Sonia loomed over me. She was covered in mud and bleeding from a wound in her forehead, and she held her right arm clamped against her belly. She yelled, “Can you hear me, Michael? Can you move?”
I pushed myself upright. For a second the world grayed, as if reality were draining out of me again, but the feeling dissipated. Sonia reached down with her good arm to help me up, but she winced. I stood, unsteady. I don’t think I had ever felt so old, so drained of strength.
I leaned on Morag. She had always been strong, but now she felt very solid, like a stone pillar. She was wearing a simple white coverall, the kind of practical gear she had always preferred. But her coverall was mud-streaked and splashed by a spray of blood, somebody else’s blood, and her strawberry blond hair was mussed by the breeze. She was even more embedded in the world than before, when the wind hadn’t seemed able to touch her.
Somehow she had come back: not a ghost this time, not an elusive vision glimpsed from the corner of my eye, but here.
“You’re real,” I said.
She looked down at herself. “Real?”
“You’re back in the world.” I touched a mud splash on her sleeve. “You weren’t before. You are now.”
“It looks that way, doesn’t it? How strange.”
Suddenly I had a head full of questions, and things I had waited seven-teen years to say to her. But even at that moment, behind it all was a single sharp memory, of what John had said to me about their affair, a grain of pain.
I glanced around. The crowd was actually thicker than it had been before the blast, I thought. Engineers and VIPs, covered in mud and blood, wandered around or sat in the dirt. The VR guests had been untouched by the blast, of course. They walked like glittering ghosts through the battlefield that our event had become; some of them even had drinks in their hands. I wondered if we had a few visitors who hadn’t been here before the blast. It was a common phenomenon: Bottleneckers, they were called, disaster-tourists.
I became aware of the others, Shelley, John, Tom. They all looked battered and muddy, but had no obvious serious injuries — none save Sonia herself, who was shepherding us, despite her damaged arm. She seemed to be the only one of us thinking clearly. I guessed her military training had kicked in, and I was grateful for it.
Everybody was staring at Morag. Maybe the shock of having just come through the explosion helped us; if we hadn’t been dulled by that I don’t know how we’d have coped.
Tom’s mud-streaked face was a mask of hurt and bewilderment. “Dad—”
I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been able to save him from this profound shock. “Later. We’ll deal with this.”
Something of his dry cynicism returned. “Well, we’ll have a lot to talk about, won’t we?”
Sonia tapped her ear; maybe she was getting information through her service-issue implants. “OK, EI security are getting ahold of things. Makaay and Barnette are dead. Many casualties on the rig. The EI people are doing a good job, but they are concerned about follow-up attacks. And they hope to get the VR facilities shut down so we can lose these Bottleneckers.”
“What about the police, the authorities?”
“See for yourself.” She pointed.
Outside the footprint of the wrecked marquee, cops and military types swarmed, and as my hearing recovered I heard the roar of vehicle engines, the flap of chopper blades. They must have been on hand to provide cover for this VIP-heavy event anyhow, but they had been unobtrusive, and now they seemed to just melt out of the tundra.
Sonia began to herd us away from the marquee. “The Alaska State Troopers are taking charge of the incident for now. They want to get us out of here, the five of us—”
“Six,” I said. I got hold of Morag’s arm. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be separated from her.
“Six, then. The marquee area and the rig will be closed down as a crime scene. We’ll be flown out to a hospital. But we’ll be in military custody.”
Shelley said, “So we’re all suspects?”
We had all grown up with terrorism, and we knew the mantra: everyone is on the front line, everyone is a suspect. But it was depressing to be caught up in its dreary processing.
John said, “We’ll be held as witnesses at the minimum. I’ll make sure we get proper legal representation. I have contacts…” He trailed off. He had struck his usual blustering competent-man-taking-charge pose, and it was briefly impressive despite the mud streaked across his face, his torn shirt, the way his fringe of hair stood on end, caked in dust. But Morag stood here, large as life, impossibly alive, watching him without expression. He crumbled, his words drying up, his personality imploding.
Sonia led us toward a site that was being marked out by troopers as a landing area. A chopper descended toward us, a big old Chinook in camouflage colors.
I asked, “Where are they taking us?”
“Fairbanks.”
“Fairbanks?” That was in the interior of Alaska, six, seven hundred kilometers from Prudhoe Bay.
Sonia shrugged. “Not my decision. It has a good hospital, I’m told. And we can be made secure there. You need to remember that the military’s response to situations like this is always to establish control. Dispersing key components isn’t a bad way to do it.”
Shelley forced a grin. “I’m a key component. Gets you right there, doesn’t it?”
Tom, freaked out, said, “Shut up, shut up. ”
The chopper landed heavily, and a trooper waved at us. Sonia ran toward the chopper, holding Tom’s hand. They ducked to avoid the still-turning blades. Shelley and John followed, and then me and Morag.
I clung to Morag’s hand firmly. “I always did want a ride in a Chinook, ever since I was a kid.”
“I know,” she said. “On any other day this would be a thrill, wouldn’t it?”
I glanced at her. Was she joking? But that was how Morag would have reacted, with dry humor. “Come on, that trooper is starting to look pissed at us.”
We sat strapped into canvas slingback seats bolted crudely to the floor. Battered, bruised, bloodied, we looked like refugees from a war zone — as we were, I guess. Six troopers rode with us. Their faces hidden by faceplates like space suit visors, they watched us, calm and alert, cradling massive weapons.
We took off with an unceremonious lurch. It was true that I had always wanted to fly in a Chinook. It was a design so good it had been flying since before I was born, and was still in operation now, all over the world. But the interior of that old bird was hideously uncomfortable, a roar of noise.
From the air the sight of the rig was spectacular. We saw it through the open door of the Chinook’s cargo bay. The rig’s heart had been torn out by the Higgs-field suicide bomb, leaving a hollow tangle of rusted metal that stood precariously on bent stilts. Whatever there was left to burn was doing so, fitfully. Choppers, planes, and drones buzzed around the rig like flies, and launches skirted it nervously. Away from the rig the sea seemed to be boiling, with immense slow-moving bubbles of gas breaking the surface. The gas was methane, of course, escaping from the hydrate deposits we had meant to stabilize, but had only succeeded in breaking apart. But at least the flares that had ignited in the first moments after the detonation seemed to have burned themselves out.
The chopper slid away from the coast and swept south, heading inland toward Fairbanks, and I could see no more.
Sonia seemed to have run out of the adrenaline that had brought her so far. She was bent over her damaged arm now, grimacing with pain. I wondered if one of the troopers could give her a morphine shot or somesuch, but Sonia was capable of asking for that herself if she wanted it.
Tom, John, and I were locked in a tense silence. We avoided each other’s eyes. John just sat there with his hands clasped, staring at the floor. Morag herself sat, eyes wide, mouth a small bud, her expression unreadable. I wondered if she was going through some kind of shock, too. After all what greater trauma could there be than to be reincarnated?
As for me I felt utterly dislocated, battered by the blast we had lived through, and now suspended in midair in this antique military vehicle, with my dead wife at my side. I couldn’t have guessed even an hour before that the logic of my life would bring me to this situation, here and now, with everything turned upside down.
Shelley said at last, “I wonder what happened to our moles.”
I imagined all those moles burrowing in the dark, plaintively listening for each other with their fine acoustic, electromagnetic, and seismometric senses. Mostly they would have survived; they were surely far enough away from the detonation. “They are probably fine,” I said. “They’ll find each other. They’ll know something has gone wrong, and will go dormant.”
“Yes. But they’ll be frightened.”
John raised his eyebrows. But Shelley wasn’t being anthropomorphic; you had to think about the mental state of your sentient engineering. I said, “We’ll get them back.”
Sonia said, “So we did more harm than good in the end.”
“We’ll fix it,” I said. I surprised myself by my firmness. “We have to. The issue of the hydrates hasn’t gone away, no matter what happened today.”
Shelley said, “But Ruud Makaay is dead. So is Barnette.”
“We’ll just have to fill Ruud’s shoes,” I said. “And, to be blunt, maybe we can leverage Barnette’s death to help us.”
“You think that will work?”
“I bet it’s what she would have wanted.”
John raised his head. After all we had been through, even a bomb blast, his mouth, where I had hit him, was still leaking blood. “That doesn’t sound like you, Michael.”
“Maybe I’m not the same person I was a couple of hours ago,” I snapped back at him. “Things sure don’t feel the same to me. How about you?”
He risked a glance at Morag. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to deal with this situation.”
“Then shut the fuck up,” I said.
He dropped his head again.
One of the troopers took a message from the Chinook’s pilot. The mass distribution was all wrong, she told us; the pilot was actually worried we might have a stowaway. So we were all searched, and the troopers combed the hold.
It turned out to be Morag. Her actual mass far outweighed the Chinook’s systems’ estimates, which were based on her external appearance.
The troopers looked at Morag, and at each other, and shrugged. We flew on.
We landed at Fairbanks International Airport. We clambered out of the Chinook while more choppers, military, police, and coast guard swooped out of the sky, and ambulances and military vehicles bustled on the ground.
Our trooper escort tried to hustle all of us into a military lorry, a heavy-duty armored job that stank of gasoline; the military had held on to the raw power of gas. Tom made a fuss about Sonia’s damaged arm, and demanded an ambulance. But Sonia herself brushed that aside, and we all got in the back of the truck.
Under escort, we were whisked away from the airport, and raced along a straight drag called Airport Way. We turned off before we reached Fairbanks’s downtown, such as it was, and pulled into the Memorial Hospital, where still more troops had gathered to meet us. I had to admire the speed with which all these resources had been mobilized.
Inside the hospital a serious young army officer told us we were to be treated for our injuries, and then interrogated about what had happened out at Prudhoe. He didn’t say anything about our legal status or our rights. John made some noises about legal representation, and he gave the officer some contacts he wanted called. But I already had the sense of being trapped in a vast, inhuman process that wouldn’t let up until I was spat out the other end, drained of any useful information — and hopefully cleared of suspicion.
We were to be separated, we were told, to be examined individually. But I wasn’t going to let Morag go. It wasn’t just my personal feelings; the situation seemed far too strange to allow it. At first the army officer wasn’t having any of it. But I pulled rank. I was a senior figure on the Refrigerator project, after all, and John weighed in with some support; he was always good at that stuff.
So while the others were taken away individually Morag and I were allowed to stay together, although our guard complement was doubled.
We were led to an examination room, where we were attended by a bewildered-looking doctor, a couple of nurses, another army officer, and a black-suited FBI agent from the local field office in Fairbanks. The doctor briskly put us through some medical checks. I was treated for cuts, bruises, a bang on the back of the head. My breathing had taken a battering, my chest crushed, and my lungs filled with smoke; they made me suck down pure oxygen for a while. Otherwise I was unharmed. Then I was put through more checks that had little to do with my health. My blood and DNA were sampled; I was X-rayed; all my implants were interrogated; I was even put through a full body scanner. I expected it all and endured it.
In parallel, the medics investigated Morag. She gave up blood when they stuck a needle in her, her cheek swabs offered up DNA, the X-rays showed she had bones and organs in the proportions you’d expect. But that business of her excess weight clearly baffled them all. And the scanning machines were puzzled when she showed none of the implants you’d expect in somebody her age, no spinal interface, no sonic chips in the bones of her skull, no medical monitors swimming around her bloodstream.
It wasn’t impossible to find people free of such gadgets. There were those who had religious or other moral objections to interfacing so directly with technology, and in many parts of the world such facilities weren’t available anyhow. Older folk especially resisted having electronics stuffed deep inside their bodies; I don’t think uncle George had a single implant his whole life. But for most citizens of the advanced societies of the West, the implants were so obviously convenient, and such a key interface to the services and products of your society, that you just took them without thinking, the way earlier generations had bought cell phones and transistor radios. Anyhow, Morag was bare.
And when her lab results started coming back the army officer and FBI agent started to look at her very quizzically. I could understand why. She had given them the DNA of a woman seventeen years dead.
When they had done with their examinations, the medics insisted we get a little rest before the authority types started in on their interrogations. The FBI guy and the army officer agreed to a couple of hours. We weren’t going anywhere, the search through the debris at Prudhoe Bay, by fingertip, sniffer dog, and microscopic robot, was only just beginning — and I was sure our little private room would be saturated by surveillance technology, our every word and gesture monitored, recorded, and analyzed. Odd how you start to think like a criminal in situations like that.
But they left us. And for the first time since her return, I was alone with Morag.
We lay side by side on cots in a small private room, holding hands. As we calmed down, out of the rush of events, I had time to think, to feel. And I tentatively began to explore, in my head, the possibility that all this might be real.
“I wonder what they’re making of me,” she said. “Not only should I be dead, that’s bad enough. I should be seventeen years older than I am. I’m probably freaking them all out.”
“Maybe they think you’re a clone,” I said. “There are simpler explanations than—”
“Than the truth?” She turned on her side and looked at me; her strawberry blond hair fell across her face. “And what about you? Is the truth freaking you out, too, Michael?”
“What truth?” She had no answer.
“I don’t know how I feel,” I said. “I feel like I’m waking up. You know? That it’s just sinking in.”
“I know. I don’t know what to say. We’ll just have to give it time.” Her voice had that light lilt that was a legacy of her childhood, and her tone just the right frisson of humor. She was just as I remembered her, and more; she had even brought back things I had forgotten about her, things that had once been so precious.
For seventeen years I had been storing up all I had longed to say to her, all I had longed to tell her I felt, after I thought I’d lost the opportunity for good. But somehow, with her there beside me, none of that stuff mattered. It was as if the intervening seventeen years had never existed. I was taken back to the immediacy of her death, how I had felt in the first days and weeks, and the wound was as raw as it had ever been. It made no sense, emotionally. But then the situation we were in made no sense. My heart wasn’t programmed for this, I thought.
Morag was watching me. “You’ve been through a lot,” she said.
That made me laugh. “I’ve been through a lot… You know, I think the doctors’ tests have started to make it more real for me. I mean, ghosts don’t have DNA, do they?”
“I’m not a ghost,” she said faintly.
“OK. But I think you’ve been haunting me all my life.”
“All your life?” She sounded genuinely puzzled.
“Since I was a kid.” I’d never told her this before she had died. Now, though, I hesitantly ran through the strange story for her.
She blew out her cheeks. “On any other day that would be a hell of a story.”
“Do you remember any of this? Like those times on the beach, when I was nine or ten—”
She said, frowning, “I feel like there are gaps. I don’t know, Michael.”
I asked her the basic question bluntly. “How did you get here?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why has it happened? Why are you here?”
She had nothing to say.
I propped myself on one elbow and looked at her. Now that I had started asking questions, more occurred, as if my brain was starting to work again. “Why should you be the age you are?” As far as I could tell from what the doctor had hinted, she was precisely the age she had been on the day of her death.
“I don’t know,” she said. “It just is.”
“And how come you weren’t fazed to find out what date it is — seventeen years in your future?” I rubbed my own jowly jaw. “How come you weren’t horrified to find I’d turned into the oldest man in the universe?”
“I just seemed to know where I was. When I was. The way you know such things anyhow, without thinking about it.”
“But that must mean you were set up, somehow. Prepared for your return.”
“Rebooted? Is that the word you’re looking for?” There was fear in her voice, doubt, but there was an edge of humor, too. “You were always such a tech-head, Michael. Believe me, I want to know, too. But I think you’re just skirting around the big questions.” She shook her head. “Seventeen years and you haven’t changed a bit.”
She was right. Only a couple of hours after her reincarnation, metaphysics just didn’t matter. I sat up, swinging my legs over the edge of my bed, and faced her. “All right, let’s get to it. There’s no sign of the pregnancy, is there? Or of the labor, the birth?”
“So that doctor said.”
“But you remember it all.”
She frowned. “I went into labor too early. It hurt like hell. You rushed me to hospital, in the car.” I remembered; what a ride that was. “I was taken in for a C-section. I was drugged to the eyeballs, but the pain — I knew something was going wrong—” Suddenly she was weeping, even as she spoke; her shoulders shook, and she wiped angrily at her eyes. “Damn it, Michael, for me this only just happened.”
My heart was being ripped apart. I longed to hold her, to comfort her. But a spasm of anger stopped me. “What else happened in between? A white light, a guy with a beard and a big book at a pearly gate—”
“I don’t know.” She hid her eyes with her arm, a gesture I suddenly remembered so well. “Something… I can’t say. It’s not even like a memory. I didn’t ask for any of this, Michael.” Then she lowered her arm and faced me. “Just as I didn’t ask to have a relationship with John. You must know about that by now.”
“How do you expect me to feel about that?”
“It just happened,”she said. “It wasn’t anybody’s fault. You were away so much… John and I worked together a lot. We just sort of fell into it. And then the pregnancy.”
She had chosen not to terminate, she told me, even though the baby was obviously John’s, even though she knew how much hurt it would cause everybody — and even though the doctors had advised her to abort for the sake of her own health, I learned now — she couldn’t bear to lose it.
“So you let me think it was mine.”
“We didn’t know how to handle it. John and me. We didn’t know what to do for the best.”
“Did you love him?”
“Yes,” she said bravely. “But I loved you more, Michael. I always did. So did John. Neither of us wanted to hurt you. And then there was Tom to think about. I never planned to leave you, you know, to go to John. Our relationship was just a, a thing, and then we got caught out there. We didn’t know what to do. I’m not expecting you to sympathize, Michael, but we were both in a hell of a state.”
It was hard to imagine John, my competent older brother, having got himself into such a mess.
“We put off telling you,” she said. “We decided I’d wait until I had the baby — as much as we decided anything. Once it was born, once it existed—”
“He,” I said. “The baby was a boy.”
She took that in, and nodded carefully. “OK. Once he was there, it would all feel different. You remember how we were before Tom was born, frightened and elated all at the same time? But then once he was born things sort of clarified.”
“I remember.”
“So when the new baby came, when it was real, a person, we would see how we all felt. And then—”
“And then you’d tell me that this wonderful bundle of joy was not mine but my older brother’s?”
Anger flared in her eyes. “Is that all you think about, that it’s John’s child? If it had been some stranger’s, would you feel better?” She shook her head. “You’ve suddenly gotten so old your face looks like it’s melted. But you’re still a little kid inside, still competing with your brother…”
Maybe she was right. After all my fist still hurt from where I had punched John in the mouth. But I wanted to be careful not to think that way, not to go down that road, because I didn’t want to draw the conclusion, on any emotional level, that my brother had killed my wife. How could I live with such a thought in my head?
We seemed to run down. We sat there facing each other.
“I can’t believe it,” I said. “We’ve only been together a couple of hours. You’ve been returned to me from the dead, for God’s sake, like fucking Lazarus. And we’re yelling in each other’s faces.”
“You started it,” she snapped back.
“No, I didn’t. You slept with my brother.”
We stared each other out. Then we laughed, and fell together. I held her in my arms, and pressed her face to my neck. Her skin was smooth, astonishingly soft. It was young skin, I thought, young compared to mine, anyhow.
“What about Tom?” she asked, whispering into my neck. “It’s going to be hard for him.”
“I told him we’d get through this together.” I squeezed her hand. “And John. We’ll get through it somehow.”
“Yes. But what a mess. A funny lot, you Pooles.”
I pulled back and looked at her. I wondered if she knew George was dead. “How are you feeling now?”
“I just came back from the dead,” she said. “I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel.”
I was scared to ask it, but I had to. “Do you remember dying?”
“No. I remember the table, the anesthetic, the pain. I remember a feeling that things were going wrong. It was like losing control, like a car going off the road.” That wasn’t a metaphor that anybody would use nowadays. She pulled back a bit and looked at her own hand, flexing her fingers. “I feel as if I’ve had a close shave. As if I nearly got caught by the ocean current, or nearly fell off the cliff. My heart is thumping. You know? I feel as if I nearly died.” She stared at me, helpless, looking for guidance. “But I did die, didn’t I?”
And we were both weeping again.
But there was doubt in my heart. At first none of this had seemed real at all. Then, as we floated into the hospital here through the equally unreal experience of a Chinook flight, I guess I had just accepted the whole thing as a happy miracle. Now, though, as my head started to work again, the glow seemed to be fading, and questions began to press me.
The fact was, whatever mechanism had brought her back and whatever reason it had for doing so, since her death seventeen years of life had gone by for me, a life I had lived without her, which she had never shared. So there was a barrier between us, seventeen years deep. That thought made me cry even more.
We stayed that way, crying and hugging, until the FBI agent came to ask us hard questions about the events at Prudhoe Bay.
Drea came to Earth, to offer Alia some support. They met in a small hut near the center of the Transcendents’ community beneath the cathedral. The cabin’s walls were translucent, and if Alia looked up she could see the monumental tetrahedral arching scraping at the sky.
Leropa sat with them, a chill, motionless presence.
They had to sit on pallets; there were no chairs in this little room, and its floor was just a woven carpet scattered over the dirt. Somehow this was typical of the Transcendence, Alia thought, its ambition soaring out of this external shabbiness. She wondered now if the drabness of the worlds she had seen, the Rustball and the Dirtball, even Earth itself, had something to do with the stupendous distraction of the Transcendence: unhealthily introverted, obsessed with the past, it was not sufficiently engaged with the present — and it neglected the impoverished worlds of its human subjects.
Through the hut walls she could see others of the community, other Transcendents. They were just a bunch of very old people, making their slow and cautious way through the ancient rubble of the cathedral, trailed by their serving bots and a few human attendants. But there were patterns in the way they moved, subtle interactions. It was a kind of flocking that was a shadow of the sparkling constellations of thought she had glimpsed within the Transcendence itself. But it was a grotesquely diminished shadow.
And today the Transcendents’ movements were disturbed, edgy, as if something was troubling them.
It is doubt, Alia thought uneasily. A vast doubt embedded in the cosmic mind, folding down into the fragile bodies of these Transcendents. That is why they seem so disturbed. And perhaps I am the source of that doubt.
Drea was watching the undying, too. Boldly she asked Leropa, “Why aren’t you like them?”
Leropa looked out of the hut at her peers. She sat with her legs crossed, in no apparent discomfort. “One thing, perhaps. I never had children.”
Alia sat forward. It was the first time Leropa had told her anything of her own past. “You didn’t? Why not?”
“Because I am undying, of course. If I had had children, I would likely have outlived some of them. Even if they bred true and were undying themselves, accident statistics dictate that some would have gone before me. We humans haven’t evolved to outlive our children. Can I not be spared that?”
Drea said, “But they would have had children of their own.”
“Yes, and then what? You feel a bond with your great-grandchildren, I’m told, or even a generation or two later. But after that the genes are diluted by a muddy tide of the semen and estrus of strangers. Occasionally in the great crowd of your descendants a chance gathering of features will remind you of you, or your children, of what once was. But mostly, whatever there was that defined you is simply washed away, like everything else in this transient universe of ours.
