Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Like the child of a peacenik going to work on weapons systems,” Tom speculated. “The work might be fascinating. But you just know it’s wrong.”

So there was a deep conflict in Cushman, so far below the surface nobody was aware of it, not his family or employers — maybe not even himself.

“But the Multipliers spotted it,” John said sourly. “It seems they have become expert at rooting out people like Ben Cushman. They are predators, the feds say, feeding on emotional vulnerability.”

Tom said, “I still don’t understand what made him blow himself up.”

“I told you it was the organization,” John said. “The Multipliers. Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon, not an individual one. It’s as simple as that.”

If the authorities had decades of experience in dealing with suicide bombers, so organizations like the Multipliers had decades of expertise to draw on in turning a confused kid like Ben Cushman into somebody prepared to kill himself for a cause he probably hadn’t heard of a year before.

John said, “They draw you in gradually. They present their case as a noble cause on behalf of a community — in this case, all those disenfranchised and impoverished by the Stewardship and other global projects. They argue you step by step into more extreme positions. They show you martyrs — nothing breeds a suicide bomber like previous bombers — who are made into heroes you would want to emulate. And they praise you, they make you part of the group, they get you to aspire to a certain kind of heroism.

“And then you make a public statement, on record.” Gloomily we watched as the tiny VR Cushman, smiling confidently, mouthed his selective quotations from the Bible. “This was really the moment Cushman killed himself,” John said. “Because once he had recorded this statement of intent, there was no way he could back down. Given the psychological investment he’d made in that recording, it was actually easier for him to die rather than suffer the loss of face of not following through.”

I said, “And he did all this while working on the project he was planning to destroy.”

John shrugged. “VR links make it possible to be with your brothers, your teachers, right under the nose of your enemy. Odd how advancing technology only makes it easier for us to hurt each other…”

“OK,” I said. “But whatever this kid’s motivation, he still needed backup.”

As I had suspected it wasn’t easy to turn a Higgs-energy pod into a devastating bomb. Cushman had needed to use a tailored virus to break through the pod’s layers of protective sentience, and even then he had needed an elaborate triggering device to make the thing go bang. Cushman had been one of our best engineers, a bright kid, but there was no way he could have put this stuff together himself; he must have had support.

John wasn’t meeting my eyes. Tom looked from one to the other of us, uncertain.

I said, “And that’s where you come in. Isn’t it, John?”

He waved his hand. Cushman disappeared, and new VR images coalesced. “They found traces of DNA on bits of the bomb-making gear left behind in Cushman’s room, up in Prudhoe.” We saw faces in the display on the tabletop, faces extrapolated from the DNA traces: an embryo, a baby, a young child, a boy, growing to adulthood.

I wondered if this technology was something else that would startle Morag after her seventeen-year absence. It was now possible to take a DNA sample and compute how that genome would have expressed itself as a fully grown adult — or indeed any age you cared to choose. Thus the criminologists had been given the ability to re-create the faces of the victims or perpetrators of crimes from the slightest human trace, a fleck of spittle, a flake of skin under a fingernail.

I recognized who it was long before the reconstruction was finished: those broad features, the deep, eager eyes, the prominent teeth.

“I know him,” Tom said. “I saw him at the launch event.”

So had I. The image was of Jack Joy.

“You were his first contact,” John said to me defensively. “After he met you on the plane. He looked you up, found out what you were doing, decided it was something his destructive little band might be interested in. It’s the way they work. Opportunistic, probing, looking for a way in.”

“I didn’t know he was in the Multipliers,” I said, “or anything like them. Obviously. He told me he was in the Lethe River Swimming Club.”

Tom asked, “So how did he get through to the project?”

John sighed. “He got in through me. I’m a Swimmer, too.”

Tom just gaped.

“Jack cross-checked the Swimmer membership with EI and the hydrate project, and out popped my name, as neat as you like. Couldn’t have been easier for him. Opportunism, you see. And that was the in he needed. He called me to introduce him to the project; he was talking about the Swimmers backing it financially. I couldn’t see any harm. It was only when he actually showed up, as a VR anyhow, that I started to feel uneasy.”

“I don’t get it,” Tom said. “If this guy wanted to destroy the project, why would he put money into it?”

“As a way in,” John said. “If you invest, you’re inside; the more you invest the closer to the center you get. And once he was inside it wasn’t hard for him to find Ben Cushman, who was already being groomed by the Multipliers.

“I couldn’t see the harm in the Swimmers,” John said miserably. “There is a whole spectrum of us, Michael. It helps you cope with a difficult world; you accept things, you find a way to make a living, you get on with your life, you try to enjoy the ride. There’s a lot of humor in there, you know — black, but it makes life a bit more bearable…”

I wondered if he knew about the Last Hunters, another group in his “spectrum,” and what he would think of their expression of black humor.

“And because of this stupid indulgence of yours,” I snapped at him, “a suicide bomber got through to the heart of my project. Because of you, we nearly all got killed.”

“The FBI cleared me,” John said, still defensive.

“But the moral guilt is all yours,” I said heavily.

He looked at me for a heartbeat, as if he were going to fight back. But then he hung his head, beaten.

Tom touched my arm. “For God’s sake, Dad. Take it easy on him.”

I didn’t really want Tom to see me in this black mood. “I’ve got a lot I have to forgive John for right now, Tom. I guess I’m not big enough to do it.”

Tom sat back. “You’re talking about Mom.”

And there it was, the issue that divided and united us, out in the open.

John raised his head, and I saw true misery in his eyes. “Michael, if you want to know, if it helps you at all, I’m ripped up inside, too. And at least I told you what happened between us before—”

“Before her ghost came back to life to tell me herself? Do you think that makes it OK, what you did?”

“You have to see, Michael, that we, Morag and I, had reached a kind of settlement between us. We had decided what to do. She would have the baby, we would see how we all felt after that, and then we’d talk to you. It was all going to be OK; we would fix everything.”

A settlement, I thought: a verbal contract, a lawyer’s way of rationalizing away pain.

“But she died,” John said. “Death came down on us like a blade. After that everything changed, all the threads of our life cut short.

“And in all the time since then, I’ve had to deal with this in my head. Michael, nobody knew the truth about that pregnancy, nobody but me, once Morag was dead. I knew how much you had been hurt — and how much more you would hurt if you knew what I had done — and I couldn’t tell you. And, with time, we settled down to a new way of being in each other’s lives, you and me. That was my way of coming to peace with myself.”