Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Alia snapped, “Leropa. Don’t do this.”

Leropa smiled thinly. “Think about your own mother, your baby brother. They died in pain, pain beyond your imagination. At least your brother, an infant, didn’t know what was happening. But your mother knew. In those last heartbeats an awareness of her approaching death, the loss of the rest of her life — the loss of you — deepened her anguish, exponentiated it far beyond the physical. But it needn’t be that way.”

Alia glared at Leropa. “You call it love, to inflict this horror upon us?”

Leropa actually seemed puzzled by her choice of words. “ Inflict ?”

Drea buried her head on her sister’s shoulder. “Make her stop, Alia. I can’t bear it.”

That shadowy woman seemed to spot the hut. She walked slowly toward it, clutching her child. She seemed confused and exhausted, as if she had been through a great trial. But through the misty translucence of the hut’s walls her features were gradually becoming clearer.

Leropa said, “Don’t you even want to say good-bye to her? Don’t you even want to say sorry? ”

“Leropa, I’m begging you.”

The woman hesitated again. She paused for a moment, looking around. She seemed to be murmuring comforting words to the child in her arms. Then she turned away and walked off, her figure diminishing and blurring, until she was gone, as if she had never existed at all.

Drea glared at Leropa through tear-streaked eyes. “You know what the trouble is? You Transcendents, with all your obsession with the past, don’t listen to people. I’ve had enough of being used. Leropa, if you Transcendents want to use the people of the past as a dumping ground for your guilt, then you ought to ask them first. You should have asked Michael Poole if he wanted his wife back!”

Leropa sighed. “What if we asked you? Alia, would you choose never to have even the possibility of seeing your mother again? You might refuse now — but how can you be sure how you will feel in ten years, or fifty, or a thousand? You will be an undying, Alia; you would have a long time to regret such a choice.

“And even if you did make the choice for yourself, would you make it on behalf of others? Your father, for example? The rest of humanity, you have never even met? You are arrogant, Alia — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing — but I don’t think even you are arrogant enough for that. So what do we do? Ask them all?” She laughed, a strange, dry sound. “Shall we take a vote?”

“Appoint a representative,” Alia said impulsively.

Leropa glared at her.

Alia quailed, but stuck to her ground. “I think my sister’s right. The Redemption is for the benefit of the Transcendence, not us. And in its quest for Redemption the Transcendence has lost sight of simple human morality.” Am I really lecturing a near-god?… “Appoint a representative to speak on behalf of the rest.”

Leropa said loftily, “Impossible. A mere human could not bargain with the Transcendence. She, he couldn’t possibly comprehend the meaning of the choice, let alone make a valid decision.”

Drea snapped, “You aren’t better than me, Leropa, you wizened old—”

“She’s right,” Alia said quickly. “Drea, this isn’t about rivalry, about one bunch of humans lording it over the rest. We’re dealing with the Transcendence. It genuinely is a higher life-form, a higher consciousness. You could no more debate with it than a flower, or a blade of grass, could argue with you.”

Drea said, “ You could.”

Alia smiled, feeling tired. “Actually I’d be in a worse position than you. I am part of the Transcendence itself — it’s true, Drea, already, even though my Election isn’t complete. I am like one neuron among the billions in your head.”

Leropa said, “A mortal creature cannot negotiate with its god. Only a Transcendence can negotiate with a Transcendence.” But she looked into Alia’s eyes.

Alia saw the answer there. “Then,” she said, “we must make the representative equivalent to the Transcendence. Just for one day.”

“Just for one day,” Leropa said slowly. “Well. Quite an ambition. But perhaps it will help resolve this crisis. But who will speak for all mankind?” She smiled coldly. “Michael Poole, perhaps?”

Oddly, that made sense to Alia. After all, Poole had been the recipient, or the victim, of Morag’s restoration. He knew what was being offered; he had lived through it.

And then there was Poole himself. After a lifetime of Witnessing Alia knew Poole as well as she knew anybody of her own time. Michael Poole was flawed but decent, a loving and courageous man who tried to cope. He was everything that had been best about the humanity of his era, she thought. “Yes. Michael Poole.”

Leropa looked surprised, as if a bluff had been called. “Then you must prepare him, Alia,” she said.

“Very well…”

A deep tremulous fear ran through Alia. What had she got herself into — and how had she got to this point? Was she, little Alia, changing the course of its destiny, and therefore reshaping the path of humanity?

But she was part of the Transcendence now, and all her doubts and questions were a necessary projection of its own inner turmoil. Maybe it would have come to this decision point by some other route, even if she had never existed. But I do exist, she thought. And I have made this happen. Me. And maybe this strange exercise really would help the Transcendence resolve its epochal confusion over the Redemption. It was a moment of defiant, quite un-Transcendent pride.

Drea stared from one to the other, her mouth slack, excluded. Alia saw she shivered with fear — of her, of her sister, as much as of the strange old undying, Leropa.

A couple of days after my talk with Rosa, we gathered in the lobby of the Deadhorse hotel, which we’d reserved for our purposes: me, my reincarnated wife, Tom and Sonia, John, Rosa, Gea. Gea had saturated our environs with counter-surveillance technology. We most assuredly did not want stories of what we were attempting that evening to leak out to the press.

We drew upright chairs into a horseshoe, and we all took our places. John’s lips were pursed, his arms folded, his opinions obvious. Sonia was wide-eyed. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking — maybe, What the hell kind of family am I attaching myself to here? The little Gea toy robot just rolled backward and forward on the floor, somehow reassuring in her absurdity. Rosa sat in her chair, or appeared to; she had a stack of leather-bound books in her lap, and she wore a surplice and a purple stole.

At the head of the horseshoe, the focus of the group, Morag just sat there, head up, eyes wide open, watching us, expressionless. She was wearing a simple dress, open at the neck, her favorite blue color; her hair was brushed back. When she moved, the chair creaked under her weight. It might have been funny if it wasn’t so strange.

Tom gazed around the room mournfully. “I cannot believe we’re doing this. Dad, do we have to be here?”

“But an exorcist doesn’t usually work alone,” Rosa said. “I would expect to work with a younger priest. Someone who could take over if I die, or am possessed. There would be a doctor, to provide medications if necessary. And there would be a family member — somebody strong, in case things get, umm, interesting.”

“This is all quackery,” John said sternly. “Mumbo jumbo.”

“It’s an ancient ritual,” Rosa said, admonishing him. “It derives from the New Testament. Christ Himself drove out demons: ‘My name is legion.’ ”

“I remember that line,” I said. “Lots of pigs got drowned, didn’t they?”