Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“We didn’t know how to handle it. John and me. We didn’t know what to do for the best.”

“Did you love him?”

“Yes,” she said bravely. “But I loved you more, Michael. I always did. So did John. Neither of us wanted to hurt you. And then there was Tom to think about. I never planned to leave you, you know, to go to John. Our relationship was just a, a thing, and then we got caught out there. We didn’t know what to do. I’m not expecting you to sympathize, Michael, but we were both in a hell of a state.”

It was hard to imagine John, my competent older brother, having got himself into such a mess.

“We put off telling you,” she said. “We decided I’d wait until I had the baby — as much as we decided anything. Once it was born, once it existed—”

“He,” I said. “The baby was a boy.”

She took that in, and nodded carefully. “OK. Once he was there, it would all feel different. You remember how we were before Tom was born, frightened and elated all at the same time? But then once he was born things sort of clarified.”

“I remember.”

“So when the new baby came, when it was real, a person, we would see how we all felt. And then—”

“And then you’d tell me that this wonderful bundle of joy was not mine but my older brother’s?”

Anger flared in her eyes. “Is that all you think about, that it’s John’s child? If it had been some stranger’s, would you feel better?” She shook her head. “You’ve suddenly gotten so old your face looks like it’s melted. But you’re still a little kid inside, still competing with your brother…”

Maybe she was right. After all my fist still hurt from where I had punched John in the mouth. But I wanted to be careful not to think that way, not to go down that road, because I didn’t want to draw the conclusion, on any emotional level, that my brother had killed my wife. How could I live with such a thought in my head?

We seemed to run down. We sat there facing each other.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “We’ve only been together a couple of hours. You’ve been returned to me from the dead, for God’s sake, like fucking Lazarus. And we’re yelling in each other’s faces.”

“You started it,” she snapped back.

“No, I didn’t. You slept with my brother.”

We stared each other out. Then we laughed, and fell together. I held her in my arms, and pressed her face to my neck. Her skin was smooth, astonishingly soft. It was young skin, I thought, young compared to mine, anyhow.

“What about Tom?” she asked, whispering into my neck. “It’s going to be hard for him.”

“I told him we’d get through this together.” I squeezed her hand. “And John. We’ll get through it somehow.”

“Yes. But what a mess. A funny lot, you Pooles.”

I pulled back and looked at her. I wondered if she knew George was dead. “How are you feeling now?”

“I just came back from the dead,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”

I was scared to ask it, but I had to. “Do you remember dying?”

“No. I remember the table, the anesthetic, the pain. I remember a feeling that things were going wrong. It was like losing control, like a car going off the road.” That wasn’t a metaphor that anybody would use nowadays. She pulled back a bit and looked at her own hand, flexing her fingers. “I feel as if I’ve had a close shave. As if I nearly got caught by the ocean current, or nearly fell off the cliff. My heart is thumping. You know? I feel as if I nearly died.” She stared at me, helpless, looking for guidance. “But I did die, didn’t I?”

And we were both weeping again.

But there was doubt in my heart. At first none of this had seemed real at all. Then, as we floated into the hospital here through the equally unreal experience of a Chinook flight, I guess I had just accepted the whole thing as a happy miracle. Now, though, as my head started to work again, the glow seemed to be fading, and questions began to press me.

The fact was, whatever mechanism had brought her back and whatever reason it had for doing so, since her death seventeen years of life had gone by for me, a life I had lived without her, which she had never shared. So there was a barrier between us, seventeen years deep. That thought made me cry even more.

We stayed that way, crying and hugging, until the FBI agent came to ask us hard questions about the events at Prudhoe Bay.

Drea came to Earth, to offer Alia some support. They met in a small hut near the center of the Transcendents’ community beneath the cathedral. The cabin’s walls were translucent, and if Alia looked up she could see the monumental tetrahedral arching scraping at the sky.

Leropa sat with them, a chill, motionless presence.

They had to sit on pallets; there were no chairs in this little room, and its floor was just a woven carpet scattered over the dirt. Somehow this was typical of the Transcendence, Alia thought, its ambition soaring out of this external shabbiness. She wondered now if the drabness of the worlds she had seen, the Rustball and the Dirtball, even Earth itself, had something to do with the stupendous distraction of the Transcendence: unhealthily introverted, obsessed with the past, it was not sufficiently engaged with the present — and it neglected the impoverished worlds of its human subjects.

Through the hut walls she could see others of the community, other Transcendents. They were just a bunch of very old people, making their slow and cautious way through the ancient rubble of the cathedral, trailed by their serving bots and a few human attendants. But there were patterns in the way they moved, subtle interactions. It was a kind of flocking that was a shadow of the sparkling constellations of thought she had glimpsed within the Transcendence itself. But it was a grotesquely diminished shadow.

And today the Transcendents’ movements were disturbed, edgy, as if something was troubling them.

It is doubt, Alia thought uneasily. A vast doubt embedded in the cosmic mind, folding down into the fragile bodies of these Transcendents. That is why they seem so disturbed. And perhaps I am the source of that doubt.

Drea was watching the undying, too. Boldly she asked Leropa, “Why aren’t you like them? ”

Leropa looked out of the hut at her peers. She sat with her legs crossed, in no apparent discomfort. “One thing, perhaps. I never had children.”

Alia sat forward. It was the first time Leropa had told her anything of her own past. “You didn’t? Why not?”

“Because I am undying, of course. If I had had children, I would likely have outlived some of them. Even if they bred true and were undying themselves, accident statistics dictate that some would have gone before me. We humans haven’t evolved to outlive our children. Can I not be spared that?”

Drea said, “But they would have had children of their own.”

“Yes, and then what? You feel a bond with your great-grandchildren, I’m told, or even a generation or two later. But after that the genes are diluted by a muddy tide of the semen and estrus of strangers. Occasionally in the great crowd of your descendants a chance gathering of features will remind you of you, or your children, of what once was. But mostly, whatever there was that defined you is simply washed away, like everything else in this transient universe of ours.

“And still they breed, your descendants, on and on. Soon they are so remote they don’t feel as if they have anything to do with you at all. After a thousand years their belief systems will have changed utterly. Chances are they may not even speak the same language. Your genetic contribution dilutes further, diffusing through the population like a disease. Given enough time, nothing is preserved, Alia, nothing you build, nothing you pass on, not even your genetic legacy, save only in a cold biochemical sense. How crushing that is, how desolating, how isolating! And of course, it’s all quite irrelevant.”