Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Irrelevant to what?”

“To the great project of immortality — of personal survival. Alia, if you choose not to die then you are doing it for you, not your descendants — because you are choosing not to clear the stage for them. ”

“So you compete with your own children.”

“You must. That is why only individuals muddled by sentimentality and doubt would choose to have children; it is contradictory to the basic goal of longevity.”

And even the impulses of the genes were served, in a sense, Alia thought. The genes strove for their own biochemical survival. If they could not be passed on to the young, then their only means of survival was in the body of their undying host. This was the final logic of immortality: an immortal must displace her own children.

If we were animals, Alia thought, we would eat our young. She said, “And you have no regret?”

Leropa looked at her scornfully. “Have you not listened? There is nothing to regret. Better to be alone than to be abandoned. No wonder all those out there are flattened by time! This is a choice you will soon have to make for yourself, Alia. To have a child is to open the door to death, for it means the dissolution of self.”

How cold, Alia thought, how selfish. So much for the love of the Transcendence.

They sat in the shabby tent, displaced in time and space, while the undying shuffled in the dirt.

We were all held for a week, in the secure but smothering confines of the hospital at Fairbanks. We weren’t even allowed out to attend the funerals of Makaay and the others — not even the state funeral of Edith Barnette, a vice president assassinated like the president she had once served.

Morag was an unresolvable problem for the authorities.

As far as they were concerned she had just appeared out of nowhere. In their endless stocktaking of orderly births and deaths her sudden appearance was as jarring an event as a disappearance would have been, the mirror-image of a murder or an abduction. Immigration also needed an explanation for her presence on American soil. And they needed to understand how it could be that she had the DNA of an American citizen seventeen years in the grave.

Shelley muttered darkly about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind. “They’re bothered about a few anomalies in records of births and deaths. But Morag appeared out of nowhere. What about the conservation of mass? Shouldn’t we all be arrested for breaking that little law?”

There was certainly nothing Morag herself could tell them. She seemed to have a reasonably complete set of memories up to the moment of her death, seventeen years before. Past that point she seemed to have some partial information — impressions, not memories. On some deep level of her mind she seemed to know that seventeen years had worn away, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. The doctors hypothesized about parallels with amnesiac cases. I doubted that was going to lead them anywhere.

The FBI seemed eventually to settle on a hypothesis that she was an illegal clone of some kind. I was happy for them to lose themselves in that fantasy; I knew there was nothing else to find. Her legal status remained a puzzle. She certainly wasn’t Morag Poole, the person who had died so long ago, not in the eyes of the law. So she was assigned an open “Jane Doe” file — “like a faceless corpse fished out of the river,” as she said herself.

Morag wasn’t given her full freedom, not for now. She was released into my custody, but even that deal took some swinging, as the authorities had decided I was somewhat flaky myself. What saved the day was a surprise intervention from Aunt Rosa, who used the authority of the Church to back me up.

Anyhow after that week, we were all “released back into the wild,” as Shelley put it — all, to my astonishment, save John. He was sent to a more secure FBI facility down at Anchorage. There were “connections” the G-men wanted to investigate further. His legal status was dubious, but I wasn’t too concerned. If anybody could look after himself in a situation like that it was John. And anyhow, I had enough spite in me to be glad that the feds were giving him a hard time; I knew it was ignoble, but I felt he deserved it.

The rest of us were asked not to leave Alaska for the time being. We all went back to Prudhoe Bay.

What a strange crew we were.

Shelley and I threw ourselves back into the work. I was guiltily glad to have a distraction from the strangeness of Morag.

Tom and Sonia agreed to come back to the project, too. Tom said he didn’t want to see the bombers win, as he had seen for himself the damage the destabilization of the undersea hydrates could do. It pleased me deeply that we were going to continue working together, even though I knew the return of Morag was bound to put us under extraordinary, unprecedented strain.

The rebuilding of the Refrigerator itself had already begun, even before Shelley and I got back to the coast. Many of the techs working on that project were very young — just like the suicide bomber, a technician himself — and a good number of them had been killed. But the deaths seemed to have welded the survivors together; there was a determination about them that “the bad guys” would not win, that we who remained would see this thing through as a memorial to those we had lost. Maybe that was a predictable reaction: we had all grown up sharing a world with terrorists, with the dreary knowledge that with every step forward you took there was somebody waiting to drag you back. But it was moving even so.

The work proceeded quickly. The network of tunnels we had already built, burrowed through cubic kilometers of the seabed, was intact save for the area beneath the rig itself. Shelley needn’t have worried about our moles; most of them still functioned, just as I had hoped. Once the signals stopped coming they just sat patiently in their tunnels, waiting for we contrary humans to figure out what we wanted to do next.

The oil rig we had used as the base of the project was wrecked beyond usefulness, however. A whole new project to dismantle it safely was soon under way, an enormous undertaking in itself. A new nitrogen liquefaction plant would be set up on a platform not far from the site of the rig, anchored to the seabed. Once that was in place and attached to our network we would start her up again, and finish the analysis of our prototype system, work we had barely begun on the fatal day of the explosion.

And after that, with our proof of concept in place, we would go cap in hand to the authorities for backing for a wider rollout. The loss of Barnette had been a huge shock, but the whole incident had raised the profile of the project, and we had every reason to hope that in the end the bombing would do us more harm than good.

As we began to move forward again, the work was pleasing. We were all helping each other recover — and we were, maybe, saving the world in the process. It was deeply satisfying and thoroughly absorbing.

In the middle of all this, I found Morag a distraction. Can you believe that?

We ate together, walked, slept together.

It was a joy, of course, to hold her, to immerse myself in her scent, her warmth, the way her hair curled against my chest — sensations my mind had forgotten but my body remembered. It was as if I was suddenly made whole again.

We didn’t have sex, though. I wasn’t sure why. My body responded to her closeness, and I thought hers did, too. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something to do with the strangeness of her new body, a density I could feel when I touched her. But the truth may have been simpler. I was seventeen years older since the last time, though she hadn’t aged at all; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her.