Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

The prospect was attractive, just trees and some low bushes and the grass. But further away I saw what looked like fencing, lines of rectangular panels turned to the sun. They were engineered trees. We controlled genomes so exquisitely that we no longer bothered to grow a tree and cut it down and chop it up; we just grew panels that could be snapped off, taken away, and used immediately. I’d read that in Sweden they had developed living houses, just sprouting from the ground with saunas attached. And in one Chinese lab they were growing whole books on trees, complete with text, like bundles of leaves.

When George got his breath back he sang a few lines from a plaintive song. “All the leaves are brown / And the sky is gray…”

“That sounds pretty.”

He shrugged. “This whole place is totally transformed from when I was a kid. See all these trees? They’re sycamore. And the undergrowth is rhododendron and Japanese knotwood.” He pointed with his stick. “There used to be a big old oak tree over there. Edge of the fifteenth green.” There was nothing left now but a hollow in the ground, faintly shadowed. “As a kid I started coming out here to meet a girlfriend who lived nearby. I’d cycle over and sneak in and read in the shade of that old tree. Sometimes I’d pinch golf balls that came sailing by and sell them back to the punters, but that’s another story.

“Well, I came back — Christ, I must have been in my fifties, your age — to clear up some last bits of business after my father’s death. I took a walk out here. And that old tree was dying. I always thought it would live forever, or at least outlive me. But it actually looked like it was bleeding; there was this awful tarry sap leaking out of cankers on its trunk. All the leaves were brown.

“Later I found out what it was. Sudden oak death, they called it. It was a kind of fungus that kills by cutting off the flow of nutrients in the trunk. You get these fungi all over the world, and where they come from they don’t usually do that much harm. But back then we were shipping plants and trees all over the planet, and bringing their pathogens with them. Now you only see oak trees in hothouses in Kew Gardens.” He waved a hand at the sycamore above him. “Instead we have this spindly crap. And all the wildlife you used to get with the old stuff has gone, too, woodpeckers and butterflies and toads. The world seems emptied out.”

I knew what he meant. Monocultural and silent, England was like an abandoned theater stage, the actors all gone. Much of America was the same.

“But when I first noticed that poor bleeding tree all I could think of was that silly old song. All the leaves are brown. But there is no warm L.A. sunshine to escape to, is there?”

“I guess not.”

George leaned back against the tree trunk and sighed. “Listen, Michael. I hate to sound like an old man, but you ought to know this. I’ve been thinking of getting myself written into a tree…”

I’d heard of this. The idea was you would embed a coded version of George’s genome into the DNA of a sycamore, say. It would make no difference to the tree: there were ways to do this without changing the length of the tree gene, or the protein it spelled out. But the tree as it grew would be a kind of living memorial, with every one of its trillions of cells carrying a genetic echo of George himself.

The robot said sourly, “He’s put it in his will.”

“I never thought you’d be so sentimental, George.”

“Sentimental? Maybe. I don’t have any kids, you know.”

That was the selling point, of course. Across Europe and North America childbirth rates were falling, and an increasing number of people faced the prospect of dying childless. So they were being sold other “ways” of having their heritage live on.

“I think it’s some deep genetic thing,” George said, his voice fading a bit. “I don’t have any regrets about not having kids — not for the sake of the kids themselves, because they never existed, and even if they had they’d probably have turned out to be arseholes. But behind me there is a queue of grandmothers and grandfathers going all the way back to some low-browed Homo erectus. Why should that long line end with me? It doesn’t feel responsible that I should let it all just go without a fight.”

On impulse I touched his hand; the flesh was papery, liver-spotted, but warm. “We share a lot of genes, George,” I said. “What, a quarter? You live on through me. And through Tom. But if you want the tree, I’ll make sure you get your tree.”

“Thank you,” George said.

The robot, standing beside us, whirred softly. I wondered what it made of our talk.

“So anyhow,” George said carefully, “it isn’t just Tom and gas hydrates that’s on your mind, is it?”

Immediately I understood what he meant. “John called you, too, didn’t he? He told you about Morag. That asshole.”

“He means well,” George said, a bit dubiously. “At least I think he does. That’s family for you. They can lift you up and smack you in the mouth with the very same gesture.”

“And what about you? Do you think I’m crazy too?” The robot looked at me warningly, and I realized I’d snapped. “Sorry,” I said.

“Of course not,” he said. “I believe you. Why not? The world’s a strange place; I haven’t lived so long and not figured that out. And you always seemed sensible to me. I have some advice, though. Go see Rosa.”

“Rosa?”

“My sister, your aunt. Look, her background is — odd.” He’d once told me how she’d been taken away from home to be brought up by a holy order in Rome, a peculiar, introverted society of matriarchs of some kind; he’d called it a “Coalescence.” “She left it all behind years ago. By the time she got back in touch with me she was ordained, and working as a Catholic priest in Spain.”

“I should go see a priest? ”

“You think you’re haunted,” he said. “Who else are you going to consult? Look, I’ll set up the contact for you. She’s family. And I bet yours won’t be the only ghost story she’ll have heard in her life.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said, uncertain. “And she’ll be — umm, sympathetic?”

George said ruefully, “We Pooles don’t do sympathy, Michael, even those of us who take holy orders. But you may get some truth from her. If you want therapy, I’ll sell you the robot.”

“You chuffing won’t,” said the robot.

“So,” George said, “how are you feeling now?”

“I have all this stuff swirling around in my head,” I said hesitantly. “Tom. The hydrate deposits. The Kuiper Anomaly. Morag. Each of these seems extraordinary, or tremendously significant, or both. And they are all somehow focusing down on my life. Sometimes I wonder if there is some connection between them.”

His eyes, still the family smoky gray, were bright. “Of course there’s a connection. You. ”

I hadn’t wanted to say it out loud. I looked down at my body, my paunchy belly, my fat legs. “That makes no sense.”

“Actually it’s halfway to madness,” the robot pointed out.

“We aren’t all created equal, Michael. Let me tell you something. You know that the Kuiper Anomaly was discovered in the first decade of the century. But it actually showed up on some old records, images and infrared searches, dating from before the formal ‘discovery.’ It had just never been recognized for what it was. But we have a date, I mean to within a day, when that thing appeared on the edge of the solar system. And you know what that date is?”

Suddenly I felt cold. It was like the feeling I sometimes got before one of Morag’s visitations. “Tell me.”