Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“I. Me. Myself.” He said the words in a dead tone, like a metronome, but his gaze was on the floor. “Do you ever listen to yourself, Dad? Do you remember the funeral, when we buried her, and the kid? Did you know I snuck into the church early?”

I hadn’t known.

“I went to her coffin. It was in the aisle, before the altar. I tried to open that fucking box. I wanted to climb in with her. I didn’t want to be left with you. Because I knew that all you would think about was yourself. You even gave more thought to the kid who killed your wife than to me.”

“Tom—” I spread my hands. “Please. I don’t know what to say. Everybody’s fucked up, you know.”

“Oh, I understand that.” He actually smiled. “You know, I forgive you. I’m an adult now, I can see you couldn’t help it. But you should have tried to protect me, even from yourself. You should have tried. ”

“I’m sorry.”

“And now you come to me and tell me you’re being haunted by my mother. No, worse, you don’t even tell me, I have to find it out from somebody else.” He was still, rigid with anger. “How am I suppose to deal with that?”

I had no idea what to say.

At last he sat back. “So what now?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You dragged me home, Dad. You insisted on seeing me, talking to me. Fine. I guess I owed you that much. Have you got what you wanted?”

“I don’t want you to put yourself at risk again.”

He laughed, contemptuous. “You think you can stop me?”

“Not if you don’t want to be stopped. Any more than you can stop me from designing starships…” I shook my head. “You know, the irony is, we’re both right.”

“We are?”

“Sure. I’m right to believe in an expansive future for mankind. The Kuiper Anomaly is proof that it’s possible: somebody else got through their Bottleneck and hung that thing up there. But you’re right to try to deal with the problems of the present, because if we don’t get through the Bottleneck there won’t be any future at all. I’ve had enough of hearing about the differences between us. We should try to find some common ground.”

That took him by surprise. He seemed to think it over. In those few seconds I could feel some of the tension between us drain away. We’d both said what we had come in to say, we had both landed blows.

“All right.” He stood up. “Anyhow, we’ll try not to fight.”

“Amen to that.”

“Dad, I think I need to do some physio, sleep a bit more.”

I took the hint. I stood and headed for the door. “Maybe I’ll see you in the morning?”

“Yeah. Look, Dad — you may be an asswipe, as Uncle John says, but you’re still my dad, and I’m stuck with you.”

“Ditto,” I said fervently.

“But give up on this haunting crap, OK? Get some therapy, for Christ’s sake.”

I sighed. But we had crashed through the barriers to an island of truth; it wasn’t a time for lies or bland reassurances. “You’ll have to tell your mother that. Goodnight, son.”

I closed the door behind me.

On the third day on the Rustball, Alia’s inquisition resumed — for so she had come to think of it.

And today she finally learned what this strange, drab world had to offer her.

She was brought back to that dark, iron-walled room. The three Campocs were here again, Bale, Seer, and Denh, surrounded by a subtly different sample of their relatives. Once again they asked her to talk about her sister. She went back over what she’d said before, and tried to dig out more memories, tease out more meaning.

But the exercise made her feel increasingly uncomfortable. Her jokey stories of how she’d tricked her sister, or out-competed her, or left her embarrassed, no longer seemed so clever.

“There is always a rivalry between siblings,” said Bale’s great-aunt. “It is part of the human condition, no doubt exported from old Earth itself.”

Perhaps. But again and again down the years, Alia had indulged that rivalry at her sister’s expense. It was a kind of bullying, Alia thought now, for Drea had been helpless: Alia was her sister, and no matter what Alia did to her, dear stolid Drea would always come back for more. On some level Alia had known that, and had exploited Drea’s loyalty.

“I’ve been awful,” said Alia.

As she reached this conclusion the Rusties’ faces were watchful, interested, engaged, sympathetic: analytical, not judgmental.

“You’re flawed,” Bale said. “We are all flawed. But it’s best to know about it, to look inward, to see honestly.” There was something intense in the way he said that. He was guiding her, she saw, to a new insight.

Alia looked inward. And she started to understand.

Something was different: something about her perception of herself. Her own memories had never been sharper, more accurate; it was as if she had a scholar inside her head, refurbishing the muddled archives that made up her recollection of the past, her picture of herself. And at the same time she was seeing that picture with a pitiless clarity she had never known before.

She had crashed through a barrier. She had changed, subtly, internally.

“How are you doing this? Is it the Mist? Or some chemical transfer when you touched me—”

Bale said, “ How doesn’t matter. Anyhow you’re doing it to yourself. Consciousness is the awareness of self, and self is recorded in memory. You are becoming more conscious, for the quality of your awareness is increasing. Your memories are more precise, and your perception of them is clearer.”

“But I hate it! I see myself better than ever before, but I don’t like what I see. I feel like sticking my fingers in my ears, shutting my eyes, turning away. Distracting myself until I forget.”

Bale’s great-aunt said, “We have all been through it.”

She sighed. “But turning away won’t work anymore, will it?”

“No. But,” Bale said, “would you prefer not to know yourself?”

“Right now, yes!”

That night she lay awake, alone in the dark. She had turned away Bale’s gentle invitations to share his bed.

Even hours after the inquisition she couldn’t stop looking inward, couldn’t stop thinking about herself. She tried to immerse herself in her Witnessing, but right now not even Poole’s antics and endeavors seemed able to distract her.

And anyhow she envied him, she realized reluctantly. Poole had been unusually clear-sighted for his time. But even so he had walked around in a kind of dream. Like every human his memories were imperfectly stored in the biochemical mishmash of his nervous system. And he had endlessly edited the story of his life, unconsciously, to make logic out of illogical situations, to put himself at center stage and in control of events. There were sound reasons for this. A human memory had never been meant to be an objective recording system but a support for ego: without the comforting illusion of control, Poole’s mind might have crumbled in the face of an arbitrary universe.

But all that was different now.

Her consciousness had already been superior to Poole’s, even before she had come to the Rustball. A half-million years of evolution and environment had seen to that. And now the subtle re-engineering initiated by the Campocs, as it gently knit and re-knit her neurones, or whatever it was doing in her head, accentuated the gap. Her memory was as perfect a recording instrument as any technology could deliver. And her self-awareness was so clear, the mists banished, that the comfort of delusion was no longer an option.

Her knowledge of herself was accurate, and utterly pitiless.

She called Reath, in orbit.