Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I guessed I knew far more about her Order than she could imagine. But I didn’t want her to know about George’s manuscript; he had made it clear he had never told her about it.

“Rosa, you speculated about evolutionary purposes for ghosts, how maybe they evolved to help us through bottlenecks of the past. Are you disappointed that the visitations are just” — I shrugged — “technological after all?”

She smiled. “It is never a good idea to be disappointed by the truth. And besides, maybe I did hit on a deeper meaning. Perhaps the visitations, the Witnesses, did somehow aid us through those bottleneck times, even if unwittingly. Perhaps humanity was able to survive, and grow to cover a Galaxy, precisely because the likes of Alia closed the time loops from past to future.”

“That sounds like a time paradox.”

“Alia is a traveler from the future. Her very presence here must be perturbing all our lives, already changing the future, and yet she is here even so. What can be more paradoxical than that?”

“Maybe. But that doesn’t help us much right now, does it?” I got up and paced around the room, my thinking muddy, unsatisfactory. “The whole thing seems so old-fashioned. Welcome O Visitor from the Incredi-ble Year Five Hundred Thousand!… It’s a 1940s dream.” I suppose I was thinking of George again, the heaps of decaying science fiction novels he had given me.

“Those dreams were a product of the age,” Rosa said. “The twentieth century was a time of cheap energy, of technological optimism. And so we dreamed expansive, progressive dreams. Now people turn inward. The children are taught to do so — all those introspection classes in the schools! We live in a time of constraint, when one dare not dream that things might be different, for any possibility of difference seems even worse than what we have.

“But a deeper part of us knows that something is missing. We are a species that has lived through immense calamities in the past — vast climatic upheavals, huge natural disasters, plagues and famines, the rise and fall of empires. We have been shaped by such events. Even if we don’t realize it, we yearn for the epic, the apocalyptic. And now the epic has found us. It has found you, Michael.” As always she spoke calmly, but her tone was warm.

“You think I should call her back?”

“Of course. What else is there to do? You must resolve this, Michael. But you must not be humble before her.”

“Humble?”

“She has come here for her own purposes, her own agenda, it seems. But we don’t have to accept that agenda. Perhaps even Alia has limits.

“We know so much more now than I ever imagined we would learn, when I was a child in the 1960s. And Alia, with a half million years’ advantage over us, must know far more yet. But what of the deepest issues of all? Does she know why anything exists at all, rather than nothing? Before such questions, the details of cosmological unfoldings seem rather trivial, don’t you think? And if we can pose questions she can’t answer, perhaps Alia’s people are no smarter than we are, for all their redesigned rib cages and alien symbiotes.” Her eyes glittered, hard, knowing, skeptical.

That night, alone in my room, I called her. It felt absurd to be sitting on my bed, calling the name of a creature who wouldn’t be born for half a million years until after my bones were dust, if she ever existed at all.

Yet she came. There were no special effects, no flashes or bangs or swirls of light. One instant she wasn’t there, the next she was, a part of my reality as solid as the bed in my room, the table, the chairs. She looked out of place. With her slightly stooped stance and that long crimson fur hanging from her limbs, she did look like an escaped ape. But she smiled at me.

She glanced around the room. She rubbed a cautious finger along the back of a chair, pulled it out, and tried sitting on it. But she didn’t look comfortable, with her knees tucked up and her arms dangling to the ground. So with a lithe, graceful swing, she leapt up to the tabletop and sat in a kind of lotus position.

She said, “I’ve Witnessed you all my life, but I don’t know much about your social protocol. Is it OK to sit on your table?”

I shrugged. “It’s not even my table.”

“You called me,” she said. The warmth in her voice was obvious.

“Did you think I wouldn’t?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“Would you have come anyhow?”

“No,” she said firmly. “You had to call. You have to want this.”

I wondered, Want what ? “Listen, Alia, if you’re from the future, why don’t you help us?”

“Help you? How?”

“We’re struggling to get through this Bottleneck. Our hydrate-stabilizer scheme is a lash-up; you must see that. Why don’t you give us some help — some technology guidance, maybe?”

She eyed me, and I thought I could see the true answer in her expression. Because it would be as useful as handing a laser rifle to an australopithecine. She seemed to understand tact, however. She said, “You don’t need our help, Michael. Not in that way. You’ll make it through without us. Isn’t that better?”

Maybe. But I had to ask. “This means a lot to you, Alia. Your Witnessing of me, this visitation. I can see that.”

“Yes—”

“ I mean a lot. Don’t I?”

Her eyes, in that mask of fur, were bright as stars. “I grew up with you. When I saw you, especially when you were unhappy—” She reached out a strong, long-fingered hand toward me, then drew it back. “I wanted more. I wanted to touch you. Of course I could not.”

Shit, I thought. I found myself pitying her. But if I had to be Witnessed, maybe I was lucky to have happened on somebody who was affectionate toward me. If I had found an enemy far down the corridors of time, the consequences could have been very different. Deep beneath these feelings of pity, though, I was angry, angry that my whole life had been fucked over by the carelessness of these future voyeurs.

And then Alia made it worse.

She leaned close to me. “Michael, once I was joined with your child. Your second son. In Hypostatic Union, which—”

My son who died. I felt cold. “You Witnessed him? ”

“More than that. It was closer than Witnessing. I felt what he felt. I lived his life. He didn’t suffer. He even knew joy, in his way—”

I moved sharply away from her. “Christ. What gives you the right? ”

She looked at me, shocked. “I wanted to tell you about him, to help you.” Then she dropped her gaze, humbly. “I’m sorry.”

“I… Oh, shit.” How was I supposed to cope with this stuff? “Look, I don’t mean to hurt you. I know this isn’t your fault.”

“You always wanted Morag. And that was what you always saw. And in the end she was returned to you.”

“Yes. But we weren’t happy. Perhaps it was impossible we ever could have been.”

“I was sad for you,” she said. She sounded sincere and I believed her. “But,” she said, “it was because you couldn’t be happy with Morag that I’m here now. And why I must ask you to help us.”

“Us? I don’t understand, Alia.”

“There is much I must tell you,” she said. “About the Transcendence. And Redemption…”

And as she spoke, a doorway to the ultimate destiny of mankind opened before me.

When Rosa saw the virtual record of my latest conversation with Alia, she seemed electrified.

She called us together. Once again the Pooles gathered in another Deadhorse hotel room: me, Tom, John, and Aunt Rosa projected from Seville.

This time Tom had wanted to bring Sonia, but she ducked out, for the same reason we had left her out before: “Poole family business,” she said. Somewhat to my surprise, Gea dropped out as well this time. She gave the same excuse: “Family business.” But by “family” Gea meant not just us Pooles but the human family. This was an issue for the species, and our artificial companions weren’t going to be able to help us now. A deep instinct, though, prompted me as usual to bring in at least one independent mind, in Shelley Magwood. She griped about how busy she was, but she came anyway.