Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Rosa asked again: “Who are you?”

The Morag-thing spoke, but it was a burst of that rapid-fire speech. Somehow it didn’t seem so strange coming from her mouth.

Rosa cut her off. “We can’t understand.”

The creature was still looking at me. She hesitated, then spoke more carefully. “Sorry,” she said. She pronounced every part of the word with exaggerated care: “Shh-oo-rrh-yy.”

I said, “Tell us who you are.”

“My name,” she said, “is Alia.”

Alia, the ape-thing that had been Morag, turned around slowly, those human eyes bright. She carefully put the little silver crucifix down on her seat. Then she bent down — she was very limber — and inspected the little tumbler of salt and the vial of wine beside her chair. She made no comment; maybe she thought that having salt, wine, and crucifixes around was normal for us. Then she straightened up, and studied us again.

We all just stared.

Alia stood more upright than any chimp, although her body was undeniably apelike, with a high chest, and arms as long as her legs. There was something odd about her hips, too, narrow with an odd geometry. Maybe she was like our remote ancestors, I thought, the australopithecines, the early sort not longer after they split off from the chimps.

John looked the most horrified, but then he had a lot to be horrified about. John’s world had always been a very orderly place; he’d had enough trouble getting used to the idea of ghosts and reincarnated dead wives. And now this. But even Rosa, who I had thought would never be fazed by anything, was clutching her prayer books, clearly shocked.

And Alia stared at me, as if she was as stupefied to see me in the flesh as I was her.

Suddenly Alia ran a few steps toward Sonia. We all flinched back. Tom and Sonia clutched each other.

Alia stumbled after a couple of paces and stopped. “Sorry,” she said, in that elaborate, slowed-down manner. “High gravity. Better to walk. Forgot.” She took a more cautious step, two, not very gracefully; I got the impression walking was not what she was used to.

She stood before Tom and Sonia. I was proud of them that they just stared back. She said, “Sonia Dameyer.”

Sonia was rigid.

Then she turned to Tom. “Thomas George Poole. Tom. I have seen you grow up. Variant pigmentation.” She reached out again and, to my horror, ran a fingertip down Tom’s cheek.

Tom slapped her hand away. “Back off, Planet of the Apes.”

Alia’s mouth dropped open. She looked shocked — suddenly her face looked very human, under that mask of fur. “Have I given offense?” She bowed. “I apologize. I am sure it will not be the last time I get something wrong.”

Sonia said, “What’s the problem, don’t they have white people where you come from?”

Alia thought about that. “Before the First Expansion the homogenization of culture on Earth eliminated the already minor differences between human racial groups. Skin pigment is one of the most heritable of human genetic features, and differences diluted quickly.” Her voice was getting better, I thought, her grammar a bit more precise, her tone more controlled. But this stuff about skin pigment sounded stilted, as if she was accessing some data store. She smiled brightly at Sonia, and pulled at the fur on her own face. “Some of us don’t have skin pigment at all!”

Tom asked, “What’s the ‘First Expansion’?”

“The future,” John hissed. “She’s talking about the future. I think.”

Perhaps he was right. But, I thought, if there had been a “First Expansion” there must have been a second, at least, maybe a third. In that one phrase I caught glimpses of a towering history.

Alia moved on from Sonia. When she got to the Gea robot she bent down, reached out — and picked her up. She turned the robot over and over, while Gea’s tiny wheels whirred.

I was stunned. Alia had shown she was “real,” as real as Morag had been, by handling the exorcism objects, by touching Tom’s cheek. But she seemed to be just as “real” in Gea’s VR world. Maybe they had different categories of reality, wherever she came from.

Alia put the robot down, squatted down, and faced it. “You are Gea. An artificial mind.”

Gea rolled back and forth experimentally, as if checking her wheels still worked. “You already know all about me.” Somehow Gea’s pompous B-movie-robot voice fit the situation.

“Yes, I do.”

“May we scan you?”

“Of course,” Alia said cheerfully. “In fact you already are.” She patted Gea on the head. “You are delightful. And so well crafted. We will talk later.”

Well crafted? This was one of the planet’s most advanced artificial sentiences. Alia sounded like a patronizing museumgoer admiring the artistry of a Neolithic flint hand axe.

Alia walked past John, who flinched back.

And now, at last, she came to me. She was a creature the size of a ten-year-old child, her fur shining where it lay in layers over her flesh. I could hardly read the expression in her squashed-up face, she was too alien for that. But I thought I saw warmth in her eyes.

I said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”

John snorted. “Christ, Michael. How can you joke?”

“I like your humor, Michael Poole,” Alia said. “Not that I always understood it.”

“You did?” My head was spinning; I tried to make sense of this. “You’ve, uh, studied me?”

“We say Witnessing, ” she said. “I’ve Witnessed you, Michael Poole, all of your life. All of my life.”

“Then you really are from the future,” Tom said. There was an edge to his voice. “My father is dead to you, isn’t he? He’s a fossil you dug up. You can read his whole life the way you can read a book. From birth to death. We are all dead to you —”

John touched his arm. “Tom, take it easy.”

“It isn’t like that,” Alia said. “Thomas George Poole, to Witness isn’t just to watch. It is to appreciate. To share. Michael Poole, I have shared your life, your triumphs, your woes. And now I meet you at last. It is more than an honor. It is — fulfillment.”

Rosa pursed her lips and nodded. That I was being watched by the future was one of the possibilities she had guessed at. She looked almost satisfied, the puzzle resolved.

But I felt deeply uneasy. It was more than self-consciousness. I was a bug trapped beneath a microscope slide, my whole life had been splayed open for inspection. I snapped, “And what about Morag?”

Alia’s smile faded. “I stand before you, and you ask for Morag?”

I couldn’t believe it. She sounded hurt.

Rosa spoke, for the first time since this new apparition had come to us. “Tom is right, isn’t he? That you are from the future?”

Alia turned to her. Her small face was creased, comically quizzical. “It depends what you mean. Can you rephrase the question?”

Tom asked cautiously, “Were you born on Earth?…” His nerve seemed to fail him. “Oh, hell. I can’t believe I even asked a question like that! This is like something from that old stuff you used to read, Dad, it’s a clichй—”

Sonia touched his arm. “Tom, it’s OK.”

I said, “This is difficult for all of us.” So it was. I was calmer than Tom or John, but inside I was screaming at the idiotic strangeness of the whole setup.

Tom took a breath, and tried again. “OK. So were you born on Earth?”

Alia snorted. “Do I look like I was born on Earth?… Sorry. I was born on a ship, called the Nord. ” She hesitated. At times it seemed to take her a while to find the right word, as if she was accessing some nested data store. “Umm, a starship.”