“And still they breed, your descendants, on and on. Soon they are so remote they don’t feel as if they have anything to do with you at all. After a thousand years their belief systems will have changed utterly. Chances are they may not even speak the same language. Your genetic contribution dilutes further, diffusing through the population like a disease. Given enough time, nothing is preserved, Alia, nothing you build, nothing you pass on, not even your genetic legacy, save only in a cold biochemical sense. How crushing that is, how desolating, how isolating! And of course, it’s all quite irrelevant.”
“Irrelevant to what?”
“To the great project of immortality — of personal survival. Alia, if you choose not to die then you are doing it for you, not your descendants — because you are choosing not to clear the stage for them. ”
“So you compete with your own children.”
“You must. That is why only individuals muddled by sentimentality and doubt would choose to have children; it is contradictory to the basic goal of longevity.”
And even the impulses of the genes were served, in a sense, Alia thought. The genes strove for their own biochemical survival. If they could not be passed on to the young, then their only means of survival was in the body of their undying host. This was the final logic of immortality: an immortal must displace her own children.
If we were animals, Alia thought, we would eat our young. She said, “And you have no regret?”
Leropa looked at her scornfully. “Have you not listened? There is nothing to regret. Better to be alone than to be abandoned. No wonder all those out there are flattened by time! This is a choice you will soon have to make for yourself, Alia. To have a child is to open the door to death, for it means the dissolution of self.”
How cold, Alia thought, how selfish. So much for the love of the Transcendence.
They sat in the shabby tent, displaced in time and space, while the undying shuffled in the dirt.
We were all held for a week, in the secure but smothering confines of the hospital at Fairbanks. We weren’t even allowed out to attend the funerals of Makaay and the others — not even the state funeral of Edith Barnette, a vice president assassinated like the president she had once served.
Morag was an unresolvable problem for the authorities.
As far as they were concerned she had just appeared out of nowhere. In their endless stocktaking of orderly births and deaths her sudden appearance was as jarring an event as a disappearance would have been, the mirror-image of a murder or an abduction. Immigration also needed an explanation for her presence on American soil. And they needed to understand how it could be that she had the DNA of an American citizen seventeen years in the grave.
Shelley muttered darkly about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind. “They’re bothered about a few anomalies in records of births and deaths. But Morag appeared out of nowhere. What about the conservation of mass? Shouldn’t we all be arrested for breaking that little law?”
There was certainly nothing Morag herself could tell them. She seemed to have a reasonably complete set of memories up to the moment of her death, seventeen years before. Past that point she seemed to have some partial information — impressions, not memories. On some deep level of her mind she seemed to know that seventeen years had worn away, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. The doctors hypothesized about parallels with amnesiac cases. I doubted that was going to lead them anywhere.
The FBI seemed eventually to settle on a hypothesis that she was an illegal clone of some kind. I was happy for them to lose themselves in that fantasy; I knew there was nothing else to find. Her legal status remained a puzzle. She certainly wasn’t Morag Poole, the person who had died so long ago, not in the eyes of the law. So she was assigned an open “Jane Doe” file — “like a faceless corpse fished out of the river,” as she said herself.
Morag wasn’t given her full freedom, not for now. She was released into my custody, but even that deal took some swinging, as the authorities had decided I was somewhat flaky myself. What saved the day was a surprise intervention from Aunt Rosa, who used the authority of the Church to back me up.
Anyhow after that week, we were all “released back into the wild,” as Shelley put it — all, to my astonishment, save John. He was sent to a more secure FBI facility down at Anchorage. There were “connections” the G-men wanted to investigate further. His legal status was dubious, but I wasn’t too concerned. If anybody could look after himself in a situation like that it was John. And anyhow, I had enough spite in me to be glad that the feds were giving him a hard time; I knew it was ignoble, but I felt he deserved it.
The rest of us were asked not to leave Alaska for the time being. We all went back to Prudhoe Bay.
What a strange crew we were.
Shelley and I threw ourselves back into the work. I was guiltily glad to have a distraction from the strangeness of Morag.
Tom and Sonia agreed to come back to the project, too. Tom said he didn’t want to see the bombers win, as he had seen for himself the damage the destabilization of the undersea hydrates could do. It pleased me deeply that we were going to continue working together, even though I knew the return of Morag was bound to put us under extraordinary, unprecedented strain.
The rebuilding of the Refrigerator itself had already begun, even before Shelley and I got back to the coast. Many of the techs working on that project were very young — just like the suicide bomber, a technician himself — and a good number of them had been killed. But the deaths seemed to have welded the survivors together; there was a determination about them that “the bad guys” would not win, that we who remained would see this thing through as a memorial to those we had lost. Maybe that was a predictable reaction: we had all grown up sharing a world with terrorists, with the dreary knowledge that with every step forward you took there was somebody waiting to drag you back. But it was moving even so.
The work proceeded quickly. The network of tunnels we had already built, burrowed through cubic kilometers of the seabed, was intact save for the area beneath the rig itself. Shelley needn’t have worried about our moles; most of them still functioned, just as I had hoped. Once the signals stopped coming they just sat patiently in their tunnels, waiting for we contrary humans to figure out what we wanted to do next.
The oil rig we had used as the base of the project was wrecked beyond usefulness, however. A whole new project to dismantle it safely was soon under way, an enormous undertaking in itself. A new nitrogen liquefaction plant would be set up on a platform not far from the site of the rig, anchored to the seabed. Once that was in place and attached to our network we would start her up again, and finish the analysis of our prototype system, work we had barely begun on the fatal day of the explosion.
And after that, with our proof of concept in place, we would go cap in hand to the authorities for backing for a wider rollout. The loss of Barnette had been a huge shock, but the whole incident had raised the profile of the project, and we had every reason to hope that in the end the bombing would do us more harm than good.
As we began to move forward again, the work was pleasing. We were all helping each other recover — and we were, maybe, saving the world in the process. It was deeply satisfying and thoroughly absorbing.
In the middle of all this, I found Morag a distraction. Can you believe that?
We ate together, walked, slept together.
It was a joy, of course, to hold her, to immerse myself in her scent, her warmth, the way her hair curled against my chest — sensations my mind had forgotten but my body remembered. It was as if I was suddenly made whole again.
We didn’t have sex, though. I wasn’t sure why. My body responded to her closeness, and I thought hers did, too. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something to do with the strangeness of her new body, a density I could feel when I touched her. But the truth may have been simpler. I was seventeen years older since the last time, though she hadn’t aged at all; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her.
Morag wasn’t freaked. “Give it time,” she said. “It’s not as if either of us is supposed to know how to handle this. I mean, how many support groups are there for husbands whose dead wives have come back to life? We’ll find our way through…”
Just as I’d said to Tom. But soon I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.
When we talked we did fine, so long as we talked about the past, the years we had in common. She was interested in my work, because she was interested in me.
But if we talked about the wider world she quickly grew confused, and even, I feared, bored. She had been out of the loop for seventeen years, after all. She had no memories of 2033, for instance; she was like a coma victim who had slept through the whole thing, and the transformation of global society wrought by the Stewardship and the Happy Anniversary strike was something she was learning about, not something she had lived through, as I had.
I was ripped up by guilt to feel this way, as if I somehow wasn’t deserving of the strange miracle of her return. But being with Morag was — a dislocation. I really was relieved to get away from her, to get back to work, to normality.
She continued to be subjected to examinations by federal-agency scientists and doctors. I think they might have left her alone if not for that strange anomaly of her weight.
Rosa, too, or anyhow her VR presence, was a frequent companion for Morag, and so was Gea, manifested in the form of her little rolling robot. Charmingly, Morag remembered the toy that had gathered dust on uncle George’s shelf for decades. They would sit with her, hour after hour, the bent-over little old woman in black and the absurd robot, gently interrogating her. I was happy about this; I suspected they had a better chance of figuring out some aspect of the truth behind Morag’s reincarnation than any number of government doctors.
I was also keen for Tom to spend some time with his mother. He was very reluctant at first. He surely didn’t want to get hurt again. Or maybe some deeper instinct was operating, some aspect of Tom’s humanity blocking her out, because this couldn’t be her. But he accepted he had to deal with the situation. And so they spent time together, away from me, away from Sonia. I knew it wasn’t making him happy, though.
After a couple of weeks we got a call from John in Anchorage. He was to be released at last, and the FBI had reconstructed the story of the bombing. So Tom and I flew down to Anchorage to collect him, and to learn the truth.
Tom, John, and I sat in a small room in the Anchorage FBI field office.
John looked healthy enough. He was clean-shaven; he had even managed to get his hair cut. But you could tell he had been living in the same set of clothes for a couple of weeks, even though they had been laundered and repaired; there were faint traces of bloodstains on one jacket sleeve.
And there was a hunted look in his eyes, almost indefinable, but there. After all he had spent fifteen days in custody at the whim of a vast system, without charges, without information on the process he was being put through. “Did me good to see the other side of the bars for once,” he told me when we met up. But I could see that was just a front, that he was never going to sleep so easily again. My stab of unholy glee when I first heard he was going to be detained now made me ashamed.
But I knew that Morag had spent some time with John, as a VR projection from our base at Prudhoe Bay. When I turned up in Anchorage I had no idea how those sessions had gone. All John had said was how awkward she seemed with the VR technology, which had moved on hugely since she had disappeared from the world. I had yet to work through my issues over this; we didn’t discuss it.
We studied VR images of our bomber. His name was Ben Cushman. He had been twenty-three years old. I hadn’t known him personally, but his personnel file described him as one of EI’s best and brightest young talents. Not only that, I was shocked to learn, he was married. He even had a kid, a three-year-old girl, a cute little button. His young wife, a college sweetheart in her pretty newlyweds’ house in Scranton, was now a widow, and that little girl would probably not even remember her father.
Tom said, “My God, he was younger than me. And he seems so normal. I thought he’d be some kind of zealot, or so stupid he was easily manipulated, or else he’d just be crazy. But he was none of those things, was he?”
No, he wasn’t. Cushman was intelligent, from a reasonably secure background, successful in his own career. There were none of the usual risk factors of suicide in his background: no mood disorders or schizophrenia, no substance abuse, no history of previous attempts on his own life.
“And he had a kid,” I said. “Who kills himself if he has a three-year-old daughter? That’s what I can’t figure out.”
John said grimly, “But you don’t need to be crazy, or ignorant, or desperately poor, or blinded by ideology, or in any way disturbed to become a suicide bomber. They are just like you and me — like Ben Cushman, here. The feds understand; they’ve had to figure it out. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve learned more about it than I ever wanted to know…”
There had been suicide bombers throughout history, he said, all the way back to Jewish Zealots who had attacked the imperial Romans back in the first century, and the Islamic Assassins in the Middle East in the eleventh century, even the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. The modern wave of suicide attacks had begun with a truck-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the 1980s. Since then the psy-chologists and anthropologists and others had had sixty years of experience in figuring out the patterns behind such attacks, and the individuals behind them.
“Except it’s not usually the individuals that count,” John said. “It’s the organization.”
Tom leaned forward. “What organization?”
Cushman, it turned out, had been a member of a radical anticonservation group who called themselves the Multipliers. John showed us a VR clip of Cushman himself, speaking brightly, standing at attention, a smile on his face. “Be fertile and multiply. Fill the Earth, and instill fear and terror into all the animals of the Earth and birds of the sky…”
“This is from his ‘suicide note,’ ” John said.
“Biblical,” Tom said.
“Yes. God’s mandate to Noah.”
The Multipliers were an extremist group who embraced the changes the world was going through. Let the climate collapse, they said, let the Die-back finish off the animals and plants and birds and fishes. After all there was no likely scenario in which people would go extinct. We should follow Noah’s mandate to be fertile and multiply — even if the end result was that we would finish heaped up in vast domed arcologies on an otherwise uninhabitable planet. And so they opposed organizations like EI with their vast ambitions to change the course of events, to save things.
It was hard to understand how a kid like Ben Cushman had got involved with a bunch like the Multipliers. But when you looked a bit closer, Cushman’s background was a bit more complicated than it appeared. His father, and the Cushmans for a few generations back, had worked in the steel industry that had imploded when America gave up on the automobile. A deep sense of failure, of abandonment and betrayal, had lodged itself in Ben’s head at a very young age.
He was a bright kid, of course. He had gone away to college; in fact he had won a scholarship from EI. With one part of his head he was attracted to the scale and ambition of EI programs. But there was a contradiction, for EI was a product of the world that had grown up after the collapse of the industries that had provided income and self-respect for Cushman’s family. There must have been a level on which he felt deeply uncomfortable with what he was doing.
“Like the child of a peacenik going to work on weapons systems,” Tom speculated. “The work might be fascinating. But you just know it’s wrong.”
So there was a deep conflict in Cushman, so far below the surface nobody was aware of it, not his family or employers — maybe not even himself.
“But the Multipliers spotted it,” John said sourly. “It seems they have become expert at rooting out people like Ben Cushman. They are predators, the feds say, feeding on emotional vulnerability.”
Tom said, “I still don’t understand what made him blow himself up.”
“I told you it was the organization,” John said. “The Multipliers. Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon, not an individual one. It’s as simple as that.”
If the authorities had decades of experience in dealing with suicide bombers, so organizations like the Multipliers had decades of expertise to draw on in turning a confused kid like Ben Cushman into somebody prepared to kill himself for a cause he probably hadn’t heard of a year before.
John said, “They draw you in gradually. They present their case as a noble cause on behalf of a community — in this case, all those disenfranchised and impoverished by the Stewardship and other global projects. They argue you step by step into more extreme positions. They show you martyrs — nothing breeds a suicide bomber like previous bombers — who are made into heroes you would want to emulate. And they praise you, they make you part of the group, they get you to aspire to a certain kind of heroism.
“And then you make a public statement, on record.” Gloomily we watched as the tiny VR Cushman, smiling confidently, mouthed his selective quotations from the Bible. “This was really the moment Cushman killed himself,” John said. “Because once he had recorded this statement of intent, there was no way he could back down. Given the psychological investment he’d made in that recording, it was actually easier for him to die rather than suffer the loss of face of not following through.”
I said, “And he did all this while working on the project he was planning to destroy.”
John shrugged. “VR links make it possible to be with your brothers, your teachers, right under the nose of your enemy. Odd how advancing technology only makes it easier for us to hurt each other…”
“OK,” I said. “But whatever this kid’s motivation, he still needed backup.”
As I had suspected it wasn’t easy to turn a Higgs-energy pod into a devastating bomb. Cushman had needed to use a tailored virus to break through the pod’s layers of protective sentience, and even then he had needed an elaborate triggering device to make the thing go bang. Cushman had been one of our best engineers, a bright kid, but there was no way he could have put this stuff together himself; he must have had support.
John wasn’t meeting my eyes. Tom looked from one to the other of us, uncertain.
I said, “And that’s where you come in. Isn’t it, John?”
He waved his hand. Cushman disappeared, and new VR images coalesced. “They found traces of DNA on bits of the bomb-making gear left behind in Cushman’s room, up in Prudhoe.” We saw faces in the display on the tabletop, faces extrapolated from the DNA traces: an embryo, a baby, a young child, a boy, growing to adulthood.
I wondered if this technology was something else that would startle Morag after her seventeen-year absence. It was now possible to take a DNA sample and compute how that genome would have expressed itself as a fully grown adult — or indeed any age you cared to choose. Thus the criminologists had been given the ability to re-create the faces of the victims or perpetrators of crimes from the slightest human trace, a fleck of spittle, a flake of skin under a fingernail.
I recognized who it was long before the reconstruction was finished: those broad features, the deep, eager eyes, the prominent teeth.
“I know him,” Tom said. “I saw him at the launch event.”
So had I. The image was of Jack Joy.
“You were his first contact,” John said to me defensively. “After he met you on the plane. He looked you up, found out what you were doing, decided it was something his destructive little band might be interested in. It’s the way they work. Opportunistic, probing, looking for a way in.”
“I didn’t know he was in the Multipliers,” I said, “or anything like them. Obviously. He told me he was in the Lethe River Swimming Club.”
Tom asked, “So how did he get through to the project?”
John sighed. “He got in through me. I’m a Swimmer, too.”
Tom just gaped.
“Jack cross-checked the Swimmer membership with EI and the hydrate project, and out popped my name, as neat as you like. Couldn’t have been easier for him. Opportunism, you see. And that was the in he needed. He called me to introduce him to the project; he was talking about the Swimmers backing it financially. I couldn’t see any harm. It was only when he actually showed up, as a VR anyhow, that I started to feel uneasy.”
“I don’t get it,” Tom said. “If this guy wanted to destroy the project, why would he put money into it?”
“As a way in,” John said. “If you invest, you’re inside; the more you invest the closer to the center you get. And once he was inside it wasn’t hard for him to find Ben Cushman, who was already being groomed by the Multipliers.
“I couldn’t see the harm in the Swimmers,” John said miserably. “There is a whole spectrum of us, Michael. It helps you cope with a difficult world; you accept things, you find a way to make a living, you get on with your life, you try to enjoy the ride. There’s a lot of humor in there, you know — black, but it makes life a bit more bearable…”
I wondered if he knew about the Last Hunters, another group in his “spectrum,” and what he would think of their expression of black humor.
“And because of this stupid indulgence of yours,” I snapped at him, “a suicide bomber got through to the heart of my project. Because of you, we nearly all got killed.”
“The FBI cleared me,” John said, still defensive.
“But the moral guilt is all yours,” I said heavily.
He looked at me for a heartbeat, as if he were going to fight back. But then he hung his head, beaten.
Tom touched my arm. “For God’s sake, Dad. Take it easy on him.”
I didn’t really want Tom to see me in this black mood. “I’ve got a lot I have to forgive John for right now, Tom. I guess I’m not big enough to do it.”
Tom sat back. “You’re talking about Mom.”
And there it was, the issue that divided and united us, out in the open.
John raised his head, and I saw true misery in his eyes. “Michael, if you want to know, if it helps you at all, I’m ripped up inside, too. And at least I told you what happened between us before—”
“Before her ghost came back to life to tell me herself? Do you think that makes it OK, what you did?”
“You have to see, Michael, that we, Morag and I, had reached a kind of settlement between us. We had decided what to do. She would have the baby, we would see how we all felt after that, and then we’d talk to you. It was all going to be OK; we would fix everything.”
A settlement, I thought: a verbal contract, a lawyer’s way of rationalizing away pain.
“But she died,” John said. “Death came down on us like a blade. After that everything changed, all the threads of our life cut short.
“And in all the time since then, I’ve had to deal with this in my head. Michael, nobody knew the truth about that pregnancy, nobody but me, once Morag was dead. I knew how much you had been hurt — and how much more you would hurt if you knew what I had done — and I couldn’t tell you. And, with time, we settled down to a new way of being in each other’s lives, you and me. That was my way of coming to peace with myself.”
“Some peace,” I snapped. “You found Inge, you had two kids. And she left you, didn’t she? Maybe you were just as haunted by Morag as I was.”
His eyes blazed angrily. “I didn’t choose any of this, Michael. But I had to cope with it. But now Morag has returned, she hasn’t lived through any of this, she can’t understand it—”
Tom blurted, “I’ve spoken to her, too. Mom.” His voice was strained. He was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, hands neatly folded on his lap.
I hated to see him like that, to think how John and I had put him in this position — how we’d failed to protect him.
He said, “With me it’s the kid, the damn kid. My little brother who killed my mom.”
I said, “I know—”
“I always felt second best to a fetus. To the ghost of a fetus. I grew up feeling that way. I always imagined she must have loved it more than me. Because she let it take her life, right?”
“And you talked about this to Morag?”
“She doesn’t listen. Or she can’t. To her it’s yesterday,” he said. “All that stuff when the baby was born. There’s something inside her that knows I grew up, I think, that knows all that time has passed, something deep down that recognizes me. But she doesn’t know how to talk to me. She remembers me as a happy kid of eight. She asks me about my life, about Sonia, like I was still a kid at grade school. She doesn’t know anything about how I spent seventeen years trying to cope with all this. I don’t want to hurt her. It isn’t her fault. And she’s my mom. But at the same time she isn’t.” He looked at John. “Do you know what I mean? My mom coming back hasn’t helped,” Tom said emphatically. “I’m sorry, Dad. That’s the way I feel.”
He was right, I thought. It was strange: a year ago, the fondest wish you could have granted me was to have Morag back in my life. And now she was back — and it was making nobody happy. It was as if Morag was a bomb that had been dropped into the middle of our tangled, multilayered relationships.
“Look at us, the three of us. What a mess.” I stood up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Now you’ve got your implants reprogrammed you can buy us both a beer, John.”
John stood, rapped on the door, and we were let out into the town.
Drifting through the mind of the Transcendence, Alia and Leropa explored the Redemption, and how it had touched Michael Poole’s life.
“This is the Third Level of the Redemption,” Leropa said. “It is called the Restoration. It is the beginning of a new age, in which the Transcendence will assume full responsibility for the past. If you have the power of a god, you have a responsibility to use it. Can you not see the magnificence?”
To touch the past was easy for the Transcendence, Alia could see now, for it had a mastery of the finitude of the universe. If you saw correctly the chains of causality wrapping around the curve of the universe, you only had to make the slightest adjustment, and your touch would cause ripples that would wash out to the furthest future, and then around the arc of time to the deepest past, and up through the long prehistory of humanity: ripples at last focusing on one woman and her unborn child. A flawed gene which might have expressed itself this way no longer did so — and a child was born safely, a mother survived to a healthy long life. That was all that was needed.
And Morag Poole, her death averted, could walk through the walls of reality and back into the life of her astonished, still-grieving husband. Suddenly this part of Michael Poole’s life, embedded in the past and viewed many times through the lens of Alia’s Witnessing tank, was not as it had been.
It was a magnificent vision, Alia thought, as all of history, past and future, shifted and waved like a curtain in a breeze.
“We gave Michael Poole his Morag,” Leropa said. “Not a copy — she was Morag! Restored, identical in every way philosophy can identify. Morag was selected for the sake of Michael Poole. And for you, Alia…”
But Alia had learned that nothing the Transcendence did was for her, but only ever for itself. And she knew that if you wanted to understand the Transcendence, you had to think things through, to think like the Transcendence itself.
“History was changed,” she said.
“A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way.”
“But Poole knew Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality.
He remembered her dying.”
“Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole’s loss if he isn’t aware of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death.”
But that wasn’t the end of it. “In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been, was, terminated at a premature birth.”
“Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration.”
“But there’s a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities…” A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.
And even that wasn’t the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence’s infinite ambition. If this goes on…
Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then all of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.
It wasn’t as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if every possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might ever have lived under any contingency was to be born — and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.
“History will be meaningless,” she murmured. “The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored…”
“All wrongs righted,” Leropa declaimed. “All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!”
Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?
But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite — and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.
But getting Morag back wasn’t making Michael Poole happy.
That one hard fact cut through her chain of thought, and suddenly the bewildering madness of it all overwhelmed Alia. Suddenly she was aware of her body, a distant scrap of flesh in the shadow of a ruined cathedral, that thrashed and curled over on itself.
