Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

The great expansion that had climaxed in the Exultant victory had cleaned out or marginalized most nonhuman life-forms, leaving the Galaxy an empty stage for a new human drama. New ideologies emerged, and successor states sprouted like weeds in the rubble of empire, each of them claiming legitimacy from the collapsed Coalition. The long age of conquest had bequeathed a Galaxy well stocked with the machinery of conflict, and the wars that followed, motivated by economics and ideology, glory and ambition, consumed millennia and countless lives.

“It was not a noble age,” Reath said, “though it threw up plenty of heroes. And it was played out in the shadow of the monumental achievements of the Exultant generation. Many were afflicted with a sense of shame at what they had become. But there was always somebody else to blame for the squabbling, of course.

“And time exerted its power. We are fleeting creatures, we humans!”

The river of time flowed on, bloodied by war, thousand-year empires bubbling like spindrift. The Coalition and its works were forgotten. And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted. This was the Bifurcation of Mankind.

There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other. Some were so different that they no longer competed for the same resources — “they no longer shared the same ecological niche,” as Reath put it. But a more fundamental xenophobia fueled genocidal wars.

“So much suffering,” Alia said. “How terrible it all was.”

Reath said, “I wonder what Michael Poole would have thought of it all, if he could have looked forward. Was all his struggle worth it, merely to enable so much suffering to follow?”

“Michael Poole gave those who followed the opportunity to live their lives,” she said. “He can’t take responsibility for what they did with that opportunity.”

Reath nodded. “When your children leave home, you can’t live their lives for them. But you always worry.”

Alia wondered briefly if Reath had any children of his own. He said very little about his past — indeed she knew far more about Michael Poole, dead half a million years, than she did about the man who had come to share her life.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Ninety thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier saw only opportunity in the fragmentation of mankind. By using one human type as a weapon against another — and, somehow, by inspiring loyalty in soldiers as unlike each other as it was possible to be and yet still be called human — he built an empire. In the end he was defeated by the sheer scale of the Galaxy. One of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent.

And yet the Unifier’s project had a long-lasting impact. If only briefly he had spread a common culture across a significant fraction of the Galaxy’s geography. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that they all once shared the same warm pond.

Reath said, “Retrospectively historians call the Unifier’s brief empire the Second Integrality of Mankind — the First being the Coalition. The Unifier planted the seeds of a post-Bifurcation unity. But it took a long time before those seeds took root.”

It was ten thousand years, in fact, before mankind began to act once more with a semblance of unity. And once again that unity required a common cause.

Mankind still controlled the Galaxy. But that Galaxy was a mere puddle of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons. This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.

“An unimaginable length of time,” Reath said, shaking his head. “Why, those who concluded the war weren’t even the same species as those who started it! And yet they fought on.”

The war didn’t so much end as fizzle out. Like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena and, exhausted, fell back to its home Galaxy — though relics were left stranded to fend for themselves, far from home. The long unity of the Third Integrality was lost.

“But we didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite,” Reath said. “For now a new force began to emerge in human politics: the undying.”

Almost since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of these were engineered to be so, by humans or even by nonhumans, and others were the children of the engineered. Of course none of these were truly “immortal”; it was just that they couldn’t foresee a time when they would die. They emerged and died in their own slow generations, a subset of mankind who counted their lives in tens of millennia or more.

The hostility of mortal mankind to these undying was relentless. It pushed the undying together, uniting them for common protection — even if, often, in mutual loathing. But they were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, they were still human; if the rest of humanity were to be destroyed, it was doubtful indeed if the undying could survive long. So while their view of the world was very different from that of the mortals, the undying ones needed their short-lived cousins.

The undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition. Stability and central control was what they sought above all else. To them the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages of Bifurcation that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, the undying decided enough was enough. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, they began to act. They set about knitting the scattered scraps of mankind into a new Integrality — the Fourth — which they would call the Commonwealth.

The new Commonwealth crept across the bruised stars. It was a slow process. By Alia’s time, since the founding of the Commonwealth three hundred thousand years had worn away; it was a remarkable thought that the great project of the Fourth Integrality had already taken most of human history. But the undying were patient.

And meanwhile they began a program to share their own longevity with as many mortals as possible. Even this was dedicated to the interests of the undying themselves — for, whatever their origins among the multiple subspecies of mankind, the new undying would quickly inherit the values and concerns of those who engineered their emergence.

Reath was enthusiastic. “It’s really a wonderful vision, Alia. The undying are no elite. They are making us like themselves, giving us the gift of their own unimaginably long lives…”

But this cold calculation repelled Alia. It was as if the cold kiss of an undying transformed a mortal into one of them, causing her to become infected with their long inhuman perspectives. It was a plague of nondeath, she thought uneasily.

Reath breathed, “And they conceived of another tremendous project. At the heart of the Commonwealth the undying began to build the Transcendence. The undying dream of a new form of human life, a higher form — the betterment of us all achieved through a new unity. A dream, a wonderful dream!…”

Alia turned back to the Witnessing tank, set to a random moment in Poole’s sixth decade, a three-dimensional slice cut out of his four-dimensional life. How strange it was that she should be united in this way with Michael Poole — he at the very beginning of mankind’s great adventure, and she, perhaps, at its end. But she was not unique. In principle, the Transcendence ordered, every human child must participate in the Witnessing of the past.