Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

On one section of floor she found a splash of dried blood, not yet cleaned up. It looked exactly as if a sack of the sticky stuff had been dropped and splashed open here. A sack about the size of a baby. Her stomach clenched. Suddenly she was vomiting. She got her face mask out of the way just in time to keep it clear of the bile that spewed out of her mouth.

A voice called her. “Alia…” She looked around wildly.

It was her father. He was waiting for her just outside the broken hull. Drea was already with him, her face buried on his shoulder. Alia launched herself up through the murky air.

Surrounded by a constellation of debris fragments, the wreckage of his home, Ansec lifted his arm around Alia. The three of them floated together, their arms wrapped around each other.

Gently Alia disengaged herself. “My mother—”

“She’s dead,” Drea said. “Bel is dead. ” Her voice was raw with weeping.

Suddenly all Alia could see was her mother’s face, its fading beauty, sometimes weak, always full of helpless love. “And the baby?”

“Gone, too,” said Ansec. “It happened so quickly…”

More conflicting emotions swirled in Alia. You drove me away so you could have this kid. And now you’ve lost him anyhow. It was a hard, savage thought that deeply shocked her. What kind of monster am I? But as she stared at her sister and her father, the complex muddle of these emotions washed away, leaving only regret, and an elemental anguish.

Reath touched her face, his long fingers useless for climbing but gentle and sensitive. “Are you going to be all right?”

“I’ll cry later,” she said. It was true. She clung to thoughts of Michael Poole, whose family had been ripped apart by a similar tragedy. Not for the first time in her life, she sought comfort from his endurance.

Reath said grimly, “I think you’d better tell me what you know about these Shipbuilders.”

The Shipbuilders, like Alia’s own people, were relics of the deepest past.

In those early days, even after the discovery of the earliest faster-than-light drives, generation starships had been a common way to reach for the stars. Sailing on into the dark, traveling much slower than light, these ships were worlds closed over on themselves, with whole generations living out their lives between launch and landfall. Alia knew this lore well, for it was the heritage of her own people. But it wasn’t a reliable way to travel.

Most generation ships failed en route — or so it was believed, for many of them simply vanished into the dark. It wasn’t hard to see why. Since most generation ships had been launched at a time when mankind was still better at taking ecologies apart, rather than building and managing them, it wasn’t a surprise that so many expired long before their intended journeys were complete.

There were other hazards. Alia’s own ship had been overtaken by a friendly bunch of FTL travelers, and reconnected to the worlds of mankind. Other ships were not so lucky. Fat, helpless, resource-rich, they had fallen foul of pirates and bandits; there had been terrible tragedies, massacres in the silence between the stars.

But there were other sorts of survivor.

Sometimes, by accident or design, a ship would simply plough on into the dark, never making landfall. Things might go well for centuries — even after the deaths of the original crew, when nobody was left alive who could remember the point of the mission. Much longer than that, though, and things started to drift.

Over millennia languages changed, ethnic compositions drifted. Those few ships that lasted so long became like monasteries, with cowed, constrained crews laboring endlessly over tasks they barely understood, seeking to preserve a purpose set down by unimaginably remote ancestors, all for the benefit of descendants who would not be born for millennia more.

And some ships went on even longer.

Given enough time the brutal scalpel of natural selection cut and shaped the ships’ hapless populations, as always working to make its subject populations fit for their environment. And in the closed spaces of a generation starship there was always one common sacrifice, cut away by that pitiless scalpel: mind.

After all, on such a ship, what did you need a mind for? The ship would manage itself, more or less, or it wouldn’t have made it so far anyhow. With mind, the crew would only get restless, start to wonder what was beyond the walls — or, worse, start to tinker with the plumbing. In the first generation such activity would be against ship’s rules. In the hundredth it would be a sin, a taboo. By the thousandth generation it would be a selection pressure.

This was the origin of the Shipbuilders. Their ships had sailed on, even though the descendants of the first crew had long lost the intelligence that had enabled the ship to be launched in the first place. They maintained their ships’ essential systems, if only by rote. They even grew inventive over such fripperies as external superstructure. Their ships became gaudy, impossibly impractical creations, their purpose being to attract other such crews — and to mate.

And they remembered how to make weapons, for piracy — or rather, since piracy implies a conscious purpose, parasitism. It was necessary. No closed ecology was perfect; any starship required some replenishment. The Shipbuilders simply took what they needed.

“They are brutal,” Alia said to Reath, “because they are mindless. They launch themselves on missiles that just rip through the fabric of their targets, scooping up stuff indiscriminately.”

“And so they shot up your Nord, ” Reath said.

Alia said, “The Shipbuilders are the stuff of nightmares to us.”

“Because they might come out of the dark to attack you at any time. An arbitrary horror.”

“Not just that. The Shipbuilders come from the same place as us. We could have fallen, as they did. They are like us. ”

Unexpectedly Reath folded Alia in his arms. “No,” he said. “They are not like you. Never think that.”

For a heartbeat she was rigid with shock. Then she softened against his musty robe, and the tears came at last.

She spent the night with Drea, in a small compartment in Reath’s shuttle, orbiting the wreck of the Nord. They shared a bunk. Sometimes they held each other, and sometimes they just lay together, back to back, or nestling.

Alia wasn’t sure if she slept at all. Her head was full of pain, of inchoate longing and guilt and regret. She was still working through her muddled feelings about her mother and brother, the pain of the loss, her guilt over not being able to resolve their final argument. Underlying it all, though, was the simple flesh and blood reality of the loss. A family was never a fixed thing, she thought, but a process. Now that process had been cut short, leaving nothing but a bloody splash on the floor. It wasn’t just her mother who had died, not just a brother, but her family, too.

It seemed strange that such things could happen in a Galaxy governed by a superior form of consciousness. And while the Transcendence agonized over the loss of all the ancestors of mankind, here she was trying to grieve over her own mother. Perhaps, in her anguish and muddled pain, she felt some ghost of the higher, more exquisite regret that had impelled the Transcendence to attempt the Redemption.

And of course, she thought reluctantly, the Transcendence must be cognizant of the disaster, as it was of all of the past. The Transcendence must already, in principle, be seeking to redeem the suffering inflicted on her, as they did every scrap of pain and anguish right back to the dawn of human consciousness.

If she wished, Alia could Witness the Nord ’s disaster. She could, through Hypostatic Union, live through it. She could even ride around inside her own mother’s head, for instance, and live out her death. But this was her family, her own mother. Even the idea of delving into the Transcendence and using its superhuman powers to inspect their suffering made her recoil.