Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I was starting to get rolling-eye signals from Shelley.

“I don’t know if this is helping us any,” I said to Rosa.

She nodded. “Then consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Paleontologist, theologian, Catholic mystic.”

John grunted. “A regular Swiss army knife among wackos.”

Teilhard had imagined that the goal of mankind was to cover the Earth with a new layer of mind, of consciousness, which he called a noosphere. With time the coherence of the noosphere — the organization of a kind of psychic energy — would grow, the “planetization” of mind would proceed, until at last a new plateau of integration would be reached.

“A singularity,” Tom said. “The noosphere would emerge through a singularity.”

“He didn’t use that language,” Rosa said. “But, yes, that’s the idea. So de Chardin spoke of humans becoming gods. And there have been thinkers who have imagined a different sort of transcendence for mankind, a transcendence through an escape to the stars.”

She told us about a Russian tradition of thinking, dating back to a nineteenth-century thinker called Nikolai Fedorov. He had drawn on Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a “Cosmism,” which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe. Space travel was thus a necessary evolutionary step en route to our merging with the cosmos.

Fedorov’s thinking had fed into the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “father of astronautics.” Tsiolkovsky had tried to turn Fedorov’s cosmic theology into the precepts of an engineering program: all the way to godhood with hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors. These strange, deep ideas had actually translated themselves into imperatives for the real-world Soviet space program. To Americans space was a frontier, a place you went to explore, to colonize; to the Russians, space was a place you went to grow, as a spirit and a species.

Shelley started to argue with Rosa about some of the details.

Tom got out of his chair, poured himself a fresh glass of water from the dispenser at the back of the room, and came to stand by me.

I asked him, “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know. Tsiolkovsky knew his thermodynamics better than Teilhard.”

“Yes. But maybe Teilhard was ahead of his time, too. He might have had some intuition of modern ideas of network theory, of complexity. Just as maybe all we have is intuitions of the kind of truths Alia knows — or will know…”

There was something compelling in all these old visions, I thought, these strange hybrids of theology and futurology and astronautics, of Christ and Marx and Darwin. Maybe they were products of their time, the struggles of thinkers born in an age dominated by religious thinking to cope with the great empirical shock of evolutionary theory, and the dreadful lesson of the geologists and astrophysicists that the universe was vast and indifferently old.

And maybe, just maybe, Rosa was right, that in all this muddled thinking done in the past we had discerned, dimly, the patterns of the future. Alia’s Transcendence sounded like nothing so much as a mixture of Teilhard’s noosphere and Tsiolkovsky’s Homo cosmicus, mankind projected into the stars, laced with a touch of Schelling’s evolving deity. “After all, if you aren’t aiming up, you’re heading down, for extinction. And if you do aim up, what limit is there but the sky itself — what limit but infinity?”

“Dad?” Tom sounded vaguely concerned.

I hadn’t realized I had said some of that out loud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”

He shrugged, turned away, and sat down. He was under control, his emotions unreadable. But I had drifted away from him. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him again.

John was interrogating Rosa. “All this antique fluff doesn’t matter a damn,” he said. “Let’s cut to the chase. We’re talking about what an advanced culture, an advanced superhuman mind, might want. What does this Transcendence want with Michael?”

Rosa said, “I believe that’s where Alia’s second key word comes in. Redemption. ”

John said, “Another oppressive old Christian concept.”

“It’s an old idea, certainly,” Rosa said. “But oppressive? That depends on the theologian you follow.”

In Christian theology mankind had become distanced from God by our primordial sin, the sin of Adam. “And so we need redemption,” Rosa said. “The goal of which is atonement — which means, literally, to make as one, to unite us once more with God. And that, some would say, was the purpose of the life of Jesus Christ.”

From the moment Christ died, it seems, His followers have been debating what exactly His death was for. Why did Christ have to die? If it was to achieve atonement with God, then how, exactly?

The earliest theories, dating from the first fathers of the Church, were crude. Perhaps Jesus was a sacrifice — and after all in His time Jewish temple rituals had been big on sacrifices. Maybe Jesus was a kind of bait to trap the devil, a triumphant moment in God’s long war against Satan. Or maybe Christ was even a kind of ransom payment for our sins, paid not to God, but to the devil.

In the eleventh century Saint Anselm had come up with a more sophisticated idea. It was called “substitutionary atonement,” Rosa said. We still owed a ransom, but now the debt was to God, a “satisfaction” for the great insult of our sins. But the trouble was we were too lowly even to be worthy to apologize. So God recast Himself into human form. Christ was a kind of ambassador for mankind — a “substitute” for our lowly selves — and, being God Himself, He was able to deal with God as a kind of equal.

I think we all bristled. John said, “It sounds feudal to me.”

By the time we reached the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a new mood, a notion that humans could better themselves by our own efforts — and therefore we ought to live in a universe where that is possible. Now Jesus’ sacrifice was not any kind of ransom or payment; it was an example to all of us of how we could grow closer to God, through love and self-sacrifice. “Exemplary atonement,” Rosa called this one.

“So we’re no longer in debt,” Shelley groused. “Now we’re just too dumb to see what we ought to be doing.”

John asked, curious, “And what do you believe, Rosa?”

She considered. “I don’t believe the purpose of Jesus’ life was to be any sort of sacrificial lamb,” she said. “The true legacy of His life is His message, His words. But historically the more sophisticated theories of atonement certainly completed Saint Paul’s great project of turning the cross from a symbol of horror to an icon of love.”

“Quite a trick,” John murmured.

I said, “And you think somewhere in this there is a lesson for us, for me, in dealing with Alia’s Transcendence.”

“There may be,” Rosa said. She leaned forward, gazing at me, and I realized she was coming to what she had called us together to say. “I have tried to interpret what Alia said to you, Michael. And I have come to believe that the network of linked human minds she describes has not yet passed through its singularity. It is on the cusp of Transcendence. For now, they are still human, or as human as Alia is. But soon they must shed their humanity. And they know that with godhead will come remoteness.”

“Ah,” Shelley said. “So we aren’t falling away from God. God is receding from us.”

“So that’s it,” Tom said. “The Transcendence can’t bear the coming separation from humanity.”

“Not with unfinished business hanging over it, no,” Rosa said. “It is remorseful, perhaps. Regretful. Who knows?”