Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“The early Church accepted the idea of ghosts, of spirits that could be detached from the body. This was bound up with competing theories of the nature of our immortal souls. In the end the early Church fathers came up with the notion of Purgatory, a place somewhere between Heaven and Hell, where restless souls could lodge. Such ideas were attacked by later thinkers — during the Reformation, for instance. But they, or rationalized versions, remain part of the Church’s corpus of beliefs.

“And the apparitions seem to keep up with technological advances,” she said with her characteristic dry humor. “As soon as photography was invented ghosts started showing up in images — never clear enough to be used as proof of the ghosts’ existence, of course.”

Thomas Edison had tried to invent machines to detect apparitions. I was intrigued by that; after all it seemed no more fantastic a thing for Edison to try than other astonishing things he had succeeded in doing, such as lighting up cities with electricity, or capturing human voices in wax.

“When the Internet spread that was immediately haunted, too; people received spectral e-mails from senders who never existed.”

“And now they show up even in virtual reality,” I said ruefully.

“But still leaving no trace,” Rosa said.

Talking this way helped me deal with the whole issue, I think. It wasn’t so much that Rosa took me seriously but the reassurance I derived from her patient analytical probing. As Rosa analyzed and classified, and picked apart cause and effect, motive and design, she was breaking open the mystery and arbitrariness that had baffled and distracted me from the start. This needn’t be overwhelming, a nightmare: that was the subtext of her dialogue with me.

But I felt more uneasy to be discussing ghosts and hauntings in that gaudy Palm Springs hotel room than I had in Spain. A place like Seville, steeped in millennia of blood-soaked history, was a place where it had felt right to contemplate deeper orders of reality. Palm Springs, bless it, was a monument to the trivial, the sensual; defiant in its own shallow reality it seemed to consume the whole universe, leaving no room for mystery.

Or maybe I was just feeling guilty about spending time on all this “spooky stuff,” as Tom persisted in calling it.

“Complicated thing, guilt,” Rosa had said when I tried to tell her about this. “We Catholics have been thinking about it for two thousand years, and we still have not figured it out. My advice is to embrace it,” she said dryly. “Good for the soul.”

Now she told me that whatever was happening to me, I evidently wasn’t alone.

There had been a huge upsurge in sightings of apparitions of all kinds, all over the world. The trend had been upward since the first few decades of the century, and was now going “off the scale,” she said.

“Even if each and every one of these sightings, including yours, is in some way bogus, their simultaneity is surely telling us something.”

I shrugged. “Yes. But what?”

She waggled a finger at me. “You are making progress, Michael, but you still have some way to go. If this were an engineering problem you would not be so helpless in your thinking. You would be looking for lines of attack, wouldn’t you? Such as seeking out more data.”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing?”

She had been digging into historical records, she said. She had hoped to find records of incidents there which might shed light on what was happening in the present.

And she had succeeded.

There had been similar waves of “hauntings” in the past. In the crisis of the Black Death in Europe in the fourteenth century, when perhaps a third of the population was lost, there were many accounts of hauntings, visitations, and other manifestations. Earlier, in the thirteenth century, the Mongols had erupted out of central Asia, plundering and massacring as they drove into China, Southeast Asia, and Europe — and, it seemed, they had driven a wave of ghost sightings and supernatural events before them.

Some of her examples were drawn from the archaeological rather than the historic record. “Take the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas,” she said. “In the few decades after Columbus’s first landfall they suffered a massive implosion of population numbers, through disease and overwork, massacre and dislocation at the hands of the colonists.”

“And they saw ghosts?”

“Recent archaeology shows a huge rising in occult symbolism and practice — and this in societies obsessed by the occult anyhow. Carvings on doors. Sacrifices. Corpses dug up and reinterred.”

“The Spaniards scared the hell out of them. Maybe it was some kind of mass hysteria.”

She shook her head. “This occurred before Columbus landed. In those last decades there was a crisis coming, certainly, a terrible, culture-terminating, genocidal crisis. But they couldn’t have known it yet — not by any causal chain as we understand it.”

She quoted more examples, still more obscure to me.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “I never heard of most of this.”

“You wouldn’t,” she said tartly. “But then I have access to records which are not available to the general public…”

I wondered what she was talking about. The Vatican and its old, deep libraries? Or perhaps, even more sinister, she meant the strange community that had brought her up, the Order; I wondered what records were kept there.

But I could come up with confirming examples of my own. I vaguely remembered uncle George’s talk of UFO scares. Born in 1960, he had actually missed the crest of that particular wave of witnessing of preternatural visitations, but he had been briefly fascinated by the lore of it all when he was a teenager. But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the threat of massive nuclear war faded, the UFOs went away. The pattern was the same, I saw uneasily. It was another wave of visitations in advance of an impeding crisis, if interpreted in twentieth-century terms, in a science-fiction-informed language of aliens and spacecraft rather than specters and ectoplasm. It just happened that in this case the feared crisis, the glare of the Bomb, hadn’t come about.

Rosa said, “And if you accept the premise that waves of apparitions occur when mankind faces a bottleneck—”

“Then there should be a wave about now, as we face the Warming.”

“Yes. With the hydrate release, perhaps, as the killer punch. A wave of haunting — a world full of experiences exactly like yours — is exactly what one should expect.”

“OK,” I said. “Suppose I accept your argument that I’m in the middle of some kind of global presaging of disaster. What I can’t see is why. What’s the point?”

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Now that is an engineer’s question. What’s the function of all this? Oh, I can think of a whole range of interpretations… Try this. Everything about us, from our toenails to our most advanced cognitive functions, is shaped by evolution. You’ve heard me argue this way before. If a feature didn’t give us some selective advantage it wouldn’t have emerged in the first place, or would have withered away long ago. Do you accept that?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Go on.”

“If that’s true, and if these visitations, and their timing coinciding with great crises, are real phenomena, then one must ask — what’s the evolutionary advantage? How can these visitors help us?”

“By providing continuity?”

“Perhaps. A linking of the better past to a hopeful future, through a desperate present… Perhaps an intelligent species needs some kind of external memory store, an external mass consciousness, to help it ride out the worst times.”