I startled awake, spooked.
I turned over. Morag was sitting up in bed, a baggy T-shirt draped over her body. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her face lifted up. I could see her quite clearly, the smooth lines of her arms, the oval of her uplifted face, even though the only light in that pokey Deadhorse hotel room was the dial of a small alarm clock. It was as if she were bathed with light from some source I couldn’t see, a warm glow, like the glow from a hearth.
Her lips moved and her tongue flickered. She started muttering, a kind of high-pitched gabbling. It was the high-speed “speech,” full of mysterious, unfathomable complexity, that we had been able to record before.
“Light,” I snapped. The room’s lights cut on with a buzz, and the room filled with the washed-out glow of fluorescents.
Morag stopped her rocking. In the flat bright light she just looked like a woman, like Morag, unreasonably sexy in my baggy T-shirt. But I could see the way the mattress was compressed under her weight. She smiled at me. “Are you OK?”
“No,” I said. “You know how that stuff freaks me out. Shit, Morag.” I sat up, pushing a pillow behind my back, and pulled the duvet up over my chest, protectively. “Don’t you ever sleep?”
“Not much,” she said. “We’ve been through this, Michael.” She was quite relaxed, her voice almost dreamy. She rocked gently, bathed in that light from nowhere. “I’m happy just to sit here. I like to watch you sleep.”
“Well, it bothers me.” It was true; it stopped me from sleeping. I was always aware of her watching me, no matter how silent and still she was.
She teased me. “We used to stay awake all night, once. You didn’t complain then. Remember that time in Edinburgh?” I did remember; as guests of a nuclear energy facility on the coast of the Firth of Forth we’d gotten to stay in Holyrood House, the seat of the old royals. She said, “You, me, a couple of bottles of champagne, a little baby oil—”
She said this in a seductive, silky way she had always reserved for our most intimate moments, and the memory of it turned me on immediately. “OK,” I said. “It’s as if I can smell the baby oil. But—”
But there was something wrong. She was Morag — I felt that deeply. But it was as if there were another presence in the room with us, another identity embedded in Morag. I had no idea how to express this. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were even clear to me.
And besides, at that moment I felt like shit, my eyes gritty, my throat dry, my head heavy with that overfull feeling you get when you haven’t given sleep a chance to clear it out. “I’m getting too old for this,” I said feebly.
“Then go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes, rocking gently.
I lay back and closed my eyes. In my head I sought the elusive rhythms of sleep, tried to dig up fragments of the dream state I’d been in before I woke. But I couldn’t ignore that heavy rocking, back and forth, back and forth, as the bed tipped this way and that, creaking gently.
I looked at her again. She had turned her face away, looking to the ceiling, as if seeking something I couldn’t see.
“I can hear them all the time, you know,” she said softly.
“What?”
“Voices… It’s like a river running, but just out of my sight, beyond a screen of trees, maybe. It’s always there in the background, and if I let myself hear it, it sort of washes through me. I sometimes think that if I could just push through that barrier, step through the last trees to the river—”
“What? What would you see?”
She closed her eyes, concentrating, peering inward. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I can almost understand. Like when you are at school, and you’re struggling to grasp some concept. You see it in outline, you grasp a few steps of the chain of logic. But then you drop it all, like juggling too many balls, and it all goes away. Or maybe it’s like a download.”
“A download? What are you talking about, Morag? Who is trying to download into your head?”
“I don’t know. ” She smiled faintly. “Maybe the answer is in the download itself, and I’m too dumb to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”
“I really have no idea.”
She faced me. She held out her hands, and I took them; she was relaxed, but I could feel the strength in her fingers, the strange density of her warm flesh. “But the trouble we have has nothing to do with my dream-talking. Has it, Michael? Or even me keeping you awake.”
“It doesn’t help,” I said sincerely.
“I know.” She rubbed the backs of my hands with her thumbs. “There’s a barrier between us. Something that’s stopping us from connecting the way we used to.”
“Of course there is,” I said. “You were dead. I saw you die. You were dead for seventeen years. That can’t just be erased.” I was speaking more harshly than we had spoken before. But at that moment, under the cold hospital-like light of that dismal room, I felt too tired to care.
“We’ll get there,” she said now, unfazed. “We’ll talk through this. We have to confront the truth, that’s all. We just need time.” But as she spoke she seemed distracted again. She lifted her face to the ceiling, her eyes half-closed. And her lips began to work, her tongue to flicker like a tiny pink snake in her mouth, as she started up her strange speaking-in-tongues once more.
I felt excluded, even repelled. “Christ.” I tried to snatch my hands back. But I startled her, and she clenched her fingers. I heard the bones in my hands snap, and was screaming before the pain began.
The Deadhorse clinic was basic, but the work they needed to do on me was simple. The doctor numbed me, set the broken bones in the back of my hands, injected nanomachines to help promote the bones’ knitting together, treated the bruising, and then shoved my hands into blow-up casts, like inflatable gloves.
After that I sat in the out-patient area, waiting for Tom to come pick me up and take me back to the hotel. A clock on the wall told me it was still only five in the morning. “Shit,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Rosa. Her voice appeared before she did. Her compact body gathered out of the air, her robes so black they seemed to suck in the light. In the bright antiseptic light of the hospital she looked totally out of place. She eyed the bench beside me. “If you don’t mind I’ll stand,” she said. “The VR facilities at this hospital are limited. I wouldn’t want to alarm anybody by slipping through the chair to the floor.”
“You didn’t bring any grapes,” I said sourly.
She bent to inspect my boxing-glove hands. “Oh, dear. You have been in the wars.”
“It was fucking painful.”
“I’m sure it was.”
“She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “Morag. It’s just she’s so strong. Her new body, whatever. She hasn’t got used to it yet. I’ve taken a few bruises before. We’re learning together, I guess. This is the first time she’s broken a bone, though.”
Rosa nodded. “The simplest test shows her strength is off the scale, for a person of her height and size. Like her mass, there is, umm, more of her than there should be.”
I looked at her reluctantly. “Do you think she’s even human?”
“I don’t know,” Rosa said. “I believe that inside she thinks she’s human, and perhaps that’s what’s most important in the end. But her body is something more than human.”
Gea’s and Rosa’s studies were bearing fruit, she said.
“Gea will give you the physics. When we draw Morag’s blood, we find human DNA. Her molecules are made of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons every bit as mundane as yours and mine. And yet there is the mystery of this extra mass. Her weight is measurable, so the mass responsive to gravity, yet it is invisible to our eyes, all our senses. Gea tells me that there are many forms of invisible matter in the universe. Perhaps Morag’s visible body is like the bright swirl of a galaxy, cradled in a wider pool of dark matter.”
“And what do you think?”
She folded her hands neatly in her sleeves. “There are older ideas which may help. Theologians have a long history of distinguishing between the form of an object and its substance, its true nature. It’s an analysis that goes back to Aristotle, of course. The Church subsumed his philosophy to find a way to think about the Eucharist.”
“The Holy Communion.”
“Yes, the host that is at once a piece of bread, and at the same time the flesh of Christ. Morag’s remarkable new body may have something of the qualities of Christ’s resurrected body — indeed, the bodies promised to us all on resurrection. It is a body, but something more. The resurrected body is impassible, beyond pain, agile, so that you move as you like, and it has subtility, so it is totally subject to the desires of the soul. And in its glory, it shines like the sun.”
All this was so much ancient bullshit to me. But I thought of Morag’s body in the dark of the hotel room, shining with a warm light of its own. “Oh, hell, Rosa. Do you believe any of this stuff?”
“Not everybody who lived before the age of enlightenment was a fool, you know. Whatever is going on here, whatever her origin — what if Morag is not the first manifestation of her kind? If there have been earlier Morags in history, the thinkers of the day will have tried to explain her away in the language of the time, in concepts alien to us. But their analysis may record some imperfectly understood aspect of the truth.”
This was overwhelming me. Exhausted, still in pain, I shook my head.
Rosa was watching me. “I don’t think it’s the nature of Morag’s transmogrified body that is troubling you, though. Is it, Michael? You have her back,” she said gently. “And it isn’t as you imagined.”
It was hard for me to answer this, for I hadn’t yet admitted it to myself, and Morag and I had come nowhere near talking it through. But she was right. “We can’t talk,” I said. “Not really. Oh, we can talk about our old lives, what happened to us, what we shared before she, well, died. But even that is odd. For her it’s recent; for me it’s seventeen years ago. Even the memories don’t feel the same anymore. Then there are the trivial things, the little things. We trip up all the time. The world has moved on while she was away, and I lived through it all. But I have to explain everything, like she’s a tourist from some other place.”
Rosa said, “She was taken out of the world, but the world kept turning. And the more the years have passed, the more has happened that she simply did not see, did not share with you.”
“The dead get deader,” I said somberly. “I feel ashamed that I can’t—”
“That you can’t love her? Don’t be ashamed, Michael. You didn’t ask for this situation; you may be in a situation nobody has ever had to face before. No wonder your emotions are all over the place. But you’re doing your best, for everybody, including Morag. Just as you always do. I have faith in you, you know.”
“Thank you.”
Rosa watched me carefully. “What about your work, Michael? Is all this getting in the way?”
Of course it was. I glanced at the clock. Not yet five-thirty, but I knew I had a breakfast appointment at seven A.M.
I was working hard, because I believed in it all. Since the bombing, as I had immersed myself in the hydrate project, I had thought harder than I had ever before about the context of my life, the meaning of my work. I had discovered conviction in myself, for the first time since I was a kid, before cynicism knocked it all out of me. We had to do this; it was as simple as that. And I was central to it all.
“Gea keeps telling me she believes I am a fulcrum of history,” I said. “Me. And you’ve said the same might be true. Even George said it. Now I’ve started to believe it, to believe my own myth. Is that crazy?”
“Not necessarily. But Morag is getting in your way.”
“I guess so.”
“The restoration of a lost wife is a fantasy of redemption. I daresay it was your fantasy. But has it made you happier?”
I thought that over. “Even if you give me Morag back, you can’t wash it all away. The memories of her death. All that suffering, all that pain. It’s as if it still exists, out there somewhere, beyond reach… Does that make sense?”
“And what do you fear most?”
“That I will come to hate her,” I said honestly. “I don’t think I could bear that.”
She straightened up, purposeful. “We don’t know how she got here. We don’t know the meaning behind your visitations, this strange reincarnation. We don’t know who is meddling with your life in this way, or why. But we must take control of the situation, so that, with or without Morag, you can move on. I think it’s time we bring it to a head.”
“Bring it to a head? How?”
I would never in a thousand years have guessed the word she used next.
“Exorcism.”
They sat in their translucent-walled tent, beneath the towering cathedral.
“I still have doubts about the Redemption, Leropa.”
“I know. The Transcendence knows. You have become something of a focus, Alia, for internal debate.”
“If you’re going to say that I’m not fit to question the wisdom of an infinite entity — a being that is to me as I am to an individual cell of my body—”
“I wouldn’t dream of saying any such thing,” Leropa murmured. “Your humanity is the point of the exercise, Alia. The Transcendence loves you as you are. And the Transcendence’s love for you means that it knows you — it shares your doubts.You are far more important than you know.”
“You already said the Transcendence loves me,” Alia said dully. “Several times.” It seemed to mean nothing. Perhaps the Transcendence was too large to know what love truly was. Perhaps the finitude of humanity was part of what made love work; perhaps the need to devote such a large fraction of your own limited life to others made love precious in the first place. Or perhaps, she thought guiltily, perhaps it was simply immature, emotionally. Powerful it might be, but it was very young.
And if the Transcendence didn’t understand love, could it ever understand the logic of Redemption?
“Even the Restoration isn’t enough,” whispered Alia. “How can it be? Just to be made alive again — it simply isn’t enough. Leropa, can’t you see that? Michael Poole loved Morag. His Morag, who died. And his love for his Morag, in the end, encompassed her death. His loss deepened his love, enriched it. That is the nature of life in a universe of mortals. If you crudely reverse her death, simply bring her back, then you are taking her out of her context of history. How did Michael Poole put it?…”
“The dead get deader,”Drea said bleakly.
“And you can never put that right.” Alia took a deep breath; this was the heart of it, though she scarcely knew how to express it. “The Restoration is futile, as futile as all the watching was, the Witnessing, even the Hypostatic Union. Because even if you allow Morag Poole to survive the suffering of her childbirth, that particle of suffering still exists, out there in a wider universe of possibility.”
Leropa stared at Alia for long heartbeats. For the first time Alia detected hostility in her gaze. “You reject the Restoration,” Leropa said. “But I wonder how you would feel if those you have lost were Restored to you.”
A shadow moved on the wall of the hut — a human form, dimly seen, perhaps a woman with an infant in her arms. She walked uncertainly, as if lost. Drea’s eyes widened, and she clutched at Alia.
Alia snapped, “Leropa. Don’t do this.”
Leropa smiled thinly. “Think about your own mother, your baby brother. They died in pain, pain beyond your imagination. At least your brother, an infant, didn’t know what was happening. But your mother knew. In those last heartbeats an awareness of her approaching death, the loss of the rest of her life — the loss of you — deepened her anguish, exponentiated it far beyond the physical. But it needn’t be that way.”
Alia glared at Leropa. “You call it love, to inflict this horror upon us?”
Leropa actually seemed puzzled by her choice of words. “Inflict?”
Drea buried her head on her sister’s shoulder. “Make her stop, Alia. I can’t bear it.”
That shadowy woman seemed to spot the hut. She walked slowly toward it, clutching her child. She seemed confused and exhausted, as if she had been through a great trial. But through the misty translucence of the hut’s walls her features were gradually becoming clearer.
Leropa said, “Don’t you even want to say good-bye to her? Don’t you even want to say sorry?”
“Leropa, I’m begging you.”
The woman hesitated again. She paused for a moment, looking around. She seemed to be murmuring comforting words to the child in her arms. Then she turned away and walked off, her figure diminishing and blurring, until she was gone, as if she had never existed at all.
Drea glared at Leropa through tear-streaked eyes. “You know what the trouble is? You Transcendents, with all your obsession with the past, don’t listen to people. I’ve had enough of being used. Leropa, if you Transcendents want to use the people of the past as a dumping ground for your guilt, then you ought to ask them first. You should have asked Michael Poole if he wanted his wife back!”
Leropa sighed. “What if we asked you? Alia, would you choose never to have even the possibility of seeing your mother again? You might refuse now — but how can you be sure how you will feel in ten years, or fifty, or a thousand? You will be an undying, Alia; you would have a long time to regret such a choice.
“And even if you did make the choice for yourself, would you make it on behalf of others? Your father, for example? The rest of humanity, you have never even met? You are arrogant, Alia — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing — but I don’t think even you are arrogant enough for that. So what do we do? Ask them all?” She laughed, a strange, dry sound. “Shall we take a vote?”
“Appoint a representative,” Alia said impulsively.
Leropa glared at her.
Alia quailed, but stuck to her ground. “I think my sister’s right. The Redemption is for the benefit of the Transcendence, not us. And in its quest for Redemption the Transcendence has lost sight of simple human morality.” Am I really lecturing a near-god?… “Appoint a representative to speak on behalf of the rest.”
Leropa said loftily, “Impossible. A mere human could not bargain with the Transcendence. She, he couldn’t possibly comprehend the meaning of the choice, let alone make a valid decision.”
Drea snapped, “You aren’t better than me, Leropa, you wizened old—”
“She’s right,” Alia said quickly. “Drea, this isn’t about rivalry, about one bunch of humans lording it over the rest. We’re dealing with the Transcendence. It genuinely is a higher life-form, a higher consciousness. You could no more debate with it than a flower, or a blade of grass, could argue with you.”
Drea said, “You could.”
Alia smiled, feeling tired. “Actually I’d be in a worse position than you. I am part of the Transcendence itself — it’s true, Drea, already, even though my Election isn’t complete. I am like one neuron among the billions in your head.”
Leropa said, “A mortal creature cannot negotiate with its god. Only a Transcendence can negotiate with a Transcendence.” But she looked into Alia’s eyes.
Alia saw the answer there. “Then,” she said, “we must make the representative equivalent to the Transcendence. Just for one day.”
“Just for one day,” Leropa said slowly. “Well. Quite an ambition. But perhaps it will help resolve this crisis. But who will speak for all mankind?” She smiled coldly. “Michael Poole, perhaps?”
Oddly, that made sense to Alia. After all, Poole had been the recipient, or the victim, of Morag’s restoration. He knew what was being offered; he had lived through it.
And then there was Poole himself. After a lifetime of Witnessing Alia knew Poole as well as she knew anybody of her own time. Michael Poole was flawed but decent, a loving and courageous man who tried to cope. He was everything that had been best about the humanity of his era, she thought. “Yes. Michael Poole.”
Leropa looked surprised, as if a bluff had been called. “Then you must prepare him, Alia,” she said.
“Very well…”
A deep tremulous fear ran through Alia. What had she got herself into — and how had she got to this point? Was she, little Alia, changing the course of its destiny, and therefore reshaping the path of humanity?
But she was part of the Transcendence now, and all her doubts and questions were a necessary projection of its own inner turmoil. Maybe it would have come to this decision point by some other route, even if she had never existed. But I do exist, she thought. And I have made this happen. Me. And maybe this strange exercise really would help the Transcendence resolve its epochal confusion over the Redemption. It was a moment of defiant, quite un-Transcendent pride.
Drea stared from one to the other, her mouth slack, excluded. Alia saw she shivered with fear — of her, of her sister, as much as of the strange old undying, Leropa.
A couple of days after my talk with Rosa, we gathered in the lobby of the Deadhorse hotel, which we’d reserved for our purposes: me, my reincarnated wife, Tom and Sonia, John, Rosa, Gea. Gea had saturated our environs with counter-surveillance technology. We most assuredly did not want stories of what we were attempting that evening to leak out to the press.
We drew upright chairs into a horseshoe, and we all took our places. John’s lips were pursed, his arms folded, his opinions obvious. Sonia was wide-eyed. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking — maybe, What the hell kind of family am I attaching myself to here? The little Gea toy robot just rolled backward and forward on the floor, somehow reassuring in her absurdity. Rosa sat in her chair, or appeared to; she had a stack of leather-bound books in her lap, and she wore a surplice and a purple stole.
At the head of the horseshoe, the focus of the group, Morag just sat there, head up, eyes wide open, watching us, expressionless. She was wearing a simple dress, open at the neck, her favorite blue color; her hair was brushed back. When she moved, the chair creaked under her weight. It might have been funny if it wasn’t so strange.
Tom gazed around the room mournfully. “I cannot believe we’re doing this. Dad, do we have to be here?”
“But an exorcist doesn’t usually work alone,” Rosa said. “I would expect to work with a younger priest. Someone who could take over if I die, or am possessed. There would be a doctor, to provide medications if necessary. And there would be a family member — somebody strong, in case things get, umm, interesting.”
“This is all quackery,” John said sternly. “Mumbo jumbo.”
“It’s an ancient ritual,” Rosa said, admonishing him. “It derives from the New Testament. Christ Himself drove out demons: ‘My name is legion.’ ”
“I remember that line,” I said. “Lots of pigs got drowned, didn’t they?”
“The word exorcise actually comes from a Greek root meaning to swear. You bind the demon to a higher authority — Christ — so that you can control it, and command it against its will.”
Sonia asked, curious, “And is that what’s written down in your little books?”
Rosa held up one battered-looking volume. “This is the Rituale Romanum, a priest’s manual of services. This contains the formal exorcism rite sanctioned by the Church. Dates back to 1614. I don’t think we have to be too formal today, however.”
John was mocking. “What, no bell, book, and candle? I’m disappointed.”
“But I am wearing the required uniform,” she said, smiling. “And I took confession before coming here. I’m absolved of my sins; there’s nothing a demon could use against me during the ritual.”
“Quackery,” John said again. “After all, what was ‘demonic possession’ but the symptom of some illness — hysteria, multiple personality, schizophrenia, paranoia, some other neuroses — even just a chemical imbalance in the brain? I wonder how many hundreds, thousands of mentally ill people had to endure the cruelty of rites like this?”
Rosa said, “Maybe a little humility is in order. There may come a time when diagnoses of ‘hysteria’ and ‘schizophrenia’ will seem just as foolish, ignorant, and superstition-laden as talk of demons. Besides,
John, belief isn’t necessary for your participation. A funeral doesn’t change the fact of death, but you wouldn’t refuse to attend one, would you? And having attended you would feel better, for through our rituals we feel we have some control over such an extraordinary and powerful part of our lives, even death. This rite is merely a way of managing the ineffable.”
“So is that what you’re trying to do today? Make us all feel better?”
Rosa replied, “No. This isn’t just cosmetic. What we have here is a ritual of proven power. And it’s the only way I can think of to break through the barriers inside Morag — to communicate with whatever she truly is, or whoever sent her here. If nothing else this will surely make it clear that we want this state of affairs to change: maybe just the fact of our desire will get through, our sincerity.”
“Get through to where?” John demanded.
“I don’t know,” Rosa snapped. “If I did, perhaps we wouldn’t need to do this. But if you have a better idea I’ll gladly hear it.”
He had no reply, but I felt he was covering a deeper fear. As he sat there, arms folded, face knotted into a scowl, I felt a surge of helpless, protective love for him; after all he was my brother.
Morag’s face was expressionless. She said now, “I sure don’t have any better ideas. Maybe if we push at the door, we may find there’s somebody pulling from the other side as well. Let’s do it.” Her voice was clear, calm, strong.
We all stared at her.
Rosa said, “Fine. Michael, do you have the props?”
I had a small bag under my seat; now I brought it out and opened it. “Props? Is that the right word?”
“Just hand them over,” Rosa said, sounding grumpy herself.
I produced a small bag of salt, which I set on the floor to one side of Morag’s chair. There was a vial of wine, bloodred, which I put down on the other side.
Tom asked, “So what’s with the salt and the wine?”
“Salt represents purity,” I told him. “The wine the blood of Christ.”
John said, “Shame we haven’t a few relics to hand. A bit of the True Cross. A saint’s toe-bone.” He laughed, but it was hollow, and nobody laughed with him.
“Wow,” Sonia said. I thought it was the first time she had spoken. “I haven’t felt this way since I messed with a Ouija board when I was twelve.” She sounded as if this were fun, like a haunted-house theme park ride. She held up her arm. “The hairs on my flesh are standing up. Look, Tom—”
He hushed her. But I envied her lack of imagination.
I reached into the bag again, and drew out a crucifix. It was a small silver pendant, in fact a legacy from my grandfather Poole, a Manchester Catholic, who died when I was ten. It was only the size of a quarter, with a little Christ like a toy soldier. But it was an extraordinary moment when I held up the crucifix before Morag, and I was aware of everybody staring at the little medallion, the way it caught the light.
I passed the crucifix to Morag and leaned over her. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I can’t believe I’m putting you through this.”
