Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Jack Joy was leaning over to see what I was doing. Some instinct made me blank out the softscreen.

He leaned back with his pudgy hands up. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry.”

“It’s OK.”

“Work? Stuff about climate change? That’s your job?”

“No. It’s my son’s, in a way…”

I felt guilty about shutting him out like that. I told him a little about Tom’s work, and the accident.

He nodded. “Good kid. You must be proud.”

“I guess. More relieved he’s still around.”

“And now you’re boning up on global warming?”

“I kind of feel the world has targeted me, or anyhow my son.”

“I get it,” he said. He tapped his nose. “Know your enemy.”

“Not that I want the Earth to be my enemy.”

“Ah.” He waved a hand dismissively. “Neither enemy nor friend. It’s just a stage, right? A stage for us humans to strut our magnificent stuff.” He stuck out his belly as he said this.

I couldn’t help laughing at him. “I don’t know if I’d say that. The Die-back—”

“Who cares about that? You see, there I would take issue with your son. All that DNA cataloguing bullshit? Forget it! Let it happen. Let them all die off. So what?”

I couldn’t believe him. “Are you serious?”

“Of course I am.” He leaned closer, conspiratorially. “Listen to me. The Die-back has been going on for millennia. Ever since the Ice Age. First we wiped out the big mammals. In North America, the mammoths and the cave bears and the lions, pow, whole populations pop like soap bubbles when the first guy with a funny little spear wanders over from Asia. Australia the same. Asia and Africa it’s different, but there the animals evolved alongside us, and had time to get used to us.” He cackled. “I guess they learned to run fast. But now we’re working our way through them, too, and the smaller critters, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, the plants and the bugs. Whatever.”

“And you don’t think that’s a bad thing?”

“Two words,” he said. “ Morally neutral. It just happened. There have been mass extinctions before, worse than this mother will ever be. And every time, you know what? Life bounces back. An evolutionary rebound, the biologists call it.” He winked at me. “So you just have to let it fix itself, and in the meantime sit back and enjoy the view. They don’t report this stuff—”

“But it’s true,” I finished for him.

He glanced at me and grinned. “Lethe, you know me already.”

“I don’t often hear people curse like that. Lethe. ”

“You don’t? Actually there’s a scientific hypothesis called Lethe. You’ve heard of Gaia?”

“Sure.” Named for a Greek earth-goddess, Gaia was a model of the Earth’s unified systems and processes, from the rock cycle, to the exchange of gases between air and ocean, to the vast cycling of matter and energy which sustained life, and which life sustained in its turn. All this was the paradigm among biologists, and a staple in Eco 101 for everybody else.

Jack said, “ ‘Lethe’ is the opposite to Gaia. An anti-Gaia, if you will. The Warming isn’t a simple event. Everything is working together, different effects reinforcing — just like Gaia, but now the Earth has begun working to destroy itself, as opposed to sustaining itself. Ask a biologist; you’ll see.

“But you know what Lethe actually means? It’s from Greek myth. Lethe was a river in Hades, which if you drank from it, would wash away your memory. Later on it was used by Shakespeare, to mean ‘death.’ Lethal — you see. But the original meaning kind of makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Forgetfulness.”

“Exactly. So as one species after another turns to dust, Earth is losing its biotic memory: look at it that way. But we, in turn, may as well forget it all, too. I never saw a tiger, and never will, but I never saw T.

Rex either. What difference does it make that one died out thirty years ago and the other sixty-five million? Dead is dead.”

“That’s a brutal viewpoint.”

“Brutal? Realist, my friend. And a realist deals with the world as it is, and not as he wishes it to be. You just have to accept it. In the long-term, from the viewpoint of history, all of this will be seen as an adjustment. It’s just our bad luck to be living through it.” He grinned, wolfish. “Or our good luck. In the meantime, why not enjoy life? Fuck it. I mean, if it’s raining, grab a bucket.”

“So what kind of bucket do you carry?”

“Me? I deal in shit,” he said, evidently enjoying the look on my face.

If a Martian came down to Earth, he said, he might conclude that the main product of mankind was shit. Great rivers of the stuff pour out of our bodies and into the sewers of our towns and cities. In less civilized communities, we just dump it into the sea. In more enlightened places, Jack said, we stir it around and perfume it in sewage plants, and then dump it into the sea.

I could guess where this was going. “Where there’s muck there’s brass.” It was an expression of my mother’s.

Jack grinned. “I like that.” He actually wrote it down on his softscreen. “Muck and brass. But that’s what it boils down to — literally.” Jack worked for a company that sold fancy reactors that treated excrement by driving off the water that formed its bulk, and then extracting various useful hydrocarbons from the residue. “It’s an amazing technology,” he said. “I’ve a brochure you can download if you like.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s all a spin-off from space technology, those closed-loop life-support systems they use up there on the Space Station. Now here we are on Spaceship Earth using the same stuff. Inspiring, isn’t it? Fresh water is short everywhere, and just reclaiming that is often enough to justify the cost of a kit.” He winked again. “Of course we don’t advertise the fact that we’re selling your own shit back to you, but there you go.” He talked about how he sold plants small enough for an individual household, or big enough to handle a whole city block, and then he got on to payment schemes.

I wasn’t very interested, and my attention drifted off.

He glanced at me speculatively. “Here.” He gave me a card. It was black and embossed with silver: THE LETHE RIVER SWIMMING TEAM. “My contact details,” he said. “If you’re interested. It will download into your implant.”

“I don’t understand the name.”

“The Swimming Team is a group of like-minded thinkers,” he said.

“All realists?”

“Absolutely. Listen, I hand out dozens of cards like this. Hundreds. It’s the way we work. No obligation, just like minds on the other end of a comms link. If you ever feel like talking over this stuff, give me a call. Why not?” He eyed me speculatively. “Of course some take the logic a little further.”

Intrigued despite myself, I asked, “They do? Who?”

“I met a guy once, through the Swimming Team. Maybe I shouldn’t tell you his name.” He winked again. “He called himself a Last Hunter. You ever heard of them?…”

The premise turned out to be simple. A Last Hunter aimed to take out the last representative of a species: the last eagle, the last lion, the last elephant of all.

“Think of it,” Jack breathed. His voice was almost seductive. “To be the man to take down the last gorilla, a species that split from humans megayears ago. To end a ten-million-year story, by writing your name across the end of it in blood. Isn’t it a fantastic thought?”

“Are you serious? I’ve never heard anything so immoral—”

He wagged his fingers at me. “Now, let’s not start up on morality again, Mike. Illegal, I grant you. Especially if you have to sneak into a zoo to do it. You see my point, though. Even in a declining world there are ways to make money — a lot of it, if you are smart enough. And, more important, to find meaning — to define yourself.”