Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

I just lay still, eyes closed. I tried to talk myself into sleeping. I felt myself drift inward, away from the poky reality of that dismal Alaskan hotel. But as my conscious mind receded I only seemed to uncover a deeper layer of anxiety, like a beach exposed by a low tide.

I needed the john.

I pushed my way out of bed, pulled on my pants, and fumbled my way in the dark to the door.

The light in the corridor was briefly dazzling. I stumbled along one wall. The only sound was the padding of my feet. There was an odd quality about the light. It was a dead and colorless glow, lacking any of the photosynthetic goodness of sunlight. Barefoot, shambling along alone, I felt like a convict.

The corridor seemed to stretch on, longer than I remembered. I wondered if I had come the wrong way, if I was somehow getting lost. But I kept on, figuring I had to get somewhere eventually.

At last I came to the bathroom. I pushed my way inside, used the facility, came back out. Again the corridor stretched away to either side of me, infinitely long, identical whichever way you looked. For a second I had to think which way I had come. My thinking seemed stuck in my head like glue in a pipe. I turned right. I figured that was the way. I began stumbling back down the corridor.

Then I saw her.

She was a slim figure, far off down the corridor. I heard her voice. She was speaking rapidly, just as she had at the Reef. But the thick-painted walls jumbled up her voice into whispers and echoes.

I ran, of course. I felt absurd running in my bare feet, with my pajama pants flapping around my legs, my belly heaving under my vest. But I ran anyhow, as I had run before, as I knew I always would run after her.

I kept my eyes fixed on Morag. I had the feeling she wanted me to reach her. She was just standing there. But though I ran as hard as I could, I didn’t get any closer. I felt no fear: none of that awful sucking banal cold of evil that Rosa had described. She was there for me. But I couldn’t reach her, no matter how hard I struggled to run down that endless corridor. She looked helpless, her hands spread.

She turned away from me and stepped into a room.

I tried to count, to remember which door she had chosen. Twenty, twenty-five down? I counted off the doors as I passed.

But a wall loomed before me.

I had to stop. I stood there panting, staring at the wall blankly. It was just a hotel wall; it had small arrowed signs pointing me to reception, and to a fire exit. It had seemed to come out of nowhere, materializing like a VR and cutting off the corridor.

I turned and looked back. The corridor didn’t seem so long now. I could even see the bathroom door I’d left open.

I knew I wouldn’t see Morag again that night. I stumbled back down the corridor, looking for my room. I longed to call Tom, but I knew I must not.

In the morning I was up early. I checked at the hotel reception for any records of last night. There were a few surveillance cameras dotted around the building, but none in the rooms, and only one to cover the length of that corridor.

After some electronic arm-twisting I persuaded the hotel’s sentience to show me images. I saw myself stumbling, running, staggering down that corridor. I had been half-asleep; I looked almost drunk. But there was no clear image of Morag. The cameras’ fields of view never quite stretched far enough, and the sound pickups were overwhelmed by noisy air-conditioning fans. Perhaps there was a shadow — a fleeting shape, a glimpse of ankle, a trace of voice on the audio recording. That was all.

Once again Morag had come and gone leaving scarcely a trace.

The day after Alia landed on Earth, Leropa arranged to meet her in a township built out of a ruined Conurbation that she referred to by an old number, “11729.” It was apparently a place of great historical significance. Alia knew nothing of this, and didn’t ask. Buried at the heart of the solar system, she was beginning to choke on age and mystery.

When morning came, Alia flew alone in Reath’s shuttle. The little craft confidently skimmed north, and circular-plan cities fled endlessly beneath the shuttle’s prow. The sky was a washed-out blue, and in the day no stars were visible. There was no Moon in the sky either. Alia wasn’t sure if the Moon, so familiar from her viewings of Michael Poole’s time, had ever been visible in the daytime. And now, of course, the Moon was gone, detached as an accident of mankind’s endless wars. She wondered if Michael Poole could have got used to a sky without a Moon.

At last something altogether more grand began to loom over the horizon.

It was a framework, an open skeletal structure. It was pyramidal — no, tetrahedral, Alia saw, with three mighty legs plunging toward the ground. It was colored blue-gray, though its true shade may have been masked by the mist of distance. Streaks of cloud curled languidly around the apex of that immense tripod, but its base was still hidden by the horizon — the whole must have been kilometers tall.

As the shuttle swept closer this structure loomed ever taller in Alia’s sky, until at last her shuttle was flying through the vast open space cradled by the framework. At the heart of the triangular floor over which the tetrahedron loomed was a city: Conurbation 11729 itself. This city retained some of the ancient domed architecture, but the domes had been worn by time, cut through and patched up, over and over.

The shuttle descended. On the ground Leropa was waiting to meet her.

“So,” Leropa said, “you are the young Elect who has caused so much trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” Alia stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“And I’m grateful that you, the Transcendence, is giving me time.”

“Oh, you don’t need to be grateful. The Transcendence can’t help but devote its attention to you. Don’t you understand that? Perhaps your tuition hasn’t been as thorough as I imagined. Child, you are already part of the Transcendence. So your doubts and questions are its doubts. Do you see?”

“I think so—”

“And so the Transcendence must deal with you, to set its own mind at ease.” Leropa closed her eyes, and nodded, as Alia had seen Reath bow his head when naming the Transcendence.

Leropa’s face was very strange, small, round, her nose and cheekbones so shallow she was all but featureless, like a crater eroded to smoothness by great age. Her lips seemed without a drop of blood, and her eyes were gray orbs dry as stones. Alia wondered how old this person was — if she could still be called a person at all. In Leropa’s presence Alia felt transient, transparent. Leropa smiled at her; it was a cold grimace, inflicted on the muscles of her face by an act of will.

Together they walked through the great circular courtyards of the domes. From the ground the domes were peculiarly dull to look at: they were simply too big to be taken in, for Alia could only see to a dome’s horizon, and could make out nothing of its true scope. But over it all the great struts of the tripod, from here a vivid electric blue, swept up until they penetrated the sky.

Alia grew increasingly uncomfortable in Earth’s heavy gravity. She kept trying to break into a run, forgetting the economy of walking — and besides her body, no longer truly bipedal, was not designed for walking. After a time she settled on a compromise, taking some of her weight on her curled fists as she loped along.

Leropa smiled at Alia as she knuckle-walked through the ruins of Earth.

Leropa spoke, in a voice like dry leaves rustling. The tetrahedron was a ruin, too, of a sort, she said. It dated from the time after the fall of the Coalition. A religious group called Wignerians or Friends, having arisen illegally in the military colonies at the center of the Galaxy, had emerged as a unifying force in the aftermath of political collapse. In its glory days it returned here, to Earth, where it had erected the mightiest of all cathedrals over the ruined capital of the Coalition that had once banned it. In the end the Friends’ creed had become the most powerful and magnificent of all mankind’s religions; it converted a Galaxy, revealed and explored the depths of humanity’s soul, and now it was quite vanished.