She took the pendant and smiled. Her face was only centimeters from mine, and I could smell the sweetness of her breath. “Everything is going to be fine. You’ll see.”
I pulled away and sat down.
Rosa turned to her book. “Let’s begin.” She began to read, rapidly, in a low voice.
John listened for a minute. “Is that Latin?”
“Prayers,” I said. “The Lord’s Prayer. The fifty-fourth Psalm. Latin is thought to be more effective.”
John threw his hands in the air. “Who am I to argue?”
We all sat in our horseshoe. Rosa’s quiet voice murmured on, the only noise in the room. Even Gea was silent. Morag just sat, her gaze downcast, her hands folded in her lap, the crucifix glinting between her fingers. She seemed calm, so still I couldn’t even see the rise and fall of her breathing. It struck me that it must have been many years since I was in an environment so empty, so denuded of electronic gadgetry, the rich and colorful texture of modern life. Here was this room with nothing but a row of chairs, a handful of people, a woman in black muttering prayers in a language none of us could understand. But it was extraordinary how the tension built.
And suddenly Rosa stood up. We all flinched.
Rosa pointed at Morag. “Who are you? Abandon your pretense. Tell me your true name. Who are you? ”
Morag gazed up at Rosa. Then she rubbed the little crucifix and smiled at me. She didn’t seem at all afraid. She mouthed, I’m sorry.
I was too shocked to react.
And then Morag began to change.
Her body seemed to shrivel inside her clothes, the skin of her face to crumple. Some kind of fur was gathering on her skin, long, pale brown hairs, not sprouting but coalescing in place over her face and arms, like a morphing VR. She continued to implode inside her clothes, so her dress was collapsing like a tent with its ropes cut. But soon her arms were protruding out of her sleeves, as if they were growing longer. With an impatient spasm she kicked off her shoes, revealing feet with long toes, as long as a child’s fingers.
All this took just seconds.
She stood up. She had become so slim that her blue dress fell away around her. Wisps of underwear, a bra and pants, still clung to her, but she pulled them away, handling them curiously. Naked, she was only about a meter and a half tall. Her body was coated with the orange-red fur. She was slim, but she had breasts with hard, prominent nipples. Her arms were long, about as long as her legs. Her all-but-human face, with a long nose and prominent chin, was coated with that soft fur. Her skull seemed small, and was covered with that smooth, shining fur. I wondered what had become of Morag’s beautiful hair.
Her eyes were human — pale gray, soft. She smiled at me, showing a row of perfectly white teeth. She held up her arm, with muscles like knotted rope beneath the fur. She was still holding the crucifix.
I risked a glance at the others. They sat in their chairs, staring. Tom was grasping Sonia’s hand so hard his knuckles were white. The Gea robot just watched, its plastic eyes bright.
Rosa was smiling.
John said, “What — the fuck — is that? Some kind of ape?”
Rosa asked again: “Who are you?”
The Morag-thing spoke, but it was a burst of that rapid-fire speech. Somehow it didn’t seem so strange coming from her mouth.
Rosa cut her off. “We can’t understand.”
The creature was still looking at me. She hesitated, then spoke more carefully. “Sorry,” she said. She pronounced every part of the word with exaggerated care: “Shh-oo-rrh-yy.”
I said, “Tell us who you are.”
“My name,” she said, “is Alia.”
Alia, the ape-thing that had been Morag, turned around slowly, those human eyes bright. She carefully put the little silver crucifix down on her seat. Then she bent down — she was very limber — and inspected the little tumbler of salt and the vial of wine beside her chair. She made no comment; maybe she thought that having salt, wine, and crucifixes around was normal for us. Then she straightened up, and studied us again.
We all just stared.
Alia stood more upright than any chimp, although her body was undeniably apelike, with a high chest, and arms as long as her legs. There was something odd about her hips, too, narrow with an odd geometry. Maybe she was like our remote ancestors, I thought, the australopithecines, the early sort not longer after they split off from the chimps.
John looked the most horrified, but then he had a lot to be horrified about. John’s world had always been a very orderly place; he’d had enough trouble getting used to the idea of ghosts and reincarnated dead wives. And now this. But even Rosa, who I had thought would never be fazed by anything, was clutching her prayer books, clearly shocked.
And Alia stared at me, as if she was as stupefied to see me in the flesh as I was her.
Suddenly Alia ran a few steps toward Sonia. We all flinched back. Tom and Sonia clutched each other.
Alia stumbled after a couple of paces and stopped. “Sorry,” she said, in that elaborate, slowed-down manner. “High gravity. Better to walk. Forgot.” She took a more cautious step, two, not very gracefully; I got the impression walking was not what she was used to.
She stood before Tom and Sonia. I was proud of them that they just stared back. She said, “Sonia Dameyer.”
Sonia was rigid.
Then she turned to Tom. “Thomas George Poole. Tom. I have seen you grow up. Variant pigmentation.” She reached out again and, to my horror, ran a fingertip down Tom’s cheek.
Tom slapped her hand away. “Back off, Planet of the Apes.”
Alia’s mouth dropped open. She looked shocked — suddenly her face looked very human, under that mask of fur. “Have I given offense?” She bowed. “I apologize. I am sure it will not be the last time I get something wrong.”
Sonia said, “What’s the problem, don’t they have white people where you come from?”
Alia thought about that. “Before the First Expansion the homogenization of culture on Earth eliminated the already minor differences between human racial groups. Skin pigment is one of the most heritable of human genetic features, and differences diluted quickly.” Her voice was getting better, I thought, her grammar a bit more precise, her tone more controlled. But this stuff about skin pigment sounded stilted, as if she was accessing some data store. She smiled brightly at Sonia, and pulled at the fur on her own face. “Some of us don’t have skin pigment at all!”
Tom asked, “What’s the ‘First Expansion’?”
“The future,” John hissed. “She’s talking about the future. I think.”
Perhaps he was right. But, I thought, if there had been a “First Expansion” there must have been a second, at least, maybe a third. In that one phrase I caught glimpses of a towering history.
Alia moved on from Sonia. When she got to the Gea robot she bent down, reached out — and picked her up. She turned the robot over and over, while Gea’s tiny wheels whirred.
I was stunned. Alia had shown she was “real,” as real as Morag had been, by handling the exorcism objects, by touching Tom’s cheek. But she seemed to be just as “real” in Gea’s VR world. Maybe they had different categories of reality, wherever she came from.
Alia put the robot down, squatted down, and faced it. “You are Gea. An artificial mind.”
Gea rolled back and forth experimentally, as if checking her wheels still worked. “You already know all about me.” Somehow Gea’s pompous B-movie-robot voice fit the situation.
“Yes, I do.”
“May we scan you?”
“Of course,” Alia said cheerfully. “In fact you already are.” She patted Gea on the head. “You are delightful. And so well crafted. We will talk later.”
Well crafted?This was one of the planet’s most advanced artificial sentiences. Alia sounded like a patronizing museumgoer admiring the artistry of a Neolithic flint hand axe.
Alia walked past John, who flinched back.
And now, at last, she came to me. She was a creature the size of a ten-year-old child, her fur shining where it lay in layers over her flesh. I could hardly read the expression in her squashed-up face, she was too alien for that. But I thought I saw warmth in her eyes.
I said, “I suppose you’re wondering why I asked you here today.”
John snorted. “Christ, Michael. How can you joke?”
“I like your humor, Michael Poole,” Alia said. “Not that I always understood it.”
“You did?” My head was spinning; I tried to make sense of this. “You’ve, uh, studied me?”
“We say Witnessing, ” she said. “I’ve Witnessed you, Michael Poole, all of your life. All of my life.”
“Then you really are from the future,” Tom said. There was an edge to his voice. “My father is dead to you, isn’t he? He’s a fossil you dug up. You can read his whole life the way you can read a book. From birth to death. We are all dead to you—”
John touched his arm. “Tom, take it easy.”
“It isn’t like that,” Alia said. “Thomas George Poole, to Witness isn’t just to watch. It is to appreciate. To share. Michael Poole, I have shared your life, your triumphs, your woes. And now I meet you at last. It is more than an honor. It is — fulfillment.”
Rosa pursed her lips and nodded. That I was being watched by the future was one of the possibilities she had guessed at. She looked almost satisfied, the puzzle resolved.
But I felt deeply uneasy. It was more than self-consciousness. I was a bug trapped beneath a microscope slide, my whole life had been splayed open for inspection. I snapped, “And what about Morag?”
Alia’s smile faded. “I stand before you, and you ask for Morag?”
I couldn’t believe it. She sounded hurt.
Rosa spoke, for the first time since this new apparition had come to us. “Tom is right, isn’t he? That you are from the future?”
Alia turned to her. Her small face was creased, comically quizzical. “It depends what you mean. Can you rephrase the question?”
Tom asked cautiously, “Were you born on Earth?…” His nerve seemed to fail him. “Oh, hell. I can’t believe I even asked a question like that! This is like something from that old stuff you used to read, Dad, it’s a clichй—”
Sonia touched his arm. “Tom, it’s OK.”
I said, “This is difficult for all of us.” So it was. I was calmer than Tom or John, but inside I was screaming at the idiotic strangeness of the whole setup.
Tom took a breath, and tried again. “OK. So were you born on Earth?”
Alia snorted. “Do I look like I was born on Earth?… Sorry. I was born on a ship, called the Nord. ” She hesitated. At times it seemed to take her a while to find the right word, as if she was accessing some nested data store. “Umm, a starship.”
“Ah,” said Rosa.
John turned on her. “What do you mean, ah?”
“That explains the long arms, the high chest. Like our primate ancestors, Alia is evolved for climbing — or for low gravity.” She smiled. “Our ancestors were apes, and so will our descendants be. Bishop Wilberforce must be turning in his grave.”
“Descendants?” That was too big a leap for me. “Alia — are you human?”
“Of course I’m human.” Again she seemed hurt, upset I’d even asked.
Oddly, at times she seemed very young, even adolescent, and easily rebuffed, especially by me. I decided I was going to have to be very gentle, tactful. Or as tactful as you can be with an ape-girl from the future. What a mess, I thought.
Alia said, “But in my time it’s different. Humans have spread out. We have become a family.”
“Across the stars?” Gea asked.
“Across the Galaxy.”
“This is the Expansion you mentioned,” I said. “Or Expansions. ”
“In a human Galaxy, there are lots of different sorts of humans. Just as there are in your time.” She frowned. “Or not. Are there? I’m sorry, I should know.”
Rosa said gently, “It’s some thirty thousand years since the last nonhuman hominid died. Homo sapiens sapiens is alone on Earth.”
“Thirty thousand years? Oh, well.” Alia said this in a flip way, as if thirty thousand years was nothing, her mistake forgivable. Her manner was playful, almost coquettish. But there was a bleak, chilling perspective behind her words, a vastness of empty time.
I said, “All right. Then you are from the future. What date are you from?”
“I can’t say.”
“What date were you born?”
“I can’t say!” She flapped her hands, agitated. “These are slippery concepts. I want to give you answers, but you have to ask the right questions!”
Gea said, “Of course she can’t answer questions about dates.”
John growled, “What are you getting at?”
“Relativity.”
It is a strange consequence of Einstein’s special relativity that time is fragmented. Information cannot travel faster than light, and that finiteness makes it impossible to establish true simultaneity, a universal “now.” And so there is a sort of uncertainty in time, which increases the further you travel. If Alia was born halfway across the Galaxy, that uncertainty could be significant indeed.
“How strange,” Rosa said, “to live in a geography so expansive that such effects become important.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” John snapped.
Gea said to Alia, “Suppose your ancestors had stayed on Earth.”
“Yes?”
“That would eliminate relativity ambiguities. In that case, how long would have elapsed, on Earth, between Michael Poole’s birth and your own? Do you know that?”
Alia said, “Round numbers—”
“That will do.”
“Half a million years.”
There was another stunned moment, a shocked silence. The human race in my day, as I now had to think of it — was only, only, maybe a hundred thousand years old. Alia was remote from me indeed, the species itself many times older than in my time. It was hard to take in such a perspective.
Tom said, “So how did you get here? Did you travel in time?”
Alia cocked her head. “I hate to be boring. Here we go again! Can you rephrase the question?…”
With Gea giving us the lead, we managed to extract a little more.
The universe was finite. It was folded over on itself in spatial dimensions — modern cosmologists knew that much — but also in time,so that the future somehow merged with the past. So to get to the past, you would think, all you had to do was travel far enough into the future — just as Columbus had once tried to find a new route to the east by traveling far enough west around the curve of the Earth.
It wasn’t as simple as that, however, as Alia tried to tell us. “It is a question of information,” she said. “Spacetime is discrete, it comes in small packages, particles. Therefore a given volume can only store a finite amount of information. And that information can be fully described by information stored on the bounding surface of the volume.” She frowned at me. “Is that clear?”
Not to me. But Gea said, “Like a hologram. You have a two-dimensional surface that contains information about a three-dimensional object, the hologram, which is reconstructed when you shine laser light on it.”
“Or like Plato,” John said. “We are prisoners in a cave and all we perceive is shadows cast on the wall outside, shadows of reality.”
“Yes,” I said. “But now Alia is saying the shadows are the reality. I think.”
Gea said to me, “This is like the holographic principle. An early attempt at quantum gravity theory.”
“Never heard of it.”
“It was abandoned, decades ago.”
“Maybe that was a mistake…”
Alia’s time was like a surface bounding the past — bounding all of history, including our own long-vanished time. And everything that could be known about the past was contained in her time, in each successive instant. That wasn’t so hard to grasp; geologists, paleontologists and historians, even detectives, have to believe that the past can be reconstructed from traces stored in the present.
But Alia went further: by manipulating events in her present, she was able to change the information in the past — to project herself here, into what was to her history. It was as if you could tinker with a few dug-up dinosaur bones and change the lives of the creatures of which they were relics.
Something like that.
I was struck, though, by a resonance with something I’d read in uncle George’s manuscript: If time is circular, if future is joined to past, is it possible that messages, or even influences, could be passed around its great orbit? By reaching into the furthest future, would you at last touch the past?… George, or anyhow his strange friends, had intuited something of the truth, perhaps.
Tom laughed, an explosive giggle. “Sorry,” he said. “Every so often I just lose it. I mean, it’s just,” he waved a hand, “you’re asking me to accept that this is a superhuman being from the far future. This ape. Where’s the disembodied brain in a jar? I mean, what can she do but swing on tires?”
I think we all knew how he felt.
We talked on. It was a difficult dialogue. We were the ignorant talking to the uneducated. I got the impression Alia really didn’t know much about all this, and cared less — as a modern teenager wouldn’t know anything about the implants in her body, as long as they worked. And we knew too little to make much sense of what she said anyhow; we had to translate it into terms we understood, interpret the information she gave us in terms of our own modern theories, which might have been as partial, falsely based or just plain wrong as notions of planet-bearing crystal spheres.
And every so often, as we worked our way through these miasmas of interpretation and guesswork, we were confronted by vast conceptual gulfs.
“Our time must be strange to you,” Rosa said. “If you were born on a ship, among the stars. The way we live must seem very alien.”
“Oh, but I prepared,” Alia said. “In the course of my Witnessing. You don’t have to visit Earth to know what it must have been like!”
“I don’t understand,” Tom said.
Alia spread her arms wide, and her long hairs dangled like curtains. “There are things I like, and things I don’t like, that have got nothing to do with being born on a ship. I like open spaces, long prospects. I don’t like enclosed spaces or running water, or rats or spiders, or blood. I grew up in zero gravity, but I can be scared of heights! All these are responses ingrained deep into my system, and the systems of my ancestors, long before they left Earth. So, you see, even if I knew nothing of Earth, I could reconstruct it just from my own responses. In fact, that has been done a number of times, by cultures cut off from their origins — people who forgot where they came from. Even they can deduce something of Earth…”
“Astounding,” Rosa said. “You left Earth behind half a million years ago. You traveled across the stars. And yet you took the savannah with you, didn’t you?”
Sonia said, “You mentioned rats. Are there animals where you came from?”
“Animals? There are rats everywhere. They don’t all sing. There are bugs and birds.” Birds flocked on her starship, she said; I couldn’t think of a more exotic, charming image. “Earth’s biosphere shows more diversity than any other human world in the Galaxy, however. That’s one reason we know it really is Earth, the original.”
“Like Africa,” Rosa said. “There is more genetic variation there, too. As Africa is for us, the home of mankind, so Earth is for these future people.”
Sonia prompted, “And there are still animals on Earth?”
“Birds. Snakes. Insects. Bugs. That’s all, really.”
“They are the supertaxa,” Gea said. “Taxa have different evolutionary rates. Some speciate more rapidly than others; some lineages last longer than others; and some taxa — the birds, snakes, rats and mice, various weeds — have both a high speciation rate and a high longevity. And so when an extinction event strikes, the supertaxa provide the great survivors. What Alia describes is exactly what I would have expected to find on an Earth of the future, after our extinction event is done. Snakes and rats and birds.”
“But no big animals?” Sonia asked wistfully.
Gea said, “I want to show you something.” She produced a VR image of a lumpy-looking animal: a rhino, but covered in shaggy brown fur.
Alia gaped. “Megafauna!”
Tom said, “That’s a Sumatran rhino, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gea said. “An unusual form, adapted for living in hilly rainforests. It went extinct, earlier this year. The last of them died in a zoo in Germany.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Alia sounded as if this creature was as exotic as a dinosaur, to her. She glanced at me. “Michael, have you?”
“I’m not a wildlife buff,” I said. “If you followed me around all my life you’ll know that.”
Gea said, “The Sumatran rhino was a living fossil. It is the least changed of all large-mammal lineages since the Oligocene, thirty million years ago, halfway back to the dinosaurs. We live in extraordinary times. That species endured for thirty million years. Even the people in this room had the opportunity to meet it, to touch it, just months ago. And now it has vanished, a geological instant after its encounter with humanity. Just like that. As all the megafauna which survived the Ice Age have gone, one by one.”
Sonia said wistfully, “And they never came back, according to Alia. You’d think they could have been brought back from the DNA.”
“Perhaps there was never room,” Rosa said. “Not if the world remained owned by humans. For we would not allow anything bigger and hungrier than us to survive.”
“Besides, evolution goes forward, not backward,” Gea said. “The mega-mammals, once gone, will never return.”
Alia was watching us. “You all sound so guilty!”
Tom said, “Do people in the future look back on our time?”
“Oh, yes.”
“And do they judge us?”
“Judge you?” Alia laughed, a strange whooping sound, but then bit it off. “I’m sorry. I know this concerns you, in this age. If not, if you didn’t have this awareness, I guess you wouldn’t be attempting the hydrate stabilization project.”
“You know about that?” I asked.
“Of course. I Witness you, Michael Poole. But why should you be judged? Look — if one species of bird out-competes another, are you going to talk about morals? Of course not. It’s just a question of competition for space in an ecology.”
“And is that how you see us?” John asked bitterly. “Are we just animals in an ecology to you?”
Alia seemed genuinely puzzled by this line of questioning. “How else would you want to be thought of?”
I said, “There is much debate about geoengineering projects. You must know that. We aren’t sure if we have the right to meddle on a planetary scale.”
Alia seemed baffled by this. “But you are already, umm, meddling.” She paused, as if accessing more data. “Consider the Earth. Twenty percent of the land and a good proportion of the sea is covered by artificial ecosystems, each containing a small number of species, selected and bred for one consumer—”
“Farms,” Sonia said.
“Yes. You have changed the very geomorphology of the planet: you have carved vast chunks out of mountains and landscapes, you have built new lakes, and reclaimed other lands from the sea, and you have created entirely artificial land forms of a type never seen before.”
Gea interrupted, “But all this must be trivial compared to the great transformation of your time, an age when mankind has covered a Galaxy.”
“Oh, of course. In the future we do it bigger and better. But planet-shaping, geoengineering, meddling, is what people do. Human history has always been a tangle of environmental changes, human responses, accidents… Human will is only one component. Just accept it!”
“There she goes again,” John groused. “Talking about us as if we’re nothing but animals. Like beavers, mindlessly building dams.”
I understood his resentment. But I remembered that this wasn’t the “true” Alia. She was deliberately slowing her speech, speaking to us as if we were children. To her, I thought, maybe we really were as busy and mindless, as productive and destructive, as bower birds or beavers.
Sonia leaned forward, as fascinated as John was on edge. “You must know the future.”
Alia said, “In a way.”
“What happens? What happens to us? Do you know how we die?”
“Not all of you.” She said brightly, “I know how Michael Poole dies. I have seen his life, the whole of it — like a book, complete from beginning to end—”
I snapped, “I don’t want to know.”
She bowed her head.
“But the future,” Sonia pressed. “The bigger picture. Just the fact that you are here, you exist, says that we’re not going to go extinct any time soon.”
“So mankind will make it through the Bottleneck,” John said.
Sonia asked, “And then what?”
“And then, expansion,” Alia said brightly. “Off the planet. To the stars!”
Sonia frowned. “Yes, but what happens?…”
It soon became clear she knew little in detail about the unraveling of history beyond our present — indeed, beyond my own lifetime. But then, why should she? If I were dropped, say, into the middle of the last Ice Age, what could I say to curious hunter-gatherers who asked about their future? It will get warmer. A lot warmer. And then, expansion. Out of your refuges, all the way to the Moon!…
And besides, she seemed to imply, the future wasn’t as fixed as all that.
Rosa asked, “And are there other cultures out there? Extraterrestrial aliens, civilizations among the stars?”
“Oh, yes,” Alia said. “Or there used to be. Some of their biologies have merged with ours. And you can still find ruins.”
Sonia said, “Ruins? What happened to them?”
“We did,” Tom said dryly. “Ask the Sumatran rhino.”
There was a long silence.
Rosa leaned forward and faced Alia. “I think it’s time we got to the point. Don’t you?”
“The point?”
“There is a reason you are here,” Rosa said. “You have a purpose. And it is to do with Michael.” She turned to me.
I said, “I have seen — apparitions — of Morag all my life. Morag, my wife. Since before I met her even, since I was a kid. You must know this. I want to know what that haunting meant. Was it to do with you, Alia? Your Witnessing?”
Again Alia looked oddly crestfallen, as much as I could read her small face, her apelike body language — as if she was actually jealous of Morag. “Yes,” she said. “It was the Witnessing.”
As a Witness she had access to my whole life. She could dip into it at will, like a random-access file. She was naturally drawn to the key events of my life — and for her, that meant the times invested with the most emotion, the most joy, the most pain.
She said, “We are so far apart in time we don’t always communicate very well. Not in language, in symbols.” I thought of our failure to decode her speech; I knew that was true. “But emotion comes through,” she said. “Raw, powerful emotion can punch through species barriers, even through time. But Witnessing is always leaky…”
The Witnessing was a muddling-up of future and past. She talked about her information surfaces again,
her holograms. All that Witnessing had damaged the holograms, somehow: it had worn holes in the fabric of my life. And through those holes I glimpsed other times, other places.
