Silicon chemistry was not as favorable a substrate for life as carbon. The properties of silicon compounds did not allow for as much complexity of molecular structure as carbon; and silicon did not bond so conveniently into forms that, like carbon dioxide, could be carried in the air or dissolved in the sea. That was why silicon-based life tended not to emerge even in places where there was far more silicon lying around than carbon, such as the crust of the Earth. But in some places, by chance, it did arise, such as here on Baynix II, the Dirtball.
There had been silicon-based life-forms on this silicon-rich world, native forms, long before humans arrived. And when humans came here, they chose to download their children into the silicon, rather than any carbon-chemistry medium: they had made them into these statues.
What a strange thing to do, Alia thought. She stroked the immense sandy cheek of the stone form before her. “Life would be so terribly slow.”
“Oh, yes,” Bale said. “But time is only perception. If you watch them over a century or so you can see them churn around in the sand…”
“Why keep the human form at all?”
Reath shrugged. “Sentiment? We evolved with human morphology, after all; perhaps we are more deeply wedded to it than we know.”
Alia walked around the head of the statue. She felt compelled to keep away from the line of sight of those immense graven eyes, though surely they could not see her; to this chthonic man she would be a flash of motion, gone in an instant. “So now I know what these statues are. I still don’t know why you brought me here.”
Bale regarded her gravely. “These people made their children into crawling things of stone, a form as remote from the basic human as it is possible to imagine. Why do you think they would do such a thing?”
Alia thought it through. “Because they were refugees. They had to hide.”
“Yes. And by abandoning the carbon-chemistry substrate they made themselves all but undetectable, even by a remote sweep for life. Nobody would expect to find humans hiding in stone…”
“Who were they hiding from?”
“Who do you think?” Bale said.
“Oh. Other people.”
Bale touched the huge hand of the statue. “We don’t know why they were fleeing. But after all this time, the desperation remains. Now can you see how much the Transcendence has to regret?”
Yes, Alia thought. And no matter how you try to achieve Redemption — no matter if every human who ever lived from now on spent her entire life on Witnessing, there would always be more pain: a bottomless pit of it.
Bale watched her sharply. “There. You see it, don’t you? The Transcendence is striving for a goal that is unachievable. That’s what we think. Yes, we are suspicious of it — and we aren’t the only ones. More and more of mankind’s resources are being poured into this sink of pointless ambition. Is there no better way to spend our wealth and power?
“And what if full Redemption can’t be achieved — what will the Transcendence do then? Alia, we think the Transcendence is approaching a crisis.”
Reath seemed shocked by this talk. “You must not anthropomorphize in this way. The Transcendence is not human, remember. It is more than human. And it has a cognizance beyond our petty comprehension. Even its regret is superhuman! You must not imagine you are capable of understanding it.”
Bale bowed his head. “Perhaps not. But we fear it. We are all affected by the Transcendence, as a planet is ruled by the power of the sun it circles. And if the sun becomes unstable… We want to know, Alia. We want to know what the Transcendence plans to do next — and perhaps we can have some influence over it.”
Reath said heavily, “And that’s where Alia comes in, is it? You see her as your way into the Transcendence.”
Bale spread his hands, looking helpless despite his squat, powerful build. “We don’t know what else to do.”
Reath stood before Alia, anger flaring in his eyes. “If you become a Transcendent, Alia, it must be for your own purposes, your own desires, not for his. ”
Alia stared at them. Much of this discussion went far above her head, this philosophy, abstraction. But these theological disputes obviously meant a great deal to these men, enough for them to have put her sister’s life at risk.
So what was she supposed to do?
She looked inside herself for guidance — and she thought of Michael Poole, the subject of her own Witnessing. What would Poole have thought if he could look ahead to this strange future of ours? What would he think of us, this obsession with the past — would he think we were insane?
There was only one way she could find out more, perhaps only one way to resolve all this.
