I left the vice president for dead and ran for the exit. Behind me, ignored, Ruud Makaay was still talking. Heads turned as I passed, concerned.
Tom caught up with me before the doorway. “Dad. What the hell are you doing?”
I pointed. “Can’t you see her?”
“I see — something. A woman out there. So what?”
“You know who it is.Come on, Tom. I just have to deal with this.”
“You mean I have to.”
I felt cold, determined. “Yes. You have to. Because if you see her, she’s haunting you, too.”
At the exit I found myself facing an EI security guard, a slab of muscle. The guard looked confused, but her job was to keep people out, not shut them in. She stood aside. I pushed out through the airlock, and into the fresh air outside, dressed in nothing but my flimsy suit. It was bloody cold. There were drops of rain in the air, or maybe it was salt spray off the sea.
I glanced around, getting my bearings. To get to where Morag had been standing I would have to cut around the base of the dome-shaped marquee, to my right. I ran that way, not bothering to check if Tom was following. I had to jump over guy ropes and skirt around blocks of equipment, generators, and heaters. More security guards watched me go by, and I saw them speak into the air. But I wasn’t impeded.
Around the limb of the marquee I stumbled to a halt. Tom came up beside me, breathing hard.
There she was: Morag, standing in an open area beside the wall of the marquee, looking back at me. She was dressed in a plain blue smock, her favorite color, the color that brought out her eyes, she always said. She didn’t seem cold, despite the Arctic breeze. She was no more than fifty meters from me, just fifty paces. She had never been so close. And she wasn’t running away, not drifting mysteriously down corridors, or disappearing into dust or mist. She just stood there. She was smiling at me. Her hands were open, as if to show me she meant me no harm.
For a heartbeat I drank in every detail of her, the hair that flopped over her brow in the breeze, the way the dress clung to her slim figure like a flag draped around a pole.
“It’s her,” said Tom. “It really is.”
“You do see her,” I breathed.
“Yes. Dad — what do we do?”
“I don’t know. It’s never been like this before.”
I spread my hands, mirroring her gesture. I took a step toward her, then another, cautiously. I was like a police officer approaching a suicide bomber, I thought. Still she didn’t recede from me, as in all those nightmare pursuits of the past. She just watched me approach, smiling.
A part of me was aware of glowing motes that danced before my eyes. We were saturated by surveillance by EI’s security systems. There could be no doubt that there would be a record of this encounter, full and clear. And there was no doubt in my mind that Morag was allowing this to happen, that this was her choice, to break through whatever barriers there were between us. She was just as I had remembered her before her pregnancy, the labor that had killed her. It had been seventeen years since her death, but she hadn’t aged a day. Oddly it might have seemed stranger to me, at that moment, if she had aged.
Now I was so close I could see the details, the tiny flaws in her skin, the beauty spot on her cheek, the small scar on her forehead. She seemed full of mass, somehow, dense with matter and light; she stood out of the background, as if patched into a faded photograph. And still she didn’t go away.
Ten paces from her I stopped. I feared what might happen if I pushed this too far. If I got too close, if I tried to touch her, would she pop like a bubble? And I wondered why she was doing this now, here. Was she here because of the hydrate project? Was Rosa right, that she was somehow an angel from the future, drawn to significance?
“Morag. Can’t you speak to me? What do you want?…”
She smiled, encouraging. Then she spoke. It was her voice, undoubtedly, light, airy, salted with a trace of her Irish background. But her words were a rapid gabble, just as they had been on the Reef, in the hotel corridor. Her tone was wistful, her eyes bright, her gaze fixed on me. I couldn’t bear to look away. But as the moment stretched, and as her only words were that strange compressed pseudo-speech, a kind of anxious sadness filled me.
A siren clamored, echoing across the flat sea. It was coming from the oil rig, out on the ocean. Distracted, I looked that way, and saw vapor venting into the air. I knew that the siren had been the signal for the start of the trial — and cheering from inside the dome, slightly muffled, told me it had been a success, that the moles had been launched and were doing their job. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less.
I turned back to Morag. And she was gone, gone, in that instant. Perhaps there was a trace of her, a profile of her figure in dancing dust, hanging in the air, sparkling; but even that dispersed on the wind. I was oppressed by guilt, for it felt as if it had been my fault that she had gone, as if I had broken the rules by looking away.