“Like the pages of a much-loved book,” Rosa said. “So worn through by a tracing finger they become transparent, and you can read the next page.”
At an intensely Witnessed moment you could get leaks, she said, traces of events from other times in your life showing through. And since Morag had been associated with the most intensely joyful and painful moments of my life, and it was those instants that had been rubbed through and linked up, what I mostly glimpsed was her. It was as if all my life with Morag had been joined together in a single eternal moment.
Alia said, “I’m sorry I can’t explain it any better.”
Rosa nodded, as if satisfied. “So Witnessing muddles future and past. I wonder if this rationalizes away every ghost story in the past — the few which were not simply delusional.”
Alia said to me, “In fact Witnessing is supposed to be neutral. You aren’t supposed to perturb your subject. Not many people know it has this kind of effect.”
John laughed. “So even in the far future we are polluters! If you need a good compensation lawyer, Michael—”
“Shut up, John.”
Rosa said coldly, “And since from Michael’s perspective you are a creature from eternity, from outside his life altogether, your intrusion has damaged his whole life.”
Alia said, “But Michael’s case was special.”
“How?”
“Because I am here. I had to push hard to break through, to be here. The distortion of your timeline was — exceptional.”
Rosa murmured, “Michael, what are you thinking?”
I shrugged. “I thought I was seeing Morag. I always imagined she wanted to come back to me. I’m disappointed that it was all just some jerky time-traveler fuck-up from the future. I’m pissed that it was nothing but you all the time.” I spat the words at Alia. I wanted to hurt her.
Her face crumpled further. But she said earnestly, “Michael, she was there, in the hauntings, the visitations. Yes, I was the Witness. But what you saw was her. And the revenant, the flesh-and-blood resurrection — that was Morag, too, Michael, in every way that it could be her.”
“Ah, yes,” Rosa snapped. “The revenant. And why was she brought back?” She used her sharp exorcist’s voice again. “You told me your name, but you have yet to tell me the full truth. What is your purpose, creature?”
Alia turned to me. “You are special, Michael Poole,” she said. “You must know that by now — it is true, whether you like it or not. You are truly a pivot of history, in this age, and your name is known into the far future.”
“Here we go,” Tom said, and he linked his hands behind his head. “The really nutty stuff.”
I turned away. I really, truly, did not want to hear this. Maybe every kid dreams that she is special, that her name will be known forever. It’s just a fantasy, an expression of adolescent yearning and uncertainty, something you grow out of. But now this Alia, this strange being from the future, was saying that for me, Michael Poole, it was so. It was as if every paranoid, grandiose dream I had ever had were folding down into this moment. But I did not want to be a fulcrum, famous for all time.
Gea said, “To be clear, you believe that Michael’s great contribution will be the hydrate project. The Refrigerator.”
“Yes. But there is more.”
“What else?”
“The restoration of Morag was part of it. I have more to ask of you, Michael Poole, a grave responsibility… You will see.” She glanced around at us all, our bewildered, angry faces. “But this is not the time. I will return.”
Rosa snapped, “When?”
But Alia would only speak to me. “When you call me, Michael.”
And she disappeared. There was nothing left but the chair where Morag had sat, with the little vials of wine and salt, and a small heap of crumpled, abandoned clothing.
We all sat back. Tom blew out his cheeks. Sonia was wide-eyed, silent — delighted, I thought, full of wonder.
John seemed angry, resentful. “I wish they had left us alone. These future ape-people, whatever they are. This is the Bottleneck, for God’s sake. Don’t we have enough to do without dealing with the future as well?”
“I imagine we all feel like that,” Rosa said. “But we may not have a choice. It is precisely because this is a time of crisis that Alia has come here. It seems we are important enough to merit visitors from the future — or at any rate, Michael is.”
John said, “I don’t want to know about the future. I don’t want to think of my life as just an archaeological trace, locked in stone. It’s my life. It’s all I have.”
“I understand. But it can’t be helped.” Rosa stood. “This has been a long session. I suggest we break, sleep, eat. We will talk tomorrow.” She eyed me. “And then you will summon back your admirer from the future, Michael.”
“If I must,” I said.
“I think you do. For it appears you have a mission. How exciting,” she said dryly. And, with a flourish like a stage magician’s, she vanished in a mist of pixels.
That night I lay down in my room, alone for the first time since the bombing. Morag was gone — if she had ever been there at all.
The exorcism and all that had followed had been a roller-coaster ride for me. I was battered, bewildered, and resentful at everybody: Rosa for setting the whole thing up, Alia who had somehow engineered all this with her “Witnessing” from the far future — and Morag, for returning into my life in such a remote and agonizingly incomplete way, and then leaving me again. None of which was fair, of course. Shit happens, I told myself, even such astounding shit as this. Even Alia wasn’t to blame. She might look like a stretched orangutan, but I had seen in her eyes, in the way she looked at me, that she was a person, fully conscious, fully formed emotionally. She was no doubt a product of her times and her society, just as I was. And I had seen, inexplicable as it was, that she was fond of me. It was as if I had developed a crush on Wilma Flintstone. What a joke.
As I drifted toward sleep, exhausted, my thoughts softened. It was in just this sleeping-waking condition that I had had so many glimpses of Morag in the past. But I knew that this time she would not come to me.
The next day I woke feeling drained. When I ordered the curtains to open, they revealed a day that was harsh even by Alaskan standards, with a sky like a steel prison roof clamped down over Deadhorse.
I had a sudden, sharp memory of a contrasting morning on Florida, a winter’s day full of bright cold sunshine, when I had gone out, at age ten or so, to fly a kite or a Frisbee or a water rocket or some damn thing. I could hear the boom of Atlantic breakers kilometers out, smell the sharp salty brine, feel the texture of the sand under my feet and on my skin. Every sense open to the max, I was fully locked into the world, and I never felt so alive, so joyous. But even then, I think I knew I wouldn’t always feel this way. I would age, my eyes would glaze over, my hearing clog, my fingertips crust over with dead flesh, and my body would become like a space suit, insulating me from the world. I knew it even then, and I dreaded it. And in time it had come to pass: this was my reality, my own aching, aging body, a face like old leather, a head stuffed with cotton wool.
When I thought back over the events of the day before — an exorcism, for God’s sake, the strange appearance of Alia, all that allusive gabble about the future — it seemed foolish, an indulgence, like the memory of a dinner party where the talk got out of hand. It seemed to me that morning that Alia’s future was a bright and shiny bubble that had somehow burst in my head overnight. And reality was responsibility: responsibility to my real work, the hydrate project.
So I went to work.
I grabbed some breakfast at Deadhorse’s one and only coffee shop, and made my way to the offices EI had set up in a small three-story block. I picked a cubicle, started up a softscreen with a tap of my fingernail, and put in a call to Shelley. While I waited for a reply I ran through my mail and other progress reports, trying to get a sense of where the project had gotten to while I had been absent in other realms.
Technically the project was going well. In a way the bombing had done us good; the heart of our prototype setup had been swept away, and Mark Two was proving to be a much sounder beast. We were starting to look further afield, too. We had started to talk to the Canadians about spreading our work out along their Arctic coast, and the Russian government had already given us permission to set up another pilot off the Siberian shore.
To obtain a mandate to roll out a global solution, it was the U.S. government, the UN, and the Stewardship agencies whose endorsement we really needed, of course. But once again poor, deluded Ben Cushman, our bomber, had probably done us long-term good. I thought that among the commentators and opinion formers a consensus was emerging that regardless of the environmental arguments, to allow our project to fail now would be a betrayal of Barnette, and of the others who had died.
That was all fine, but we still needed to make the case. And so we were starting to work with Gea’s sponsors toward a presentation to the UN. It would be given by Gea herself. Given the loss of Barnette, I couldn’t think of a better spokesperson for the cause. But it would be the first time an artificial sentience had addressed the UN General Assembly: quite an occasion. I wondered what form Gea would choose to incarnate herself. Presumably not my uncle George’s toy robot.
“How about like Alia?” I said to Shelley, when she at last came on the line. I had downloaded a record of our exorcism to her. “Perhaps an apelike post-human form would be a fitting symbol. All our futures are in the balance, et cetera.”
“Yes. And if things go wrong she could climb a pillar and swing out the window.” Shelley seemed to be multitasking: as she spoke to me she kept glancing aside, and I thought somebody just out of sight was passing her bits of paper as we spoke.
Shelley had been at her desk since six. She had always had those enviable reserves of energy, but since the loss of Ruud Makaay a vast burden of responsibility had fallen on her, and the lines around her eyes were disturbingly dark. “Hey, Michael,” she said, “I don’t want to hang up on you but we’re kind of rapid-responding here. Is there anything else you need from me right now?”
“I called to see what I could do for you.”
She eyed me; for a moment I had her full attention. “Look, Michael, we’re trying to ramp up to a production facility. We’re at a level of detail you can’t much help with. There’s always Gea’s speech; you could work on that, if you’re kicking your heels. But you have other stuff to sort out, don’t you?”
“You know me too well,” I groused.
“Maybe. I know you’re sometimes tempted to hide, just as you’re trying to hide right now in work that you don’t need to be doing. But this Alia came for you, didn’t she? I think you’re going to have to face that, and resolve it somehow, before you can move on.”
“I know.”
“Then get off the line and do it. Talk to you later, bye.” She turned away. “Now, where the hell are the results of that last deconvolution—” The image blanked out.
There was a call from John, waiting for my reply.
Shelley was right, of course. I tapped the screen, took John’s call, and immersed myself once more in strangeness.
John, Tom, and I gathered in another small office. As drab as everything else seemed to be in Deadhorse, it was empty save for a small conference table and chairs, and a few softscreens on the wall. John and Tom looked as washed-out as I felt.
We were alone save for Gea, who trundled back and forth on the tabletop, spitting sparks. Gea was going to give us some preliminary results from her scanning of Alia’s manifestation.
I spoke to John, who had called us together. “I take it you didn’t want Sonia here.”
“Tom agrees. This is a family thing, Michael. It’s all about us, about Morag. She was your wife, Tom’s mother—”
“Your lover.”
His face hardened, but he didn’t look away; for better or worse that awful truth was becoming embedded in the fabric of our relationship. “I know the future is mixed up in all this. Alia. ” He spoke the name like a curse. “But it’s about our lives, the three of us. So let’s try to start from that basis.”
“And Rosa?”
Tom rolled his eyes. “Let’s keep it down to Earth, shall we?”
Maybe he was right. Three Pooles was probably enough craziness for any one room. I turned to Gea. “So where do we start? What is Alia?”
Gea rolled complacently. “First, she wasn’t a VR. No doubt she was a projection of some sort, as she tried to explain to us. But equally she was real, as real as you are, Michael. Her body responded to our attempts to scan it, with X-rays, MRI, thermal imagers, other technologies. She shed strands of hair! With that we were even able to perform a genomic analysis.”
Gea said that Alia was human — almost.
As Rosa had guessed, that apelike form appeared to be an adaptation to zero gravity. A starship on a long-duration voyage was in an evolutionary sense like an island on Earth, where stranded animals routinely become dwarfs to spread out a limited food supply among more individuals. So the crew found their children growing smaller. And, in low or zero gravity, as the generations ticked by the children’s forms had reverted to an ancient apelike plan, with more of a balance of length between arms and legs — a design more suitable for climbing.
Surprisingly, Gea said, the basic body-plan changes seemed to be the result of natural selection rather than deliberate engineering. I’m no evolutionary biologist, but it seems there are some changes the genes find “easy” to make, such as relative growth rates, and faced with a challenging new environment, selection reaches for the easy options first. How strange, though, that these far-future people, projected into the unimaginable environment of space, had found their bodies reaching deep back in time for genetic memories of vanished African forest canopies.
“There is also some redesign of the joints,” Gea said. “For instance it looks as if Alia, like a baboon, could dangle from one arm and turn, allowing the arm to turn a full rotation in its socket.” But such redesign seemed radical for a “mere” half-million years, Gea said; perhaps this was an expression of engineered genes.
John grunted. “Next time you see her, throw her a banana and ask her to do some tricks.”
“Shut up,” I said mildly.
Gea talked us through more subtle changes, all of which pointed to an advancement over the Homo sapiens standard model circa the twenty-first century. The skeleton had been redesigned; Alia had more ribs than I did, perhaps to hold her organs in place more effectively, and so avoid hernias. Although she was designed for swinging around in weightlessness, Alia had thicker bones, vertebrae, discs in her back. She would be less prone to osteoporosis than I was, and would do a better job of functioning in high gravity, if she had to. Gea showed us images of a redesigned throat. Alia had no epiglottis, but there was a raised trachea, a kind of extension to her windpipe, so that food and drink could never get mixed up with the air she breathed; she was very unlikely to choke.
There were detailed modifications to her eyes, too. The optic nerve seemed to be attached to the retina more firmly, so that there was less chance of suffering a detached retina, and there were rings of tiny muscles around Alia’s pupils. “She seems to have a zoom facility,” Gea said dryly.
And Gea talked about Alia’s genome. Her existence was governed by DNA just as mine was, so we were both obviously products of the same lineage of life, both ultimately products of Earth. But Alia’s DNA showed divergences.
“Some of these changes appear to be the result of genetic drift, of natu-ral selection,” Gea said. “But others appeared to be engineered. We can only guess at the purpose of most of this. It may be she has a general regenerative ability, for instance. Cut off a finger, and another will grow in its place.”
John drew a softscreen toward him and made rapid notes. “Somebody ought to patent this stuff,” he said. “Just a thought.”
Tom sneered. “Uncle, how crass to be thinking of commercial gain at a time like this.”
John was unperturbed; he had endured such insults all his life. “Just doing my job. If there’s profit to be made, why not by us?”
Gea moved on to still stranger aspects of Alia’s anatomy. Much of what she had described so far had been extrapolations of the human. But there were signs of much more peculiar developments. Gea had imaged hard, impenetrable knots in Alia’s bloodstream, motes that might have been technological, remote descendants of the nanomachines of our age, perhaps.
And there even were traces of other life-forms in Alia’s body. For instance there was a kind of sheathing around portions of her nervous system, its function unknown — perhaps it was there for protection from deep-space radiation. It seemed obviously alive, and was based on an amino acid chemistry, just as Alia was. But it did not share Alia’s genome — indeed there was no trace of DNA to be found in it at all.
“Alien life,” I said slowly. “Not from Earth, because not based on DNA. She has a kind of symbiosis with alien life-forms.”
“So it seems.”
For long heartbeats we sat there, trying to digest this latest bit of news. I think I was the most imaginative of the three of us, the most open-minded. But even I was struggling with this. Here was not just a woman from the future, here was ET — and not sitting in a flying saucer looking back at me, but wrapped around the neurons of this remote descendant.
“All of this is evidence of advancement, in the broadest sense,” Gea said now. “Many past developments life’s capabilities have depended on symbiosis, the cooperation of one kind of life-form with another, or even the incorporation of one into the other.” Even complex cells were the result of one such merger, she said. Mitochondria, once independent creatures, were now used as miniature power plants within our own cells.
“And so what might come next,” I said, trying to follow her chain of thought, “is more mergers. Of our bodies with machines, and biology with technology. Or of our Earth-derived life-forms with life from another biosphere altogether, alien life.”
“Just as we see with Alia,” Gea said.
John scowled at the little robot. “I don’t think I like you telling me I’m inferior to that monkey woman.”
Gea said, “Then who would you like to tell you?”
Tom grinned, and I suppressed a laugh.
John leaned over the robot. “And what about you, sparky? If humanity is progressing onward and upward, what’s going to become of you?”
“I suspect we artificial types will play our part in your development,” Gea said, as unfazed as ever. “We know that Alia is actually far more intelligent than any modern human being. With all respect. We have the evidence of her speech for that, her ‘true speech,’ the accelerated gabble we recorded from Morag. I strongly suspect that she is also more conscious than any human alive today, in the truest sense. She has a deeper mind, and surely a deeper sense of herself. Some humans fear that artificial minds will make humans obsolescent. But Alia shows us that humans will not become obsolescent, any time soon. So what has happened? Perhaps there has been a competition with the machines, a selection pressure to become smarter.”
John said, “Or perhaps we just absorbed you. Perhaps you’re just another symbiote.”
“Perhaps. But we may have chosen not to participate in such a symbiosis. After all that is the great benefit of sentience — choice. And if that’s so, who knows what our destiny may be?” And she rolled back and forth, a half-kilogram of painted tin.
I spoke to Rosa later that day. She showed up in my hotel room, a small, dense, black figure. She listened patiently as I summarized what Gea had told us.
“Even what Alia told us of cosmology made sense,” I said. “Or at least it didn’t contradict what we know.”
I had been a cosmology fan all my life. I was encouraged by uncle George, who said I was lucky to be alive at a time when cosmology was moving out of the realm of philosophy and into hard science. There had been the emergence of quantum gravity, and the great astrophysical satellite studies of the first part of the century that had mapped the relics of universal birth in fine detail, all of which had enabled us to put together a firm biography of the universe all the way back to the Big Bang. Of course being a fan of all this stuff hadn’t helped me spot the approaching Higgs revolution, which had developed from all this.
But as part of the new understanding, we knew the universe was finite.
I said, “We haven’t mapped the topology of the universe yet — that is, its shape. But for sure, a finite, closed form of the kind Alia hinted at fits what we know.”
“Perhaps that finiteness is necessary for the development of life, of mind, in some way,” Rosa mused. “If the universe were infinite, just dissipating into the dark, perhaps mind would simply fizzle out, too. Perhaps everything is connected.”
“Maybe you should ask Alia about that.”
“It’s you she’s interested in, not me,” Rosa said. “And what of the human future she sketched — all these ‘Expansions’ across the Galaxy?”
“That seems all too plausible, too,” I said.
“Yes,” Rosa said. “We humans seem to have been an unstable lot from the beginning. Unlike other animals, even our hominid forebears, we aren’t content simply to find a role in the ecology. And in the future, it seems, that same restlessness will drive us on beyond the Earth. We will encounter others out there, and those others will go the way of the mammoth and the Neandertal, their last relics incorporated into the very bodies of their destroyers.”
“Umm,” I said. “Have you heard of the Fermi Paradox?” This was an old conundrum, dating back nearly a century. The universe is so old that there has been time for it to be colonized many times over, before humans even evolved — so if extraterrestrial aliens exist, why don’t we see any sign of them? “One candidate solution is that there is a killer species out there, a voracious predator that swoops down and assimilates any culture foolish enough to attract the notice of the bad guys. It’s a chastening thought that some day we may be the predators; we may be the instigator of a Fermi Paradox of our own…”
Rosa nodded. “But does it have to be that way? I grew up in a society which was quite different. The way we lived in the Order will always have its critics. But the Order was able to deliver very high population densities, very large numbers of human beings living orderly human lives, and all without harming anybody else. So I have firsthand experience of how humans can get along with each other without needing to trash the Galaxy to do it.”
I guessed I knew far more about her Order than she could imagine. But I didn’t want her to know about George’s manuscript; he had made it clear he had never told her about it.
“Rosa, you speculated about evolutionary purposes for ghosts, how maybe they evolved to help us through bottlenecks of the past. Are you disappointed that the visitations are just” — I shrugged — “technological after all?”
She smiled. “It is never a good idea to be disappointed by the truth. And besides, maybe I did hit on a deeper meaning. Perhaps the visitations, the Witnesses, did somehow aid us through those bottleneck times, even if unwittingly. Perhaps humanity was able to survive, and grow to cover a Galaxy, precisely because the likes of Alia closed the time loops from past to future.”
“That sounds like a time paradox.”
“Alia is a traveler from the future. Her very presence here must be perturbing all our lives, already changing the future, and yet she is here even so. What can be more paradoxical than that?”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t help us much right now, does it?” I got up and paced around the room, my thinking muddy, unsatisfactory. “The whole thing seems so old-fashioned. Welcome O Visitor from the Incredi-ble Year Five Hundred Thousand!… It’s a 1940s dream.” I suppose I was thinking of George again, the heaps of decaying science fiction novels he had given me.
“Those dreams were a product of the age,” Rosa said. “The twentieth century was a time of cheap energy, of technological optimism. And so we dreamed expansive, progressive dreams. Now people turn inward. The children are taught to do so — all those introspection classes in the schools! We live in a time of constraint, when one dare not dream that things might be different, for any possibility of difference seems even worse than what we have.
“But a deeper part of us knows that something is missing. We are a species that has lived through immense calamities in the past — vast climatic upheavals, huge natural disasters, plagues and famines, the rise and fall of empires. We have been shaped by such events. Even if we don’t realize it, we yearn for the epic, the apocalyptic. And now the epic has found us. It has found you, Michael.” As always she spoke calmly, but her tone was warm.
“You think I should call her back?”
“Of course. What else is there to do? You must resolve this, Michael. But you must not be humble before her.”
“Humble?”
“She has come here for her own purposes, her own agenda, it seems. But we don’t have to accept that agenda. Perhaps even Alia has limits.
“We know so much more now than I ever imagined we would learn, when I was a child in the 1960s. And Alia, with a half million years’ advantage over us, must know far more yet. But what of the deepest issues of all? Does she know why anything exists at all, rather than nothing? Before such questions, the details of cosmological unfoldings seem rather trivial, don’t you think? And if we can pose questions she can’t answer, perhaps Alia’s people are no smarter than we are, for all their redesigned rib cages and alien symbiotes.” Her eyes glittered, hard, knowing, skeptical.
That night, alone in my room, I called her. It felt absurd to be sitting on my bed, calling the name of a creature who wouldn’t be born for half a million years until after my bones were dust, if she ever existed at all.
Yet she came. There were no special effects, no flashes or bangs or swirls of light. One instant she wasn’t there, the next she was, a part of my reality as solid as the bed in my room, the table, the chairs. She looked out of place. With her slightly stooped stance and that long crimson fur hanging from her limbs, she did look like an escaped ape. But she smiled at me.
She glanced around the room. She rubbed a cautious finger along the back of a chair, pulled it out, and tried sitting on it. But she didn’t look comfortable, with her knees tucked up and her arms dangling to the ground. So with a lithe, graceful swing, she leapt up to the tabletop and sat in a kind of lotus position.
She said, “I’ve Witnessed you all my life, but I don’t know much about your social protocol. Is it OK to sit on your table?”
I shrugged. “It’s not even my table.”
“You called me,” she said. The warmth in her voice was obvious.
“Did you think I wouldn’t?”
“I wasn’t sure.”
“Would you have come anyhow?”
“No,” she said firmly. “You had to call. You have to want this.”
I wondered, Want what? “Listen, Alia, if you’re from the future, why don’t you help us?”
“Help you? How?”
“We’re struggling to get through this Bottleneck. Our hydrate-stabilizer scheme is a lash-up; you must see that. Why don’t you give us some help — some technology guidance, maybe?”
