Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

There was nobody around but me. It was eerie to walk through the quiet streets. Fifty years ago the place would have been carpeted by automobile metal, cars parked in every drive and bumped up on the sidewalks. Now the cars had gone, and the houses with their blanked-out windows were like backs turned to me.

Tom and I had made peace, of a sort. Or we had agreed to disagree. Or something. But now I found myself obsessing about our arguments about the Stewardship.

The Stewardship was a legacy of Amin’s administration, though it was set up after she died. It was a new international body, a “green UN,” assembled with the power and authority of the U.S. government. Its central task, the challenge of the century, was to feed everybody, to raise per capita food production while reducing our consumption of materials and energy.

It had started with simple quick-return initiatives, like buying up land high in ecological value but in danger of overexploitation. Right now the Stewardship was working on two mighty flagship projects: to save what was left of the Brazilian rainforest, a hotspot of biodiversity and evolutionary innovation, and to stabilize China, so parched and overcrowded that the Yellow River was poisoned when it didn’t run dry, and whose vast lowlands were one massive hydraulic engineering project.

But there were plans to go much further, to establish an ethical framework and new economic rules to rebuild the world — the kind of work John was involved in.

It really was a new “Marshall Plan for a bruised world,” a bold interplay of environmental management, economics, diplomacy. Gradually even the religions had come on board, and a decades-long tide of conflict spawned out of aggressive and triumphalist tendencies in all the major faiths had begun to turn. The Stewardship had even been given a limited democratic legitimacy when the rest of the world was allowed to participate in U.S. presidential elections, a “fifty-first state” with as many electoral college votes as California — more than enough to turn close elections.

I believed the Stewardship was the greatest achievement of statesmanship of my adult life. I was able to talk about this passionately. But Tom didn’t appear to agree with me, even about this. How could the two of us be so different?

Well, I told myself, a relationship is a process; you crash through dramatic stages now and then but you never reach a conclusion, not this side of the grave anyhow. But I wasn’t sure how to follow it up with Tom, what to do next. Or what to do about Morag, come to that.

As I walked, all the issues in my life churned around in my head, seeking focus, interconnection: work, the starship, Tom, Morag, the niggling issue of the gas hydrates. Also, though I didn’t quite want to admit it, it was faintly disturbing that everything seemed to center on me.

I think I imagined that talking to George would help me get this straight in my head.

George’s home was just another in a row of boxes of brick.

George had kept a few windows as windows, even if the glass was dusty and his Paintwork, smart or not, had seen better days. And he still had a garden; little sprinklers watered his lupins, asters, and delphiniums. His lawn looked healthy enough, but the holly bushes that had once separated the garden from the sidewalk had been replaced by a line of bamboo.

He took a couple of minutes to answer my ringing. He greeted me with a broad, toothy smile. “Michael! So you turned up.” He led me into his hallway, and through toward the kitchen. “Come in, come in. I’m glad to see you. But then, old people are always glad of visitors. Pathetic, isn’t it?”

The hallway was narrow, the walls coated with yellowing wallpaper, and there was a musty, damp, unmistakeably old-person sort of smell, despite the labors of a spiderlike cleaning robot that scuttled upside down over the ceiling. The place was noticeably flood-proofed. There were no carpets downstairs, just tiles and a few roll-up rugs and mats, and the electricity sockets had been reinstalled halfway up the walls.

George was the same sort of build as me — compact or squat, depending on whether you’re looking out or in. He still moved pretty well, but his upper body was bent over, his neck jutting forward, and there was a kind of uneven fragility in his footsteps.

The kitchen was clean and bright, and I could smell garlic. George once lived in Italy, and he picked up some good cooking habits there. But with its safety-conscious ceramic covers, rounded edges, and bright primary colors the kitchen looked oddly toylike. George had grumbled about that before: “The social workers turn your home into a chuffing nursery,” he would say. But in alcoves on the walls there was a collection of Catholic artifacts, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, a little plastic bottle labeled “Lourdes Water.” These were relics of George’s parents, I believed, who had been devout.

George was eighty-seven years old. His wife, my aunt Linda, had died a few years earlier. He had actually remarried her after they divorced; at age twelve I was hauled over to England to attend the second wedding — “a joke,” my mother called it, “typical George.” As far as I could tell George and Linda had been happy. But then, a few years back, she had died. “That’s the trouble with happy endings,” he told me after the funeral. “You just live on and on, until you’ve sucked all the juice out, and it turns out not to be so happy after all.”

He sat me at his small breakfast table and began to fuss with a kettle. “So what do you want, tea, coffee? A beer? Have a beer. Go crazy.”

“A beer will be fine.”

He rubbed his hands and cackled, his open mouth revealing even white teeth, probably regrown from buds. He bent stiffly, opened his refrigerator, and hauled out a couple of brown bottles.

The refrigerator protested in a soft whisper. “George, are you sure that’s wise? It’s a little early, don’t you think?”

“Chuff off,” he said cheerfully, and slammed the door shut.

The beer was strong and gritty. I asked, “Wheat beer?”

“The only kind I can afford. The hop harvest never recovered after that milt in the 2030s. Shame. But it’s five percent proof.” He took a long pull. “So,” he said, “tell me about your Kuiper project.”

That was what I always liked about George, even when I was a kid. He never acted like an uncle, never like family. He wouldn’t ask you polite, bored questions about how you were getting on at school. Over the years he developed common interests with us — with me it was spaceflight and all things extraterrestrial — and so when he visited we always had something real to talk about.

Not that my mother appreciated that, I don’t think. “You treat Michael as the son you never had,” she once yelled at him. “Bollocks,” George had replied succinctly, to my huge pleasure.

George always said he was pleased I was working on Kuiper, even if it was just a small-scale design study. He found the Anomaly particularly fascinating, because, he told me, its discovery in the first decade of the century had come at a strange time in his own life. His father had just died, he had gone looking for a sister he had never known he had, and the discovery of Kuiper and the great philosophical transformation it had brought had seemed to him to parallel the upheavals going on in his own heart.

Also, he told me once, it was particularly appropriate that I should work on Kuiper. He didn’t elaborate. George could be a bit mysterious at times. Well, he was a Poole.

As we sat there talking about Kuiper a toy robot came rolling into the room. It was a real antique, all shaped tin and plastic and little glass eyes, and as it rolled along a flywheel sent friction sparks shooting from a grill in its belly.