Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I glided across that drowned landscape in smooth silence, as if we were riding on the water itself, as if it were all a dream.

By the time we reached York it was growing dark. I joined a line at the rickshaw rank outside the rail station, and soon I was being hauled around the outskirts of the city by an unreasonably athletic young woman. In this post-traffic era, in their wisdom the city authorities had repaved many of the streets with cobbles. It might be fine for pod buses, but by the time we reached my hotel my ass felt like tenderized steak.

The hotel was where I remembered it. It is a small place just off the A-road that snakes south from York toward Doncaster, overlying the route of an old Roman road. The hotel itself is old, some kind of coach house, eighteenth century I think. Because it’s within a reasonable walk of the city center it’s stayed profitable where many similar businesses have folded. It’s modern enough, but there’s nothing glamorous about it. Friendly place, though; the only security check I had to go through was a DNA scan verified by Interpol.

The room I was given was just a bland box with the usual facilities, a minibar and a dispenser for drinks and a big softscreen showing muted news. I couldn’t remember which room we’d taken, back then. Anyhow the interior looked to have been knocked around since those days, nearly thirty years gone. Maybe our room didn’t even exist anymore, in any meaningful sense.

Of course the staff here didn’t know anything about me. I was just some guy who’d called to make a reservation from Heathrow, and I wasn’t about to tell them why I’d come back here, why I remembered the hotel so well: that this was where I had stayed, with Morag, at the start of our honeymoon.

I sat in the one big armchair, with my suitcase sitting unopened on my bed, and meaningless news flickering on the wall. It was late evening, but to my body it was the middle of the afternoon, Florida time. I felt restless, perturbed. I didn’t want to face anybody, not even a room service robot.

Why was I here? For Morag, of course. I had come here, on impulse, to our honeymoon hotel, a place of great significance for the two of us. Fine. Here I was. But what was I supposed to do now?

On impulse I placed a call to Shelley Magwood.

I brought up her image on my big plasma screen. She was in the middle of her working day, but to her eternal credit she took time out to talk to me, a confused loser in a hotel room in England. But as I sat there, awkward, inarticulate, unable to broach the subject that was dominating my mind, she seemed to grow faintly concerned. Her background shifted around her; I saw that she had moved to a private office.

“Michael, I think you’d better come clean. I can see something’s on your mind. So you’re in York, because you had your honeymoon there. Right?…”

I told her about our wedding day. We had married in Manchester, to be close to Morag’s family, and most of my mother’s, too. But her parents were both dead, and only one of her two siblings showed up. On my side my mother was restless; she always felt confined by England, by her past. Uncle George had turned up — but not my mother’s other sibling, my aunt Rosa, whom I’d never met. Still, the day had gone well; weddings generally do, despite the family bullshit that always surrounds them.

And at the end of the day Morag and I headed off to York to begin our honeymoon, a couple of weeks of hopping around some of Britain’s historic sites.

Shelley said cautiously, “I don’t know anything about York. Nice place?”

“Very old,” I said in a rush. “It was a Roman city. Then it was the capital of the northern kings who dominated Saxon England for a while. Then the Vikings came, and this was the last of their kingdoms to fall, as England finally unified politically. And then—”

“I get the picture,” she said dryly.

I forced a laugh. “A good place to come ghost-hunting. Don’t you think?”

She stared at me. She knew me well, but surely she’d never seen me in this agitated state before. “Michael, digging into the past isn’t a bad thing. People do it all the time. Everybody’s family tree is online now, extracted from the big genome databases, all the way back to Adam, and people are fascinated. Who can resist looking on the reconstructed faces of your ancestors? But, well, you can lose yourself in there. Isn’t that true?”

I felt impatient. “That’s not the point, Shell. And that’s not what I’m doing.”

“Then just tell me, Michael. Did you say something about ghosts? ”

And I admitted to her, at last, that I’d come here to seek the ghost of Morag, my lost wife. It was a relief to express it all, at last.

Shelley listened carefully, watching my face. She asked a string of questions, dragging details and impressions out of me.

When I’d finished, she said dryly, “And so you thought you’d give me a call. Thanks a lot.”

“I never did have too many friends,” I said.

“Look, I’m honored you told me. I am the first, aren’t I? I can tell. And this is obviously very important.”

“It is?”

“For you, certainly.”

“ For me. So you don’t think it’s real. I’m just—” I made scrambled-egg motions beside my head.

She shrugged. “Well, that’s one explanation, and it’s the simplest. But I’ve known you a long time, Michael, and you never seemed crazy to me. An asshole maybe, but never crazy. And what do I know about ghosts? I’ve seen the same movies you have, I guess.”

I’d never discussed the supernatural with Shelley; she was hardheaded and practical, thoroughly grounded in a world she could measure and manipulate. The hypothetical alien builders of the Kuiper Anomaly had generally seemed enough strangeness for her. “Do you believe any of that?”

She shrugged. “The universe is an odd place, Michael. And we see only a distillation of what’s out there, a necessary construct to allow us to function. Nothing is what it seems, not even space and time themselves. Isn’t that pretty much the message of modern physics?”

“I guess so.”

“But it’s a strangeness we tap into, with our Higgs-field drive. Do you ever think of it that way? As if we’re slicing off a bit of God with our monkey fingers, using the Absolute as fuel for our rocket engines.”

No, I never had thought of it that way. But I was starting to realize that my intuition to call her in my confusion had been a sound one. “So there are layers of reality we can’t see. The supernatural. Eternity.”

“Whatever.” She was dismissive. “I don’t think labels help much. Some of our experiences are more profound than others. More significant. Times of revelation, perhaps, when you solve a problem, or when you figure something out, something new about the world — you’re an engineer; you know what I mean—”

“You feel as if you’ve gotten a bit closer to reality.”

“Yes. Something like that. I’m quite prepared to believe there are times when we’re more conscious, more aware than at other times. Especially since the neurological mappers and other bump-feelers freely admit they still have no idea what consciousness is anyhow. And if you follow that logic through,” she said doggedly, “maybe you’d expect to find, umm, hauntings associated with places where high emotions have been experienced.”

“As in classic ghost stories.”

“Yes. Who knows?” She studied me. “So if you really want to confront this ghost you say is stalking you, maybe you’ve come to the right place.”

I nodded. “I sense a ‘but.’ ”

“OK. But you aren’t really here to become a ghost-buster, are you, Michael? You’re here because you want a release from the past. Redemption maybe. And surely there are other ways to do that other than to try to get yourself haunted.”