She faced Bale and Reath. “I will go forward. I will continue on this path; I will go on to the Transcendence. But you are right,” she said to Reath. “If I do enter the Transcendence it will be for my own purposes, not anybody else’s. Not even yours, Reath.”
He bowed his head.
“Bale, I have listened to what you say. But I will promise you nothing. Nothing. And I will not act under duress. You will release my sister now. ”
He faced her down for a heartbeat. Then he, too, bowed his head.
Alia heard a gasp. In the shadow of the tent, Drea had slumped forward. The Campocs were clumsily attending her.
Alia turned back to Bale. “We were partners. I thought you cared for me. But you betrayed me.”
“Oh, Alia—”
“If you ever harm any of my family again, I will make you pay.”
He said nothing, and he tried to keep his mind closed to her. But she sensed fear. Good, she thought. Perhaps there will be advantages to being a Transcendent after all.
She began to walk back to Reath’s shuttle. “Are we done here? What’s next?”
I peered through the door into darkness.
I glanced back at my companions. Shelley watched me with a lively curiosity, Vander with obvious envy. In their different ways, both of them longed to step through this door. But it was me Gea had asked for.
I stepped through the doorway -
Wham.
I was standing in the open air, beside a riverbank. Under a glaring sun, the ground was crowded with vegetation. It was ferociously hot and humid.
When I looked back, the door and its frame had disappeared. I guessed I was in some kind of immersive VR. But there had been no sense of transition, none of the usual preparation, no lying down in a darkened place or a sensory-deprivation tank. I was simply here. Wherever here was.
I stepped forward, toward the river. My fake-leather shoes slipped on the bare rock, or stuck in patches of mud. Sweating hard, I felt ridiculous in my shirt and jacket, city clothes. I was not equipped for this.
There was nobody about, no sign of buildings or vehicles. As far as I could see nothing moved, no animals crawled; there was no sound but the chirping of some insect. And not a single bird flew in the sky.
The river was broad, meandering, sluggish, working its way through a wide valley littered by marshes and swamps. Vegetation crowded, green and lush, vigorous. But with the shock of my immersion wearing off, I started to tune in to strangeness.
There were lots of mosses and ferns, and lining the riverbank stands of what I thought might be bamboo, but on closer inspection looked more like horsetails. Away from the river itself taller trees crowded in thickets, surrounded by an undergrowth of ferns and mosses. The trees were some kind of fern, I thought, with a woody trunk and leaves clustered in strange starbursts at the ends of their branches. They looked like ginkgoes, maybe. Elsewhere there were patches of scrub, low-lying ferns and something like heather.
The place was oddly drab. Everything was a deep muddy green: there was no other color anywhere, no flowers. And there was no grass, oddly.
I stepped close to the water and squatted down. I rustled at the undergrowth, moving it aside. The leaves and fronds were heavy and damp; if this was VR the detail impressed me.
At last I saw something move. I d
isturbed plenty of insects: centipedes, cockroaches, beetles. Snails and worms crawled through the mud by the water’s edge, and a dragonfly fluttered into the air on filmy wings. Again I was struck by what was not here: no bees or wasps, no ants, not a single termite mound.
I made out a ripple in the water, a ridged back breaking the surface. It looked like a crocodile — but the head I glimpsed, the tail, didn’t look quite right.
Then something scuttled out from between my legs. I jumped back with a start. It was a little creature no larger than my hand, running on splayed legs. With four legs and a tail, it looked something like a lizard. But the shape of its head and body were subtly off, like a sketch made from memory. It scuttled back into the undergrowth.
And as I stared after the lizard thing, I heard a bellow, a deep, mournful sound. My heart pounding, I turned around.
Animals moved across the landscape, perhaps half a kilometer from me, a dozen of them in a scattered herd. They had massive barrel-shaped bodies, but their weak-looking limbs sprawled out to either side of them, and they moved slowly, clumsily. Their heads were big shovel-shapes with broad mouths. They were the size of cows, although there were a couple of smaller individuals, infants. But on those splayed legs they had a reptilelike gait; they looked like fat, land-going crocodiles.
