Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

The gravity-wave echoes washed around the closed universe, from pole to pole — and from future to past. The information the Listeners sought from their gravity waves wasn’t just about the great physical events of the universe. It was about the history of mankind.

The Transcendence had conceived a great project. It would build a probe that it would send into the furthest future, and thereby hurl it into the deepest past. And there, hiding in the dark at the rim of Sol system, this monitor from the future would witness the unfolding of mankind’s deepest history — and it would send the whole complex story back around the curve of the universe to the great entity that had constructed it. The Listeners recorded these whispers, sent from the deepest past to the furthest future. Once retrieved, the news from history was analyzed and stored in Coalescent archives, and disseminated to form the basis of the Witnessing.

Thus the past was brought into the present of the Transcendence. And, buried somewhere in that immense lode of data mined from the past, was the wormlike thread of Michael Poole’s biography.

Reath disturbed Alia from her absorption. It was as if she came back to herself, back to the dismal cavern of the Listeners, from a dream of cosmic unity.

Reath studied her, analytical but uneasy. “Have you learned enough?”

She frowned, thinking. “I’ve learned how we recover the past. But I’ve yet to learn how we use that information. It isn’t over yet, Reath.”

“Then what next?”

“I don’t know.”

He sat beside her. “So we go on. Alia, I’m concerned you’re becoming sidetracked from your true purpose.”

She returned his gaze blankly. “What does it matter to you? I thought you said it’s up to me to find my own way into the Transcendence. Isn’t that exactly what I’m doing?”

“You have tasted the Transcendence, but you are still alone, still Alia. And it is Alia’s curiosity you are indulging. If you only gave yourself up to the Transcendence, all your doubts and questions would wash away. I’ve seen it many times before.” He clearly meant that to be reassuring, and perhaps it would have seemed so once, but now his bland assurances chilled her. “And besides,” he went on, “are you sure these questions you have come from your own heart? Don’t forget these Campocs blackmailed you into this whole line of questioning about the Redemption.”

She said coldly, “The Campocs’ methods were primitive. Brutal. But the questions they raised are valid. Reath, I want to resolve all my doubts before the Transcendence swallows me up. Is that so hard to understand?”

Reath frowned. “Your language of ‘swallowing up’ is inappropriate. The Transcendence is an augmentation, not a diminishing.”

But I’d rather be alone and sane, Alia thought darkly, than conjoined into a vast insanity. I have to be sure. But she couldn’t possibly say that to Reath, of course.

“We go on,” she said firmly.

“Yes, but where to?” Drea asked uneasily.

The Listeners seemed to be getting used to the visitors’ presence. They scuttled back and forth across the floor of their chamber, their huge eyes capturing the flickering of their light beams.

Drea stared at them in disgust. “This is a terrible place.”

Suddenly Alia felt confined, trapped, buried under this great mound of tunneled-through dirt. She turned to Reath. “Let’s get out of here—”

Berra gasped. She staggered and reached out to Alia, who recoiled.

Reath took Alia’s arm. “Try to be calm,” he murmured. “Don’t alarm Berra further. We need her guidance to get out of here before—”

“Before what?”

“Before she fulfills her final duty to the hive.”

“What final duty? What’s wrong with her?”

“Why, don’t you see? She needs to keep us here, as long as she can. She needs you, Alia.”

Berra had been born with the potential for intelligence. But she had probably never been fully conscious,

self-aware — not before Alia arrived.

“Because,” Alia said slowly, “it’s best if a drone doesn’t know she’s a drone.”

“Yes. Which is why in most hives, drones shed their higher cognition. But there are circumstances when intelligence is too useful to lose altogether — when the Coalescence is attacked, for example, or has to be moved.”

“Or when a Transcendent-Elect comes asking questions,” Alia said.

“Yes. Alia, Berra lucked out. She was just the interfacer who happened to be closest when we came calling. She may not even have known our language before she was needed. She probably didn’t even have a name before, because it was better that she didn’t. It was as if she woke up, for the first time in her life, the moment you walked through the door.”

“But now we’re leaving,” Alia said. “She can go back to the way she was. Can’t she?”

Reath shook his head. “Alia, Berra has served the hive well. But now she knows too much: she knows who she is, that she is a drone. And she has nowhere else to go. Alia, she will be dead before we leave the planet.”

Alia stared in horror at Berra. The little drone seemed to be folding over on herself, as if imploding, still staring at Alia.

Alia couldn’t stand it. She Skimmed away, right out of there, out of the heart of the hive. She found herself standing on the rusty plain once more. She ripped off her face mask and sucked in the dusty air.

While we worked with Ruud Makaay on fleshing out EI’s involvement in our gas-hydrates project, Shelley and I stayed in Palm Springs.

We were guests of EI in a grand, somewhat faded hotel. Its outer shell had been Painted so that it glittered silver in the dry sunlight like a vast, complicated Christmas-tree bauble. Inside there was a gigantic pool, and an even bigger bar, where a robot pianist gently played Chopin. But no guests.

Shelley had a lot of work to do, as always. She worked eight or nine hours in every day, some of it with Makaay and the EI staff. But she also kept in contact with clients, suppliers, and contacts all around the world, and those nine work-hours were scattered randomly through each twenty-four. She worked in the hotel’s small computer-aided-design booth, in her swimsuit or a fluffy hotel bathrobe, surrounded by VR visitors, or ghostly circuitry plans, or mock-ups of intricate mechanical assemblies. She had an admirable capacity to function well at three in the morning, and catch up with a catnap at four in the afternoon.

So I spent some time alone. It was close to midsummer and off season, but even so Palm Springs had an echoing, empty feel. The twentieth-century wealth and ease of transportation that had built the place had drained away, leaving a glittering bubble in the desert air. It wasn’t so bad for me. I felt as if I’d been through a lot, and Palm Springs, big and depopulated, was a good place to let the tension drain away. If only I played golf the place would have been perfect, I thought.

Shelley and I did spend our spare time together. We ate, swam, walked, talked. I was always extremely fond of Shelley. Competent, engaged, humorous, at ease in her life and her work, she was the kind of human being that I’d always aspired to be. And I think she was fond of me, too, even though compared to her I was a no-hoper — never reliable, always inclined to flakiness. But I was “never short of ideas,” she would sometimes say. You needed somebody around to come up with the impulse to do things, and I was a source of that — as witness our hydrate stabilization project itself.

For sure a life with Shelley, who was sane, engaged, and alive, would have been good for me — if not always for her. But it was never going to happen, because, as she had said herself, Morag was always there, for better or worse as attached to me as my right arm, and there was no point behaving as if it wasn’t so. I sometimes regretted that fact. I think Shelley did a little, too. But our relationship had its place in my notional spectrum of possibilities. So it goes.