Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

We all knew why we were there. They had all heard Alia’s strange invitation to me, recorded by the hotel’s security systems and by monitors Gea had left with me. We played it through again. The record was hard for me to listen to over again, however, in that room, with us all sitting around a scuffed tabletop, with cups of coffee and bottles of water and softscreens before us, common sense cut in.

As she listened Rosa’s small body was hunched, her eyes glittering. Her hungry intensity scared me.

“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said abruptly, unable to bear the mood. “It’s a cold Alaskan day. A Monday. This morning I ate Cheerios and drank coffee and watched football highlights. Out there people are taking their kids to school and putting in the laundry and going to work. And here we are talking about how we’re going to deal with the far future of mankind. Are we all just crazy?”

John grunted. “What do you mean, we? It’s you who’s being subpoenaed by the ape-people, as far as I can make out.”

Shelley was tapping at a softscreen on the tabletop. She murmured, “Nobody’s crazy. I saw the records Gea has been making, and her analysis of Alia, the chimp-thing. I don’t know what the hell is happening here. But this is real.”

“OK,” said Tom. “But even if you buy all that stuff, now we have to go one jump further. We have to believe that this — Transcendence, this mish-mash of superbrains — wants my dad to save them. My dad, sitting there like a barrel of goose fat, is going off to the far future to save mankind.”

“Nicely put, son,” I said.

“It’s another clichй, Dad. Like those old stories you used to read me as a kid. The decadent humans of the far future need our primitive vigor to save them.”

“You enjoyed that stuff at the time,” I said defensively.

“Yes, but as stories. Not as a career move.”

Rosa, dark, intense, solemn, said, “Shelley is right. We all saw Morag — so did the world. And we Pooles all saw Alia. Our best strategy is to assume that everything we have been told is real. Suppose, then, that Alia is telling the truth. Suppose that all of human history, folded back on itself, really is funneling through this moment, into the conscience of one man, of Michael Poole. Suppose it is true! The question then is, what must we do about it?”

John surprised me by being constructive.

“In my business the key to success is to work out what the other guy really wants — your client, your legal opponent, the jury, even the judge. You may not be planning to give him what he wants, but if you know it you have a chance of manipulating him. So I think we have to consider what this ‘Transcendence’ of Alia’s, this vastly advanced composite entity, might want. ”

Shelley was scanning through material on her softscreen. “That’s not so easy to answer. Since Michael asked me to join in with this, I’ve been digging up old references on how we thought far-future beings, or maybe advanced aliens, would behave, what they would do. And you know what? All we ever did, it seems to me, was to project ourselves up into the sky.

“Look at this stuff.” She displayed some tabletop VRs for us. “Here you have Dyson spheres, cultures taking apart worlds to enclose their suns and so trapping every bit of energy. And for what? Living space, uncountable trillions of square kilometers of elbow room. This isn’t the future,” Shelley said, “not any kind of future. These are the concerns of the mid-twentieth century, energy supplies, demographics, population explosions, painted over the sky. And all Dyson was talking about was the infrastructure of a civilization. He didn’t seem to have much to say about what an advanced culture would do with all its power.”

Tom nodded. “Except to fill up the Galaxy with endless copies of its own kind. Just as we do.”

Rosa said, “But there are other precedents in our intellectual history of attempts to analyze the motives of more-than-human minds.”

John pulled a face. “I have a feeling you’re going to get all theological again.”

Rosa smiled, aloof. “Isn’t that why I’m here? There can be no more superior intelligence than God’s. What is Christian theology but a two-thousand-year-old quest to read His Mind — what is all our devotion but an effort to understand His desires and to act accordingly?

“Believe me, the universe Alia comes from, a universe that may soon be dominated by a superior consciousness, really isn’t so different from the universe imagined by Christians. For example the old Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism. Russell said he would ask God why he should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor.”

“And we want to break the silence,” Shelley said.

“Yes. We long to talk to the aliens, as we have always longed to talk to God.”

John glared at her. “I can’t make you out, Aunt Rosa. You’re a priest, but you seem to put the subject matter of your own faith into the same box as wacko UFO stuff. I can’t tell what you really believe.”

She wasn’t fazed. “I didn’t have to check in my cerebral cortex at the door of the seminary, John. It’s possible to have a mind, to be able to think, and to have faith. And even if the premises of my religion, of all our religions, have been wrong, perhaps all our thinking about God has served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.”

“Even if they are our own future selves,” Shelley said, her voice small.

Rosa said now, “I believe that everything about this strange situation is summed up in the two key words Alia used in her pitch to Michael: Redemption, and Transcendence.”

Transcendence: what could it possibly mean?

Rosa said, “It’s a word that has various definitions in philosophy. But Kant’s notions have the ring of prophecy, I think. Transcendent: beyond the sphere of human knowledge or experience, above and independent of humanity, indeed independent of the material universe itself.”

Shelley said, “Alia told Michael she has been drawn into this Transcendence, that she has had some kind of direct experience of it. But when she comes out of it, she can only remember fragments.”

Like memories of a dream, she had said to me, fleeting, elusive, evapo-rating even as you turn the warmth of your attention on them. And we knew that everything Alia said to us had been translated, and vastly simplified.

Rosa said, “Yes. Through what Alia had to say to us we can only glimpse, barely, the vaster concepts of the Transcendence itself. But it’s all we have. From Alia’s hints it certainly sounds as if the Transcendence will have many of the attributes we traditionally ascribe to our gods. But it is arising from humanity; it has embarked on a journey whose final end, perhaps, isn’t clear even to it. And so it is an evolving god.”

She talked of a nineteenth-century German philosopher called Schelling, who had been responsible for the introduction into philosophy of “evolutionary metaphysics.” What if God can grow, can change? And if so, what must He change into?

John said, “I thought God is eternal, and hence unchanging, as measured by our petty notions of time. How can an eternal God evolve from anything into anything else?”

But old Schelling, it seemed, had had an answer to that. His God was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega state was in some sense contained within the Alpha. The only difference was in the expression of that potential. Rosa spoke of the unevolved God as deus implicitus, and His final state as deus explicitus; the two states were different expressions of the same identity. “Schelling imagined that the universe evolves along with its god. In its final state the cosmos will be fully realized, every potential fulfilled — and it will be at one with its god. It is as if God realizes His own true potential through the vast self-expression of the universe. Perhaps these ideas foreshadow the entelechy of the Transcendence Alia described to Michael…”