Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I turned back and wound my way back down the huge exit ramps, and returned to the hotel.

Tom slept, showered, whatever, for twelve hours. Then he called me through my implant. I went to his room.

He sat in the room’s single armchair. He was bundled up in a tired-looking hotel dressing gown, watching news that bubbled quietly from one wall. His hair had been shaved at some point during his brief hospitalization. He looked cadaverous, ill; he probably looked worse than he was. He had an aspirator in his hand, the only sign I’d seen of continuing medical treatment.

I sat on the bed, and he gave me a whisky from his minibar. It was midnight, but both our body clocks were screwed. With nobody else around, you make your own time.

There we were, the two of us, sitting side by side in an alien country, neutral territory.

“We need to talk,” I said tentatively.

“Yeah, we do.” The words came out as a growl. He leaned over and tapped the wall.

To my surprise, an image of the Kuiper Anomaly came up. It was a tetrahedron, an electric-blue framework that rotated slowly. Every so often starlight caught one of its faces, and it would flare up, iridescent, as if soap films were stretched across the frame.

“What’s this?”

He said, “I’ve been hacking into your logs, Dad. Seeing what you’ve been up to, the last few days.”

“You always did do your homework,” I said.

“Still this shit with you, isn’t it? Starships and alien beings.”

I folded my arms — I know, a defensive posture, but he had gone straight on the attack. “How can you call it shit? Look at this thing, obviously artificial, the only artificial object we know of in the universe not made by human hands. We’re facing the biggest mystery in human history — and the answers may deliver the greatest change in human consciousness since—”

“Since we came out of the caves? Since we walked on the Moon? Since Columbus or Galileo, or the invention of the sentient toilet bowl?”

“But—”

“Dad, will you just stop talking? You’ve been talking all my fucking life. I remember when Mom left you that time. I was six—”

“Seven, actually.”

“She told me why she was taking me away from you for a while.”

“She did?”

“She always talked to me, Dad, in a way you never did. Even though I was only a little kid. She said you had two modes. You were either depressed, or else you were escaping from the fucking planet altogether. We would come back to you, she promised me, and we did, but she needed a break.”

I said grimly, “It might have been better if she’d had that out with me, not you.”

“She’s dead, Dad,” he reminded me. He snapped his fingers, and the image of the Anomaly scrunched up and whirled away. “So you think it would have been better if I’d followed you, and devoted my life to this kind of blue-sky shit rather than the Library of Life?”

I still had my arms folded. “If you had, you wouldn’t have got yourself nearly killed by some burp of toxic gas in a godforsaken place nobody ever heard of. At least I’d know where you were, instead of having to hear that you’d nearly died through some friend of a friend…” I hadn’t meant to say any of that. All this stuff, the resentment, the sense of abandonment, the hurt, was just tumbling out, having been penned up inside me since I’d heard the bad news.

Tom said, “So it’s not the danger to me that bothers you. It’s the effect on you. You’ve always been the same, Dad.”

“Just don’t get yourself killed,” I blurted. “It’s not worth it.”

He looked at me, almost curiously. “Biospheric capture isn’t worth it? Why not? Because we’re through the Bottleneck? Is that what you think, that the worst is over?”

I spread my hands. Here we were, with a kind of dreadful inevitability, arguing about the state of the world, rather than our relationship. “We’re dealing with it, Tom. Aren’t we? We gave up the damn automobile. We gave up oil! Some people will tell you that was the most profound economic transformation since the end of the Bronze Age. And then there’s the Stewardship.”

He actually laughed. “The Stewardship? You think that the Warming, the Die-back, are somehow fixed by that vast instrumentality? Dad, are you really that complacent?”

“Tom—”

“We are fundamentally different people. Dad, you were always a dreamer. A utopian. You dreamed of space and aliens — the future. But I think the future in your head is a lot like the afterlife, like Heaven. Both impossible fantasies of places that we can never reach, and yet where all our problems will just go away. And, like the afterlife, those who believe in the future try to control what we do in the here-and-now. There has always been a kind of future fascism, Dad. But the future is irrelevant.”

“It is?”

“Yes! Not if we can’t get through the present. I’m different from you, Dad. I’m no dreamer. I go out there, into the world, and I deal with it like it is. And that was always beyond you, wasn’t it? You never liked the present. It’s just too complicated, too messy, too interconnected. There’s nothing you can get your engineer’s teeth into. And not only that, it’s depressing.”

He rubbed his bald scalp. “I remember you once worked with me on a homework assignment on cosmology. You always were good at that stuff. Do you remember trying to prove to me that the universe must be finite? You spun me around on an office chair, fast enough for my legs and arms to go rising up. You asked me how I’d know if it was me spinning around in a stationary universe — or if the universe was spinning around me. The two situations seem symmetrical; how could I tell? But if I was stationary, what was pulling my arms away from my body, and making me feel nauseous? It had to be the universe, the whole of it, a great river of matter and energy circling around my body, stars and planets and people, and as it spun it was tugging at my legs, through gravity, relativity, whatever. I thought that was a wonderful thought, how I was connected to everything else.

“But, you said, that showed the universe had to be finite. Because if it was infinite, it would load me down with an infinite inertia. I wouldn’t be able to spin at all. I’d have been trapped like a bug in amber. You see, that’s how I think you are in the world, Dad. You see the complicated real-world problems of ecology and climate and politics and all the rest like an infinite universe that pins you flat. No wonder you’d rather believe it’s all been fixed. By the Stewardship, for God’s sake, the last word in bureaucracy and corruption…”

Well, maybe so. I did wonder if Tom would have preferred me to be a brutal realist like Jack Joy, the Lethe Swimmer.

I got up, walked around a few paces, turned away until I was calmer. “Maybe we ought to keep it down. We might wake the other guests.”

He didn’t smile. “What other guests? Nobody here but us ghosts, Dad. Which reminds me—” Reaching out, he tapped another part of the wall screen.

He brought up a picture of me, standing in that puddle in York in the middle of the night, taken from some security camera. So, suddenly, things had got even more messy.

I sat down. “Who sent you this?”

“Uncle John. Does it matter who? I know what you’ve been doing, Dad. I know about the fucking — ghost. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

“Believe me,” I said fervently, “it’s not by choice.”

“Oh, isn’t it?” I couldn’t read his mood. He sat back, apparently relaxed. But one fist clenched and unclenched.

And so suddenly my haunting was messing up an already complicated emotional situation. We were entering uncharted territory in our relationship, I thought; put a foot wrong and I could do damage that would last a lifetime. “Tom — I don’t want this. But I see her. Or I see something. I don’t know what to tell you. I’m trying to figure it out myself. But this has been happening to me for a long time…”