She eyed me, and I thought I could see the true answer in her expression. Because it would be as useful as handing a laser rifle to an australopithecine. She seemed to understand tact, however. She said, “You don’t need our help, Michael. Not in that way. You’ll make it through without us. Isn’t that better?”
Maybe. But I had to ask. “This means a lot to you, Alia. Your Witnessing of me, this visitation. I can see that.”
“Yes—”
“I mean a lot. Don’t I?”
Her eyes, in that mask of fur, were bright as stars. “I grew up with you. When I saw you, especially when you were unhappy—” She reached out a strong, long-fingered hand toward me, then drew it back. “I wanted more. I wanted to touch you. Of course I could not.”
Shit, I thought. I found myself pitying her. But if I had to be Witnessed, maybe I was lucky to have happened on somebody who was affectionate toward me. If I had found an enemy far down the corridors of time, the consequences could have been very different. Deep beneath these feelings of pity, though, I was angry, angry that my whole life had been fucked over by the carelessness of these future voyeurs.
And then Alia made it worse.
She leaned close to me. “Michael, once I was joined with your child. Your second son. In Hypostatic Union, which—”
My son who died. I felt cold. “You Witnessed him?”
“More than that. It was closer than Witnessing. I felt what he felt. I lived his life. He didn’t suffer. He even knew joy, in his way—”
I moved sharply away from her. “Christ. What gives you the right?”
She looked at me, shocked. “I wanted to tell you about him, to help you.” Then she dropped her gaze, humbly. “I’m sorry.”
“I… Oh, shit.” How was I supposed to cope with this stuff? “Look, I don’t mean to hurt you. I know this isn’t your fault.”
“You always wanted Morag. And that was what you always saw. And in the end she was returned to you.”
“Yes. But we weren’t happy. Perhaps it was impossible we ever could have been.”
“I was sad for you,” she said. She sounded sincere and I believed her. “But,” she said, “it was because you couldn’t be happy with Morag that I’m here now. And why I must ask you to help us.”
“Us? I don’t understand, Alia.”
“There is much I must tell you,” she said. “About the Transcendence. And Redemption…”
And as she spoke, a doorway to the ultimate destiny of mankind opened before me.
When Rosa saw the virtual record of my latest conversation with Alia, she seemed electrified.
She called us together. Once again the Pooles gathered in another Deadhorse hotel room: me, Tom, John, and Aunt Rosa projected from Seville.
This time Tom had wanted to bring Sonia, but she ducked out, for the same reason we had left her out before: “Poole family business,” she said. Somewhat to my surprise, Gea dropped out as well this time. She gave the same excuse: “Family business.” But by “family” Gea meant not just us Pooles but the human family. This was an issue for the species, and our artificial companions weren’t going to be able to help us now. A deep instinct, though, prompted me as usual to bring in at least one independent mind, in Shelley Magwood. She griped about how busy she was, but she came anyway.
We all knew why we were there. They had all heard Alia’s strange invitation to me, recorded by the hotel’s security systems and by monitors Gea had left with me. We played it through again. The record was hard for me to listen to over again, however, in that room, with us all sitting around a scuffed tabletop, with cups of coffee and bottles of water and softscreens before us, common sense cut in.
As she listened Rosa’s small body was hunched, her eyes glittering. Her hungry intensity scared me.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this,” I said abruptly, unable to bear the mood. “It’s a cold Alaskan day. A Monday. This morning I ate Cheerios and drank coffee and watched football highlights. Out there people are taking their kids to school and putting in the laundry and going to work. And here we are talking about how we’re going to deal with the far future of mankind. Are we all just crazy?”
John grunted. “What do you mean, we? It’s you who’s being subpoenaed by the ape-people, as far as I can make out.”
Shelley was tapping at a softscreen on the tabletop. She murmured, “Nobody’s crazy. I saw the records Gea has been making, and her analysis of Alia, the chimp-thing. I don’t know what the hell is happening here. But this is real.”
“OK,” said Tom. “But even if you buy all that stuff, now we have to go one jump further. We have to believe that this — Transcendence, this mish-mash of superbrains — wants my dad to save them. My dad, sitting there like a barrel of goose fat, is going off to the far future to save mankind.”
“Nicely put, son,” I said.
“It’s another clichй, Dad. Like those old stories you used to read me as a kid. The decadent humans of the far future need our primitive vigor to save them.”
“You enjoyed that stuff at the time,” I said defensively.
“Yes, but as stories. Not as a career move.”
Rosa, dark, intense, solemn, said, “Shelley is right. We all saw Morag — so did the world. And we Pooles all saw Alia. Our best strategy is to assume that everything we have been told is real. Suppose, then, that Alia is telling the truth. Suppose that all of human history, folded back on itself, really is funneling through this moment, into the conscience of one man, of Michael Poole. Suppose it is true! The question then is, what must we do about it?”
John surprised me by being constructive.
“In my business the key to success is to work out what the other guy really wants — your client, your legal opponent, the jury, even the judge. You may not be planning to give him what he wants, but if you know it you have a chance of manipulating him. So I think we have to consider what this ‘Transcendence’ of Alia’s, this vastly advanced composite entity, might want. ”
Shelley was scanning through material on her softscreen. “That’s not so easy to answer. Since Michael asked me to join in with this, I’ve been digging up old references on how we thought far-future beings, or maybe advanced aliens, would behave, what they would do. And you know what? All we ever did, it seems to me, was to project ourselves up into the sky.
“Look at this stuff.” She displayed some tabletop VRs for us. “Here you have Dyson spheres, cultures taking apart worlds to enclose their suns and so trapping every bit of energy. And for what? Living space, uncountable trillions of square kilometers of elbow room. This isn’t the future,” Shelley said, “not any kind of future. These are the concerns of the mid-twentieth century, energy supplies, demographics, population explosions, painted over the sky. And all Dyson was talking about was the infrastructure of a civilization. He didn’t seem to have much to say about what an advanced culture would do with all its power.”
Tom nodded. “Except to fill up the Galaxy with endless copies of its own kind. Just as we do.”
Rosa said, “But there are other precedents in our intellectual history of attempts to analyze the motives of more-than-human minds.”
John pulled a face. “I have a feeling you’re going to get all theological again.”
Rosa smiled, aloof. “Isn’t that why I’m here? There can be no more superior intelligence than God’s. What is Christian theology but a two-thousand-year-old quest to read His Mind — what is all our devotion but an effort to understand His desires and to act accordingly?
“Believe me, the universe Alia comes from, a universe that may soon be dominated by a superior consciousness, really isn’t so different from the universe imagined by Christians. For example the old Fermi Paradox has much in parallel with the much more ancient conundrum of silentum dei. Bertrand Russell was once asked how he would respond to God if he were called to account for his atheism. Russell said he would ask God why he should have made the evidence for His own existence so poor.”
“And we want to break the silence,” Shelley said.
“Yes. We long to talk to the aliens, as we have always longed to talk to God.”
John glared at her. “I can’t make you out, Aunt Rosa. You’re a priest, but you seem to put the subject matter of your own faith into the same box as wacko UFO stuff. I can’t tell what you really believe.”
She wasn’t fazed. “I didn’t have to check in my cerebral cortex at the door of the seminary, John. It’s possible to have a mind, to be able to think, and to have faith. And even if the premises of my religion, of all our religions, have been wrong, perhaps all our thinking about God has served a profound purpose if it has been a kind of vast practice run, to prepare us to deal with the real gods out there.”
“Even if they are our own future selves,” Shelley said, her voice small.
Rosa said now, “I believe that everything about this strange situation is summed up in the two key words Alia used in her pitch to Michael: Redemption, and Transcendence.”
Transcendence:what could it possibly mean?
Rosa said, “It’s a word that has various definitions in philosophy. But Kant’s notions have the ring of prophecy, I think. Transcendent: beyond the sphere of human knowledge or experience, above and independent of humanity, indeed independent of the material universe itself.”
Shelley said, “Alia told Michael she has been drawn into this Transcendence, that she has had some kind of direct experience of it. But when she comes out of it, she can only remember fragments.”
Like memories of a dream, she had said to me, fleeting, elusive, evapo-rating even as you turn the warmth of your attention on them. And we knew that everything Alia said to us had been translated, and vastly simplified.
Rosa said, “Yes. Through what Alia had to say to us we can only glimpse, barely, the vaster concepts of the Transcendence itself. But it’s all we have. From Alia’s hints it certainly sounds as if the Transcendence will have many of the attributes we traditionally ascribe to our gods. But it is arising from humanity; it has embarked on a journey whose final end, perhaps, isn’t clear even to it. And so it is an evolving god.”
She talked of a nineteenth-century German philosopher called Schelling, who had been responsible for the introduction into philosophy of “evolutionary metaphysics.” What if God can grow, can change? And if so, what must He change into?
John said, “I thought God is eternal, and hence unchanging, as measured by our petty notions of time. How can an eternal God evolve from anything into anything else?”
But old Schelling, it seemed, had had an answer to that. His God was the first and the last, the Alpha and the Omega, but the Omega state was in some sense contained within the Alpha. The only difference was in the expression of that potential. Rosa spoke of the unevolved God as deus implicitus, and His final state as deus explicitus; the two states were different expressions of the same identity. “Schelling imagined that the universe evolves along with its god. In its final state the cosmos will be fully realized, every potential fulfilled — and it will be at one with its god. It is as if God realizes His own true potential through the vast self-expression of the universe. Perhaps these ideas foreshadow the entelechy of the Transcendence Alia described to Michael…”
I was starting to get rolling-eye signals from Shelley.
“I don’t know if this is helping us any,” I said to Rosa.
She nodded. “Then consider Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Paleontologist, theologian, Catholic mystic.”
John grunted. “A regular Swiss army knife among wackos.”
Teilhard had imagined that the goal of mankind was to cover the Earth with a new layer of mind, of consciousness, which he called a noosphere. With time the coherence of the noosphere — the organization of a kind of psychic energy — would grow, the “planetization” of mind would proceed, until at last a new plateau of integration would be reached.
“A singularity,” Tom said. “The noosphere would emerge through a singularity.”
“He didn’t use that language,” Rosa said. “But, yes, that’s the idea. So de Chardin spoke of humans becoming gods. And there have been thinkers who have imagined a different sort of transcendence for mankind, a transcendence through an escape to the stars.”
She told us about a Russian tradition of thinking, dating back to a nineteenth-century thinker called Nikolai Fedorov. He had drawn on Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a “Cosmism,” which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe. Space travel was thus a necessary evolutionary step en route to our merging with the cosmos.
Fedorov’s thinking had fed into the work of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the “father of astronautics.” Tsiolkovsky had tried to turn Fedorov’s cosmic theology into the precepts of an engineering program: all the way to godhood with hydrogen-oxygen rocket motors. These strange, deep ideas had actually translated themselves into imperatives for the real-world Soviet space program. To Americans space was a frontier, a place you went to explore, to colonize; to the Russians, space was a place you went to grow, as a spirit and a species.
Shelley started to argue with Rosa about some of the details.
Tom got out of his chair, poured himself a fresh glass of water from the dispenser at the back of the room, and came to stand by me.
I asked him, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know. Tsiolkovsky knew his thermodynamics better than Teilhard.”
“Yes. But maybe Teilhard was ahead of his time, too. He might have had some intuition of modern ideas of network theory, of complexity. Just as maybe all we have is intuitions of the kind of truths Alia knows — or will know…”
There was something compelling in all these old visions, I thought, these strange hybrids of theology and futurology and astronautics, of Christ and Marx and Darwin. Maybe they were products of their time, the struggles of thinkers born in an age dominated by religious thinking to cope with the great empirical shock of evolutionary theory, and the dreadful lesson of the geologists and astrophysicists that the universe was vast and indifferently old.
And maybe, just maybe, Rosa was right, that in all this muddled thinking done in the past we had discerned, dimly, the patterns of the future. Alia’s Transcendence sounded like nothing so much as a mixture of Teilhard’s noosphere and Tsiolkovsky’s Homo cosmicus, mankind projected into the stars, laced with a touch of Schelling’s evolving deity. “After all, if you aren’t aiming up, you’re heading down, for extinction. And if you do aim up, what limit is there but the sky itself — what limit but infinity?”
“Dad?” Tom sounded vaguely concerned.
I hadn’t realized I had said some of that out loud. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m fine.”
He shrugged, turned away, and sat down. He was under control, his emotions unreadable. But I had drifted away from him. I hoped I hadn’t hurt him again.
John was interrogating Rosa. “All this antique fluff doesn’t matter a damn,” he said. “Let’s cut to the chase. We’re talking about what an advanced culture, an advanced superhuman mind, might want. What does this Transcendence want with Michael?”
Rosa said, “I believe that’s where Alia’s second key word comes in. Redemption. ”
John said, “Another oppressive old Christian concept.”
“It’s an old idea, certainly,” Rosa said. “But oppressive? That depends on the theologian you follow.”
In Christian theology mankind had become distanced from God by our primordial sin, the sin of Adam. “And so we need redemption,” Rosa said. “The goal of which is atonement — which means, literally, to make as one, to unite us once more with God. And that, some would say, was the purpose of the life of Jesus Christ.”
From the moment Christ died, it seems, His followers have been debating what exactly His death was for. Why did Christ have to die? If it was to achieve atonement with God, then how, exactly?
The earliest theories, dating from the first fathers of the Church, were crude. Perhaps Jesus was a sacrifice — and after all in His time Jewish temple rituals had been big on sacrifices. Maybe Jesus was a kind of bait to trap the devil, a triumphant moment in God’s long war against Satan. Or maybe Christ was even a kind of ransom payment for our sins, paid not to God, but to the devil.
In the eleventh century Saint Anselm had come up with a more sophisticated idea. It was called “substitutionary atonement,” Rosa said. We still owed a ransom, but now the debt was to God, a “satisfaction” for the great insult of our sins. But the trouble was we were too lowly even to be worthy to apologize. So God recast Himself into human form. Christ was a kind of ambassador for mankind — a “substitute” for our lowly selves — and, being God Himself, He was able to deal with God as a kind of equal.
I think we all bristled. John said, “It sounds feudal to me.”
By the time we reached the Enlightenment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was a new mood, a notion that humans could better themselves by our own efforts — and therefore we ought to live in a universe where that is possible. Now Jesus’ sacrifice was not any kind of ransom or payment; it was an example to all of us of how we could grow closer to God, through love and self-sacrifice. “Exemplary atonement,” Rosa called this one.
“So we’re no longer in debt,” Shelley groused. “Now we’re just too dumb to see what we ought to be doing.”
John asked, curious, “And what do you believe, Rosa?”
She considered. “I don’t believe the purpose of Jesus’ life was to be any sort of sacrificial lamb,” she said. “The true legacy of His life is His message, His words. But historically the more sophisticated theories of atonement certainly completed Saint Paul’s great project of turning the cross from a symbol of horror to an icon of love.”
“Quite a trick,” John murmured.
I said, “And you think somewhere in this there is a lesson for us, for me, in dealing with Alia’s Transcendence.”
“There may be,” Rosa said. She leaned forward, gazing at me, and I realized she was coming to what she had called us together to say. “I have tried to interpret what Alia said to you, Michael. And I have come to believe that the network of linked human minds she describes has not yet passed through its singularity. It is on the cusp of Transcendence. For now, they are still human, or as human as Alia is. But soon they must shed their humanity. And they know that with godhead will come remoteness.”
“Ah,” Shelley said. “So we aren’t falling away from God. God is receding from us.”
“So that’s it,” Tom said. “The Transcendence can’t bear the coming separation from humanity.”
“Not with unfinished business hanging over it, no,” Rosa said. “It is remorseful, perhaps. Regretful. Who knows?”
I said, “I still don’t see what is has to do with me.”
Rosa said patiently, “The Transcendence wants redemption, Michael. In the Christian mythos, the redemption of mankind was achieved through the sacrifice of one man—”
“Oh,” I whispered. “And this time it’s me.” I was numb, neither hot nor cold. I wondered if I was dreaming all this, if I was delusional somehow.
Everybody started talking at once.
Rosa said to me, “Think what this means, Michael. I listened carefully to the way Alia described all this to you. You would be a ‘representative’ of mankind, in some way.”
Shelley said, “That sounds like the feudal stuff. What did you call it?”
“Substitutionary atonement, yes. Michael will be our champion before the Transcendence, somehow able to deal with it as an equal, as Anselm imagined Christ negotiated with God over mankind’s sins.”
“But what does it want me to do? Apologize?”
“Oh, I don’t think you have to apologize for anything,” Rosa said. “It is the Transcendence that is seeking redemption — not the other way around.”
“So it wants to apologize to me? For what?”
“You will have to find that out.” Her face was close to mine; she stared at me, intent, hungry. “But this is why you must become elevated to the Transcendence yourself, Michael, so that you will be worthy of absolving the Transcendence, as no mere human could be, if you deem it the right thing to do.”
My sense of unreality deepened. “I don’t know what to say. Why couldn’t I be a normal crazy?” I whispered to Shelley. “Why couldn’t I just think I was Napoleon Bonaparte? Why did I have to go all the way to the big JC?”
Shelley grabbed my hand. “Michael, I’m not about to let some posse of superhumans nail you to a metaphysical cross.”
“But there may be no choice,” Rosa said.
I said, “This is insane, Rosa.”
“Yes,” she said urgently. “That is precisely what it is. Insane. The Transcendence may be reaching for godhood, but it is somehow flawed, Michael. Otherwise, why would it put itself through such anguish, such contorted apologizing? Yes, it is probably insane.
“But it is powerful, remember. We know it can reach around the curve of time. We know it can bring the dead back to life. An insane god is unimaginably dangerous. That is why we must find a way to deal with it.”
John stared at her, and burst out laughing.
“I feel like laughing myself,” I said.
“I understand,” Rosa said. “Really, I do. This is too big for us to imagine. But this strange responsibility has descended on us nevertheless.” Earnest excitement showed in her face. “We truly find ourselves at the fulcrum of history, Michael. You do.
“I know you are full of doubt. I know that you don’t feel you are up to this challenge. You think you may be carried away by megalomania; you don’t even trust yourself. But you will do this, Michael. You will call Alia again. You will let her take you into the Transcendence itself. You will do it, won’t you? I can see it in your eyes. It isn’t in your heart, your soul, to turn away from this…”
I hated myself for it. I couldn’t bear even to look at Tom, or John, or Shelley, those representatives of my common sense, my conscience. But Rosa was right. She knew me too well. Even if the ghost of Morag hadn’t been involved, I would have gone in there.
Rosa said, “Just remember the Transcendence isn’t omnipotent.”
“It isn’t?”
“We know that. The substitutionary atonement it is seeking proves that much: we surpassed that in the sophistication of our thinking centuries ago. We are small, slow, stupid, weak compared to the Transcendence. But there is at least one way in which it is inferior to us. Michael, you can deal with it.”
As we broke up, John had one more question for Rosa. “Suppose all this is true. That the future folds over onto the present and the past, that our far-future descendants will become godlike. What chance will you Catholics have then? The game is up, isn’t it?”
Rosa smiled thinly. “The Christian Church survived the fall of Rome, and the science of Aristotle and Newton, Galileo and Copernicus and Einstein. Catholicism even survived Martin Luther. I think we will survive this.”
And she disappeared.
Tom came to me. He didn’t bother even to ask whether I was going to do it. “Just when,” he said. “Tell me when, Dad.”
I shrugged. “Tomorrow, maybe. Why not? I’m not getting any braver.” Not that I was sure if I needed courage; if something is so far beyond your imagination, it’s hard even to fear it. “You aren’t going to call me an instrumentalist again, are you, Tom?”
“No. I can see you aren’t doing this for yourself, not at any level. You’re doing it for the same reason you went straight back to the hydrate project after the bombing. You’re going to do it because you think you have to.”
“The Transcendence chose me…”
“I know.”
“But I’m sorry, Tom.”
“For what?”
“Because I’m going off and leaving you again. Same old story.”
“OK. But at least I have warning this time. Have you got any dinner plans?”
That took me off guard. “I guess not. What are you thinking, a Last Supper?”
John and Shelley joined us. John said, “A last beer may be a better idea.”
Shelley put her arm around my waist. “Do you think it will make any difference if you have to go off and slay demons in the far future with a hangover?”
“It might actually help,” I said. “OK, first round on me. What do you prefer, water or wine?”
Leropa and Alia walked in the lengthening shadows of the cathedral’s titanic ruin.
“So you visited him.”
“It was — strange. Difficult.”
Leropa made no comment.
Alia said, “I believe Michael Poole will do what we ask of him.”
Leropa eyed her. “And that pleases you?”
“Shouldn’t it?”
“There is one corollary to our discussion I didn’t want to raise in front of your sister,” Leropa said.
“Corollary,”Alia said dismissively. “The Transcendence believes it is a creature of love. But its language is all logic.”
Leropa raised a hairless eyebrow. “Let us talk of logic, then. You are not the first to have pointed out the ultimate logical flaw in the Redemption program.”
Alia nodded. “No matter what you do, even if you change history to eliminate every element of suffering, the suffering will still exist—”
“In a wider universe of possibilities. Yes.”
“So Redemption is impossible.”
“Not necessarily,” Leropa said. “Your sister was right to intuit that the Redemption is not for those who suffered long ago; it is for the Transcendence itself. It is hoped — but it is only a hope — that somewhere in the Levels of Redemption might be found sufficient solace. At some point we might be able to say: this is enough. And with the past redeemed it will be possible to look to the future — to look outward, not inward.”
Alia nodded. It was a valid hope. But — “If that point is never reached? If there is no solace to be found? What then?”
Leropa sighed. “If suffering exists, no redemption may be possible. But need it have been so? What if humans had never existed at all? What if the Earth had remained lifeless, like the Moon? Then there would have been no suffering to atone, no evil to redeem — no sin to expiate. Perhaps that would be a better state of affairs than to allow ineradicable suffering to exist, without the possibility of healing.”
Alia stopped in her tracks. “Are you serious?”
“It is the final stage of Redemption, its ultimate logic. We call it the Cleansing. It is not that mankind will cease to exist,” said Leropa quietly. “It never will have existed. And it could be arranged quite easily. Remember, the Transcendence can restore the dead to life, with a mere gesture. This final solution is almost elegant. Economical.”
A cold anger burned in Alia. “Is this where the logic of love has led the Transcendence — to love mankind so much that it must be eliminated?”
“This is only a possibility,” Leropa said. “But in what is to come, you must always remember that this dark possibility is there — if Michael Poole fails.”
She raised her hand, curling fragile fingers. And Alia imagined consequences flowing from that gesture, flowing out across space and time, to the far future and into the deepest past. Leropa was a small, hunched-over woman in a worn, shabby robe, shuffling through the debris of an immense ruin. And yet she held the fate of all mankind in her bony fingers.
The first shock of Transcendence is -
I can’t say. The words don’t exist in my head. What is it like, then?
