Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

Our lunch was cut short by an alarm. It was a mournful siren that sounded from far away, like the cry of some immense beast raising its head from the sea of garbage. The landlady came out of her kitchen, wiping her hands. She peered up at the sky and muttered.

Rosa and I stepped outside the cavelike restaurant. The cause of the alarm was obvious. Coming from the north was a murky red cloud that towered high above the glinting shoulder of the Reef; its upper levels thrashed and writhed, purple. The light was already failing.

“This wasn’t forecast,” Rosa said.

Looking down the slope of the reef I saw people running for shelter, the shopkeepers and stallholders battening down and grabbing their wares. They swarmed everywhere, racing over their garbage heap like the ants Rosa seemed to think they were.

In one open area, some youngsters were whooping it up. There were maybe fifty of them. Bottles and cigarettes were passed around; it was quite a party. They started jumping up and down and yelling at the approaching storm cloud, as if defying it. Beyond them I made out a line of police, la policia, clumsy in heavy gear. Some of them were fiddling with heavy-looking weapons, like batons, that hung from their waists. It was obvious the kids’ antics were making the police nervous. There were very few young people in Seville, and it could be these cops had never dealt with a drunken, high-spirited mob of kids like this before.

The sky grew darker. Bits of loose garbage began to blow about on the surface of the Reef.

And then, as the light failed, I saw her. She was standing at the foot of the Reef proper, where the lowest stratum of doomed cars was sinking into the ground. She was staring up at me.

I had never seen her so close. It was her, no doubt about it; I could make out her eyes, her nose, the laugh lines around her mouth. I could even hear her voice, though I could make out no words. It was typical of her to come to me now, in the storm, in a time of confusion.

Rosa stood beside me. I dared take my eyes off Morag for a second — I was fearful she would just vanish back where she had come from if I looked away — but I saw that Rosa was staring in the same direction as me, her small mouth open.

“Rosa — you see her, don’t you?”

Rosa took my hand; her leathery grip was reassuring. “I think so.”

I was overwhelmed. It was the first time anybody else had shared my visions. “Can you make out what she’s saying?” All I could hear was a kind of jabber, very rapid; Morag almost sounded like a speeded-up recording.

Rosa listened closely. “No words,” she said. “But it sounds like information. Structured. Very dense. We should have brought a recorder.”

“Yes…”

Morag turned away, took a step further down the slope, and looked back at me. I thought her expression was pleading.

“I have to go to her.” I looked down, seeking the staircase. It was getting very dark now, and windblown sand scraped the back of my neck, a premonition of what was to come.

The landlady gabbled agitated Spanish.

Rosa said, “She says we must go inside. The storm—”

“No! Morag’s down there. Let me go!”

But they were surprisingly strong, especially the landlady, and they began to drag me back toward the shelter of the restaurant.

Morag was walking away, her hair whipping around her face. Still she looked back at me. But she was blurring into the darkness, becoming indistinct again, and I could no longer hear her voice.

Further down those kids seemed to be getting more excited as the storm approached; they were dancing and jumping and whooping, some of them stark naked. One cop drew his weapon. Laser light flashed, charging the air, and then lightning-like bolts gushed. Kids fell, convulsing. The other revelers’ exhilaration turned to anger, and they closed on the police.

But I saw no more of the battle, or of Morag, for the dust descended on me. Suddenly it was everywhere, in my eyes, mouth, ears, hair, and the world was full of the wind’s stupendous bellowing. Rosa and the landlady hauled me backward into the cave, and a door slammed, shutting out the storm.

We sat in that darkened cave, illuminated only by a lamp that burned Reef methane. The landlady gave us water to wash the dust out of our hair and mouths and off our skin, and we drank a hot, flavorless tea.

Rosa had to pay for all this, of course.

“So,” Rosa said gently. “I feel privileged. I’ve encountered many ghost stories, Michael. I told you that. But I’ve never seen somebody else’s ghost before.”

I felt powerful, confused emotions. I was disoriented to be in the Reef at all, and disappointed to have lost Morag, when she had seemed so close. But I clung to that electrifying understanding that Rosa had seen what I had seen: whatever was going on, I wasn’t crazy or delusional. I was relieved, I guess. But I was even more scared of the whole thing than before.

“I have to get this straight in my head, Rosa. It’s in the way.”

“In the way? — ah, yes. Your gas hydrate project.” She touched my hand. “You are trying to balance your own needs, the issue of Morag, with the wider needs of us all. You feel confused. But that’s because you are a good man, Michael.”

I snorted. “Good? Me?” I thought of my relationship with Tom, that terrible flawed mess. “Believe me, I don’t feel it.”

“You don’t need to. Saint Augustine said that if you don’t feel you are good then you must pretend you are so. You practice, you do good things. And then, one day, you wake up and find you are good after all.”

The landlady nodded, muttering; perhaps she picked up some of Rosa’s childlike sermonizing.

“I don’t want to lose Morag again,” I said. “Not if I don’t have to. But I need to understand.”

“Well, since I saw her, too, I now need to understand also,” Rosa said. “Let me do some research.”

That surprised me. “Research? I expected you to say you’d pray for me.”

“I will, if it will help.” She tapped her forehead. “But God didn’t give us brains for nothing. Let me see what I can figure out.”

The landlady, muttering, opened the door a crack. But the storm was still howling, and a scattering of sand hissed on the floor.

This time Alia and her uneasy crew traveled more than a thousand light-years away from the center of the Galaxy, and returned to the plane of the spiral arms, where the sky’s equator was a thick band of light, the compressed glow of the disc seen edge-on, and the Galaxy center itself was a huge sun that glowered behind scattered stars.

They had come in search of the engine of the Redemption, Reath said enigmatically.

They approached a world, another world with no name but only a number in the Commonwealth’s catalog. It was just another rust-red globe, a scrap of desert folded over on itself, calmly circling a shrunken sun.

This world was old, far older than Earth. The whole stellar system was old. Billions of years of collisions had scoured it clean; it was a long time since even the sparkling flowers of comet impacts had disturbed the slumber of this world’s worn plains. It was all a bit depressing to Alia, but she was learning it was typical.

Reath’s shuttle slid low through dust-laden air. The landscape was unprepossessing, worn away — and dominated by mounds that pushed out of the sand, low but neatly circular. They were just heaps, the same dull crimson color as the rest of the landscape, but they were regular, like perfect spheres buried in the dirt. The mounds were everywhere, peppering the shadows of worn-down continents, the filled-in seas. Some of them were kilometers across.

Life had never advanced far on this shrunken world. But humans had come here, of course; in time they had been everywhere. Those low mounds were their signature.