meddle.”

  “If you’re going on about the hydrate project, I get enough of that from Tom.”

  “Not that. I admit that’s necessary. But it had to be you doing it, didn’t it, Michael? It fit your personality like a glove, didn’t it? An excuse to tinker. You were always mucking about at home, too. All those pointless do-it-yourself projects you never finished.”

  “Morag—”

  “Your half-built conservatory, that you abandoned because you ran out of money. Or the way you changed half the windows in the house, then left the rest because you got bored. Or the way—”

  “Morag. Is all this going anywhere?”

  “And now here you are fiddling with all of human history,” she said. “You think it’s a coincidence that this weird old woman picked you? Of course you’re going to want to plunge your hands in up to the elbows. It’s what you do. You’re a meddler, Michael. An instrumentalist.”

  I sighed. “You always go over the top, don’t you?”

  “All right. Put it this way. You’re childish. You’re like a kid in an art show. You want to touch the paintings, scrape bits off, deface them, draw your own copies, put them in new frames. Because you’re not mature enough yet just to sit back and enjoy the view—without meddling.”

  I thought that over. “But that’s w
hat we’re like. Humans, I mean. We’re a species who do things.”

  “Not necessarily,” Alia said now. “There are other ways to be.” And she widened my perspective yet again.

  There was a spectrum of minds, here within the Transcendence itself, and still more beyond its still-expanding walls. I sensed these different minds as if hearing voices at the ends of long corridors. All of them were human or post-human, and most were more or less like my own. But there were sorts of mind quite different to mine, other ways of thinking, other ways to live.

  The strange Coalescents in their vast hives were one example.

  And with Alia’s gentle guidance I came on a people, a branch of mankind, who had long ago settled on a world in the Sagittarius Arm. It was a water-world, like an Earth drowned under an almost global ocean. The people here, post-people anyhow, had given up clothes and spaceships and even tools, and developed bodies like otters or small dolphins, and now spent all their lives in the endless calm of the water.

  Alia said, “They gave up their minds. They knew it was happening. What you don’t use, you lose. But they didn’t care . . .”

  I didn’t understand. “They could do so much more. They once did. But they put it all aside. And they’ve left themselves vulnerable. A volcanic spasm, an asteroid strike—”

  “They don’t care! They have the present, they have each other, and that’s enough.”

  There was a deep question here, Alia said. What was the purpose of intelligence? Was intelligence the highest outcome of the evolutionary process—or, like everything else, a mere means to an end?

  “Intelligence is expensive,” Alia said. “There’s the energy cost of your big brain itself. And you need a lot of infrastructure to support it—some equivalent of eyes, hands, legs, to give you the information you need on the external world, and the capability of manipulating it.”

  “So why bother getting smart at all?”

  “Because there are circumstances where it is the only choice . . .”

  Humanity’s chimplike ancestors had been kicked out of their ancestral forests by climate change. The savannah was a harsh environment, where you were exposed to extremes of temperature, easily spotted by predators, and where water and food sources were scattered far and wide. In order to survive, human intelligence had had to mushroom.

  “You need to be smart, if you’re adrift in a hostile environment,” Alia said. “But if you ever manage to stumble off the savannah and back into the forest again—”

  “You can give up your mind,” I said.

  Morag said, “I think I understand. Birds give up flight whenever it’s safe, if they flap to an island without predators. Why not mind?”

  Curiously I turned to the seal-folk flipping and gliding in their world-ocean. Their shining, shallow thoughts were contained within the Transcendence’s awareness; cautiously I sampled them. I tasted contentment, as delicious and ephemeral as the salty flesh of a fish. Yes, for these post-people it was enough. Life had no goals, for them; life was a process, whose only purpose was to be relished.

  Alia said, “Michael Poole, are you seriously telling me they need to be redeemed from their pain by your flawed god? What pain?”

  “But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Intelligence isn’t just a tool. Knowledge is worth having for its own sake . . . isn’t it?”

  Morag brought back that jewel-like knot of wisdom that represented the Transcendence’s physics. “Take another look.”

  Again I peered into the mass of ancient wisdom. But this time, under the guidance of Alia and Morag, I looked deep into the heart of the jewel—and I discerned a tiny flaw, a lack of completion.

  There were limits to understanding by any mind—human or post-human, even Transcendent. This was incompleteness: no mathematics, a logical construct of the human mind, could ever be made whole or completely consistent. Because of this, you could prove that there were limits to what any conceivable computer could do. But a mind was at heart an information-processing system—so no mind, however vast, could ever be fully cognizant of itself.

  Not even the Transcendence.

  “Ah,” Morag said, as if she was learning with me. “ ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it a model of the whole Universe?’ ”

  “Who’s that?”

