Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

She was taken aback; he rarely snapped at her.

“Think it through,” he said. “Suppose it were true. How would you feel? ”

To know you would certainly die one day was one thing. To know that there was at least a chance that you might live on and on and on, without limit, would change everything. How would she feel? “Different.”

“How? What about other people? You’ve just had an almighty row with your family. Would you feel differently about that if you thought that you might face millennia more of life?”

“I wouldn’t have had the row at all,” she said immediately. If her mother were to die before they could be reconciled, Alia would always regret it. And if she lived for tens of millennia or more, that regret would burn away at her soul, irresolvable. “It would drive me crazy, in the end. If I knew I was not going to die I’d try not to do anything I might have to regret forever.”

“You’d become cautious.”

“I wouldn’t make enemies. And I wouldn’t hurt my friends.” But I might not even make friends, she thought, if I knew I might be stuck with them forever — or, worse still, outlive them.

Reath was watching her, as if trying to follow her thoughts. “What else? I know you are a Skimmer. I envy you that! But the real excitement of Skimming comes from the risk, doesn’t it? Now, as things stand, if you were to have an accident, if you managed to kill yourself, you would be giving up a few centuries of life. But what if you were risking millennia — an indefinite future?”

She snorted. “I’d have so much more to lose. You don’t think about that consciously when you Skim, but — if I took your pill I’d never leave my room!”

“Suppose your sister was here with us now, and she fell into the sea. Would you try to rescue her?”

“Yes.”

“You’d risk your own life to save hers?”

“Yes!”

“Even at the cost of a hundred thousand years of existence?”

“I…” She shook her head.

“How do you think other people would feel about you?”

“They would hate me,” she said immediately. “They would envy me — turn against me.”

“For your long life? Even if they knew that your longevity was for a purpose, for their own betterment?”

“Even so. Nobody would see past the fact that I would live on when they were dust. I would think like that. I would have to hide…” She shook her head. “Some gift it would be! I’d be paralyzed by the thought of all that future. I’d have to hide away.”

“I think you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “To be given Indefinite Longevity, to be released from a finite life span, is a step change, like ice turning to water, a total transformation. And you would have to find a way to act, to contribute to the human world, to make a difference, even though this great weight of time was hanging over you.”

“Why must I act?”

“Because longevity is necessary for the greatest projects of all. A human life is just too short to accrue true wisdom. By the time you’ve figured out how things work, you’re aging, losing your faculties, dying.”

“But Michael Poole lived less than a century.”

“True. It’s amazing those poor archaics achieved as much as they did!”

“Reath, if I were to become a Transcendent, what about my family?”

“They couldn’t follow you,” he said gently.

She would be alone, she thought, left stranded by time. One by one her family and friends would turn to dust — even Drea, even her new kid brother. Could she live with that? Only by shutting herself off, by closing down her heart. How could she possibly choose such a path?

“Reath, you said I might discover wisdom within me. I’m not wise at all. I haven’t lived long enough. Ask my mother how wise I am!”

“Your age isn’t the point. If you know you are undying, it’s not your past that gives you wisdom. It is your future — or your awareness of it. And I think you are already starting to acquire some of that awareness. You don’t have to choose now,” he said gently. “We’re only at the beginning, you and I, of our exploration.”

“Reath—” She hesitated. “Are you a Transcendent?”

“Me?” He laughed, brusquely, but he turned away.

An alarm chimed. “Oh!” Reath said. “They’re arriving at last.”

They hurried from the flitter.

At first she could see nothing but the clamor of the waves as they swelled and subsided. But then she saw a sleek shape, pale white, passing just under the surface of the water. Another followed, coming up from the darker depths, and a third, skimming like the first around the platform.

Soon there were a dozen of the creatures, perhaps more. Some of them were smaller — children, perhaps, calves with their parents. They were streamlined and coated with a thick fur; they moved with grace and startling speed. And they swarmed past and over each other, moving with an awareness of each other that seemed uncanny.

Reath peered down, smiling. He was clearly enjoying the sight.

But Alia was ship-born; living things didn’t interest her much. “Very pretty,” she said. “So what? Where are the people?”

He looked at her, raising his eyebrows. “You must learn to see, Alia.”

One of the creatures broke away from the pack and came swimming toward the surface. Now she could see that it had four stubby limbs — four limbs as she had, though these were fins. At the end of each fin was a kind of paddle, webbed with five stubby extensions, perhaps the relics of fingers and toes.

She got the point. That there were four limbs, not two or six or eight, was a clue. A tetrapodal body plan was a hallmark of Earth life, an accidental arrangement that had been settled on early in the development of animals there — including the ancestors of humans — and had been stuck to ever since, even as most of those animals either went extinct or scattered across the Galaxy. But it didn’t have to be that way; six or eight or twelve limbs would have been just as effective. A four-limbed body was a signature: I am from Earth.

The creature broke the surface and lifted its head out of the water. It had a face, with a stubby, smoothed-over nose, and a mouth that gulped at the air. And though its brain pan was flat it had a smooth forehead, a distinct brow — and two eyes, sharp blue, that met her gaze. She felt a powerful shock of recognition, something deep and ancient that joined her to this animal. But those eyes were blank, empty.

The creature broke the brief contact, and dived back beneath the waves and out of sight.

“Remarkable,” Reath murmured. “But now you see why I was evasive about this world’s name…”

“They are human,” she said.

“Well, their ancestors were — and so are these, in the terms the Commonwealth recognizes.

“Their ancestors came here, long ago, at the time of the Bifurcation. They tried to settle. They built rafts, ganged together. They trained their children to fish for the native life-forms — they must have engineered their digestive systems to enable them to eat the fish and crab and eel analogues to be found here.” He shook his head. “But the children and grandchildren took to the water, more and more. The rafts couldn’t be maintained, not in the very long run, for there was no raw material to fix them, and no will to do so either. Soon the ocean closed over the rafts’ last remnants. But the people remained, and their children.”

“And they lost their minds.”

“Well, why not? Alia, big brains are expensive to maintain. If you have an unchanging environment, like this endless ocean, you don’t need to do much thinking. Far better to spend your energy on swimming faster, or diving deeper. A big head would be good for nothing but creating drag! And the adaptation worked.” He stared out. “This ocean could drown ten Earths. There’s no limit to how many of these critters there might be out there. There is room for billions, trillions! Perhaps some of them have adapted further — to go without air, to reach greater depths, even to reach the ice of the sea bed.”