Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

They were all hard-faced, weary-looking. And they were all spattered with mud. Though I was cast an occasional glance, there was no curiosity, no welcome. I walked on through the town.

Most of the buildings were wooden-walled huts. But I saw a few rounded tents made of what looked like leather: maybe they were yurts, I wondered, as the Mongols had once built in another part of this great ocean of land. And there were buildings something like teepees, tented poles tied off at the top, walled not with skin but with brush and dried earth. Ribbons dangled from poles: prayer ribbons, I learned later, put up by people who still practiced shamanism and animism, people only a generation or so from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, and the idea that the very land is crowded with spirits. If that was so, the spirits weren’t being too propitious that day. Everything was plastered by that gray-black mud. It clung to the walls and roofs in big dollops as if it had been sprayed out of a vast hose. Even on the ground, trampled bare between the buildings, there were splashes and craters, the gray of the mud mixing with the earth’s dark brown.

The strange melted-ground subsidence had affected some of the more solid buildings. One little shack adorned with a cross, perhaps a Christian church, was leaning at a spectacular angle. The yurts and teepee structures looked more or less upright, though. I supposed that if the ground started to give way you could just roll up your home and move to somewhere a bit more stable.

I soon walked right through the township and out the other side, and found myself facing the sea. Perhaps this was a fishing village, but I saw no boats, no harbor. A few hundred meters away the coastline rose up in low sandy cliffs that looked as if they were just melting into the sea. I saw no sign of that chopper; perhaps it had passed on along the coast. The sea itself was solid gray; it looked bitterly cold. And it seemed perilously close; I could see tide marks on doorsteps and around the bases of the houses. It looked to be eating into the shoreline here, the way it was in Florida.

There was one building obviously not owned by the locals. It was a tent in camouflage green, with a Red Cross painted brightly on the canvas. Familiar from too many disaster-zone news reports, it was an ominous sight.

Somebody screamed, so loud it hurt my ears before muffling filters cut in.

A little girl was standing before me. She was just a bundle, almost lost in an oversized parka. Her face was a round, ruddy ball, streaked with tears, and she was staring at my feet. A woman came and scooped her up, glaring at me.

And as I watched the woman walk away I noticed a row of body bags on the ground, all neatly zipped up.

“Hey, you!” It was a crisp summons in an American accent, west coast perhaps.

A woman walked toward me in a space suit — or anyhow that’s what it looked like, a bright blue coverall marked with UN relief agency logos. But she had her masked hood open and pushed back from her head. She was black, late twenties maybe, a severe expression on her small face. “You shouldn’t be out here with so much exposed flesh,” she snapped at me now. “Haven’t you heard of tick-borne encephalitis? And how did you get here anyhow?”

“I’m not really here,” I said. I reached out as if to shake her hand. She responded automatically, offering me her own gloved hand; my hand passed through hers, briefly breaking up into a cloud of boxy pixels, and a protocol-violation warning pinged in my ear.

“Oh, a VR,” she said, her urgency morphing smoothly to contempt. “What are you, some kind of Bottlenecker? A ghoul, come to see the dead people?”

Her words chilled me. “I’m no disaster-tourist—”

“Then show some consideration.” She pointed to my feet.

Looking down I realized what had upset the little girl so much. I was hovering a few centimeters above the ground surface; no wonder the kid was spooked. I hastily issued system commands, and I sank down to the ground.

The soldier turned to go. Evidently she didn’t have time to waste on the likes of me.

I hurried after her. I wished I could grab her arm to get her attention. “Please,” I said. “I’m looking for my son.”

She slowed, and looked at me again. Her name was Sonia Dameyer, I read from a tag on her chest, Major Sonia Dameyer of the U.S. Army. She was a familiar sight, an American soldier dressed in a space suit in some godforsaken corner of the planet, like most of her kind nowadays devoted to rescue work and peacekeeping rather than war-fighting. “Your son was here in person, through the burp?”

“The what?… Yes, he was here. I heard he was alive, but maybe hurt, I don’t know anything else. His name is Tom Poole.”

Her eyes widened. “Tom. The hero.”

She said this gently, but it was not what you want to hear about your missing child. I was dimly aware of my body, my real body, immersed in a body-temperature fluid and mildly anesthetized, churning in the dark, as if I were having a bad dream. “Do you know where he is?”

“This way.” She turned toward that big hospital tent.

I followed. My VR steps felt very heavy.

We walked into the tent. We had to pass through a kind of bubble airlock, inflated from clear plastic. Of course I could just walk through the walls, but Dameyer lifted the flaps for me, and I followed protocol. Inside it was dark; my vision blinked and juddered. But my VR eyes responded to the changed light levels as fast as a camera aperture dilating open.

When I could see, I looked around wildly at rows of fold-out canvas beds. Med robots, clumsy gear-laden trolleys, whirred self-importantly. Most of the patients wore oxygen masks, and drips snaked into arms. I couldn’t see too many signs of traumatic injuries, no broken legs or crushed ribs. They looked like victims of a poisoning, or a gas attack, like the London underground incident in the 2020s. Not that I’m an expert on medical emergencies. The patients were all adults — and obviously not locals; this whole setup was sent in by the Western powers to tend for their own.

My vision shattered again. I shook my head, as if that was going to help. “Damn it.”

“The trouble,” came a weak voice, “is the tent. Partial Faraday cage woven into the fabric. It might be the UN but this is a military operation, Dad…”

I whirled. It was Tom, that familiar face staring up at me from a green military-issue pillow. I could barely even see him.

It was a tough moment. As a VR you can’t cry, not with the cheap software John had hired for me anyway. But I was crying, that overweight, out-of-condition body floating in a tank in downtown Miami like a baby in a womb crying its embryonic heart out. Not only that, my comms link kept crashing, so that Tom’s image would break up into planes and shadows, as if he was the one who wasn’t really there, rather than me. I tried to hug him. I closed my arms on empty air while protocol warnings pinged. How sad is that?

Tom was bound to disapprove of the way I’d come running out here after him. The logic of our father-son relationship would allow nothing less. But, in the gloom of that hospital tent, as I fumbled to make contact with him, his expression was soft — not welcoming, but at least forgiving. In his way, I thought, he was glad to see me.

After a few minutes of this farce, the doctor attending Tom ordered me out of there as I was distracting the other patients. But he took pity on us. Tom’s “dose” had been light, he said, and though Tom still needed bedrest he could leave the field hospital.

So Tom swung his legs out of his bed, and a med-bot helped him pull on his trousers and jacket.

Carrying only a light oxygen pack, with the mask loose around his neck, he limped slowly out of the tent. I longed to support him, but of course I couldn’t. Instead he allowed Major Sonia Dameyer to take his arm.