  “David Hume. Not an engineer, so you won’t have heard of him. Face it, Michael. No mind can ever be fully cognizant of itself—and mind is not the goal of the cosmos anyhow. And the Redemption, this cack-handed do-it-yourself fix-up it means to inflict on human history, can only lead to disaster.”

  Leropa had been silent for a long time. She said now, “Flawed god the Transcendence may be, but it is capable of at least one great act. Perhaps we can never atone for the suffering of past ages. But we can at least wipe it away. And, if we can’t atone, isn’t it our duty to do so?”

  Alia said, “Leropa—”

  “It is time for your decision, Michael Poole.”

  The other voices, Alia, Morag, fell silent, and I was left alone.

  I looked deep inside myself.

  Could there be any possible ethical justification for the Cleansing? Could the elimination of suffering ever be worth the elimination of life itself?

  If the great cauterization were done, then those unborn—including myself—would never have known it happened. It would not be felt, nor would the pain they might have suffered. But on the other hand, they would have no chance—no chance to make their own futures, to be glad to be alive, however briefly.

  “Life comes first,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.” Yes, I thought as I framed the words; that was just.

  “Then,” Leropa said, “what of the Redemption?”

  The Transcendence was like an immense parent, I thought, brooding over the lives of its children—all of humanity, in the future and the past. And the Transcendence longed to make its children safe and happy, for all time.

  But I was a parent, too. I had lost one child, saved another. If I could somehow have fixed Tom’s future at his birth, or even before he was conceived, so that his life would be lived out in safety—would I have done so? It seemed a monstrous arrogance to try to control events that might happen long after my death. How could I ever know what was best? And even if I did, wouldn’t I be taking away my son’s choices, his ability to live out his own life as he wanted?

  You had to let go, I thought. You had to let your children make their own mistakes. Anything else verged on insanity, not love.

  I didn’t have to say it. As I formulated these thoughts I glanced around the sky-mind of the Transcendence. There was a change, I thought. Those pinpoint awarenesses whirled in tight, angry knots, and giant reefs of wisdom loomed out of the dark like icebergs on a nighttime ocean. I had troubled the Transcendence with my decision, then. Perhaps that meant it was the right one.

  On some level, the Transcendence must already have known, I thought. I was just a lever it used to lift itself back to sanity. But that didn’t mean it was happy about it. Or grateful.

  Leropa hissed, “Michael Poole. You know that if the Redemption is abandoned, you will lose Morag forever, don’t you?”

  I recoiled from this personal attack. So much for the lofty goals of the Transcendence, I thought; so much for transhuman love. “But I already lost her,” I said. “Nothing the Transcendence can do will make any difference to that. I guess it’s part of being human. And so is letting go.”

  Leropa said, “Letting go?”

  “Of the past, the dead. Of the future, the fate of your children. Even an arch-instrumentalist like me knows that much.”

  Leropa laughed. “Are you forgiving the Transcendence, Michael Poole?”

  “Isn’t that why I was brought here?”

  “Good-bye, Michael Poole,” Leropa said. “We won’t meet again.”

  And suddenly, I knew, it was over. I searched for Morag. Perhaps there was a trace of her left.
But she was receding from me, as if she was falling down a well, her face diminishing, her gaze still fixed on me.

  And then the stars swirled viciously around me—for an instant I struggled, longing to stay—but I was engulfed in the pain of an unwelcome rebirth, and a great pressure expelled me.

  Chapter 59

  The six of them gathered in Conurbation 11729: Alia and Drea, Reath, and the three Campocs, Bale, Denh, and Seer.

  Under the mighty electric-blue tetrahedral arch of the ancient cathedral, the undying walked their solitary paths. Some of them mumbled to themselves, continuing their lifelong monologues, but the very oldest did not speak at all. But even now she was aware of the presence of the Transcendence, in her and around her. And she was aware of its turmoil, like a storm gathering, huge energies drawing up in a towering sky above her.

  Campoc Bale drew Alia aside. She could still faintly sense the extended consciousness he shared with his family, like a limited Transcendence of its own. And about him there was still that exotic sense of the alien, the different, which had given their lovemaking so much spice.

  He said carefully, “We did not mean any harm to come to your ship, your family.”

  “But you led the Shipbuilders to the Nord.”

  “Yes.” It was the first time he’d admitted it explicitly. “We were concerned that the Redemption would rip everything apart. We were right to be concerned, weren’t we?”

  “And I was your tool, your weapon to use against the Transcendence.”

  “You were more than that to me,” he said hotly.

  “Your manipulation was gross. You threatened my sister, you endangered my family—”

  “We would never have harmed Drea.” He looked up. “I think on some level you always knew that, didn’t you? And we did not mean the incident with the Shipbuilders to go so far.”

  “Incident. My mother died, and my brother. Are you looking for forgiveness from me, Bale? Do you want redemption, after all that’s happened?”