The cow-crocs gathered around the tree ferns and dragged at their leaves with their big plated mouths. They didn’t seem to have any teeth. My anxiety subsided. Herbivores, then; I should have no trouble with them unless I got in the way of a stampede.
But then I made out a low, lithe shape slinking through the shade of a tree. It was smaller than the cow-crocs, maybe the size of a dog, with a bulky body and stubby tail. It had sideways-askew legs, another variant on the theme of crocodile. But there was nothing sluggish or ungainly about the way this creature moved, nothing stupid about the sharp eyes I could see gleaming in that blunt head.
I stood stock-still. It was foolish to be afraid. This must be a VR, and VRs were full of safeguards; I should have nothing to fear. But this VR was of a density and richness like none I’d experienced before — and it wasn’t under my control.
“Do you know what you’re looking at?”
I was startled. The voice was small, metallic, and it came from near my feet.
A toy robot, fifteen centimeters tall, stood on a patch of bare rock. Its shell was painted gaudy colors, red and blue and yellow, but the paintwork was chipped and scuffed, heavily played with. It had eyes like glass beads that lit up when it talked, and a tiny grill from which its insect-sized voice emanated. It was pointing a ray gun at me, but I didn’t feel too concerned, as the ray gun and the arm that held it were just shaped tin shells. It didn’t even have legs, just molded shapes concealing wheels. It rolled toward me now, and a friction mechanism crackled and sparked.
“I know you,” I said. “You’re uncle George’s companion. His home help.”
“Not quite.”
“What are you doing here?… Oh. You’re Gea, aren’t you?”
“You can think of me as Gea if you like.” She spoke with that ridiculous cod-American toy-robot accent.
“And you chose to manifest yourself as uncle George’s robot?”
“I used a form you are familiar with. What did you expect?” She ran back and forth a little, sparking. “Actually this form does the job. Although it’s sometimes tricky getting around.”
“I bet it is.” I glanced up the valley toward the shambling herd of cow-crocs. “Am I in the past? What are those creatures, dinosaurs?”
“Not dinosaurs. Dinosaurs haven’t evolved, yet.”
That yet chilled me. “They behave like mammals but they walk like reptiles.”
“They are neither. They are a class from which true mammals will one day evolve. The paleontologists call them mammal-like reptiles. The big herbivores are called pareiasaurs. Those you see on the far side of the river” — a huddle of smaller, more nervous-looking creatures — “are a kind of dicynodont. The predator is a type of gorgonospian.”
I glanced at my feet. “And the little lizards?”
“They aren’t lizards. Lizards haven’t evolved yet, either. Some of them are reptiles called procolophonids. Others have no name. Only species which have left a distinguishable trace in the fossil record have names assigned by human paleontologists.”
“So how can you reconstruct them?”
“Extrapolation, from traces in modern genomes, ecological-balance calculations, other sources. I am confident in the veracity of what you see.”
“Oh, are you? Where am I, Gea?”
“You are some two hundred and fifty million years into the past. This is an era known to the geologists as the Permian. If you want more precision—”
Two hundred and fifty million years.“That’s precise enough.”
“Much that is familiar has yet to evolve. The whole hundred-million-year history of the dinosaurs, their rise and fall, follows after this time. There are no grasses yet, no flowering plants, no wasps or bees or termites or ants. There are no birds. And yet there is much that is familiar, deeper qualities.”
“Yes.” I thought it over. “All the animals have four legs, one head, one tail.”
“The tetrapodal body plan is a relic of the first lungfish to crawl out of some muddy river onto the land, a choice once made never unmade; presumably all animal life from Earth will always follow this plan. And there are deeper, persistent patterns in the nature of life: the dance of predator and prey, for instance.”
