Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“I design starships as therapy. Now I’m ghost-hunting as therapy. I must be pretty fucked up.”

She smiled, but her scrutiny was unyielding, intense, a bit intimidating. “Well, aren’t you?”

“I think I have to do this.”

She shrugged. “Maybe. But, look, I’m worried you’re going to come to harm. That you’ll descend into some pit inside yourself that you’ll never come out of.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said.

“Now, why isn’t that reassuring? When you come out the other side of this shit, it’s obvious what you should do.”

“It is?”

She leaned forward, her giant-screen image looming over me. “Talk it over with Tom. Your son. And then get back to work, for Christ’s sake.”

She cut the connection.

Alia woke early, her first morning on the Rustball.

She washed and ate. Swathed by the Mist, which had spared her from the effects of the gravity, she had slept reasonably well, but the air inside the rust-walled little dwelling was just as murky and still as outside. She felt stale and worn down, joyless, just like the planet itself.

Without ceremony Bale invited her to join what he called a “conversation.”

She found herself in a large, plain room. It was all but full. Perhaps twenty people sat on the floor, informally. When Alia asked where she should sit, Bale just shrugged, and she picked a spot at random. The three Campocs sat close to her, giving her a welcome bit of familiarity. The others were more distant, their faces receding into the gloom. The room itself was as dark and enclosing as the whole planet seemed to be — and uninteresting, the strange iron faces of the walls unadorned.

There was a round of introductions. These people, it seemed, were all members of Bale’s extended family: parents, children, siblings, cousins of varying complicated degrees. Alia effortlessly recorded the names, and built up a map in her head of this densely populated family network.

When the formality was done, she asked, “Are we going to start now?”

“Start what?” Bale asked.

“My training. The Second Implication.”

Bale shrugged, his shoulders machine-massive. “We’re just going to talk.”

She said, irritated, “Just as I spend most of my time with Reath, talking.”

“Reath is a good man. But what is the subject of the Second Implication?”

“Unmediated Communication. I’m not sure what that means but—”

“You can’t talk about communication,” Bale said gently, “without communicating.”

She sighed. “So what are we going to talk about?”

“What humans always talk about. Themselves. Each other. You’re a visitor. We’re curious.”

With all those gazes on her, she felt terribly self-conscious. “What can I tell you? I’m ordinary.”

“Nobody is ordinary.”

Somebody spoke up from the back — a great-aunt of Bale’s, it turned out. “Who’s the most important person in your life?”

She said immediately, “My sister. She’s ten years older than me…”

Once she had started she found it easy to open up. These “Rusties,” as they called themselves, were good listeners. And so she talked about Drea.

When Alia was small Drea had taken care of her, as a big sister should. But as Alia had grown that ten-year age gap became less important, and the sisters became more equal friends. Gradually Alia’s interests had come to dominate the time they spent together — especially dancing, especially Skimming.

Drea had always seemed grave to Alia, a bit stolid, a bit dull. Alia was more exotic, perhaps, her mind livelier, her body always a bit more flexible. It had been up to Alia to pull her sister along with her, to involve her in things she mightn’t otherwise have tried. It was a rivalry that added a spark to their relationship.

Gradually warming up, she told this story in anecdotes and in sweeping summaries. Sometimes one of the Rusties would give her something back, tell her a similar story from their own complicated family networks. There was nothing remotely judgmental about their reaction.

But, slowly, Alia began to feel uncomfortable. She wound down.

Twenty pairs of eyes watched her.

Bale said, “Alia, are you well? Do you need a rest — a drink, perhaps, or—”

“What is meant by ‘Unmediated Communication’?”

For an answer, Bale reached out and took her hand. It was the first time any of them had touched her physically; she felt an odd jolt, like a mild electric shock. She pulled back, startled.

Bale said, “Most human communication is symbolic.”

She struggled to regain her composure. “You mean language?”

“Language, art, music. Language is a legacy of our deepest past. With it we envisage past and future, build cities and starships — with language we won a Galaxy. But it is all symbolism. I encode my thoughts in symbols, I transmit them to you, you receive them, and decode them. You can see the limitations.”

She frowned. “Bandwidth problems. Difficulties of translation.”

“Yes. What I say to you can only be a fraction of what I think or feel. But there are modes of communication deeper and more ancient than language.”

Suddenly he snapped his fingers in her face, and she flinched.

“I apologize,” Bale said. “But you see the point. That message was crude, just a gesture of threat. But you reacted immediately, in the deeper roots of your being. And when I took your hand you felt something beneath words, didn’t you? We humans communicate on a tactile level. Even a cellular, even a chemical level…”

“It sounds scary,” Alia admitted.

“You don’t know the half of it,” said Denh.

“What do you mean?”

“Before you can communicate with others, you have to be able to communicate with yourself.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You will.”

“When will my treatment begin?”

“It already has,” called Bale’s great-aunt from the back of the room.

She looked around, feeling claustrophobic, helpless, exposed before these drab strangers.

I lay down in the dark and took a pill.

After I lost Morag I was prescribed medication. There were medicines, I was told, that could target the sites in your head where traumatic memories are formed. Something to do with inhibiting the formation of certain proteins. If I only took the pill, I was told, I would still remember Morag and all that had happened, as if I stored a narrative in my head, but I wouldn’t feel it — not the same way, not so much that it would harm my functioning.

John had always pressed me hard to take the medication. For sure it’s what he would have done. But I had refused. Memories are what make up me — even bad memories, dreadful memories. What’s the point of “functioning” if I lose that? When I refused to allow Tom the same treatment I faced a battery of counselors who gravely advised me on the harm I was causing to my helpless son, the hurt I could help him avoid. I stuck to my guns. But sometimes, I admit, when I look back on Tom’s life since, I wonder if I made the right choice for him.

So I refused the “forget” pills. But I did learn that there are also such things as “remember” pills.

By getting glutamate or some such molecule to work more efficiently, there’s a medication that can sharpen memories, rather than dull them. It takes some analysis by various therapeutic machines to figure out what you need, and you have to put up with counseling about the damage that might be done to your personality by too much memory. But it’s over-the-counter stuff. When I found out all this I bought some pills, and put them aside, kept them in my bathroom bag. I’d carried them everywhere since, knowing they were there but not thinking about why I wanted them with me.