Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

The most primitive communications we knew of were chemical signaling between plants. Here you couldn’t go beyond first-order Shannon entropy: given a signal, you couldn’t guess what the next would be. Human languages showed eighth — or ninth-order entropy.

We talked around the meaning of this. The Shannon entropy order has something to do with the complexity of the language. There is a limit to how far you can spin out a paragraph, or even an individual sentence, if you want to keep it comprehensible — though a more advanced mind could presumably unravel a lot more complexity.

Sonia asked, “And the dolphins?”

Sadly, the dolphins’ whistles showed no more than third or fourth-order Shannon entropy. They beat out most primates, but not by much.

“I guess they were too busy having fun after all,” Sonia said wistfully.

Tom had glowered all the way through this. Now he asked, “And the signal from the mother-thing? What does your analysis tell us about that?”

“It passes the Zipf test,” Rosa said. “And as for entropy—”

She laid a new line on her graphical display of plant, chimp, dolphin, human languages. Sloping shallowly, it tailed away into the distance of the graph’s right-hand side, far beyond the human.

“The analysis is uncertain,” Rosa said. “As you can imagine we’ve never actually encountered a signal like this before. Human languages, remember, reach Shannon order eight or nine. This signal, Morag’s speech, appears to be at least order thirty. We have to accept, I think, that Morag’s speech does contain information, of a sort. But it is couched in a fantastically abstruse form. As if it contains layers of nested clauses, overlapping tense changes, double, triple, quadruple negatives, all crammed into each sentence—”

“Jeez,” Shelley said. “No wonder we can’t figure it out.” She sounded daunted, even humbled.

It wasn’t a comfortable thought for me either. The bright new artificial minds, such as Gea, would surely have scored more highly than us on a scale like this — but at least we made them. This was different; this was outside humanity’s scope altogether. Suddenly we were going to have to get used to sharing the universe with a different order of intelligence than us.

“And,” I said, wondering, “it’s coming out of the mouth of my dead wife.”

Again my words sparked Tom off. He stood up, pushing back his chair. “No,” he shouted. “ It’s not her. That’s the point — can’t you see? Whatever is animating that fake shell, whatever is producing these alien words, it is not her. ” And he stormed out of the room, without looking back.

Sonia hurried after him, with a mouthed “Sorry” to me.

The meeting broke up. I was left with the patient VR image of Rosa, and the graphs that scrolled in the air around her.

I apologized for Tom.

“Give him time,” Rosa said. “After all it is a strange business. His mother is trying to talk to you…”

“If it is Morag.”

“ You believe it is, don’t you? But we face this odd mixture of emotional power — she is your wife, after all, and Tom’s mother, there can hardly be stronger emotional bonds — coupled with this strange symbolic overcomplexity. She has something she needs to tell us, that seems clear, but she doesn’t seem to know how to do it.”

I had no answer. I just sat there, my head and limbs heavy; I felt simply overwhelmed by all I had learned.

Rosa watched me carefully. “Are you all right?”

“I think so. It’s all a lot to take in.” I rubbed my temples. “So much is going on, so fucking much. I’m trying to push forward the hydrate project. I’m trying to deal with Tom, and John, and everybody else. Even Shelley. Even you. And I have this business of Morag, which only seems to get stranger and stranger. I don’t want to hurt anybody, Rosa. Especially not Tom.”

“I know that,” Rosa said gently. “You think you are weak. Don’t you, Michael?”

I shrugged. “What else should I think?”

“You are buffeted. You are surrounded by epochal events in our history; you are at the center of an extraordinary storm. And at the same time you are being subjected to these extraordinary manipulations and messages.”

I forced a smile. “Messages from beyond the grave?”

“From somewhere else, certainly. We may yet learn there is some connection between all these different sorts of strangeness in your life, and things will get more complicated still.”

Just as her brother had hinted, I thought uneasily. But I had enough conspiracy theories in my life.

Rosa said, “But in the middle of the storm you keep going, Michael. You keep trying to do your best for everybody. You know, you remind me of Saint Christopher.”

I tried to remember my Catholic lore. “The patron of travelers?”

“Yes. The story is he offered to carry the Christ child across a river. But the child got heavier and heavier. The child told Christopher it was because he was carrying the weight of the whole world on his shoulders. And yet Christopher kept on going, one foot after another, until he completed the crossing. That is exactly what you are doing, Michael, and you will continue to do so, until you reach the other side.” She smiled. “I don’t think you are weak at all.”

There was a soft chime. Evidently Rosa heard it, too, for she was disturbed in her sanctum in Seville, as I was.

The call was from John. My uncle George, Rosa’s brother, was dying.

When Alia emerged from her Hypostatic Union, Reath brought her away from the claustrophobic antiquity of Earth and back to the comparatively familiar confines of his ship, which patiently followed its slow orbit about the old planet. The six of them, Alia, Drea, Reath, and the Campocs, sat in a huddle in Alia’s cabin, as she tried to describe her experience.

“How fascinating,” Reath said. “You begin even without a sense of self. Then comes a feeling for events, disconnected in your awareness. You have to learn sequence, order, separation. How remarkable that time comes before space! Does phylogeny recapitulate cosmology?”

Drea had her arm around her sister. “Reath, can’t you shut up? Alia, you say you saw Michael Poole’s face?”

Alia sighed. “I think so. But I was looking out from inside a prematurely born baby’s head. A dying baby.”

Reath said, “In Poole’s era even very young babies were innately programmed to respond to human faces. An evolutionary relic of obvious utility. It’s not impossible you made out his face.”

“I recognized the event,” Alia whispered. “The birth. I’ve seen it many times, in the tank. I even Witnessed it again after I came out, to check.”

“The child was Poole’s,” Drea prompted.

“His second son. Killed by a heart defect. The mother died, too — Morag. It was an incident that shaped Poole’s whole life, subsequently. I’ve seen it many times.”

“But never from the inside,” Reath said grimly.

“No. Not that way…”

Alia understood now. She had lived out the child’s life, its whole life from conception to death. She felt as if she had been away for eight months — though only eight hours had passed for the others. This was the Second Level of the Redemption. At this higher level, you didn’t watch a life from the outside, unlike the conceptual simplicity of Witnessing; you saw it from the inside. You lived it through heartbeat by heartbeat from the moment of conception to the finality of death, and you shared every scrap of sensation, every feeling, every thought. All you didn’t have was will.

“It wasn’t much of a life,” Alia said. “Less than eight months — not that time meant much at first. But I lived through it all.”