Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I heard a crow calling. I looked up. I could see the bird wheeling over the tower on the mound. Suddenly the sky seemed brighter; high clouds were laced pink.

“Hey…”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You’re American?”

“Yes.” I looked down at myself, at the filthy water leaking from my shoes. I tried to think of something to say, something that would normalize the situation. “Jet lag plays hell with your sleep patterns, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” he replied, doubtful. He turned away, continued walking his bicycle.

I looked up toward the mound. It just looked like a hill now, the castle a ruin, not the center of some kind of maze as it had seemed a moment ago. There was no sign of Morag, but I knew there wouldn’t be.

That young man was still looking back at me. If I didn’t want a police bot to be called out I should get out of there and clean myself up. I turned and faced that flood in the road. In the gathering light it didn’t look so daunting. I walked to the road’s centerline and just strode straight through the water. The road had given way; this pool must have been there a long time. But the water came no higher than my knees, and in a moment I was through it.

When I woke the sun was high. It was around noon local time. I didn’t remember how I had got there, got back into my hotel from the flooded road. The whole thing was like a dream.

But I was lying on my bed, not in it, and though I’d kicked off my shoes my trousers were muddy, my sweater smeared with green grass stains, and debris had rubbed off onto the bed’s top sheet. The management wouldn’t be pleased with me.

Something had happened, however.

A corner of the big wall softscreen was flashing. A message was waiting for me from John.

I showered first, made a coffee, ate a cookie from the minibar. Then I sat in my armchair, faced the wall, and called John. Towering over me on the wall, he was furious — two-dimensional, badly colored, but furious. “Lethe,” he said.

I was struck by his use of that word, but now wasn’t the time to talk about a stranger on a plane. “Lethe to you,” I snapped back. “What’s eating you?”

“You are.” It turned out Shelley Magwood had called him last night.

I felt cold, wondering how much she had told him. “She shouldn’t have done that.”

“Why the hell not? She was concerned, asswipe, not that you deserve it. And wasn’t she right to be?”

He tapped a screen before him, out of my sight.

A corner of my wall filled up with an image, grainy, badly lit. But you could see the castle mound, the flooded street, a figure standing there in muddy water up to his ankles. John had used his contacts to hack into the town’s security cameras. He shouted now, “You call this a responsible way to behave? For this I paid a small fortune to send you to Europe? Are you crazy?”

“If you listened to what Shelley told you,” I said stonily, “you’ll understand that this is about me and Morag. It’s got nothing to do with you. You have to let me work this out my own way, John.”

“Oh, do I?”

I studied him, growing curious. I’d rarely seen him so angry. “What’s eating you? Why are you taking this so personally?”

“I’m not.”

Despite his denial, I could see something was going on here. If I had felt lobotomized last night, today I was sharp. Was he angry I just hadn’t told him about my haunting by Morag first? Or was there something more? “You’re hiding something. Is it to do with Morag? Damn it, John, she was my wife. If you know something you have to tell me.”

He faced me again. “I know I shouldn’t have made this fucking call. Off.” The screen turned to sky blue.

So John had had a connection to Morag I knew nothing about. Another unwelcome ghost from the past, I thought. I sat in my armchair, in my hotel dressing gown, and sipped coffee that quickly grew cold.

On Alia’s second day on the Rustball, Bale took her to the sea.

If they went overland it would take a whole quarter of a day to reach the ocean. Bale offered to Skim there with her if she preferred. But she wanted to see more of this world.

So she rode with him in a ground transport along a road that gleamed, metallic, running straight as an arrow across the gravity-flattened plain. The landscape was all but featureless, the towns they passed identical to the one where the Campocs lived. It was like passing through a sparsely sketched simulation.

Much of what she saw was dictated by geology. When the Rustball had formed it had been a rocky world, rather larger than Earth, with a massive iron core and a mantle of lighter rock. In the usual way of things it had suffered multiple impacts during its formation — including one final collision with a second monstrous proto-planet. Alia learned that Earth itself had suffered a similar collision, a great rocky splash that had resulted in the formation of its Moon. The Rustball had been stripped of most of its rocky mantle, and had been left as a lump of iron as big as the Earth, with a flock of moonlets made of its own mantle rock. But iron was more dense than rock, and so this world was more massive than Earth, its gravity strong.

Over time, comets delivered a skim of water and air, and the naked iron rusted enthusiastically. Without a rocky mantle there was none of the magmatic churning that characterized Earth’s dynamic geology. Still, simple life had come here, brought by the comets, settling into oceans that gathered in impact-basin hollows.

And later, humans arrived.

Alia was discovering she wasn’t interested in planets. She had grown up on a ship, a human-made environment. The Nord was a small, liveable place, built to a human scale, where everybody knew everybody else. And the Nord was fluid, every aspect of its design shaped by human whim. As a small child she had loved to spend time in the Nord ’s museum, where there was a display of all the ship’s morphologies since its launch long ago, reconstructed from records, or archaeological traces in the Nord ’s fabric. As the millennia ticked by the vessel had mutated and morphed like a pupa writhing in its cocoon, every aspect of its geometry shaped by its crew.

But a world was different, weighed down by its own vast geological inertia. Why, most of its mass was locked up in its interior, useless for anything but exerting a gravity field you could have replicated with the most basic inertial adjustor! And it was static in time. A through-the-ages diorama of the Rustball would have been very dull, she thought: nothing but rocks, broken here and there by the transient flickering of green.

If the Rustball had started out dull, its human colonists hadn’t done much with the place, Alia thought. The plain drabness of the human world here was striking. The different towns, though separated by hours of surface travel, were very similar in their bland, squat architecture; there was no sense of local identity. And there was no art that she could see, nothing beyond the functional.

She probed Bale gently about all this. He would only say: “If everywhere’s the same, why bother traveling?”

“Lethe, I hate planets,” she said. “No offense.”

“None taken,” Bale said blandly.

It was a relief when they reached the ocean.

The water pooled in a complicated multiple basin cut in the iron by a series of impacts. On a shore of hard, red-rusted iron, waves broke; driven by the higher gravity the waves were low but fast-moving.

She was surprised to see people here, gathered in little parties along the shore. Bicycling vendors sold food, water, souvenirs, and simple toys. It was a happy place, as happy as she had seen on the Rustball; people were enjoying themselves. But as she walked through crowds of running children, harassed parents, and languid lovers, something was lacking, she thought. It took her a while to realize that there was no music to be heard, not a single note.