Transcendent (14 page)

She tried to express this to Reath.

“Redemption is the will of the Transcendence,” he said peremptorily. “And so to understand the Transcendence you must understand the Redemption.”

“But what difference does it make? Michael Poole never knew I’ve been watching him all my life.”

“It certainly makes a difference to us, doesn’t it? The only alternative to knowing is
not
to know, to ignore all the suffering of the bloodstained generations that preceded us. Wouldn’t that diminish us?”

“I don’t know,” Alia said honestly.

“We have time to explore this later.” He stood up. “This has been a rich conversation. You’ve given me much to think about, Alia.”

“I have? But you’re the teacher.”

He smiled. “I keep telling you. The wisdom you need is within yourself, not in me. And I think you’re learning how to find that wisdom very well . . . Do you feel you are ready for the Second Implication?”

She took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

“Tomorrow, then, we will make a new landfall.”

After he left, idly she let the tank projection run forward.

There was Poole, clambering over that strange reef of broken machinery. Hot, dirty, he seemed troubled, agitated; he seemed to be trying to reach something, or someone.

And then he turned and looked up, out of the tank, directly into Alia’s eyes.

She gasped. She clapped her hands, and the Witnessing tank cleared. The image of Poole disappeared, that stern accusing stare evaporating in a blur of cubical pixels.

That was
not
supposed to happen.

Chapter 11

I ordered a pod bus to take me back to the airport.

The pod, not much more than a dozen seats in a gleaming glass bubble and a hydrogen-fuel engine hidden in the floor, rolled silently up to my mother’s front door. There was one other passenger, apparently airport-bound like me. I clambered aboard with my suitcase. Embarrassingly my mother kissed me good-bye on the step. The pod sealed itself up and hissed away.

We worked our way out into the road system, the bus’s own local sentience tying into a system-wide intelligence mediated by a sky full of satellites and an invisible lacing of microwave signals. The traffic gradually built up, until we had in view, oh, at least twenty vehicles whirring away along the silvertop: pod buses like mine, cabs, delivery trucks, transport for disabled people, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks. My bus, as it swam into this stream, attached itself to more of its kind, nose to tail, until we were in a train of eight or ten pods, rolling easily along the road. I could see the heads of my fellow passengers in the bright blisters of the other pods. Every so often other pods would join us, or the train would crack open, releasing a pod to peel off down a slip road to perform some local pickup or dropoff.

We moved pretty fast on the open road, maybe a hundred kilometers an hour, and in the few busy stretches we could be tailgating the vehicle in front, just centimeters away. It was traffic moving at speeds and with such closeness that would once have scared me to death. But of course nobody was driving, no human being. We passengers in our glass bubbles were precious treasures cradled by metal and ceramic and electronic intelligence, washed along the road system in safety and silence—and with no more pollution than a puff of water vapor here and there, the residue of hydrogen burning in oxygen.

We kept to the silvertop stripe. Painted down the centerline of the old tarmac it was modern smart-concrete, embedded with miniature processors: self-diagnosing and self-repairing, it should need no maintenance for decades. But away from the silvertop whole lanes had been abandoned, and the old tarmac surface was crumbling, the defiant green of weeds pushing through the black, the first stage of nature’s recovery. There was a nostalgic tug when you looked out over those disintegrating acres of black stuff. I imagined the great unending streams of traffic, millions of tons of metal and glass and gasoline, that had once poured along these highways. And off the road you could see more haunting sights: abandoned gas stations and motels and shopping malls, all part of the vast infrastructure that had once sustained that river of traffic, and in turn fed off it.

How strange it is that all the cars have gone!

Of course it was economics, not environmental sensitivity, that killed the automobile.

There was a tipping point in the 2020s. For decades the national economy, and our political freedom to move, had been utterly constrained by our dependence on oil. And now the oil was running out: the engineers had to start fires in the wells to force out the last of the oil, or send down microbes to detach it from pores in the reservoir rocks. At home we were suffering from price spikes, blackouts, sabotage, and we were getting drawn into increasingly messy conflicts over the last dwindling supplies, in the Middle East, Central Asia. And then there was the Warming, whose distressing effects, and link to the carbon economy, were increasingly apparent. In retrospect it was a ridiculous time, a time of hysteria and desperation—and of growing awareness. The coup in Saudi Arabia was the last straw. The non-OPEC oil had long since dried up, and the taps being closed on the world’s largest remaining fields, even briefly, was an economic blow that caused layoffs and stagflation.

Enough is enough, said President Amin, the second woman head of state. By the time she took the White House in 2024, freeing America from its dependence on oil was at last politically possible. Amin, the right woman at the right time, articulated a profound but deceptively simple dream of an America accepting a new destiny—an America that cared about its responsibility for the future of mankind “as far as we, on our shining hill, can see.” One day this vision would lead to the Stewardship.

But first we needed new strategies for energy and transport.

Amin put together the first version of our modern power infrastructure strategy, with distributed generation and a reliance on hydrogen and nuclear power—and the nukes would soon be replaced by Higgs plants. Of course there was resistance. The political highlight of Amin’s first term was a stupendous battle between the legislators and Exxon-Mobil-Shell-BP, the last of the great carbon conglomerates. And as OPEC saw its power base disappearing we faced external threats, too.

And, even more traumatically, we had to be weaned off the automobile.

It turned out to be simple, politically. In the longer term we were to switch to a new transport paradigm based on hydrogen, biofuels, and electric cells. But for now, as we gave up the oil, Amin enforced drastically improved fuel efficiency, and imposed new environmental and future taxes, reflecting the true price of an auto from its manufacture through its injection of carbon into the air. This “Full Social Cost Pricing” as the economists called it, just priced private cars out of reach.

