Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

In parallel, the medics investigated Morag. She gave up blood when they stuck a needle in her, her cheek swabs offered up DNA, the X-rays showed she had bones and organs in the proportions you’d expect. But that business of her excess weight clearly baffled them all. And the scanning machines were puzzled when she showed none of the implants you’d expect in somebody her age, no spinal interface, no sonic chips in the bones of her skull, no medical monitors swimming around her bloodstream.

It wasn’t impossible to find people free of such gadgets. There were those who had religious or other moral objections to interfacing so directly with technology, and in many parts of the world such facilities weren’t available anyhow. Older folk especially resisted having electronics stuffed deep inside their bodies; I don’t think uncle George had a single implant his whole life. But for most citizens of the advanced societies of the West, the implants were so obviously convenient, and such a key interface to the services and products of your society, that you just took them without thinking, the way earlier generations had bought cell phones and transistor radios. Anyhow, Morag was bare.

And when her lab results started coming back the army officer and FBI agent started to look at her very quizzically. I could understand why. She had given them the DNA of a woman seventeen years dead.

When they had done with their examinations, the medics insisted we get a little rest before the authority types started in on their interrogations. The FBI guy and the army officer agreed to a couple of hours. We weren’t going anywhere, the search through the debris at Prudhoe Bay, by fingertip, sniffer dog, and microscopic robot, was only just beginning — and I was sure our little private room would be saturated by surveillance technology, our every word and gesture monitored, recorded, and analyzed. Odd how you start to think like a criminal in situations like that.

But they left us. And for the first time since her return, I was alone with Morag.

We lay side by side on cots in a small private room, holding hands. As we calmed down, out of the rush of events, I had time to think, to feel. And I tentatively began to explore, in my head, the possibility that all this might be real.

“I wonder what they’re making of me,” she said. “Not only should I be dead, that’s bad enough. I should be seventeen years older than I am. I’m probably freaking them all out.”

“Maybe they think you’re a clone,” I said. “There are simpler explanations than—”

“Than the truth?” She turned on her side and looked at me; her strawberry blond hair fell across her face. “And what about you? Is the truth freaking you out, too, Michael?”

“What truth?” She had no answer.

“I don’t know how I feel,” I said. “I feel like I’m waking up. You know? That it’s just sinking in.”

“I know. I don’t know what to say. We’ll just have to give it time.” Her voice had that light lilt that was a legacy of her childhood, and her tone just the right frisson of humor. She was just as I remembered her, and more; she had even brought back things I had forgotten about her, things that had once been so precious.

For seventeen years I had been storing up all I had longed to say to her, all I had longed to tell her I felt, after I thought I’d lost the opportunity for good. But somehow, with her there beside me, none of that stuff mattered. It was as if the intervening seventeen years had never existed. I was taken back to the immediacy of her death, how I had felt in the first days and weeks, and the wound was as raw as it had ever been. It made no sense, emotionally. But then the situation we were in made no sense. My heart wasn’t programmed for this, I thought.

Morag was watching me. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.

That made me laugh. “ I’ve been through a lot… You know, I think the doctors’ tests have started to make it more real for me. I mean, ghosts don’t have DNA, do they?”

“I’m not a ghost,” she said faintly.

“OK. But I think you’ve been haunting me all my life.”

“All your life?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.

“Since I was a kid.” I’d never told her this before she had died. Now, though, I hesitantly ran through the strange story for her.

She blew out her cheeks. “On any other day that would be a hell of a story.”

“Do you remember any of this? Like those times on the beach, when I was nine or ten—”

She said, frowning, “I feel like there are gaps. I don’t know, Michael.”

I asked her the basic question bluntly. “How did you get here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why has it happened? Why are you here?”

She had nothing to say.

I propped myself on one elbow and looked at her. Now that I had started asking questions, more occurred, as if my brain was starting to work again. “Why should you be the age you are?” As far as I could tell from what the doctor had hinted, she was precisely the age she had been on the day of her death.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just is.”

“And how come you weren’t fazed to find out what date it is — seventeen years in your future?” I rubbed my own jowly jaw. “How come you weren’t horrified to find I’d turned into the oldest man in the universe?”

“I just seemed to know where I was. When I was. The way you know such things anyhow, without thinking about it.”

“But that must mean you were set up, somehow. Prepared for your return.”

“Rebooted? Is that the word you’re looking for?” There was fear in her voice, doubt, but there was an edge of humor, too. “You were always such a tech-head, Michael. Believe me, I want to know, too. But I think you’re just skirting around the big questions.” She shook her head. “Seventeen years and you haven’t changed a bit.”

She was right. Only a couple of hours after her reincarnation, metaphysics just didn’t matter. I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of my bed, and faced her. “All right, let’s get to it. There’s no sign of the pregnancy, is there? Or of the labor, the birth?”

“So that doctor said.”

“But you remember it all.”

She frowned. “I went into labor too early. It hurt like hell. You rushed me to hospital, in the car.” I remembered; what a ride that was. “I was taken in for a C-section. I was drugged to the eyeballs, but the pain — I knew something was going wrong—” Suddenly she was weeping, even as she spoke; her shoulders shook, and she wiped angrily at her eyes. “Damn it, Michael, for me this only just happened.”

My heart was being ripped apart. I longed to hold her, to comfort her. But a spasm of anger stopped me. “What else happened in between? A white light, a guy with a beard and a big book at a pearly gate—”

“I don’t know.” She hid her eyes with her arm, a gesture I suddenly remembered so well. “Something… I can’t say. It’s not even like a memory. I didn’t ask for any of this, Michael.” Then she lowered her arm and faced me. “Just as I didn’t ask to have a relationship with John. You must know about that by now.”

“How do you expect me to feel about that?”

“It just happened,” she said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. You were away so much… John and I worked together a lot. We just sort of fell into it. And then the pregnancy.”

She had chosen not to terminate, she told me, even though the baby was obviously John’s, even though she knew how much hurt it would cause everybody — and even though the doctors had advised her to abort for the sake of her own health, I learned now — she couldn’t bear to lose it.

“So you let me think it was mine.”