Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I had the feeling he was offering me something. But what? A finger or an ear chopped from the carcass of the last silverback gorilla? I found him overwhelming, disgusting — fascinating.

To my relief a hovering bot approached bearing food and drink, and I had an excuse to switch off. Jack Joy pulled off handfuls of sandwiches and began to feed.

To introduce her to the next Implication, of Unmediated Communication, Reath brought Alia to a new world.

As Reath’s ship slid into orbit, Alia peered down reluctantly. Orbiting a fat yellow star buried deep in the rich tangle of the Sagittarius Arm, this was a rust-brown ball surrounded by an extravagant flock of moons. It was an unprepossessing sight, even for a planet. The air was dense and thick and laden with fat gray clouds; it was like looking into a murky pond. The land was rust-colored and all but featureless, the only “mountains” worn stubs, the valleys the meandering tracks of sluggish rivers. There were oceans but so shallow that the world’s predominant ruddy color showed through. And there were still more peculiar landscapes, such as huge circles of some glassy, glinting material.

There was life, though. It showed up in patches of gray-green flung across the face of the crimson deserts — managed life, as you could see by its sharp edges, and the neat bright blue circles and ellipses of reservoirs. Alia made out the grayish bubbling of urban developments around these agricultural sites.

The planet had a catalog number, assigned to it on its rediscovery by the Commonwealth. And it had a name: Case, a blunt title that, it was said, dated back to the days before the Exultants’ victory, when this place, close to the outer edge of the spiral arm, had been a significant war zone. Alia wondered vaguely if “Case” had been a hero of that forgotten war. But, Reath said, the locals didn’t use either the official name or the catalog number; they just called their world, reasonably enough, the “Rustball.”

As they orbited, Reath patiently taught her to read this planet.

The thick air, and the worn, low mountains, were symptoms of high gravity, he said: though this world was only a little larger than Earth, its surface gravity was much higher than standard, and so it must be denser. And that rust color was the color of iron oxides — literally rust.

If the world looked old, so it was. The Galaxy, mother of the stars, was at its most fecund before Earth’s sun was even formed. So humans moving out from Earth had found themselves in a sky full of old worlds, like children tiptoeing through the dusty rooms of a dilapidated mansion.

As for those glassy plains, said Reath, they were not strange geological features but the relics of war, a bloody tide that had washed over this world again and again.

After a day, a ship came climbing sluggishly out of the planet’s steep gravity well. The shuttle, fat, flat, round, had the rust color of the planet of its origin, and reminded Alia of a huge insect, a toiling beetle. Even before it arrived, Alia felt a deepening disappointment.

The two crafts established an interface, and a tunnel opened up between them. Three men came drifting through into the roomier confines of Reath’s ship. “Welcome to the Rustball,” one of the visitors said. He introduced himself and his companions as Campoc Bale, Campoc Denh, and Campoc Seer. “Reath has asked us to host you.”

Reath nodded.

The Campocs were squat, all of them a head shorter than Alia, with thick, powerful-looking limbs. Though their costumes were a bright blue, their skin seemed to have something of the murky crimson-brown color of the Rustball itself, and their heads were as hairless and round as the planet of their birth. When they smiled Alia saw they didn’t have discrete teeth but enameled plates that stretched around the curves of their jaws.

Alia said, “I’m guessing that ‘Campoc’ is a family name? And so the three of you—”

“Two brothers and a cousin,” Bale said. But he didn’t say which was which. “And I know what you’re thinking. You’ll have trouble telling us apart.”

“Most visitors do,” said Denh.

“But we don’t get too many visitors,” said Seer.

“And don’t worry,” Bale said, “I’ll do most of the talking.”

“That’s a relief.”

In the cluttered cabin, they made a strange collection of disparate human types: the long, elegant frame of Reath, the stubby, hairless Campocs, and Alia with her long arms and golden fur. And yet something united them, Alia thought: a curiosity about each other, a deep genetic kinship.

“So much for the formalities,” Reath said brusquely. He began to shepherd all of them toward the tunnel to the Rustball ship. “Go, go! I’m sure you’ll have much to talk about. As for me I’ve plenty to catch up on here.”

Alia followed the Campocs into their ship. Her luggage trailed after her. Inside, the beetlelike ship was as cramped and unadorned as the outside.

Reath said, “Alia, if you need me, call. But you’ll be fine.”

“We’ll make sure she is,” said Bale.

The shuttle detached itself from Reath’s ship with a noise like a broken kiss, and ducked without fuss into the thick atmosphere of the Rustball.

Alia had never felt so stranded.

On the ground, when she stepped out of the shuttle, the heavy gravity immediately plucked at Alia, and she staggered. The air was thick and hot and smelled of ozone. The clouds overhead were lowering and oppressive. It was like being at the bottom of an ocean; she felt as if she would be crushed. But a couple of moons sailed high, fat matching crescents identical in phase.

Bale was at her side. He took her arm. “Give it a minute,” he whispered. “It will pass.”

So it would. As soon as she had set foot on the planet, the Mist had swarmed into her, through her mouth and nose, and through the pores of her skin. Soon she could feel a subtle tingling in her bones and muscles and lungs, as the pain of existence on the Rustball began to recede.

The Mist lingered on every colonized world. The little creatures who comprised it were neither machine nor living; after half a million years the distinction between biology and technology was meaningless. As she stood here the invisible machines were busily swarming through her body, reinforcing and rebuilding and supplementing, equipping her to cope with the sheer work of survival. Alia didn’t think much about this. The Mist just worked.

The shuttle had landed on an apron of some durable black material, with crimson dust scattered thinly across it. A settlement of some kind clustered at the rim of the apron. Remarkably, the squat buildings seemed to be constructed of sheets of iron. There was dust everywhere, on the ground and on the buildings, even in the air, which had a pale pink hue. The hot air felt dry and prickly, though she suspected precipitation was imminent from those heavy clouds — rain, she thought, digging out the planet-dwellers’ word.

The Campocs were watching her.

Though Alia towered over the Campocs, like an adult among children, these strange little men were not children. There was a calm seriousness about them that was like nothing she had experienced before. It was as if they were listening to voices she couldn’t hear. But then she was here for a purpose: to be made ready for the second stage of her training, the Implication of Unmediated Communication. Though she didn’t yet understand how, these odd little men must have qualities beyond her; they must be at least one step closer to true Transcendence than anybody she had met before.

And beyond that uneasy realization, she thought the three of them seemed calculating as they studied her, as if they had their own purposes for her visit. Bale, especially, stared at her. Bale’s face was like his world, she thought, his nose small, his mouth a colorless line; his eyes, though large and watery, were like waveless pools.