At the base of this ancient food chain were plants, insects, and invertebrates. Little lizardlike creatures, like my procolophonids, ate the plants and insects, and in turn various carnivores munched on their bones. At the very top of the food chain were the gorgonospians, like the saber-tooth critter I had seen; gorgonospians ate pretty much everything, including each other.
“This is the first complex ecosystem on land,” the robot said. “But it is based on a web of food and energy flows nearly as complex as today’s. For such an ancient scene, it is remarkably rich.” Her tiny voice sounded even more ridiculous when she used words like ecosystem.
“So why are you showing me all this?”
“Because it is about to be wiped out.” The robot rolled backward. Her glass-bead eyes flashed. And the world changed.
I staggered. It felt as if the land surface beneath my feet melted and flowed.
And suddenly it was hot, a sweltering heat much more severe than the tropical humidity I had suffered earlier. It was dry, airless, and I found myself gasping; I tugged at my shirt, ripping buttons to open the neck.
The land had changed utterly.
The basic topography remained, the river and its valley, the eroded hills further away. But the river was low, a trickle in a plain of dried and cracked mud. And the green-brown blanket of life had shrunk back everywhere. The stands of ginkgolike trees were bare trunks, lifeless. Only scattered bushes and low ferns, and smaller undergrowth plants, weedlike, seemed to be surviving. I saw none of the big cow-sized herbivores, or the doglike carnivores that had hunted them. Suddenly this was an empty stage.
But still there was life here. An animal poked its nose out of a burrow, cautiously, like a badger emerging from its set. This was a low-slung reptilian, about the size of a cat, with the characteristic croclike splayed legs and wedge-shaped head of the time. Snuffling, the animal managed to expose a stand of mushrooms, pale and sickly, and it dug its face into their white flesh. There wasn’t much flesh beneath its warty skin, and I could see the bones of its spine and rib cage.
It looked up at me, at the only biped on the planet. Its eyes were glazed, incurious. Then it shambled toward the river, seeking water.
The little robot was still at my feet, her glass eyes blank.
“So what’s happened?”
“There have been major eruptions,” the robot said. “Far from here, in Siberia, too far away to hear or see. But they have had a global influence.”
<
br /> They had not been volcanoes, I learned. Magma, “flood basalts,” had come seeping from fissures in the ground, and had covered vast areas.
“When the eruptions began the injection of dust into the air caused a snap freeze, a couple of cold summers. But since then the huge flows of basalt have been emitting carbon dioxide and sulphur dioxide.”
“Greenhouse gases.”
“Yes. The result is a rise in air temperatures, all around the planet. Life here was always precarious. Even a one-degree rise in temperature has been enough to kill off many plants, and the herbivores that fed off them—”
“And the carnivores that fed off them. ”
“Yes. There have been few actual extinctions yet, but biotas have been disrupted, and populations of plant and animal species have crashed. The creature by the river is a dicynodont. Its habit of burrowing in the ground to estivate has enabled it to ride out the worst of the heat where others have succumbed.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Worse is to come.”
“Yes.”
Another snap transition; I staggered, shocked.
That baking sun had disappeared. Suddenly rain poured out of a cloud-choked sky, hammering on my head and shoulders hard enough to hurt — but then I realized that the water was actually stinging me, like a mild acid. Hastily I dragged my jacket over my head. But there was no relief from the sweltering heat; the air was so humid it was actually difficult to breathe.
The robot stood patiently at my feet, rain splashing from its paintwork.
“Shit,” I shouted. “You might have warned me.” I could barely hear my own voice above the roar of the rain.
“The dicynodonts had no warning.”
“More eruptions?”
“Yes. The basalt traps are pumping out chlorine, fluorine, sulphur dioxide, as well as carbon dioxide. These gases are combining with the high air to form a cocktail of acids, hydrochloric, sulphuric, carbonic—”
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