Stephen Baxter - Transcendent

And it wouldn’t be enough, she saw immediately. It could never be a true atonement for her, no matter how many times she lived through her mother’s life. For her mother’s suffering would still exist, for all Alia’s minute inspection of it.

This must be the heart of the Transcendence’s dilemma over Redemption, she realized. But if it was not enough to watch the past, not even to live it out through Hypostatic Union, not even if that process were driven to infinity — then something more must be sought. And the Transcendence must know it, too. But what more could there be? Curiosity burned in her, and a vast longing for a relief from her own pain.

Drea stirred in her half-sleep. Shame laced through Alia. In her Transcendental scheming she had once again forgotten her simple humanity. She held her sister, until Drea was still.

At the start of the next day the six of them — the three Campocs, Reath, Alia, and Drea, gathered in Reath’s shuttle, and shared hot drinks.

“Just like old times,” Seer ventured. Nobody responded.

They talked desultorily of the menace of the Shipbuilders.

“It’s hard even to resent them, hard to hate them,” Alia said dully. “Because they have no minds, no purpose. This is just what they do. But the menace is getting worse.”

“It is?”

“This is a time of peace, Reath. Once the Galaxy was full of warships; in those days the Shipbuilders were kept in their place. But now there aren’t so many weapons around.”

“They will have to be dealt with,” Bale said.

Drea said coldly, “Or welcomed into the family of mankind, to become a part of the awakening of the cosmos. Isn’t that how your friend Leropa would put it, Alia?”

Alia studied her sister, shocked. Alia had never seen such a hard expression on her sister’s face. “What’s wrong with you?”

Drea stared at the Campocs; they avoided her eyes. Drea said, “I’ve been doing some thinking. Alia, doesn’t it strike you as strange that just as you swim off into the Transcendence, this horror should be inflicted on the Nord? ”

“I don’t understand—”

“I don’t believe in coincidences,” Drea said.

Bale put down his drink and leaned forward. “Drea, you’d better say what you have to say. Are you accusing us of something?”

“You bet I am,” Drea said fervently. “You set up Alia’s election to the Transcendence so you could use her as a tool to study the Redemption. Then you kidnapped me and threatened my life to force her to go on. And now she wanted to come home; you knew she was thinking about abandoning the whole cosmic mess. So you acted again, in your clumsy, vicious way—”

Alia put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Drea, please.”

Drea turned to her. “Don’t you see? The Redemption is about regret, about loss. So the Campocs have engineered this whole incident. They wanted to inflict loss on you, Alia. They wanted to give you something to regret. They took away your mother and your brother, to make you go back into the Redemption.”

Alia felt bewildered. “But how—”

“ The Campocs led the Shipbuilders to the Nord.”

It seemed unbelievable. Alia looked to Reath for support, but his face was expressionless. If it were true -

Rage exploded in Alia. She stood and loomed over Bale, her fists bunching. “Is she right? Tell me. Lethe, I took you into my bed. If you have done this for your own twisted purposes, the truth is the least you owe me.”

Bale met her gaze calmly. She thought he seemed calculating, but his thoughts were seamlessly closed to her. “Maybe we did, maybe not. You’ll never know, will you? If I tell you it’s true, you might think I’m just trying to manipulate you. And if I deny it, you won’t believe me.”

Alia turned to Reath. “Do you think they did it? Did they lead the Shipbuilders here?”

“I don’t know,” Reath said reluctantly. “But whether they did or not, they have worked out how to use it against you, haven’t they?”

Bale said heavily, “But, whichever way — this is all your fault, Alia.”

She gasped; she felt as if she had been punched. “My fault?”

“You are the Transcendent-Elect. We are mere instruments. If not for you, none of this would have happened.”

She remembered her own musings of the night before, her own deep hunger to know what might be found at the higher levels of the Redemption. Surely Bale saw this in her; all his scheming wouldn’t work unless there was something in herself that wanted this, too.

She already knew far more about the Redemption than Bale ever had. She had seen the ultimate logic of the Restoration, the madness of infinity: if Bale was concerned that the Redemption would consume the resources of mankind in a vast but futile quest, he was right to doubt the Transcendence. She doubted, too. She was driven by curiosity and doubt — and, perhaps, by a hunger to know if the Redemption was possible after all, if it could somehow be achieved. And so she knew that she would do as Bale planned; she had no choice. She hated him for it.

“You are monsters,” Drea said to the Campocs.

Seer actually grinned. “Ah, but we’re charming monsters. Don’t you think?”

Alia loomed over Bale. “Very well. If the Transcendence is what you want, let’s call it now.” He quailed, but she descended on him. With a strength fueled by anger she grabbed his shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

And she slammed her awareness into his mind. He cried out, but he could not escape. Her force of will poured along the interconnections to his relations’ consciousnesses, and they screamed and writhed. Peripherally she was aware of Reath and Drea pulling away, shocked.

With the minds of the Campocs wrapped around her own like a cloak, she called for Leropa. “Take me back. I need you now. Oh, take me back!”

A month after George’s funeral, Ruud Makaay announced that he believed that the trial hydrate stabilization project off Prudhoe Bay was “mature” enough to be presented to the world’s decision-makers. A day was set.

It would be a key moment for us. After weeks of construction and development we now had a properly interconnected prototype network, dug out by the moles and extensively tested. All that remained to do was to start pumping liquid nitrogen through the veins we had burrowed into the methane-laden sediments of the seafloor: all we had to do, in other words, was switch on, and we ought to be able to reduce the temperature of Arctic seafloor strata across a rough circle kilometers across. “Serious chilling,” as Shelley Magwood said.

And we were going to do it in the full glare of media attention, and in the presence of every key agency of governance from the state government of Alaska up to the Stewardship itself. I tried to be confident. I’d pored over EI’s test results, analyses and modeling. I saw no reason why anything serious should screw up. I was optimistic; I usually am. And I expect people to behave rationally and for the common good. John always said I was an idealist, and he meant it as an insult; he was probably right.

For sure I was wrong to be confident, that particular day.

In a way, it all started to go wrong the moment I saw Morag.

On the morning of Makaay’s sales pitch I was late rising. Still staying in that dreadful sanatorium-like hotel in Deadhorse — and now plagued by visitations — I hadn’t slept well. Alone, I took a pod bus from the hotel, and rode in silence to the coast.

The layout at Prudhoe Bay was much as it had been before, when Makaay had tentatively launched the project’s integration stage before a crowd of engineers, employees, and one former vice president. You had the rig out at sea, clearly visible under a very pale, very cold blue sky, and on the shore once more EI had set up a marquee for the visitors. But the marquee was much larger and grander than the tent they had put up the last time. When I stepped inside into dry air-conditioned warmth, I was immediately immersed in a pleasant buzz of noise, of crowds. Somewhere music discreetly played, a warm bath of sound.