Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“OK,” I said. “But things may be a little more complicated than that.”

I was thinking of my visitations by Morag.

I felt an impulse to tell her, to confess. I still hadn’t even told John about it. But I was starting to think I ought to open up to somebody about it. But, as well as I knew Shelley, I had no idea what her reaction would be. I guess I was afraid of losing her.

Maybe she intuited some of my confusion, if not the reason for it. She leaned forward. “Focus on Tom,” she said. “The project doesn’t need you right now. But he does.”

I nodded. The moment passed, and my secret stayed intact a little longer.

During their long interstellar jaunts in the monastic silence of his ship, Reath encouraged Alia to study the history of mankind. “If you don’t know where you’ve come from,” he would say, “you certainly don’t know where you’re going.”

And in this study, as he had been throughout her life, it was the small, dark, unhappy form of Michael Poole that was her companion, and her anchor point.

Humanity was thought to be some six hundred thousand years old, six hundred thousand years since the root stock had diverged from still more primitive forms. For the first hundred thousand years, mankind was confined to Earth — a period that had actually ended in Michael Poole’s own lifetime. This era was a lengthy and mostly uninteresting saga of a groping toward rationality and material command, amid endless wars.

“The most interesting thing about mankind in this long Earthbound period is its fragility,” Reath said. “Think about it. Humanity was confined to one rocky world in a remote corner of the Galaxy — indeed, imprisoned in a membrane of water and organics smeared over the planet’s surface. Up to Michael Poole’s time, that was all the life anybody knew about in the whole universe! Why, the slightest disturbance could have wiped us out — destroyed mankind before we got started — and that would have been that.”

The terrible contingency made Alia shudder. “Poole’s generation referred to his time as the Bottleneck.”

“They were right,” Reath said. “But it wasn’t the only age of crisis. There were several points in human history where things went badly wrong. Seventy thousand years before Michael Poole’s time there was an immense volcanic eruption that disrupted the planet’s climatic systems. Even earlier, while mankind was still just a species of upright apes among many others, a plague cut the rootstock down to a few dozen. Mankind reduced to just fifty or so! — think of it. You can see traces of such times in our genetic legacy even now, traces of a dreadful simplifying. The major difference with the Poole Bottleneck was that this was the first anthropogenic crisis — the first caused directly by the actions of mankind.

“It’s no great surprise that as Witnesses we are drawn to bottlenecks. They are the times of maximum danger for mankind, maximum drama — and yet of maximum flux and opportunity.”

Alia stared at Michael Poole, his troubled face trapped in stillness inside her Witnessing tank. In this incident Poole was outdoors, in a strange landscape. In hot dense sunlight, he was climbing over a vast heap of wreckage, of smashed and abandoned machines. “Here he is aged fifty-two,” she said. “He is entering the most critical time of his life.”

“He looks troubled.”

“He often does,” she said wryly. “Poole knew the dangers of his age very well. Most educated people of the time did, I think. But after the danger his son encountered, Poole came to grasp the implications better than most. He worked on a geoengineering project after all.”

“And he was a Poole,” Reath said, somewhat reverently.

“But they were all so limited — all the people of his time, even Poole himself. The best you can say about them is that they were beginning to understand how little they did know.”

“And is it the problems of the Earth that are depressing him so?”

“More than that,” she said. “His own work isn’t going well. And it is a difficult time in his personal life…” She skimmed the projection back and forth; Poole stayed steady at the center of the flickering images while people appeared and imploded around him.

When she was young Alia had focused her Witnessing on the more accessible moments of Poole’s life: his joyous childhood, his discovery of love as a young man. With Reath’s gentle coaxing she had been trying to concentrate on this period, the most difficult time of his life — Poole’s own Bottleneck, perhaps.

But it was very hard for her to get into the head of a fifty-two-year-old man from the middle of the twenty-first century. Everything about his life was so different. Her fifties would be the start of her young adulthood, a time of opportunity and growing command over her destiny. For Poole, more than half his life — and the more productive, enjoyable part — had already gone. He was rapidly running out of future.

Sometimes, when she studied Poole, all she seemed to see was his smallness. He was a dark, unhappy creature, shut in on himself, trapped in a world so impoverished of stimulus and capability it was a wonder people didn’t simply die of boredom and frustration. “He knows so little,” she said. “He will die knowing so little. He suffers so much. And yet he will shape history.”

Reath touched her shoulder. “This is just as Witnessing is meant to be. As you come to understand the life of another embedded in the past, you come to understand yourself better.

“But you must try to keep a sense of perspective, Alia. Mankind did pass through this terrible Bottleneck. And the future of this limited little species was remarkable indeed…”

After its long Earthbound prologue, mankind erupted off the planet, “like a flock of birds lifting from a tree,” said Reath.

There followed a wave of exploration, colonization, and conquest, in which Michael Poole’s descendants played a significant part. But after the startling discovery of a Galaxy full of alien cultures, many of them ancient and malevolent, it was a wave of expansion that was pushed back several times. Once that reverse reached all the way back to Earth itself.

With the alien occupation of Earth overthrown, mankind re-emerged strong, united, focused — pathologically so, perhaps, Reath said. The government of the time, the most powerful central authority ever to emerge in human history, was known as the Coalition. A new expansion, a froth of war, conquest, and assimilation, swept across the face of the Galaxy. It took twenty-five thousand years, but at last the center of the Galaxy itself lay in human hands, and legends of the victorious warriors, the “Exultant generation,” resonated down the ages that followed.

Alia said, “ ‘Pathological’? That’s a strange word to choose.”

“But it was a pathology, of a sort,” Reath said. “Think about it. The Coalition controlled mankind for twenty-five thousand years! That’s a period that was comparable to the age of the species itself, at the time. For all that time the Coalition controlled culture, politics — even the genetic destiny of mankind. The soldiers who finally broke into the Galaxy’s Core were as human as Michael Poole, save for some superficialities. It was unnatural, Alia! That’s why I say it was pathological. A kind of madness gripped mankind, as we became defined solely by the war.”

“But it was a successful madness.”

“Oh, yes!”

When the war was won, the center could no longer control a Galactic mankind. Reath said darkly, “It was as if a truce had been called among humans, for the purposes of the war against the aliens. But with the Galaxy won history resumed — history of the usual bloody sort.”