It is like stepping off a cliff. Or it is like suddenly plunging into a shocking new medium, like ice-cold water. Or it is like the instant your first child is born, and you hold him in your arms, and you know your life isn’t your own anymore, and never will be again.
It is like waking up.
When I looked back on my entire life up to this point, it was as if I had been dreaming. I saw all my perceptions of the world, and even my experiences of my inner world, for the partial fantasies that they truly were. But I knew that if I ever got out of this strange state of new consciousness, it would be this that seemed like a dream. But I felt oddly confident, even though I knew I had come to a place beyond my comprehension. I could cope with this, I thought.
But where had I come to? If I had awoken from the dream of human existence, if I had truly opened my eyes for the first time — what did I see?
For now, nothing. It was not as if I had my eyes closed, but more as if I had my gaze averted, my head full of thoughts of other things. I couldn’t see anything because I wasn’t looking; it was a matter of will. But it was waiting for me.
I lifted my metaphoric head. I focused my metaphoric eyes. And I saw -
Light.It flooded into my mind, brilliant, searing hot. All my brief confidence disappeared immediately. I was nothing but a mote of awareness, scorched, shriveled, blasted away. I tried to scream.
The light faded. I was back in my state of unseeing again.
“I know what you would have said if one of your junior engineers, or your students at Cornell, had gone plunging in like that.” The voice, gentle, dry, came out of nowhere, with no source. I wasn’t hearing it, I couldn’t turn my head toward it. Yet it was there even so, a voice in a dream.
“Morag?”
“Alia,” she said, a gentle regret shading her tone. “I am Alia. I am here with you, to help you.”
“I’m glad,” I said fervently. “So tell me what I’d have said.”
“You’d say, Walk before you run. ”
“Quite right, too. Is this the Transcendence, Alia?”
“What did you see?”
“It was like looking into the sun. It burned me out.”
“I blame myself,” she said. “When I was first immersed in the Transcendence, I had had months of training — of mental discipline, and of development of various faculties. Also I have half a million years’ evolutionary advantage over you, Michael. No offense. And I found it overwhelming, that first time. For you it is all but impossible.”
“So teach me how to walk, Alia.”
“One step at a time.”
I felt a gentle pressure, as if a hand had cupped my chin to lift my head, as if I were a child. Metaphor, metaphor. But metaphors are fine if they help you understand.
“Look now.”
I saw a black sky full of stars, all around me, above and below. It was as if I was a stranded astronaut taken far from Earth and left drifting in space. I had no sense of vertigo, though; perhaps that had been edited out. The stars were scattered deep through three dimensions, but they were all a uniform color, a kind of yellow-white. I began to make out patterns, groupings, tentative constellations.
“Stars. But they aren’t stars, are they? Just another metaphor.”
“A metaphor for what?”
It was obvious. “The Transcendents. The individuals who contribute to this group mind. Like us.”
“Like me,” Alia said. “Not quite like you.”
“Am I not a star?” I felt unreasonably disappointed. “Twinkle, twinkle.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “But a special sort of star.”
The stars began to drift around me. Now they were like fish in some vast dark aquarium. The patterns they made became clearer, swoops and whirls and sketches of light. And each of them was a mind, I marveled.
I knew the principle. The Transcendence was not a simple pooling of minds but a dynamic network, of which these stars were the nodes. The greater awareness of the Transcendence itself was an emergent property of the network, arising from the community of minds, yet not overwhelming them individually. It had something in common with an anthill, I thought — or even uncle George’s strange Coalescence.
So much for theory. I wanted to see the Transcendence itself. I looked up.
I saw more stars, swarms of them flocking in patterns that elaborated scale upon scale, rising up as far as I could see. And at the very limit of my vision the shifting constellations seemed to merge into a mist, and then a bright point. That ultimate unity was the consciousness of the Transcendence itself, arising out of the interactions of the community of star-minds on which it was based.
When I looked around I could see the same point-like unity whichever way I looked. An impossible geometry, of course, but a neat metaphor.
At Alia’s subtle nudging, I widened my perceptual field further.
Moving through the flocks of stars were darker shapes, more elusive. Sometimes the stars would settle on their velvet surfaces, and I would make out the glimmer of an outline, a complex morphology. But then the stars would rise up again like startled birds, and the form would be lost.
“These are the structures of the mind of the Transcendence,” Alia said. “Ideas. Beliefs. Understandings. And memories — many, many memories.”
I saw one form that was a little different from the rest — compact, almost glimmering, like a multifaceted jewel, but of jet-black. It was like a bit of polished coal. “What’s that?”
Alia sounded as if she was smiling. “Take a look.”
I didn’t know how to. But even as I framed the desire I felt myself falling toward the jewel-like knot of knowledge.
I felt a surge of new understanding — a moment of insight, like a breakthrough after years of study in some arcane subject, or the sudden clarification when the solution of a puzzle becomes obvious. This glimmering knot of understanding contained all of physics — and I saw it all. I enjoyed a deep understanding of the fabric of the cosmos, from the minuscule symmetries of the fundamental objects from which space and time were ultimately constructed, all the way to the jewel-like geometry of the universe as a whole, folded over on itself in higher dimensions — although now I saw that those two poles of structure, large and small, were in fact one, as if all of reality were folded together again on some more abstract scale.
But even as I wallowed in this joyous understanding, a part of me noticed features a physicist of the twenty-first century would have recognized — even an engineer like me. Our basic map of the universe’s composition was here, the proportions of dark energy, dark matter, baryonic matter, as determined by our space telescopes; and I made out the familiar milestones of the universe’s evolution out of the initial singularity, through stages of expansion and cooling, all the way to the matter-dominated age that had given rise to humans. Some of our theories to explain this universal structure had contained glimmerings of truth after all, I realized. They were all partial, all gropings in the dark, each tentative explanation like the light scattered from one facet of this ultimate jewel of understanding. And yet we got some of it right, I thought with a surge of pride, we primitives on our single, muddy, messed-up little world.
But that sense of pride quickly dissipated when I saw that this jewel-like structure of knowledge, this “ultimate truth,” was ancient. The total understanding dreamed of by the physicists of my time, the limits of their imagination, had not only been achieved, but long ago — and it had been overshadowed by deeper mysteries yet.
But I wasn’t here for physics, but to confront mysteries of the human heart — and the superhuman. Reluctantly I pulled away. I tried to remember, to hold on to some glimmering of this ultimate understanding, but already it was melting like a snowflake cupped in my hand, its beautiful symmetries and unity lost. Already I was forgetting.
Alia said gently, “Michael, I think you’re ready now. It’s time.”
“Time for what?”
“To meet the undying.”
Dread gathered in my heart. But you have a duty, I told myself dryly. You asked for this, Poole.
“Let’s get it over with.”
“Hello, Michael Poole. I regret I was born too late to meet your most illustrious ancestor…”
This was Leropa, then. The undying spoke as if from shadows. I didn’t want to see her any more clearly.
“I don’t understand how I’m talking to you,” I said. “Or Alia, come to that. We’re all part of the Transcendence — aren’t we?”
“The Transcendence is a mind, Michael, but it is not a human mind. There is no reason why a mind must have a single pole of consciousness — as your pole of awareness feels like a mote lodged forever behind your eyes.”
But, I thought uneasily, even in my time minds aren’t so simple. Maybe we three are like multiple personalities screaming at each other inside the head of a schizophrenic.
“Or perhaps we are emblems,” Leropa said now. “We stand for certain traits of the Transcendence, as it tries to resolve the internal dilemma over the Redemption, which Alia so acutely identified.”
“In which case I might be no more real than a character in a Platonic dialogue? Charming. What traits?”
“I am the purpose of the Transcendence. Its will. And you, Michael, are its conscience. We are here to debate the Redemption.”
And to understand the Redemption, she said, I had to understand love. Again I felt that feather-touch on a metaphorical chin, a ghostly finger lifting my gaze to new horizons.
Through its completed cosmology the Transcendence was cognizant of the universe as a whole, of all of space and time, the whole of the human past. And now it showed the past to me.
I was dazzled by the great portrait; I longed to turn my metaphorical head away. But I began to make out broad aspects. It all sprang from a deep root, the long prehistory of humankind on Earth, a root that emerged from down deep, rising through other forms of hominid and ape and animal — not lesser, each of them was perfectly adapted for the environment it found itself in, but steadily acquiring an elusive quality of mind. That deep dark Earthbound taproot culminated in my own time, like a shoot bursting out of the soil. History after my day was a tangle of foliage that sprawled across the face of the Galaxy — knotted, fecund, vibrant, full of detail, from the rise and fall of empires and even species, down to the particular experience of a small child wandering along a beach by the light of a blue-white star a thousand light-years from Earth.
Again I longed to remember this. Just the fact that humans had lived so long, and come so far, would have been beyond the imaginations of most people alive in my own cramped and dangerous century.
But it was a saga full of tragedy. I saw the scars of war, and of mindless natural disasters, where trillions of human lives had been destroyed like needles on a burning pine tree.
Leropa said, “Look at it all, Michael Poole. Look at these particles of humanity trapped in the suffering of the past. And the Transcendence loves every one of them.”
I thought I understood. “It is unbearable.”
“Yes. How can the Transcendence face the infinite possibilities of the future, when its past is knotted up with blood and pain?”
It was the paradox of a god born of human flesh and blood. To achieve full awareness the Transcendence had to absorb every human consciousness, even far into the past. And that meant it had to absorb all that pain. The Transcendence needed Redemption, a cleansing of the pain of the past, before it could advance to the mighty possibilities of the future.
Leropa said carefully, “You see it, don’t you? You see it all. And you understand.”
“Yes,” I breathed. Of course I did. I had shrunk from the hubris of the project. But here and now, surrounded by the vast echoing halls of the mind of the Transcendence, I felt swept up, seeing only the magnificence of this great ambition.
The Transcendence was not infinite, not yet. But it believed it was approaching a singularity, a gathering-up of complexity and cohesion, which would drive it along asymptotic pathways of possibility to an infinity of capability and comprehension. Beyond that point it would no longer be human, for there was no commonality between the infinite and the finite. But unless it was able to resolve the dilemma of Redemption before that point of singularity, the product of that great phase change would be a flawed creation — infinite, yes, but imperfect.
“It will be a wounded god,” I said. Just as Rosa had intuited. It was an unthinkable outcome.
Through the Witnessing and the Hypostatic Union, it tried to bring the suffering of the past into its full awareness, and so to atone. But mere watching could never be enough. So the Transcendence went further. In the Restoration, every human that possibly could have existed would be brought into reality. It would be a stunning, shining moment of rectification. Such trivialities as causality and consequence would be abandoned — but the Transcendence would be infinite, I reminded myself; and to an infinite being even infinite tasks are trivial.
But still it wasn’t enough.
Leropa said, her voice silky, “One way or another the Redemption must be completed. And if atonement cannot be achieved then it would be better to make a simplifying choice.”
I knew what she meant. “If you don’t exist, you can never suffer.” The ultimate simplicity of extermination.
“The Cleansing is within our grasp, if we will it to be done.”
She was right. It was right. And at that moment even the dreadful notion of the Cleansing didn’t dismay me. I was within the Transcendence, yet I was the Transcendence. For a brief moment I shared its huge ambitions, and its limitless fears — and I faced its dilemma. I felt as if I were trapped under an immense weight.
And, in that moment, I fully accepted Leropa’s logic. History must be cleansed, one way or another. And it must be done now…
But Alia whispered in my metaphoric ear. “Michael. Wait. Think. What would Morag say? ”
Morag?…
“You always were a berk, Michael Poole.”
I imagined I could see her, a kind of elusive shadow glimpsed from the corner of my eye.
“A berk? Charming.”
“You always have to meddle, meddle, meddle.”
“If you’re going on about the hydrate project, I get enough of that from Tom.”
“Not that. I admit that’s necessary. But it had to be you doing it, didn’t it, Michael? It fit your personality like a glove, didn’t it? An excuse to tinker. You were always mucking about at home, too. All those pointless do-it-yourself projects you never finished.”
“Morag—”
“Your half-built conservatory, that you abandoned because you ran out of money. Or the way you changed half the windows in the house, then left the rest because you got bored. Or the way—”
“Morag. Is all this going anywhere?”
“And now here you are fiddling with all of human history,” she said. “You think it’s a coincidence that this weird old woman picked you? Of course you’re going to want to plunge your hands in up to the elbows. It’s what you do. You’re a meddler, Michael. An instrumentalist.”
I sighed. “You always go over the top, don’t you?”
“All right. Put it this way. You’re childish. You’re like a kid in an art show. You want to touch the paintings, scrape bits off, deface them, draw your own copies, put them in new frames. Because you’re not mature enough yet just to sit back and enjoy the view — without meddling. ”
I thought that over. “But that’s what we’re like. Humans, I mean. We’re a species who do things.”
“Not necessarily,” Alia said now. “There are other ways to be.” And she widened my perspective yet again.
There was a spectrum of minds, here within the Transcendence itself, and still more beyond its still-expanding walls. I sensed these different minds as if hearing voices at the ends of long corridors. All of them were human or post-human, and most were more or less like my own. But there were sorts of mind quite different to mine, other ways of thinking, other ways to live.
The strange Coalescents in their vast hives were one example.
And with Alia’s gentle guidance I came on a people, a branch of mankind, who had long ago settled on a world in the Sagittarius Arm. It was a water-world, like an Earth drowned under an almost global ocean. The people here, post-people anyhow, had given up clothes and spaceships and even tools, and developed bodies like otters or small dolphins, and now spent all their lives in the endless calm of the water.
Alia said, “They gave up their minds. They knew it was happening. What you don’t use, you lose. But they didn’t care…”
I didn’t understand. “They could do so much more. They once did. But they put it all aside. And they’ve left themselves vulnerable. A volcanic spasm, an asteroid strike—”
“They don’t care! They have the present, they have each other, and that’s enough.”
There was a deep question here, Alia said. What was the purpose of intelligence? Was intelligence the highest outcome of the evolutionary process — or, like everything else, a mere means to an end?
“Intelligence is expensive,” Alia said. “There’s the energy cost of your big brain itself. And you need a lot of infrastructure to support it — some equivalent of eyes, hands, legs, to give you the information you need on the external world, and the capability of manipulating it.”
“So why bother getting smart at all?”
“Because there are circumstances where it is the only choice…”
Humanity’s chimplike ancestors had been kicked out of their ancestral forests by climate change. The savannah was a harsh environment, where you were exposed to extremes of temperature, easily spotted by predators, and where water and food sources were scattered far and wide. In order to survive, human intelligence had had to mushroom.
“You need to be smart, if you’re adrift in a hostile environment,” Alia said. “But if you ever manage to stumble off the savannah and back into the forest again—”
“You can give up your mind,” I said.
Morag said, “I think I understand. Birds give up flight whenever it’s safe, if they flap to an island without predators. Why not mind?”
Curiously I turned to the seal-folk flipping and gliding in their world-ocean. Their shining, shallow thoughts were contained within the Transcendence’s awareness; cautiously I sampled them. I tasted contentment, as delicious and ephemeral as the salty flesh of a fish. Yes, for these post-people it was enough. Life had no goals, for them; life was a process, whose only purpose was to be relished.
Alia said, “Michael Poole, are you seriously telling me they need to be redeemed from their pain by your flawed god? What pain?”
“But I still don’t understand,” I said. “Intelligence isn’t just a tool. Knowledge is worth having for its own sake… isn’t it?”
Morag brought back that jewel-like knot of wisdom that represented the Transcendence’s physics. “Take another look.”
Again I peered into the mass of ancient wisdom. But this time, under the guidance of Alia and Morag, I looked deep into the heart of the jewel — and I discerned a tiny flaw, a lack of completion.
There were limits to understanding by any mind — human or post-human, even Transcendent. This was incompleteness: no mathematics, a logical construct of the human mind, could ever be made whole or completely consistent. Because of this, you could prove that there were limits to what any conceivable computer could do. But a mind was at heart an information-processing system — so no mind, however vast, could ever be fully cognizant of itself.
Not even the Transcendence.
“Ah,” Morag said, as if she was learning with me. “ ‘What peculiar privilege has this little agitation of brain which we call thought, that we must thus make it a model of the whole Universe?’ ”
“Who’s that?”
“David Hume. Not an engineer, so you won’t have heard of him. Face it, Michael. No mind can ever be fully cognizant of itself — and mind is not the goal of the cosmos anyhow. And the Redemption, this cack-handed do-it-yourself fix-up it means to inflict on human history, can only lead to disaster.”
Leropa had been silent for a long time. She said now, “Flawed god the Transcendence may be, but it is capable of at least one great act. Perhaps we can never atone for the suffering of past ages. But we can at least wipe it away. And, if we can’t atone, isn’t it our duty to do so?”
Alia said, “Leropa—”
“It is time for your decision, Michael Poole.”
The other voices, Alia, Morag, fell silent, and I was left alone.
I looked deep inside myself.
Could there be any possible ethical justification for the Cleansing? Could the elimination of suffering ever be worth the elimination of life itself?
If the great cauterization were done, then those unborn — including myself — would never have known it happened. It would not be felt, nor would the pain they might have suffered. But on the other hand, they would have no chance — no chance to make their own futures, to be glad to be alive, however briefly.
“Life comes first,” I said. “Everything else is secondary.” Yes, I thought as I framed the words; that was just.
“Then,” Leropa said, “what of the Redemption?”
The Transcendence was like an immense parent, I thought, brooding over the lives of its children — all of humanity, in the future and the past. And the Transcendence longed to make its children safe and happy, for all time.
But I was a parent, too. I had lost one child, saved another. If I could somehow have fixed Tom’s future at his birth, or even before he was conceived, so that his life would be lived out in safety — would I have done so? It seemed a monstrous arrogance to try to control events that might happen long after my death. How could I ever know what was best? And even if I did, wouldn’t I be taking away my son’s choices, his ability to live out his own life as he wanted?
You had to let go, I thought. You had to let your children make their own mistakes. Anything else verged on insanity, not love.
I didn’t have to say it. As I formulated these thoughts I glanced around the sky-mind of the Transcendence. There was a change, I thought. Those pinpoint awarenesses whirled in tight, angry knots, and giant reefs of wisdom loomed out of the dark like icebergs on a nighttime ocean. I had troubled the Transcendence with my decision, then. Perhaps that meant it was the right one.
On some level, the Transcendence must already have known, I thought. I was just a lever it used to lift itself back to sanity. But that didn’t mean it was happy about it. Or grateful.
Leropa hissed, “Michael Poole. You know that if the Redemption is abandoned, you will lose Morag forever, don’t you?”
I recoiled from this personal attack. So much for the lofty goals of the Transcendence, I thought; so much for transhuman love. “But I already lost her,” I said. “Nothing the Transcendence can do will make any difference to that. I guess it’s part of being human. And so is letting go.”
Leropa said, “Letting go?”
“Of the past, the dead. Of the future, the fate of your children. Even an arch-instrumentalist like me knows that much.”
Leropa laughed. “Are you forgiving the Transcendence, Michael Poole?”
“Isn’t that why I was brought here?”
“Good-bye, Michael Poole,” Leropa said. “We won’t meet again.”
And suddenly, I knew, it was over. I searched for Morag. Perhaps there was a trace of her left. But she was receding from me, as if she was falling down a well, her face diminishing, her gaze still fixed on me.
And then the stars swirled viciously around me — for an instant I struggled, longing to stay — but I was engulfed in the pain of an unwelcome rebirth, and a great pressure expelled me.
The six of them gathered in Conurbation 11729: Alia and Drea, Reath, and the three Campocs, Bale, Denh, and Seer.
Under the mighty electric-blue tetrahedral arch of the ancient cathedral, the undying walked their solitary paths. Some of them mumbled to themselves, continuing their lifelong monologues, but the very oldest did not speak at all. But even now she was aware of the presence of the Transcendence, in her and around her. And she was aware of its turmoil, like a storm gathering, huge energies drawing up in a towering sky above her.
Campoc Bale drew Alia aside. She could still faintly sense the extended consciousness he shared with his family, like a limited Transcendence of its own. And about him there was still that exotic sense of the alien, the different, which had given their lovemaking so much spice.
He said carefully, “We did not mean any harm to come to your ship, your family.”
“But you led the Shipbuilders to the Nord. ”
“Yes.” It was the first time he’d admitted it explicitly. “We were concerned that the Redemption would rip everything apart. We were right to be concerned, weren’t we?”
“And I was your tool, your weapon to use against the Transcendence.”
“You were more than that to me,” he said hotly.
“Your manipulation was gross. You threatened my sister, you endangered my family—”
“We would never have harmed Drea.” He looked up. “I think on some level you always knew that, didn’t you? And we did not mean the incident with the Shipbuilders to go so far.”
“Incident.My mother died, and my brother. Are you looking for forgiveness from me, Bale? Do you want redemption, after all that’s happened?”
“Alia, please—”
She laughed at him. “Go back to your Rustball and bury yourself in the empty heads of your brothers. You will never be a part of my life again.”
His broad face was full of loss, and she felt a faint stab of regret. But she turned her back on him and walked away.
Reath walked with her. “Weren’t you a little hard on him?”
She glared at him, refusing to answer.
He sighed. “It is a time of change for us all, I suppose.”
“What about you, Reath? What will you do now?”
“Oh, there will always be a role for me and my kind,” he said wryly. “Many of the Commonwealth’s great projects will continue whatever the Transcendence decides to do next: the political reunification of the scattered races of mankind is a worthwhile aim.”
“That’s noble, Reath.”
They came to Drea, who was sitting, looking bored, on a block of eroded rubble.
Reath asked, “And what of you two? Where will you go next?”
“Back to the Nord, ” Drea said immediately. “Where else? The Nord is home. Besides, I think my father needs us right now.” She reached up and took her sister’s hand. “Right, Alia?”
But Alia did not reply.
Reath turned to her. “Alia?”
She found a decision formulated in her head, a decision she hadn’t known she had made. “Not the Nord, ” she said. “Oh, I’ll miss Father — and you, Drea. I’ll visit; I always will. But—” But she couldn’t live there anymore. She had seen too much. The Nord and its unending journey were no longer enough for her. “I’ll find a role for myself. Maybe I can work for the Commonwealth, too… Someday I’ll find a new home.” She pulled Drea to her feet and hugged her. “Somewhere to have children of my own!”
Drea laughed, but there were tears in her eyes.
Reath watched them more seriously. “Alia.” His tone was grave, almost reprimanding; it was just as he had spoken to her when he had first met her.
She snapped, not unkindly, “Oh, what is it now, you old relic?”
“If this is your true intention — just be careful.”
“Of what?”
“Of yourself.” He had seen it before, he said: in Elect who had failed, or even mature Transcendents who, for reasons of health or injury, had been forced to withdraw from the great network of mind. “You never forget the Transcendence. You can’t. Not once you have experienced it, for it is an opening-up of your mind beyond the barriers of you. You may think you have put it aside, Alia, but it always lurks within you.”
