Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Anyhow when this all unravels the Pooles are going to be rich. We’ve always been engineers, we’ve always been meddlers, and now we will have money, and money means the power to do things. I guess my own race is run. But I wonder what the Pooles will do with all that power in the future.

Sometimes I think all our adventures, we Pooles, are to do with a quest for God. Rosa’s Coalescence, if George’s analysis was right, was certainly superhuman, but no god, nothing but a mindless multiplication. Alia hinted that at mankind’s peak we went to war at the center of the Galaxy, and what we found there was very strange, unimaginably ancient, and powerful. So that generation found God, and, exultantly, used Him as a weapon. And in Alia’s time, we looked for God in the last place He might be hiding — deep within ourselves. But He wasn’t there either.

As for me, I’ve returned to my work on the interstellar-probe application of the Higgs technology.

You’d think that my exposure to the future might have crushed my confidence in what we can achieve. Alia, after all, was born on a starship, a ship that had been cruising for half a million years. How can my trivial little unmanned probe, a one-shot water rocket, compare to that? But I don’t feel like that at all. This is what I can build, this is what I can contribute. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without me.

I love it. I feel like I’m playing. I feel as if I’m a kid on the beach once more, ten years old, throwing Frisbees with uncle George.

Suddenly, though, the starship study has become a lot more urgent. NASA engineers have been poring over our results, and there is talk of some serious money being pumped our way. The motive is clear. The Kuiper Anomaly has vanished.

That strange, tetrahedral object drifting among the dead comets and ice moons of the outer solar system, only discovered within my own lifetime, has suddenly disappeared. There’s not a trace of its passage; it just went. And so people want to find a way to get out there, to find out what the hell is happening. It’s ironic that the probe’s disappearance has created more interest and alarm than its presence ever did. But while the Anomaly was evidence that there had once been other minds, its removal is proof that those minds are still acting.

I know, as very few others do, that the true purpose of the Kuiper Anomaly was to mediate the linking of the future with the past; it was the channel through which the Transcendent generation was able to reach us — reach me. When the Transcendence collapsed, its great projects abandoned, the construction and launch of the probe in their future was aborted — and so it never reached our past.

I think reality has changed. I think the probe never existed, and I don’t think that exploring astronauts are going to find any trace that anything was ever out there at all. Of course that begs the question of how come I remember the thing, how come there are libraries full of forty years’ worth of space-telescopic records of its presence. I try not to think about that.

I’m glad it’s gone, though. The Kuiper Anomaly was a physical mani-festation of the meddling of the Transcendents in our time. The more I think about the vast scope of their ambition, the more I resent their galling instrumentalism. Maybe I have more of Tom in me than I imagine.

But we have options.

Think about it. They are up there in the far future, off in the highest branches of a great tree. But we are at the tree’s roots. And if we cut off the tree at the trunk, the highest branch will come crashing to the ground. If nobody was to have another child ever again, for instance, then not one of the Transcendents could ever be born. There are no doubt less drastic ways to fight a war with the future.

I’m not advocating any of this. But perhaps we should wargame options.

If the future ever attacks us again, we should fight back.

Today is January 1st, 2048. The digital millennium has come and gone, and all those date registers in all those antique processors have absorbed the extra binary digit without so much as a squeak; there is no news of any problems anywhere. Another disaster averted. Happy New Year.

Sometimes, however, I despair.

I look around at the world, I follow the news, and I count up all we’ve lost even in my own lifetime. And I know, from my contact with Alia, that Earth’s ecology won’t recover from the tremendous shock we have inflicted, not even in half a million years.

Once I tried to express all this to Gea. She told me to go outside, to the scrap of garden I share with the other tenants of this block, and to find an old piece of rotten log. I did as she asked. I found a chunk of crumbling wood, and turned it over. Roots and strands of fungi pulled apart, as if the ground didn’t want to let it go, and a damp, cold, musty smell rose up from the thick dark earth that had been hidden beneath.

There was a whole shadowy world in there. A spider, her belly heavy with a white silk egg case, scuttled away to the shade. Millipedes coiled up into tight little spiral. A centipede squirted its slow way through a heap of bark fragments. But these naked-eye critters were the megafauna of Log-world. Following Gea’s advice, I hacked off a chunk of the log with a knife, shook it out over a white handkerchief spread on the ground, and examined what fell out with a magnifying glass. I saw worms and mites and a dozen other sorts of creatures, wildly diverse in their body plans, all crawling around on my handkerchief. And even that wasn’t the end of it. Gea showed me magnified images of droplets of water, each one just swarming with billions of bacteria. The deeper you dig down the more tiny ecologies just keep popping up.

OK, we humans have made a mess of the biosphere at some levels. But the big, visible living things up here on Earth’s surface are only a scraping of the planet’s true cargo of life. Nothing we can ever do is going to make much of a dent in that crude, overwhelming fact.

Such reflections are humbling. But they also comfort me. We shouldn’t feel so bad about ourselves. We’re just animals in an ecology, too. Gea says she is trying to promote this kind of “microaesthetic,” to help us humans get a sense of perspective about themselves. Vander was right; she does care about us.

Gea is a surprisingly good companion. She is smarter than me after all, and she will, with any luck, live forever. Also the way she rolls about on my tabletop shooting sparks from her belly makes me laugh.

So here I am. I listen to the sea lapping at the bottom of my avenue, and the laughter of children, and I watch the sunlight dapple on the drowned roads, and I dream of starships. Things could have turned out a lot worse for me, I guess.

But I’ll always miss Morag.

Alia found herself perched on a small platform, right at the apex of the cathedral’s mighty tetrahedral skeleton. The three great pylons of the frame swept away beneath her to touch the rust-red ground of Earth. Beneath the frame the undying community huddled in the ruined domes of Conurbation 11729.

The air was cold, and a stiff breeze blew. The platform’s material shone brighter than daylight, and it underlit Drea’s face as the sisters clutched at each other, exhilarated by the Skimming.

“Drea — what are we doing here?”

Drea stepped aside with a flourish to reveal a blocky artifact. “We’re here for this,” she said. It was Alia’s Witnessing tank, her most precious relic of childhood. “Look.”

Within the tank Michael Poole, a figurine no taller than Alia’s hand, sat quietly in a chair. From a window a warm light reflected from sun-dappled water poured into his room. Drea said, “When the Transcendence shuts down the Witnessing tanks won’t work anymore.”