There was a soft whirring at my feet, a crackle of friction sparks. I looked down. The little Gea-robot rolled back and forth on the concrete at my feet.
“Gea, did you see all that? Did you see her?”
“I recorded everything, Michael,” the robot said. “But for now I think you should consider your son.”
Tom. I had forgotten him. I whirled around. Tom was hunched over on the ground. His whole body heaved as he wept. I ran toward him, but Sonia Dameyer got there first, and wrapped him in her arms.
And in that vignette you have the whole story of our two lives.
Alia was immersed in some deep, dark, viscous ocean. She tried to struggle — but she could not, there was nothing to fight with. She tried to concentrate on her fingers, to move her toes, but there was no sensation. She felt no pain, nothing but a cushioning, cradling warmth.
She had no idea what had happened to her, where she was — if she was anywhere in any meaningful sense. Of course it was all something to do with Leropa, and her strange projects. Was this another hideous Skimming — or something stranger still? And what could it have to do with Redemption?
She couldn’t even feel herself breathe, she realized suddenly. She panicked. She looked deep inside herself, but she had no sense of her own pulse, the deepest rhythms of her body. Even her sense of her body, her arms and legs, her torso and head, was dissipating. She cowered, even more terrified. She was like a prisoner, she thought, unexpectedly released after years of captivity, longing to remain confined.
But a kind of acceptance began to steal over her. She floated, without her body, a mote adrift in this strange sea.
Was this mood of resignation itself part of the process? Without a bloodstream fizzing with adrenaline, perhaps it was impossible for her to feel fear: perhaps there was too little left of her even to be afraid. And if she had no body, did she have a self anymore?
She felt herself spreading out. If the edges of her body had been erased, now so was the boundary of her mind, her very self. She was merging with this wider sea, she thought, like a drop of coloring dropped into a bottle of water, spreading out, growing more and more dilute. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a subtle dissolving. It was like falling asleep.
Or it was like joining the Transcendence, she thought, like being immersed in that vast panoply of linked minds. But the Transcendence was something higher than mind. This bloody ocean was different; it was something lower than the body, lower than biology itself. Still she tried to fight it, to reflect back on herself.
It was her last conscious thought. After that, for an unmeasured time, there was only an endless, formless, oceanic dreaming.
And then something new.
Separateness.
There was no detail, nothing to be said about this which was separated from that. There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure — an exultance that I am.
Then something more. A kind of g
rowing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the I, of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers. Cells: they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.
The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.
But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the I should understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was itself wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the I — or around it, or beside it — was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not it.
The separated viewpoint was Alia. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.
And meanwhile the I, the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.
That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over there was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over there were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.
This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells how to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell’s cytoplasm to another’s. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function — to become an eardrum or a heart valve — and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.
The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the I, the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complexifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.
Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feet began to die, in waves and bands. It hurt, surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.
The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not its, Alia thought — his.Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.
His curiosity, not Alia’s.
This union was not like Witnessing. She was embedded deeply in the machinery of the child’s shaping body; she felt everything he did, shared every dim thought, every sensation. But she was somehow, subtly, separated from him, and always would be. She was a monitor, a watcher; she shared everything the child lived through — and would throughout his whole life — but not his will, his choice.
And there was something wrong, a note out of place in this great symphony of manufacture and assembly. There was something not quite right with the heart, she saw, a place where the mindless self-organization had gone awry. Nothing was perfect; this was not the only flaw in the growing body. Perhaps it would not matter.
As his body and nervous system developed, the child’s mind continued to evolve.
At first there had been no sense of time, or space. There were only abstractions like separateness, one thing from another, and only events, disconnected, acausal. Time gradually emerged as a sense of events in sequence: first the hands, then the cellular Die-back, then the separating fingers, one after another. Space came after that, as the body itself grew in extent and emerged from formlessness into a tool that he could, in a limited fashion, use to explore the space around him. It was a passive exploration at first, not much more than a dim realization that the universe had to be at least big enough to encompass his body. But then he had fingers to stretch out, legs to kick with. Soon he could feel the sac that contained him, could kick against its walls, and he began to get the sense that even beyond this sac was a wider universe, perhaps including beings more or less like himself.
