Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

And beyond all that, she began dimly to hear, there was a greater roar, inchoate and confused. It was as if ten thousand voices were calling at once, their words merging into a roar as meaningless and as thunderous as the crashing of the waves on a shore. This was the Transcendence, the churning of multiple interconnected minds. And it was terrifying.

She recoiled, trying to shut out what lay beyond the walls of her mind.

The shuttle came down at the edge of a township, small and very quiet. Nobody was in sight. And after they landed, nobody came to greet them.

They clambered out of the shuttle and took a walk. It was a strange experience. This battered world was very small, with a horizon as close as the curve of a hill; you could have walked all the way around it in a couple of days. The gravity was artificial, and felt like it; Alia could feel lumpiness, subtle discontinuities, as she passed from the influence of one Higgs-control inertial field to another. Even the clouds that littered the cramped, dark blue sky were orderly, artificially formed. Though stars glared this worldlet had no sun of its own, and lamps hovered in the lee of buildings to dispel shadows.

It was a drab, shabby place. Dwellings had been built into the ancient ruins without much sense of beauty or elegance or individual style — nothing but functionality. There was no art anywhere, Alia noticed, just like the Rustball.

They came upon people, but the people ignored them.

Everybody from the children upward wore clothes of a dull, machine-manufactured uniformity. They passed a kind of refectory, a public eating place. Few people even prepared their own meals, it seemed. Everywhere was quiet, lifeless. Nobody even seemed to talk.

In one shallow rubble-filled crater, a group of children played a game with a bat and ball. They ran and threw and caught, working hard enough to sweat. But their faces were empty, and they ran without calling out, or laughing, or clapping, or bickering over dropped balls and missed swings. And their movements were oddly coordinated. You could see there was something higher about them, Alia thought, something that distracted them — or controlled them, she thought uneasily. But there was something missing in them, too. They flocked like birds, somehow less than human.

“Most of the children are Transcendents, too, of course,” murmured Reath. “From before they were born, the moment of conception. Many Transcendents breed true, though not all. They play only because of the needs of their growing bodies; it is more a structured exercise than a game as you would understand it.”

“Everybody goes around as if they are in a dream,” said Drea. “Even these kids.”

Bale said, “Wouldn’t you?”

Drea said at last, “What a dull place! Is this really how superhumans live their lives?”

Reath muttered something about how the richness of a Transcendent’s individual life was as irrelevant as the cultural milieu of a liver cell.

Alia walked on stiffly, uneasy, a complex shadow cast before her by Galaxy-center light.

Drea said dryly, “Your imminent godhood doesn’t seem to be improving your patience.”

“Wouldn’t you be churned up? I keep waiting for it to happen.”

“What, exactly?”

“For them to come get me. The Transcendents.”

Reath laughed, not unkindly. “It isn’t going to be like that. There are no teachers, no guides. This is the Transcendence, remember, a manifestation of the group, not of individual actions.”

“Like a Coalescence,” Drea said.

“Like a Coalescence, yes — although a Coalescence is a mindless machine, and the Transcendence is the essence of mind. There’s nobody in charge. Alia, I called this a ‘Transcendent world,’ but that’s just a simplifying label. It isn’t a headquarters, or a capital. It’s just that many of the population here happen to be Transcendents. But there are Transcendents all over the Core — indeed all over the Galaxy. Just as individuals don’t matter, nor do places; the Transcendence is everywhere, or nowhere… Even I’m not in charge; I’m only here to point out your choices. It’s always been up to you.” He sounded wistful — even envious, she thought.

They walked on until they came to a kind of compound. Here, behind a low fence, was a group of very old people. Though dressed in the same dull robes as everybody else, they were bent, slow — most of them were in fact immobile, on chairs or beds set out on a scrubby lawn. They looked small to Alia, as if they had sublimated with age. Younger attendants walked among them, adjusting blankets and offering them bland-looking food. But the attendants seemed as distracted as everybody else.

Then, for a moment, the old people, those who walked, seemed to move in a coordinated way, blank faces lifting, twiglike limbs moving, a ghost of the energetic flocking of the children. Alia thought she could see the spirit of the Transcendence move through them, as it had through the children. But the moment passed, and all she saw were old people, muttering and stumbling in the dirt.

“The undying,” said Reath softly. “Survivors of history, and now the heart of the Transcendence, a new form of mankind altogether… Nobody knows quite how old some of these people are. That immortality pill works wonders, Alia!”

Drea asked, “But who wants to live forever if it’s going to be like this?”

Still nobody approached them, or even acknowledged their presence. Drea said that the Transcendence might be superhuman, but it wasn’t very polite.

Tired, disappointed, deflated, they trailed back to the shuttle.

Another flight, more airports and processing and online booking-system therapists. But I got through it.

From the air Seville looked like a jewel glittering on the breast of a desert. A river, the Guadalquivir, cut through the city, but its waters were low, brown, sluggish. The city itself, much of it gleaming silver with Paint, seemed oddly static, even for these traffic-free days, like a vast movie set. As the plane banked for its final descent I glimpsed the countryside stretching off to the east, across southern Spain toward the true desert of Almeria. Its barrenness was broken by patches of gray-green, maybe olive groves. Further out I saw dazzling silvery rectangles that might have been greenhouses, or solar farms — and one spindly needle shape that must have been the famous Sundial, all of a kilometer tall. But these signs of life were sparse in a huge empty landscape.

The airport terminal was a big box of glass and concrete, turn-of-the-century chic, but the concrete was cracked and stained. Spidery cleaning bots clambered stiffly over the windows, but they just seemed to be pushing the dirt around. Even inside the terminal building there was reddish dust on the floor, like fine-grained sand, swept carelessly into the corners in tiny dunes.

The debarkation processing was straightforward enough. My exit interview from the plane took only thirty minutes, with the usual blood, DNA and retina scans, psychological profiling and neural probes. But there was a lot of walking to be done from one stage of the induction to the next, and only a dribble of us passengers to do it. I felt I was in the guts of a vast machine, devised to process herds of humans that had now vanished.

Once I’d collected my bags, I made it through customs. And there was my aunt Rosa to greet me.

She was a small, compact old woman, her shoulders rounded, her movements stiff. She looked solid, though, slow-moving, oddly muscular. Her face was a disc of rumpled flesh, tanned like leather, but her eyes were pale and clear, tiny gray stones. She looked like my uncle George, far more than my mother had. Her hair was a scattering of gray threads, roughly cut. She was in the uniform of her profession, a black shirt, black slacks, and a cardigan of black wool, heavy-looking despite the heat of the afternoon. Even her shoes were black, brightly polished on her small feet. And around her neck she wore a pale slip of stiffened cloth.