Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“It happens. Like the seal-men of the water-world—”

“It’s a bucolic dream. But unfortunately the universe cares little for our wishes, or our dreams.”

Mankind sprawled across the Galaxy it had conquered, speciating, variegating, gradually reunifying. But the wider universe was empty of mankind. And in those vast spaces beyond, enemies circled, ancient and implacable.

Leropa said, “We are still out on the savannah of stars. And there are ferocious beasts out there — beasts we have driven out of the Galaxy altogether — but they are still there. And they are aware of us. Indeed they have a grudge.”

“They will come back,” Alia breathed.

“It’s inevitable. It might take another million years, but they will come.”

“And you undying are planning for war…”

“Earth will endure, you know. One day even all this, even the traces of the Transcendence itself, will be nothing but another layer in Earth’s stratified layer of rocks and fossils, just another incident in a long and mostly forgotten history. But we will still be here, taking care of things.” Her face was hard, set, her dry eyes like bits of stone.

She had never seemed more alien to Alia. And yet, she knew, this grim, relentless inhumanity might in the end be the saving of mankind.

“You frighten me, Leropa.”

Leropa grinned, open-mouthed, showing teeth as black as coal. “But I think you understand why we undying are necessary. Perhaps even we are an evolutionary recourse, do you think? But you aren’t going to take your immortality pill, are you? You aren’t going to join us.”

“No,” Alia said. She had no need of endless life, to become one of these sad old people. And she had no need of Transcendence. She would embrace her own humanity with two hands — that would be enough…

She staggered. The world pivoted around Alia, as if the wind had changed, or gravity had rippled.

Drea took her arm. “Alia? Are you all right?”

Reath asked anxiously, “Is it the Transcendence?”

Leropa said, “It is nearly over.”

Drea grabbed Alia’s hands. “Then we must hurry. There is something I want to show you while I can.

Come. Skim with me. Like when we were kids, before all this. ”

“Drea, I don’t think it’s the time for—”

“Just do it!” Laughing, she Skimmed, and Alia had no choice but to follow.

She found herself suspended over the head of Reath. His upturned face shone in the light, his mouth round with shock. Leropa had turned away, uninterested, already absorbed by her own long projects. They had traveled only a fraction of the height of the great exotic-matter cathedral.

Drea was still laughing. “Again!” she cried. “Three, two, one—”

Clutching each other, the sisters Skimmed again, and again.

I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping into the sea.

I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.

The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.

Alia told me stories of the far future, of her time. Her stories come back to me in dreams.

A half a million years from now, she said, children can Skim. It’s like teleporting, I think, “beaming,” but you don’t need any equipment, any fancy flashing lights and instrument panels and stern-jawed engineers. You just do it. You just decide you don’t want to be here anymore, you would rather be over there, and there you are. Literally.

Children are born this way. Babies learn to Skim before they can walk, or crawl, or climb. Teleporting babies: imagine that. Their parents have to chase them down with butterfly nets. And the problem of droppings is awesome. But nobody minds: on Alia’s starship, people like having a sky full of babies.

Older children use their Skimming in play. These are smart post-human super-kids who can teleport; their games are elaborate, endlessly complicated. One game Alia tried to describe to me sounded like an aerial combination of football and chess.

Adolescence comes late for kids in Alia’s time; you live a long life, and you get to enjoy a very long childhood. But when the hormones do kick in, the Skimming games get sexual, morphing seamlessly into elaborate courtship chases that can thread their way from one end of the ship to the other. The older adolescents are trained up for more formal dances, endlessly complicated quantum ballets.

And then, when you finally grow up, the ability to Skim atrophies.

I got the feeling Alia was close to this age of transition, but she didn’t want to think about it. All your life distance has been irrelevant, and you have been flitting over the static crowds of lumpen adults. Now you are dragged down to join them, and you are going to be stuck in a spacetime suddenly as thick as glue, forever. What a growing-up present, like all the trials of age hitting you at once.

Sometimes I dream of writing this up, of spinning fiction out of it. I could use it as a metaphor for growing up. Or for the plight of the Transcendence, on the point of deity, and yet unable to put aside its human past. I could add to George’s ancient science fiction library. Nobody would ever know I had stolen it all.

I came out of my contact with the Transcendence shattered. Drained. It was like the bombing of the Refrigerator project, the very instant of the explosion, the world suddenly turned to chaos, the blast’s tremendous punch in the chest. It was like that moment, but going on and on.

I don’t remember much of the weeks that followed. Tom and Sonia looked after me during that time. I wasn’t so bad. I was able to get dressed, take myself to the bathroom. I even kept working, after a fashion, on the hydrate project. I have notes that prove it, though to me they read like they were written by somebody else. But I’d forget to eat, for instance. I’d forget what time it was and stay up through the night, and be startled by the dawn. That kind of thing.

It was a time when I needed my mother, I guess. But she died not long afterward, not so long after her brother, George. Ironic, one of life’s little jokes. I miss her, of course.

The family rallied around. I think there were rows between Tom and John about who should be responsible for me: “You’re his brother.” “You’re his son.” But they kept this away from me. I don’t mind; if I’d been capable of it I’d have been rowing, too. We were never again quite as close again as we were during the crisis days. Maybe it’s enough to know we’re there for each other when we need it. Funny lot, we Pooles.

I was put into therapy. Except they don’t call it therapy now but “consciousness reengineering.” I was assigned a robot companion, a cybernetic quack the size of a footstool that rolled enthusiastically around after me. A robot, but no black leather couch, no notebook, no bust of Freud. I spent a lot of time sitting alone in a room, with a VR representation of the state of my own brain, trying to explore my innermost sensations of my memories, my self. I was innately suspicious of the whole process.

John paid for all this privately. From the beginning it was John’s instinct to keep all this strangeness away from the authorities, and despite the fact that some oddities showed up on public records, like Morag’s incarnation before the bombing, we succeeded, with some subtle help, I think, from Gea. Even the conspiracy theorists with their super-powered search engines and cross-correlation machines didn’t get a sniff of me.