“What are you saying, Reath?”
“If you are going to roam the stars, be sure it is yourself you are looking for — and not the Transcendence, for that is lost to you forever.”
On impulse she took his hands; they were warm, leathery. “You are a good friend, Reath. And if I am ever in trouble—”
“You will have me to turn to,” Reath said, smiling.
“I know.”
Leropa emerged from the flock of the undying. She approached Alia, as enclosed and enigmatic as ever. The others stood back, uncertain — afraid, Alia saw.
Leropa said: “The Transcendence is dying.”
Alia was shocked. Beside her Reath grunted, as if punched.
Leropa went on, “Oh, it’s not going to implode, today or tomorrow.”
Alia said, “But the grander aims, all that planning for infinity—”
“All that is lost. Perhaps the project was always flawed. We humans are a blighted sort. Too restless to be bucolic, too limited to become gods: perhaps it was always inevitable it would end like this. The Redemption was our best effort to resolve the paradox of an attempt to build a utopia on shifting bloodstained sands — an attempt to mold a god from the clay of humanity. But we succeeded only in magnifying the worst of us along with the best, all our atavistic cravings. And so the Transcendence will die — but at least we tried!
“This is a key time in human history, Alia, a high watermark of human ambition. We’ve been privileged to see it, I suppose. But now we must fall back.”
“And what about the undying? What will you do now?”
“Oh, we aren’t going anywhere. We will get on with things in our own patient way. We still have our ambitions, our plans — on timescales that transcend even the Transcendence, in a sense. And even without the power of the Transcendence behind us, the issues of the future remain to be resolved.”
“Issues?”
Leropa’s leathery, immobile face showed faint contempt. “Alia, you and your antique companion Poole indulged in some wonderful visions about the evolutionary future of mankind — the purpose of intelligence, all of that. Perhaps we can all find a safe place, where we can give up the intelligence we evolved to keep us alive out on the savannah, and subside comfortably back into non-sentience. Yes?”
“It happens. Like the seal-men of the water-world—”
“It’s a bucolic dream. But unfortunately the universe cares little for our wishes, or our dreams.”
Mankind sprawled across the Galaxy it had conquered, speciating, variegating, gradually reunifying. But the wider universe was empty of mankind. And in those vast spaces beyond, enemies circled, ancient and implacable.
Leropa said, “We are still out on the savannah of stars. And there are ferocious beasts out there — beasts we have driven out of the Galaxy altogether — but they are still there.And they are aware of us. Indeed they have a grudge.”
“They will come back,” Alia breathed.
“It’s inevitable. It might take another million years, but they will come.”
“And you undying are planning for war…”
“Earth will endure, you know. One day even all this, even the traces of the Transcendence itself, will be nothing but another layer in Earth’s stratified layer of rocks and fossils, just another incident in a long and mostly forgotten history. But we will still be here, taking care of things.” Her face was hard, set, her dry eyes like bits of stone.
She had never seemed more alien to Alia. And yet, she knew, this grim, relentless inhumanity might in the end be the saving of mankind.
“You frighten me, Leropa.”
Leropa grinned, open-mouthed, showing teeth as black as coal. “But I think you understand why we undying are necessary. Perhaps even we are an evolutionary recourse, do you think? But you aren’t going to take your immortality pill, are you? You aren’t going to join us.”
“No,” Alia said. She had no need of endless life, to become one of these sad old people. And she had no need of Transcendence. She would embrace her own humanity with two hands — that would be enough…
She staggered. The world pivoted around Alia, as if the wind had changed, or gravity had rippled.
Drea took her arm. “Alia? Are you all right?”
Reath asked anxiously, “Is it the Transcendence?”
Leropa said, “It is nearly over.”
Drea grabbed Alia’s hands. “Then we must hurry. There is something I want to show you while I can.
Come. Skim with me. Like when we were kids, before all this. ”
“Drea, I don’t think it’s the time for—”
“Just do it!” Laughing, she Skimmed, and Alia had no choice but to follow.
She found herself suspended over the head of Reath. His upturned face shone in the light, his mouth round with shock. Leropa had turned away, uninterested, already absorbed by her own long projects. They had traveled only a fraction of the height of the great exotic-matter cathedral.
Drea was still laughing. “Again!” she cried. “Three, two, one—”
Clutching each other, the sisters Skimmed again, and again.
I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping into the sea.
I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of children makes up for that.
The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that. But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise, different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming whether we like it or not.
Alia told me stories of the far future, of her time. Her stories come back to me in dreams.
A half a million years from now, she said, children can Skim. It’s like teleporting, I think, “beaming,” but you don’t need any equipment, any fancy flashing lights and instrument panels and stern-jawed engineers. You just do it. You just decide you don’t want to be here anymore, you would rather be over there, and there you are. Literally.
Children are born this way. Babies learn to Skim before they can walk, or crawl, or climb. Teleporting babies: imagine that. Their parents have to chase them down with butterfly nets. And the problem of droppings is awesome. But nobody minds: on Alia’s starship, people like having a sky full of babies.
Older children use their Skimming in play. These are smart post-human super-kids who can teleport; their games are elaborate, endlessly complicated. One game Alia tried to describe to me sounded like an aerial combination of football and chess.
Adolescence comes late for kids in Alia’s time; you live a long life, and you get to enjoy a very long childhood. But when the hormones do kick in, the Skimming games get sexual, morphing seamlessly into elaborate courtship chases that can thread their way from one end of the ship to the other. The older adolescents are trained up for more formal dances, endlessly complicated quantum ballets.
And then, when you finally grow up, the ability to Skim atrophies.
I got the feeling Alia was close to this age of transition, but she didn’t want to think about it. All your life distance has been irrelevant, and you have been flitting over the static crowds of lumpen adults. Now you are dragged down to join them, and you are going to be stuck in a spacetime suddenly as thick as glue, forever. What a growing-up present, like all the trials of age hitting you at once.
Sometimes I dream of writing this up, of spinning fiction out of it. I could use it as a metaphor for growing up. Or for the plight of the Transcendence, on the point of deity, and yet unable to put aside its human past. I could add to George’s ancient science fiction library. Nobody would ever know I had stolen it all.
I came out of my contact with the Transcendence shattered. Drained. It was like the bombing of the Refrigerator project, the very instant of the explosion, the world suddenly turned to chaos, the blast’s tremendous punch in the chest. It was like that moment, but going on and on.
I don’t remember much of the weeks that followed. Tom and Sonia looked after me during that time. I wasn’t so bad. I was able to get dressed, take myself to the bathroom. I even kept working, after a fashion, on the hydrate project. I have notes that prove it, though to me they read like they were written by somebody else. But I’d forget to eat, for instance. I’d forget what time it was and stay up through the night, and be startled by the dawn. That kind of thing.
It was a time when I needed my mother, I guess. But she died not long afterward, not so long after her brother, George. Ironic, one of life’s little jokes. I miss her, of course.
The family rallied around. I think there were rows between Tom and John about who should be responsible for me: “You’re his brother.” “You’re his son.” But they kept this away from me. I don’t mind; if I’d been capable of it I’d have been rowing, too. We were never again quite as close again as we were during the crisis days. Maybe it’s enough to know we’re there for each other when we need it. Funny lot, we Pooles.
I was put into therapy. Except they don’t call it therapy now but “consciousness reengineering.” I was assigned a robot companion, a cybernetic quack the size of a footstool that rolled enthusiastically around after me. A robot, but no black leather couch, no notebook, no bust of Freud. I spent a lot of time sitting alone in a room, with a VR representation of the state of my own brain, trying to explore my innermost sensations of my memories, my self. I was innately suspicious of the whole process.
John paid for all this privately. From the beginning it was John’s instinct to keep all this strangeness away from the authorities, and despite the fact that some oddities showed up on public records, like Morag’s incarnation before the bombing, we succeeded, with some subtle help, I think, from Gea. Even the conspiracy theorists with their super-powered search engines and cross-correlation machines didn’t get a sniff of me.
So I saved humanity, perhaps, in past, present, and future, but nobody knows. Astounding when you think about it.
But what was it I did? Trying to remember the Transcendence is like recalling a dream. The more you think about it, the more it eludes you. Or it is like my haunting by Morag: glimpses, remoteness, that you try to break through, but never can. I was vaguely comforted by Alia telling me that it was the same for her. She had only ever been a semi-detached member of the Transcendence, a part-qualified new recruit. It was just as hard for her to hold onto as for me.
It was frustrating not to be able to recall all I had seen. I felt as if I had glimpsed a vast, rich landscape through a pinhole, just for a second. But as time passed, and the direct experience of the Transcendence receded, I was left with memories of memories, like polished pebbles. In time, even the sense of frustration has passed away.
Gea’s speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations went remarkably well. Gea spoke about the urgency of the hydrate-stabilization proj-ect, and more generally on how it ought to serve as a model for the way we manage the planet in the future.
She even put in a short plea on behalf of her fellow artificial sentiences, and herself. We humans weren’t alone on the planet anymore, she said. We had a duty of care for our children. After all, Gea said, an artificial like herself was not limited by human biology as we were. Potentially she could be immortal. But all that potential would be destroyed if the fabric of our culture fell apart, if the technological substrate on which she depended broke up.
You would think such an appeal would alarm us. The conventional wisdom has always been that humans won’t share the future with anybody else. That even seems to have been the truth of the future I glimpsed through my contact with Alia. But according to the snap polls, the response to Gea’s appeal was warm, sympathetic. This is an age when, conscious of the past, we feel guilty about it. Gea judged our mass psychology just right.
The Refrigerator won the backing of the Stewardship agencies, and was rushed through its final stages of technical validation. Now the rollout has begun. Our pilot plant off Prudhoe Bay is the seed of what is still the largest single field, but other bases have started operating all around the Canadian Arctic, and across Siberia. Next year, Antarctica.
EI are continuing to advance the technology, even as the rollout is continuing. They hope to develop a new generation of moles that will be able to make copies of themselves. Each of these super-moles will be more pricey than the originals, but you’d only have to pay for the first generation of them, if you think about it, and the long-term costs of the project will drop away to zero.
Of course it’s expensive. But the cost of not stabilizing all those strata full of greenhouse cocktails would have been far more: potentially infinite, if the worst case had come about.
That isn’t all EI are doing. Shelley Magwood is working on high-level concept designs of a whole range of ambitious new geoengineering proj-ects.
The one that catches my eye is a direct challenge to the dreary modern paradigm of sea-level rise and flooding. At the end of the Ice Age, as the great ice sheets melted, swathes of landscape were drowned. There was “Doggerland,” which is now under the North Sea, and “Beringia,” which bridged between Alaska and Asia, and “Sundaland,” between Australia and South-East Asia, once the home of the largest belt of tropical rain forest in the world. Now there are strong proposals to turn back the sea, to reclaim some of those vast stretches of lost terrain. It seems outrageous, but the geography of the seabed will allow it, in places. The new lands, opened up for refugees, will be farmed or given over to forest land, so sequestering some of our excess carbon out of the air, and improving things long-term.
The Stewardship authorities are already talking about a model for the administration of the new provinces. There will be local democracy and chains of accountability all the way up to the planetary level, just as there should be. But there will be no new “nations” planted in Doggerland. We haven’t always lived in nation-states, and they aren’t always very constructive entities to share our world with. Maybe with the new territories as models of a different kind of governance, the old nations will at last wither away.
Shelley Magwood is in heaven with all of this. She’s even becoming a media star. An engineer as modern hero: who’d have thought it?
Of course there are still risks ahead, difficult times. We may have fixed the hydrate problem but there is plenty left to do. We’ll just have to get through this damn Bottleneck one step at a time. But we’re starting to believe we can achieve great things. And after the Bottleneck, who knows?
There will be costs. There are costs in anything you do. Alia’s vision of mankind spread across the Galaxy, an arena for trillions upon trillions of human lives, was magnificent, but it was a Galaxy we emptied out along the way. And in a sense it all started here. But the future isn’t fixed; I’ve learned that. So maybe even the downside isn’t inevitable. Maybe we can have it all. Why not?
I’m starting to believe what Alia told me, that people of the future really will look back on our age as a time to admire, a time you’d wish you’d lived through.
John has a house not far away from me. But he is often off in New York, Washington, or Geneva, pursuing his own projects, heroic in his own legalistic way. And he’s at last writing his book on his new ethics-based economics paradigm, his new kind of money.
I don’t see much of his Happy kids. It doesn’t feel like much of a loss.
I haven’t seen Rosa for some time. She gave up her ministry in Seville, and has, well, disappeared. As if into a hole in the ground.
I suspect that the Coalescence has come back into her life, somehow. It was always a shadow behind her, a depth of darkness into which I could never pry. Maybe it called her back — but from George’s account that seems unlikely; it would have no use for her, a failed drone who did her job but got too smart for her own good. Maybe, on the other hand, she tracked it down, or some descendant of it after the great scattering in Rome. Maybe she’s at least able to figure out what the meaning of it all was for her. I hope so.
Tom and Sonia are working on relief efforts in Siberia once more. Now that the Refrigerator project is rolling out there’s a lot to be done. Sonia has resigned her army commission to work with Tom. I keep a room in my apartment for them. They store some of their stuff there, so they have a permanent place in my life. I don’t see as much of them as I’d like, however. I don’t know what the future holds for them, but I think they’ll be happy together.
We are all getting rich, incidentally.
John moved fast to patent as much as he could of the information derived from images and scans of Alia, and indeed Morag, in the name of EI and ourselves; he was able to make a convincing case to the company’s lawyers that if not for us Pooles this windfall from the future wouldn’t have fallen into their laps anyhow. The genomic studies seem likely to yield fruit quickly. Longevity treatments may be the first big payoff: EI even has a trademarked name for their soon-to-be-announced product range, AntiSenescence, or AS. They are paying us for licences to investigate the material, and in future we’ll take a small but serious cut of the profits.
I don’t have any qualms about profiting from my experiences. I suffered enough; I guess I’ve a right.
Shelley has expressed doubts about polluting the timeline. After all we are patenting genetic and other enhancements that have been fed to us from the future; we will be introducing them centuries, millennia before they are “due.” I don’t worry about that, any more than about the nonexistence of the Kuiper Anomaly. I take my lead from Alia, who seemed to have a robust view of time paradoxes. The universe can take a few punches from us without disappearing up its own paradoxical fundament. Things will work out somehow — or maybe they already have.
Anyhow when this all unravels the Pooles are going to be rich. We’ve always been engineers, we’ve always been meddlers, and now we will have money, and money means the power to do things. I guess my own race is run. But I wonder what the Pooles will do with all that power in the future.
Sometimes I think all our adventures, we Pooles, are to do with a quest for God. Rosa’s Coalescence, if George’s analysis was right, was certainly superhuman, but no god, nothing but a mindless multiplication. Alia hinted that at mankind’s peak we went to war at the center of the Galaxy, and what we found there was very strange, unimaginably ancient, and powerful. So that generation found God, and, exultantly, used Him as a weapon. And in Alia’s time, we looked for God in the last place He might be hiding — deep within ourselves. But He wasn’t there either.
As for me, I’ve returned to my work on the interstellar-probe application of the Higgs technology.
You’d think that my exposure to the future might have crushed my confidence in what we can achieve. Alia, after all, was born on a starship, a ship that had been cruising for half a million years. How can my trivial little unmanned probe, a one-shot water rocket, compare to that? But I don’t feel like that at all. This is what I can build, this is what I can contribute. Anyhow, they wouldn’t have been able to achieve anything without me.
I love it. I feel like I’m playing. I feel as if I’m a kid on the beach once more, ten years old, throwing Frisbees with uncle George.
Suddenly, though, the starship study has become a lot more urgent. NASA engineers have been poring over our results, and there is talk of some serious money being pumped our way. The motive is clear. The Kuiper Anomaly has vanished.
That strange, tetrahedral object drifting among the dead comets and ice moons of the outer solar system, only discovered within my own lifetime, has suddenly disappeared. There’s not a trace of its passage; it just went. And so people want to find a way to get out there, to find out what the hell is happening. It’s ironic that the probe’s disappearance has created more interest and alarm than its presence ever did. But while the Anomaly was evidence that there had once been other minds, its removal is proof that those minds are still acting.
I know, as very few others do, that the true purpose of the Kuiper Anomaly was to mediate the linking of the future with the past; it was the channel through which the Transcendent generation was able to reach us — reach me. When the Transcendence collapsed, its great projects abandoned, the construction and launch of the probe in their future was aborted — and so it never reached our past.
I think reality has changed. I think the probe never existed, and I don’t think that exploring astronauts are going to find any trace that anything was ever out there at all. Of course that begs the question of how come I remember the thing, how come there are libraries full of forty years’ worth of space-telescopic records of its presence. I try not to think about that.
I’m glad it’s gone, though. The Kuiper Anomaly was a physical mani-festation of the meddling of the Transcendents in our time. The more I think about the vast scope of their ambition, the more I resent their galling instrumentalism. Maybe I have more of Tom in me than I imagine.
But we have options.
Think about it. They are up there in the far future, off in the highest branches of a great tree. But we are at the tree’s roots. And if we cut off the tree at the trunk, the highest branch will come crashing to the ground. If nobody was to have another child ever again, for instance, then not one of the Transcendents could ever be born. There are no doubt less drastic ways to fight a war with the future.
I’m not advocating any of this. But perhaps we should wargame options.
If the future ever attacks us again, we should fight back.
Today is January 1st, 2048. The digital millennium has come and gone, and all those date registers in all those antique processors have absorbed the extra binary digit without so much as a squeak; there is no news of any problems anywhere. Another disaster averted. Happy New Year.
Sometimes, however, I despair.
I look around at the world, I follow the news, and I count up all we’ve lost even in my own lifetime. And I know, from my contact with Alia, that Earth’s ecology won’t recover from the tremendous shock we have inflicted, not even in half a million years.
Once I tried to express all this to Gea. She told me to go outside, to the scrap of garden I share with the other tenants of this block, and to find an old piece of rotten log. I did as she asked. I found a chunk of crumbling wood, and turned it over. Roots and strands of fungi pulled apart, as if the ground didn’t want to let it go, and a damp, cold, musty smell rose up from the thick dark earth that had been hidden beneath.
There was a whole shadowy world in there. A spider, her belly heavy with a white silk egg case, scuttled away to the shade. Millipedes coiled up into tight little spiral. A centipede squirted its slow way through a heap of bark fragments. But these naked-eye critters were the megafauna of Log-world. Following Gea’s advice, I hacked off a chunk of the log with a knife, shook it out over a white handkerchief spread on the ground, and examined what fell out with a magnifying glass. I saw worms and mites and a dozen other sorts of creatures, wildly diverse in their body plans, all crawling around on my handkerchief. And even that wasn’t the end of it. Gea showed me magnified images of droplets of water, each one just swarming with billions of bacteria. The deeper you dig down the more tiny ecologies just keep popping up.
OK, we humans have made a mess of the biosphere at some levels. But the big, visible living things up here on Earth’s surface are only a scraping of the planet’s true cargo of life. Nothing we can ever do is going to make much of a dent in that crude, overwhelming fact.
Such reflections are humbling. But they also comfort me. We shouldn’t feel so bad about ourselves. We’re just animals in an ecology, too. Gea says she is trying to promote this kind of “microaesthetic,” to help us humans get a sense of perspective about themselves. Vander was right; she does care about us.
Gea is a surprisingly good companion. She is smarter than me after all, and she will, with any luck, live forever. Also the way she rolls about on my tabletop shooting sparks from her belly makes me laugh.
So here I am. I listen to the sea lapping at the bottom of my avenue, and the laughter of children, and I watch the sunlight dapple on the drowned roads, and I dream of starships. Things could have turned out a lot worse for me, I guess.
But I’ll always miss Morag.
Alia found herself perched on a small platform, right at the apex of the cathedral’s mighty tetrahedral skeleton. The three great pylons of the frame swept away beneath her to touch the rust-red ground of Earth. Beneath the frame the undying community huddled in the ruined domes of Conurbation 11729.
The air was cold, and a stiff breeze blew. The platform’s material shone brighter than daylight, and it underlit Drea’s face as the sisters clutched at each other, exhilarated by the Skimming.
“Drea — what are we doing here?”
Drea stepped aside with a flourish to reveal a blocky artifact. “We’re here for this,” she said. It was Alia’s Witnessing tank, her most precious relic of childhood. “Look.”
Within the tank Michael Poole, a figurine no taller than Alia’s hand, sat quietly in a chair. From a window a warm light reflected from sun-dappled water poured into his room. Drea said, “When the Transcendence shuts down the Witnessing tanks won’t work anymore.”
“I suppose they won’t.”
“I thought you’d want to see him one last time…” Drea leaned over the tank. “This is a time in his life after his encounter with the Transcendence. At this point in his lifeline, he remembers you, Alia.”
If he remembers anything at all, Alia thought uneasily, after his shattering self-sacrifice. “I grew up with Michael Poole. Through watching his life, I learned about mine. He was always a constant friend, even though he is half a million years dead. And then, through the Hypostatic Union with his son—”
“You touched him.”
“In a way. The Witnessing worked, you know. I got to know Poole, and I became a better person for it. I think so anyhow.”
“I think you loved him, didn’t you? Perhaps you still do.”
“But he never loved me, Drea. There was only ever Morag.”
Drea said earnestly, “It’s best this way, that it ends.” She trilled a few notes. “Every song must end — and indeed an ending, if it is exquisite enough, is part of the beauty of the song itself.”
But, Alia wondered, as she stared at Michael Poole’s empty face, must the ending of this particular song be quite so bittersweet? She felt huge forces gathering, as if the cosmos itself were focusing on this point-event in space and time. “It’s going to happen soon.”
Drea clutched her hands, watching her face with concern.
The Transcendence whirled around her, great clouds of anguish and determination. In a moment immense invisible muscles would flex — and a wave of difference would wash around the arc of the universe, from the furthest future and seamlessly into the deepest past. The universe would come apart, closed chains of cause and effect shattering, and when those chains knitted themselves up again, everything would be subtly different. And the powers the Transcendence had taken to itself, the power to meddle with the deepest past, would be put aside forever.
But in these last minutes, those powers still existed. And suddenly she knew what she must do.
Alia raised her face to the blue sky of Earth. Through the muddy daylight she thought she could see the Transcendence, the necklace-chains of minds, the drifting bergs of memory. “Do this one last thing,” she pleaded. “Spare him! Spare Michael Poole!”
Maybe it would work out for him this time. At least this way there was a chance. And after all, what was the point of being a god if you couldn’t perform the occasional miracle?
Spacetime flexed — she felt it, deep in the core of her being. And Drea gasped.
Alia looked down. The Witnessing tank was no longer clear; the image was broken, turbulent, like a pool of water stirred up with a stick. But in the last instant before the link collapsed forever, Alia saw Michael Poole turn toward the door, and stand, a look of shock on his face.
As Morag walked into the room.