Stephen Baxter: Transcendent

John waggled his paintbrush. “I ought to get on. And you ought to go see Mom,” he said, as if I’d been putting it off.

So I walked back around to the front of the house, picked up my bag, and knocked on the door.

The front door was faded by the relentless sun, and in places the clapboards were peeling back, the nails rusting and coming loose. The place wasn’t in bad shape, however. The coat of Paint that John was busily applying was a silvery scraping over layers of creamy old gloss.

My mother opened the screen door. “It’s you,” she said. She stepped back, holding the door to let me pass, with eyes averted to the floor. I stepped over rotting sandbags and dutifully delivered the kiss she expected; her skin was crumpled, leathery, warm as melted butter.

She said she would make me a cup of tea, and she led me through the hall. We passed the old grandfather clock that had come with her from England. It still ticked away with imperial resolve, even though the world in which it had been manufactured had all but vanished.

My mother was a stick-thin figure, upright and stiff and animated by a fragile sort of energy. She was still beautiful, if any ninety-year-old can be said to be beautiful. She had never dyed her hair, and it had slowly faded to white, but even now, tied back, her hair looked lustrous, soft and full of light.

In the kitchen she had ingredients for fresh lemonade laid out over the working surfaces. She made me tea, hot and strong and laced with milk, English style, and she sat with me at the breakfast table. We sipped our tea in cautious silence. I enjoyed it, of course; it brought back my childhood.

I hadn’t neglected my mother. But I’d mostly seen her when she’d made her occasional, loudly self-sacrificing pilgrimages to come visit me in my home with Morag, or later after Morag’s death in my small apartment in New Jersey, or at holiday times at John’s brownstone apartment behind the Manhattan seawalls. But those trips had got more rare as the years passed; Mother would say she wasn’t sure if it was her getting old, or the world, or both.

She opened hostilities. “I suppose John called you in.”

“He was concerned.”

“You didn’t need to come here.” She sniffed. “Either of you. I’m ninety. But I’m not old. I’m not helpless. I’m not gaga. And I’m not moving out.”

I pulled a face. “You always did get straight to the point, Mom.”

She was neither annoyed nor flattered, and she wasn’t about to be deflected. “You can explain that to your brother. He’s just like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with this house.”

“Needs a coat of Paint, though. You’ll be able to make back the cost by selling solar power to the microgrid. And you have to comply with the sentience laws; a house of this age needs a minimal IQ-equivalent of—”

“I know the damn laws,” she snapped. “Just so we understand each other. I’m not moving out. ”

I spread my hands. “Fine by me.”

She leaned forward and inspected me. I stared right back. Her face was hard, all nose and cheekbones and sunken mouth. It was as if everything else had melted away but this inner core, leaving nothing but her one dominant central characteristic.

But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.

Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in that shell, letting me see inside.

Not that she was about to let up on me. “Look at you. You’re round-shouldered, your hair’s a mess, you’re overweight. You look like shit.”

I had to laugh. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re still moping.” That was the only word she ever used to mean grief. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? Morag died, and your baby son died, and it was terrible. But it was all those years ago. It wasn’t the end of your life. How’s Tom? How old is he now?”

“Twenty-five. He’s in Siberia, working on a genetic sampling of—”

“Siberia!” She laughed. “Could he get any further away? You see, by mourning your dead son, you’ve pushed away the living.”

I stood up, pushing back my chair. “And your amateur psychoanalysis is a crock, as it always was, Mom.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, all right. Your old room is made up for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You might fill a few sandbags. The tide’s out.” She pointed to the cupboard where she stored empty sacks.

“OK.”

“It isn’t so bad here. Even now. We still have doctors and dentists and police. So-Be isn’t a ghost town yet, Michael.” She said absently, “Not to say we haven’t had our problems. You know what the most awful thing was that happened here? In one place the water table rose so high a cemetery broke open. Boxes and bones just came bubbling out of the ground. It was the most grotesque thing you ever saw. They had to bulldoze it all out of sight. And I miss the birdsong. Everywhere you go the birds seem to be missing.”

I shrugged. Birds were bellwethers of the Die-back. In 2047, their vanishing was banal. I said carefully, “Mom, maybe you really should think about moving away.”

She eyed me with a bit of humor in her expression. “You’re claiming it’s any better anywhere else?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then stop wasting time.” She sipped her tea, dismissing me.

My old room was small, but it looked out to sea, and I’d always loved it.

Of course it wasn’t really mine anymore, and yet there had never been a precise date when it had ceased to be mine. I just slept in here less and less frequently, and at some point my parents had had to make decisions about sorting it out without consulting me.

Well, they had stripped it. Now, replacing my turn-of-the-century gadget-age dйcor, it was done up in the faux-naturalistic style that had been so popular in the 2020s, with a bamboo-effect wallcovering and a green carpet of soft-bladed artificial grass. In those days, before I had started to work on the commercial development of Higgs-energy, I was a consulting engineer for the nuclear-energy industry, and I had stayed in a lot of hotels. This style of decoration had been everywhere, endless lengths of tropical-parrot wallpaper and crocodile-skin-effect floor covering, adorning anonymous concrete blocks in Warsaw or Vancouver or Sydney. It was as if we were mourning the loss of all the green stuff, even while the real thing was imploding into the Die-back all around us.

I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.

But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all carefully stored inside their boxes.