That sense deepened when sight arrived. He could make out a dim ruddy glow, that waxed and waned. Sometimes, when the light was at its brightest, he could even make out the pale fishlike shape that was his own body, the rope that anchored him to the walls around him.
But the light would dim and return, dim and return, and a new sense of time imposed itself on him: not a time dictated by the events of his own body, but a cycle that came from a wider world outside him. There were processes that went on independently of him, then; he was not the whole universe — even though it still felt like it.
Then there were sharper sensations, brought to him in a rich stream of blood. The nourishment he received could be rich or thin, familiar or strange. Sometimes it was even intoxicating, mildly, so that he thrashed uncomfortably in his tank of flesh. This came from the mother, he knew on some deep level.
For the child in the womb, here was still another lesson to learn. Not only was there a universe outside this womb of his, but there were creatures out there who imposed their will on him: even his mother, who lived her own life, while cradling his. It was a gathering awareness of separateness that presaged the child’s ultimate ejection from this crimson comfort into the harsher, much less sympathetic world beyond the walls of the womb.
But now came the pain.
It was extraordinary. It flooded the child’s still-developing nervous system as if hot mercury had been injected into it. The walls of the womb flexed, pressing at the helpless body, overwhelming his struggles. There was a new taste on his soft pink tongue, a taste he could not recognize, was not supposed to know, not yet. But Alia recognized its iron tang. It was blood.
Something was badly wrong.
The pain passed. The child relaxed, exhausted. Groping in the dark he pushed one tiny thumb into his mouth and sucked. Alia, floating with him, longed to comfort him. But the memory of the pain clung deep, and nothing was quite as it had been before, or ever could be.
Now there was another intrusion into this amniotic refuge. It was something sharp, and it was cold, unbelievably so in this little universe of soft, cushioning flesh. A probe, Alia thought, pushed in from outside. Was it possible somebody out there was trying to help this damaged child? But if so, how crude a way to do it! The child thrashed, distressed down to the core of his being. The probe sucked away some of the child’s flesh and withdrew. The child folded over on itself, scrabbling at its small face with its hands. Again peace returned, like an echo of the endless tranquillity from which the child had been separated at its conception. But it did not last long.
And when the pain came back, Alia knew that there would be no respite. Again the child shrieked silently, but there was nobody to hear him; again the womb walls flexed helplessly, as if trying to crush the child out of existence.
There was another sharp intrusion from outside. But this was much more drastic than the earlier probing. A blade slashed uncompromisingly through the wall of the womb, and light poured in. The child thrashed and grasped; it was a
s shocking as if the sky itself had cracked open. Huge forms descended and something smooth and cold closed around his torso — hands, gloved perhaps? And now, in the ultimate horror, he was lifted up, pulled away from the womb into a sharp coldness, a new realm of bitter light. But he could feel the cord in his belly tugging him back to the womb.
Amidst all this unimaginable horror the pain returned again. It was even worse now. It seemed to emanate from the core of his being, his chest and belly, and flooded out through his limbs to his tiny fingers, the thumb he had sucked. It was as if some immense hard object was slamming against his chest, over and over.
He was aware of motion, a smooth surface under him; he had been laid down. Then came a sharp pain at his belly as the cord was cut. Immense objects, perhaps fingers, dug into his mouth. But that pain flooded through him still, a new burst with every impact of those invisible fists on his chest.
He could see only a blur, only light, smeared with a crimson film of blood and amniotic fluid. But objects floated through that blur, looming down. They were faces, human faces. Even as the terrible pain continued, the child struggled to make out the faces — a first reflex of his nervous system, Alia knew. He looked for smiles, for welcoming. But there were no smiles here. And one of those faces, even though it was just a moonscape of patches and blurs, looked oddly familiar to Alia.
It was Michael Poole.
But now the faces receded, and darkness washed over the child’s vision. That pounding pain continued, and he thrashed feebly, even now fighting. But he was tiring quickly. There was a kind of question in his mind, Alia realized, an expression of a deep longing. This new darkness — was it the womb? Was he being returned to the place he belonged?
Alia could not answer him. She was only an observer. And yet she replied: Yes. There is nothing to fear. Lie still.
The darkness rose up around him now; the faces had gone, vanished forever. The miracle of biological self-organization and emergent awareness was dissipating, crumbling, and so was his mind.
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