Transcendent (13 page)

“The most interesting thing about mankind in this long Earthbound period is its fragility,” Reath said. “Think about it. Humanity was confined to one rocky world in a remote corner of the Galaxy—indeed, imprisoned in a membrane of water and organics smeared over the planet’s surface. Up to Michael Poole’s time, that was all the life anybody knew about in the whole universe! Why, the slightest disturbance could have wiped us out—destroyed mankind before we got started—and that would have been that.”

The terrible contingency made Alia shudder. “Poole’s generation referred to his time as the Bottleneck.”

“They were right,” Reath said. “But it wasn’t the only age of crisis. There were several points in human history where things went badly wrong. Seventy thousand years before Michael Poole’s time there was an immense volcanic eruption that disrupted the planet’s climatic systems. Even earlier, while mankind was still just a species of upright apes among many others, a plague cut the rootstock down to a few dozen. Mankind reduced to just fifty or so!—think of it. You can see traces of such times in our genetic legacy even now, traces of a dreadful simplifying. The major difference with the Poole Bottleneck was that this was the first anthropogenic crisis—the first caused directly by the actions of mankind.

“It’s no great surprise that as Witnesses we are drawn to bottlenecks. They are the times of maximum danger for mankind, maximum drama—and yet of maximum flux and opportunity.”

Alia stared at Michael Poole, his troubled face trapped in stillness inside her Witnessing tank. In this incident Poole was outdoors, in a strange landscape. In hot dense sunlight, he was climbing over a vast heap of wreckage, of smashed and abandoned machines. “Here he is aged fifty-two,” she said. “He is entering the most critical time of his life.”

“He looks troubled.”

“He often does,” she said wryly. “Poole knew the dangers of his age very well. Most educated people of the time did, I think. But after the danger his son encountered, Poole came to grasp the implications better than most. He worked on a geoengineering project after all.”

“And he was a Poole,” Reath said, somewhat reverently.

“But they were all so limited—all the people of his time, even Poole himself. The best you can say about them is that they were beginning to understand how little they
did
know.”

“And is it the problems of the Earth that are depressing him so?”

“More than that,” she said. “His own work isn’t going well. And it is a difficult time in his personal life . . .” She skimmed the projection back and forth; Poole stayed steady at the center of the flickering images while people appeared and imploded around him.

When she was young Alia had focused her Witnessing on the more accessible moments of Poole’s life: his joyous childhood, his discovery of love as a young man. With Reath’s gentle coaxing she had been trying to concentrate on this period, the most difficult time of his life—Poole’s own Bottleneck, perhaps.

But it was very hard for her to get into the head of a fifty-two-year-old man from the middle of the twenty-first century. Everything about his life was so
different.
Her fifties would be the start of her young adulthood, a time of opportunity and growing command over her destiny. For Poole, more than half his life—and the more productive, enjoyable part—had already gone. He was rapidly running out of future.

Sometimes, when she studied Poole, all she seemed to see was his smallness. He was a dark, unhappy creature, shut in on himself, trapped in a world so impoverished of stimulus and capability it was a wonder people didn’t simply die of boredom and frustration. “He knows so little,” she said. “He will die knowing so little. He suffers so much. And yet he will shape history.”

Reath touched her shoulder. “This is just as Witnessing is meant to be. As you come to understand the life of another embedded in the past, you come to understand yourself better.

“But you must try to keep a sense of perspective, Alia. Mankind did pass through this terrible Bottleneck. And the future of this limited little species was remarkable indeed . . .”

After its long Earthbound prologue, mankind erupted off the planet, “like a flock of birds lifting from a tree,” said Reath.

There followed a wave of exploration, colonization, and conquest, in which Michael Poole’s descendants played a significant part. But after the startling discovery of a Galaxy full of alien cultures, many of them ancient and malevolent, it was a wave of expansion that was pushed back several times. Once that reverse reached all the way back to Earth itself.

With the alien occupation of Earth overthrown, mankind re-emerged strong, united, focused—pathologically so, perhaps, Reath said. The government of the time, the most powerful central authority ever to emerge in human history, was known as the Coalition. A new expansion, a froth of war, conquest, and assimilation, swept across the face of the Galaxy. It took twenty-five thousand years, but at last the center of the Galaxy itself lay in human hands, and legends of the victorious warriors, the “Exultant generation,” resonated down the ages that followed.

Alia said, “ ‘Pathological’? That’s a strange word to choose.”

“But it was a pathology, of a sort,” Reath said. “Think about it. The Coalition controlled mankind for
twenty-five thousand years
! That’s a period that was comparable to the age of the species itself, at the time. For all that time the Coalition controlled culture, politics—even the genetic destiny of mankind. The soldiers who finally broke into the Galaxy’s Core were as human as Michael Poole, save for some superficialities. It was unnatural, Alia! That’s why I say it was pathological. A kind of madness gripped mankind, as we became defined solely by the war.”

“But it was a successful madness.”

“Oh, yes!”

When the war was won, the center could no longer control a Galactic mankind. Reath said darkly, “It was as if a truce had been called among humans, for the purposes of the war against the aliens. But with the Galaxy won history resumed—history of the usual bloody sort.”

The great expansion that had climaxed in the Exultant victory had cleaned out or marginalized most nonhuman life-forms, leaving the Galaxy an empty stage for a new human drama. New ideologies emerged, and successor states sprouted like weeds in the rubble of empire, each of them claiming legitimacy from the collapsed Coalition. The long age of conquest had bequeathed a Galaxy well stocked with the machinery of conflict, and the wars that followed, motivated by economics and ideology, glory and ambition, consumed millennia and countless lives.

