Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

“I didn’t know all that,” George said. He grinned. “So you managed to combine career advancement with throwing Frisbees all day. I’m even more impressed.”

I shrugged. “You got to enjoy yourself.”

“Absolutely.”

I knew what I had to say next, even though it was difficult for both of us. “George — you always took an interest in my stuff, a proper interest, back when I was ten or eleven.”

We both knew what I meant. My dad was always faintly bemused by such stunts as experimenting with Frisbees. He would always throw a Frisbee or two with me. But he always spoke to me as a kid, if you know what I mean, which wasn’t necessarily the right thing to do, even if I was a kid. George spoke to me as a junior engineer; he took me seriously.

“It made a difference. To my whole life.”

George just nodded; he knew what I meant, and he knew it had to be said. He clapped me on the shoulder. “I guess you were never going to be a Steve Zodiac. But you would have made a good Matthew Matic.”

“Who?”

“ Fireball XL5… Something else that will disappear from the world with me. Never mind.”

George started to tire, so I called for a pod bus, and we found a bench and sat. Sitting there, breathing hard, I thought he looked ill for the first time during the visit. I could see the skull under his flesh, I thought, the skin drawn tight beneath his cheekbones, his mouth drawn in, his eyes perhaps creased in pain. A row of blank-walled modern houses, eyeless without windows, loomed before us, uncaring.

To my surprise George said he was thinking of selling up and moving away from England altogether.

“I’m going back to Amalfi,” he said. This is a small town on the Sorrento coast of Italy. “I went there after Rome, you know, after I went in search of Rosa. Once I found her I needed some time to recover, to get myself together again. The weather is still better there than here. I know it will be hard to sell up. Hell, it will be awful having to fly again. But I think I will be able to rest there, you know? That’s the way I’ve always thought of Amalfi, a place I could rest.”

Maybe that was true. Or maybe he simply wanted to be that bit nearer to Rosa, the sister he had lost for so long.

The pod bus arrived, sighing smoothly over the silvertop, its tiny noise a ghost of the roar of the monstrous torrents of traffic that had once poured this way.

When I emerged from the VR it was early morning, Alaskan time. I napped, showered, ate, worked for a few hours.

Then I put in a call to John. We had got into the habit of talking more regularly, after the George situation landed on us. It seemed the right thing to do.

John predictably thought a move to Amalfi was a bad idea. “It will kill him,” he said bluntly. “What’s the point? It’s a waste of time and money.”

“He’s dying anyway, John! Now he’s got this idea in his head, he has an ambition, a plan. It gives him things to do, arrangements to make. What else is he supposed to do with his time, dig his own grave? And as for the money, he’ll have more than enough when he sells the house. He isn’t asking anything from us, John. Let him do what he wants.”

John, a massive-shouldered VR looming in my Deadhorse hotel room, shrugged his shoulders. “OK. I doubt if we could stop him anyhow.”

As so often, John was subtly off-key in his dealing with George’s illness, to my ears anyhow. I appreciated his emptying his pockets to reunite us all in glorious VR immersive detail, but he also had a habit of reminding us constantly that he was doing it. He always lacked something in these situations, as if he didn’t quite feel what the rest of us were feeling.

I didn’t want to say any of this to him, but he saw some of it in my face, I think. Sour, deflated, I didn’t want a fight. “I said I would go back tomorrow. That is, tonight. I think there’s something else he wants to talk over.”

“Fine. I’ll alert the service provider.”

I stood up, meaning to break the connection. But John still sat there, on a crudely sketched upright chair, watching me.

I sat down again. “Is there something else?”

He glowered at me. “I’m wondering if you’ve done any more thinking about the other business.” By which he meant, of course, Morag.

“Gea and Rosa are progressing it. I guess I’ll get back to it later.”

“I still think you should give it up.” His face was always more massive, more obviously strong than mine; his expression had never looked so intense, I thought.

Suddenly it was obvious that he cared a lot more about the business of Morag than George’s illness. “John, why?”

“We’ve been over why. It’s bad for you. It’s bad for Tom. It’s bad for all of us. I don’t know what’s going on, the meaning of those strange recordings. But it’s morbid, Michael. You must see that. It’s like a hole you’re digging yourself into, deeper and deeper. Morag is dead. Whatever is happening with these images isn’t going to change that.”

I stared at him, trying to figure him out. I remembered what Rosa had had to say, that John seemed to have his own agenda in this — that he was hiding something. “ Images. What images? This visitor, whatever she is, is real, John. She left footprints in the dirt! She’s real, and we have to deal with her.”

“Whatever she is, she’s not Morag.”

“Now, how would you know that? Why are you so concerned, John? Why do you want me to keep away from this?” Fishing, I said at random, “What are you scared of?”

That got a reaction. He stood up, knocking back his chair, which disappeared once it wasn’t in contact with his body. “I’m scared of nothing.”

“Then tell me what’s on your mind.”

For a moment he hesitated, as if on the verge of spilling something. Then he drove a fist into his palm. “Damn it, I wish I hadn’t sent you over to Rosa. That old witch is responsible for all this.”

“That makes no sense.”

“Just drop it,” he said now.

I said coldly, “Why should I do what you tell me? And if you think you can somehow pull the plug by cutting off the money, it won’t make a difference. Other people are involved now. Gea is funding the studies now from her own resources. Rosa, too. It’s out of your control, John.” I took a step toward his image, deliberately trying to provoke him. “It can’t be stopped, no matter what either of us wants. Is that a problem for you, John? What are you afraid of? ”

“You really are full of it, Michael,” he said with disgust. “You’ve blighted my entire life, do you know that? Are you going to keep this up until one of us is in the grave? Ah, to hell with you.” He waved a hand, cut the connection, disappeared.

He left me alone in my room, staring at empty space, shaking with anger, utterly baffled.

I have come to stay in Amalfi. I can’t face going back to Britain — not yet — and to be here is a great relief after the swarming strangeness I encountered in Rome.

I’ve taken a room in a house on the Piazza Spirito Santo. There is a small bar downstairs, where I sit in the shade of vine leaves and drink Coca Light, or sometimes the local lemon liqueur, which tastes like the sherbet-lemon boiled sweets I used to buy as a kid in Manchester, ground up and mixed with vodka. The crusty old barman doesn’t have a word of English. It’s hard to tell his age. The flower-bowls on the outdoor tables are filled with little bundles of twigs that look suspiciously like fasces to me, but I’m too polite to ask…

“You don’t have to read it if you want to,” George said.

We were sitting in his living room, my VR presence expensively projected so my ass seemed to nestle gratefully into one of George’s slightly overstuffed armchairs. The room had some mementos, photos and ornaments. Maybe that kind of clutter is inevitable when you get older, as the years pile up. But the equipment, the softscreens and the like, was modern, the furniture not too decrepit. There was little of the old man about the room.