Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“Some peace,” I snapped. “You found Inge, you had two kids. And she left you, didn’t she? Maybe you were just as haunted by Morag as I was.”

His eyes blazed angrily. “I didn’t choose any of this, Michael. But I had to cope with it. But now Morag has returned, she hasn’t lived through any of this, she can’t understand it—”

Tom blurted, “I’ve spoken to her, too. Mom.” His voice was strained. He was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, hands neatly folded on his lap.

I hated to see him like that, to think how John and I had put him in this position — how we’d failed to protect him.

He said, “With me it’s the kid, the damn kid. My little brother who killed my mom.”

I said, “I know—”

“I always felt second best to a fetus. To the ghost of a fetus. I grew up feeling that way. I always imagined she must have loved it more than me. Because she let it take her life, right?”

“And you talked about this to Morag?”

“She doesn’t listen. Or she can’t. To her it’s yesterday,” he said. “All that stuff when the baby was born. There’s something inside her that knows I grew up, I think, that knows all that time has passed, something deep down that recognizes me. But she doesn’t know how to talk to me. She remembers me as a happy kid of eight. She asks me about my life, about Sonia, like I was still a kid at grade school. She doesn’t know anything about how I spent seventeen years trying to cope with all this. I don’t want to hurt her. It isn’t her fault. And she’s my mom. But at the same time she isn’t.” He looked at John. “Do you know what I mean? My mom coming back hasn’t helped,” Tom said emphatically. “I’m sorry, Dad. That’s the way I feel.”

He was right, I thought. It was strange: a year ago, the fondest wish you could have granted me was to have Morag back in my life. And now she was back — and it was making nobody happy. It was as if Morag was a bomb that had been dropped into the middle of our tangled, multilayered relationships.

“Look at us, the three of us. What a mess.” I stood up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Now you’ve got your implants reprogrammed you can buy us both a beer, John.”

John stood, rapped on the door, and we were let out into the town.

Drifting through the mind of the Transcendence, Alia and Leropa explored the Redemption, and how it had touched Michael Poole’s life.

“This is the Third Level of the Redemption,” Leropa said. “It is called the Restoration. It is the beginning of a new age, in which the Transcendence will assume full responsibility for the past. If you have the power of a god, you have a responsibility to use it. Can you not see the magnificence?”

To touch the past was easy for the Transcendence, Alia could see now, for it had a mastery of the finitude of the universe. If you saw correctly the chains of causality wrapping around the curve of the universe, you only had to make the slightest adjustment, and your touch would cause ripples that would wash out to the furthest future, and then around the arc of time to the deepest past, and up through the long prehistory of humanity: ripples at last focusing on one woman and her unborn child. A flawed gene which might have expressed itself this way no longer did so — and a child was born safely, a mother survived to a healthy long life. That was all that was needed.

And Morag Poole, her death averted, could walk through the walls of reality and back into the life of her astonished, still-grieving husband. Suddenly this part of Michael Poole’s life, embedded in the past and viewed many times through the lens of Alia’s Witnessing tank, was not as it had been.

It was a magnificent vision, Alia thought, as all of history, past and future, shifted and waved like a curtain in a breeze.

“We gave Michael Poole his Morag,” Leropa said. “Not a copy — she was Morag! Restored, identical in every way philosophy can identify. Morag was selected for the sake of Michael Poole. And for you, Alia… ”

But Alia had learned that nothing the Transcendence did was for her, but only ever for itself. And she knew that if you wanted to understand the Transcendence, you had to think things through, to think like the Transcendence itself.

“History was changed,” she said.

“A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way.”

“But Poole knew Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality.

He remembered her dying.”

“Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole’s loss if he isn’t aware of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. “In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been, was, terminated at a premature birth.”

“Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration.”

“But there’s a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities…” A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.

And even that wasn’t the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence’s infinite ambition. If this goes on…

Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then all of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.

It wasn’t as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if every possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might ever have lived under any contingency was to be born — and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.

“History will be meaningless,” she murmured. “The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored…”

“All wrongs righted,” Leropa declaimed. “All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!”

Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?

But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite — and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.

But getting Morag back wasn’t making Michael Poole happy.

That one hard fact cut through her chain of thought, and suddenly the bewildering madness of it all overwhelmed Alia. Suddenly she was aware of her body, a distant scrap of flesh in the shadow of a ruined cathedral, that thrashed and curled over on itself.