“It was not a noble age,” Reath said, “though it threw up plenty of heroes. And it was played out in the shadow of the monumental achievements of the Exultant generation. Many were afflicted with a sense of shame at what they had become. But there was always somebody else to blame for the squabbling, of course.

“And time exerted its power. We are fleeting creatures, we humans!”

The river of time flowed on, bloodied by war, thousand-year empires bubbling like spindrift. The Coalition and its works were forgotten. And humans, flung upon a million alien shores, morphed and adapted. This was the Bifurcation of Mankind.

There were still wars, of course. But now different human species confronted each other. Some were so different that they no longer competed for the same resources—“they no longer shared the same ecological niche,” as Reath put it. But a more fundamental xenophobia fueled genocidal wars.

“So much suffering,” Alia said. “How terrible it all was.”

Reath said, “I wonder what Michael Poole would have thought of it all, if he could have looked forward. Was all his struggle worth it, merely to enable so much suffering to follow?”

“Michael Poole gave those who followed the opportunity to live their lives,” she said. “He can’t take responsibility for what they did with that opportunity.”

Reath nodded. “When your children leave home, you can’t live their lives for them. But you always worry.”

Alia wondered briefly if Reath had any children of his own. He said very little about his past—indeed she knew far more about Michael Poole, dead half a million years, than she did about the man who had come to share her life.

The age of Bifurcation ended abruptly.

Ninety thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, genetic randomness threw up a new conqueror. Charismatic, monstrous, carelessly spending human life on a vast scale, the self-styled Unifier saw only opportunity in the fragmentation of mankind. By using one human type as a weapon against another—and, somehow, by inspiring loyalty in soldiers as unlike each other as it was possible to be and yet still be called human—he built an empire. In the end he was defeated by the sheer scale of the Galaxy. One of his many enemies took his life, and his empire disintegrated, evanescent.

And yet the Unifier’s project had a long-lasting impact. If only briefly he had spread a common culture across a significant fraction of the Galaxy’s geography. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that they all once shared the same warm pond.

Reath said, “Retrospectively historians call the Unifier’s brief empire the Second Integrality of Mankind—the First being the Coalition. The Unifier planted the seeds of a post-Bifurcation unity. But it took a long time before those seeds took root.”

It was ten thousand years, in fact, before mankind began to act once more with a semblance of unity. And once again that unity required a common cause.

Mankind still controlled the Galaxy. But that Galaxy was a mere puddle of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons. This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.

“An unimaginable length of time,” Reath said, shaking his head. “Why, those who concluded the war weren’t even the same species as those who started it! And yet they fought on.”

The war didn’t so much end as fizzle out. Like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena and, exhausted, fell back to its home Galaxy—though relics were left stranded to fend for themselves, far from home. The long unity of the Third Integrality was lost.

“But we didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite,” Reath said. “For now a new force began to emerge in human politics: the undying.”

Almost since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of these were engineered to be so, by humans or even by nonhumans, and others were the children of the engineered. Of course none of these were truly “immortal”; it was just that they couldn’t foresee a time when they would die. They emerged and died in their own slow generations, a subset of mankind who counted their lives in tens of millennia or more.

The hostility of mortal mankind to these undying was relentless. It pushed the undying together, uniting them for common protection—even if, often, in mutual loathing. But they were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, they were still human; if the rest of humanity were to be destroyed, it was doubtful indeed if the undying could survive long. So while their view of the world was very different from that of the mortals, the undying ones needed their short-lived cousins.

The undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition. Stability and central control was what they sought above all else. To them the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages of Bifurcation that followed, were a catastrophe.

When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, the undying decided enough was enough. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, they began to act. They set about knitting the scattered scraps of mankind into a new Integrality—the Fourth—which they would call the Commonwealth.

The new Commonwealth crept across the bruised stars. It was a slow process. By Alia’s time, since the founding of the Commonwealth three hundred thousand years had worn away; it was a remarkable thought that the great project of the Fourth Integrality had already taken
most
of human history. But the undying were patient.

And meanwhile they began a program to share their own longevity with as many mortals as possible. Even this was dedicated to the interests of the undying themselves—for, whatever their origins among the multiple subspecies of mankind, the new undying would quickly inherit the values and concerns of those who engineered their emergence.

Reath was enthusiastic. “It’s really a wonderful vision, Alia. The undying are no elite. They are making us like themselves, giving us the gift of their own unimaginably long lives. . . .”

But this cold calculation repelled Alia. It was as if the cold kiss of an undying transformed a mortal into one of
them,
causing her to become infected with their long inhuman perspectives. It was a plague of nondeath, she thought uneasily.

Reath breathed, “And they conceived of another tremendous project. At the heart of the Commonwealth the undying began to build the Transcendence. The undying dream of a new form of human life, a higher form—the betterment of us all achieved through a new unity. A dream, a wonderful dream! . . .”

Alia turned back to the Witnessing tank, set to a random moment in Poole’s sixth decade, a three-dimensional slice cut out of his four-dimensional life. How strange it was that she should be united in this way with Michael Poole—he at the very beginning of mankind’s great adventure, and she, perhaps, at its end. But she was not unique. In principle, the Transcendence ordered, every human child must participate in the Witnessing of the past.

It was a strange fact that for most of mankind the business of the Witnessing, and the wider program of Redemption Reath had hinted at, was the most visible manifestation of the nascent Transcendence’s ambitions. But, Alia thought now, how strange it was that the Transcendents, while reaching for the future, should be so obsessed with the past.