Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I startled awake, spooked.

I turned over. Morag was sitting up in bed, a baggy T-shirt draped over her body. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her face lifted up. I could see her quite clearly, the smooth lines of her arms, the oval of her uplifted face, even though the only light in that pokey Deadhorse hotel room was the dial of a small alarm clock. It was as if she were bathed with light from some source I couldn’t see, a warm glow, like the glow from a hearth.

Her lips moved and her tongue flickered. She started muttering, a kind of high-pitched gabbling. It was the high-speed “speech,” full of mysterious, unfathomable complexity, that we had been able to record before.

“Light,” I snapped. The room’s lights cut on with a buzz, and the room filled with the washed-out glow of fluorescents.

Morag stopped her rocking. In the flat bright light she just looked like a woman, like Morag, unreasonably sexy in my baggy T-shirt. But I could see the way the mattress was compressed under her weight. She smiled at me. “Are you OK?”

“No,” I said. “You know how that stuff freaks me out. Shit, Morag.” I sat up, pushing a pillow behind my back, and pulled the duvet up over my chest, protectively. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not much,” she said. “We’ve been through this, Michael.” She was quite relaxed, her voice almost dreamy. She rocked gently, bathed in that light from nowhere. “I’m happy just to sit here. I like to watch you sleep.”

“Well, it bothers me.” It was true; it stopped me from sleeping. I was always aware of her watching me, no matter how silent and still she was.

She teased me. “We used to stay awake all night, once. You didn’t complain then. Remember that time in Edinburgh?” I did remember; as guests of a nuclear energy facility on the coast of the Firth of Forth we’d gotten to stay in Holyrood House, the seat of the old royals. She said, “You, me, a couple of bottles of champagne, a little baby oil—”

She said this in a seductive, silky way she had always reserved for our most intimate moments, and the memory of it turned me on immediately. “OK,” I said. “It’s as if I can smell the baby oil. But—”

But there was something wrong. She was Morag — I felt that deeply. But it was as if there were another presence in the room with us, another identity embedded in Morag. I had no idea how to express this. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were even clear to me.

And besides, at that moment I felt like shit, my eyes gritty, my throat dry, my head heavy with that overfull feeling you get when you haven’t given sleep a chance to clear it out. “I’m getting too old for this,” I said feebly.

“Then go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes, rocking gently.

I lay back and closed my eyes. In my head I sought the elusive rhythms of sleep, tried to dig up fragments of the dream state I’d been in before I woke. But I couldn’t ignore that heavy rocking, back and forth, back and forth, as the bed tipped this way and that, creaking gently.

I looked at her again. She had turned her face away, looking to the ceiling, as if seeking something I couldn’t see.

“I can hear them all the time, you know,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Voices… It’s like a river running, but just out of my sight, beyond a screen of trees, maybe. It’s always there in the background, and if I let myself hear it, it sort of washes through me. I sometimes think that if I could just push through that barrier, step through the last trees to the river—”

“What? What would you see?”

She closed her eyes, concentrating, peering inward. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I can almost understand. Like when you are at school, and you’re struggling to grasp some concept. You see it in outline, you grasp a few steps of the chain of logic. But then you drop it all, like juggling too many balls, and it all goes away. Or maybe it’s like a download.”

“A download? What are you talking about, Morag? Who is trying to download into your head?”

“I don’t know. ” She smiled faintly. “Maybe the answer is in the download itself, and I’m too dumb to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I really have no idea.”

She faced me. She held out her hands, and I took them; she was relaxed, but I could feel the strength in her fingers, the strange density of her warm flesh. “But the trouble we have has nothing to do with my dream-talking. Has it, Michael? Or even me keeping you awake.”

“It doesn’t help,” I said sincerely.

“I know.” She rubbed the backs of my hands with her thumbs. “There’s a barrier between us. Something that’s stopping us from connecting the way we used to.”

“Of course there is,” I said. “You were dead. I saw you die. You were dead for seventeen years. That can’t just be erased.” I was speaking more harshly than we had spoken before. But at that moment, under the cold hospital-like light of that dismal room, I felt too tired to care.

“We’ll get there,” she said now, unfazed. “We’ll talk through this. We have to confront the truth, that’s all. We just need time.” But as she spoke she seemed distracted again. She lifted her face to the ceiling, her eyes half-closed. And her lips began to work, her tongue to flicker like a tiny pink snake in her mouth, as she started up her strange speaking-in-tongues once more.

I felt excluded, even repelled. “Christ.” I tried to snatch my hands back. But I startled her, and she clenched her fingers. I heard the bones in my hands snap, and was screaming before the pain began.

The Deadhorse clinic was basic, but the work they needed to do on me was simple. The doctor numbed me, set the broken bones in the back of my hands, injected nanomachines to help promote the bones’ knitting together, treated the bruising, and then shoved my hands into blow-up casts, like inflatable gloves.

After that I sat in the out-patient area, waiting for Tom to come pick me up and take me back to the hotel. A clock on the wall told me it was still only five in the morning. “Shit,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Rosa. Her voice appeared before she did. Her compact body gathered out of the air, her robes so black they seemed to suck in the light. In the bright antiseptic light of the hospital she looked totally out of place. She eyed the bench beside me. “If you don’t mind I’ll stand,” she said. “The VR facilities at this hospital are limited. I wouldn’t want to alarm anybody by slipping through the chair to the floor.”

“You didn’t bring any grapes,” I said sourly.

She bent to inspect my boxing-glove hands. “Oh, dear. You have been in the wars.”

“It was fucking painful.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “Morag. It’s just she’s so strong. Her new body, whatever. She hasn’t got used to it yet. I’ve taken a few bruises before. We’re learning together, I guess. This is the first time she’s broken a bone, though.”

Rosa nodded. “The simplest test shows her strength is off the scale, for a person of her height and size. Like her mass, there is, umm, more of her than there should be.”

I looked at her reluctantly. “Do you think she’s even human?”

“I don’t know,” Rosa said. “I believe that inside she thinks she’s human, and perhaps that’s what’s most important in the end. But her body is something more than human.”

Gea’s and Rosa’s studies were bearing fruit, she said.

“Gea will give you the physics. When we draw Morag’s blood, we find human DNA. Her molecules are made of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons every bit as mundane as yours and mine. And yet there is the mystery of this extra mass. Her weight is measurable, so the mass responsive to gravity, yet it is invisible to our eyes, all our senses. Gea tells me that there are many forms of invisible matter in the universe. Perhaps Morag’s visible body is like the bright swirl of a galaxy, cradled in a wider pool of dark matter.”