The transition happened overnight, like a change of fashion. It was amazing how, when the cost of gas got high enough, you suddenly discovered you really didn’t need to drive so much after all. Instead you caught the bus and the train, of which there were suddenly plenty, or you walked. You shopped where you lived: there was a revival of “village ethic,” as local clinics and schools and shops started to flourish, providing everything you needed within walking distance. And there was a boom in comms facilities. As our physical transport capacity declined we all engaged in a “virtual economy”: telecommuting suddenly matured.

It felt easy. We were all surprised by how little we actually
needed
to drive. But of course the dislocation was staggering.

The impact on Detroit alone was bad enough, as the old factories either closed or painfully retooled for the manufacture of a much reduced volume of smart new hydrogen-economy vehicles like pod buses. A whole slew of supplier industries had to pivot or fold. The oil infrastructure had to be renovated or replaced to handle the new hydrogen and biofuel paradigm. Meanwhile there was a massive relocation of businesses out of the city centers, and of people back in. Some more modern communities, such as whole stretches of Greater Los Angeles, were suddenly rendered impractical, uninhabitable without the car; property values went crazy. Agriculture was an industry as dependent on its distribution networks as any other, and food supplies boomed and crashed as we all tried to adjust.

Of course it was a huge risk. The nation as a whole had grown rich and powerful in a world economy built on hydrocarbon fuels; shifting that fundamental basis posed dangers politically and economically. But we had made it through vast economic transitions before, such as when oil had overtaken coal around 1900. After just a few years things began to get better, and the change became so embedded it seemed odd we hadn’t taken the leap much earlier. In the end it was just a matter of will, which Amin managed to assemble.

I was pursuing my nuclear-engineering career through this whole period, and I had to work my way through it. Despite the boom in VR technology I found myself spending a lot more time than I would have wanted to away from home. Maybe that contributed to the crisis my family faced later. Anyhow, we all got through it. I guess it was a necessary adjustment, whatever the cost.

But Amin’s policies, focusing on domestic issues, had a downside. America had turned inward on itself during a particularly nasty decade. It was the Warming, of course. Access to water was the focus of many battlegrounds, from the Nile to the Amazon and even the Danube, but energy wars were also increasingly a hazard. The changing climate wiped out whole nations—even the Netherlands was depopulated. America wasn’t immune; there were droughts in the corn belt, one-off calamities like the New Orleans hurricane. All over the planet there was famine, disease, and desertification, and drifting flocks of refugees. When the oil economy collapsed the petrostates began to implode with startling rapidity, causing a whole new set of problems.

And in all this America, the only nation with the real power to help, obsessing over losing the automobile, did nothing. Our inwardness ended only with the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing of 2033, a real wake-up call. After that came the launch of the Stewardship under Edith Barnette, once Amin’s veep: America’s “Marshall Plan for a bruised world.” It began by us baling out the petrostates as a few years earlier we had baled out Detroit.

By then President Amin had paid her own price, in her assassination a week after she left office. But she had changed the world.

I used to try to explain all this to Tom. He was ten years old when Amin was assassinated; he remembers that trauma even if the greater geopolitical transformations passed him by at the time.

I thought he would want to know about the lost freedoms of the automobile age, a time when you could go where you wanted as fast as you wanted. It had been part of our birthright, we thought. I still remember how proud I was of my first car, a beat-up 2010 Ford, which I used to polish until it shone in the Florida sun. I missed driving—not just the freedom of it, but driving itself, a social interaction of a unique kind you got as you wrestled your way through heavy traffic on a Friday rush hour. Vanished skills, abandoned pleasures.

But Tom would stare at images of the vast streams of traffic that had flowed along the abandoned roads only a few years before, and at the poison that spread out from those crawling rivers of red lights and shining metal, blackening the land and turning the air over the cities the color of a Martian sky. And he would flick on links to accident statistics:
how
many died every year? No dream of freedom could possibly have seemed worth the price to Tom, who had never owned his own car, and never would.

I only saw one private car during that ride to the airport. I recognized the model. It was one of the new Jeeps, with six tires as tall as I am and a slick waterproof underside, and a little chimney stack from which it would vent its harmless hydrogen-fuel exhaust, water laced with a few exotic hydrocarbon by-products. Its cabin was perched on top of its body, a bright glass bubble. Some of these models had seats that turned into bunks, and little kitchens and toilets, and windows you could opaque to a silvery blankness. You could
live
in there. I felt an unwelcome stab of envy.

Its driver must have been seventy at least. Perhaps when the final generation of driver-nostalgics died off, I thought, so would the very last of the private cars. In the meantime, that guy was no doubt paying plenty for his fix.

But I still miss that old Ford of mine.

At the airport the check-in process was thorough, with cheek-swab DNA verification tests, neurological scans, and full-body imaging to make sure I wasn’t carrying a pathogen in my bloodstream or a knife in a hollowed-out rib.

I finally got on the plane. The cabin was wide-bodied and fitted out with big fake-leather couches, around which people fussed and planted their in-flight stuff. There were no windows, but every wall surface was smart, although for now tuned to a drab wallpaper. It was like a lounge in some slightly cramped hotel; only the cabin’s inevitable tubular architecture gave away the fact that we were on board a plane. My couch was smart, too. As I sat down I felt pads move silently into place, fitting my body shape and supporting my back and neck and lumbar region. All very civilized, though that cheap-hotel feeling deepened. I settled in and spread my softscreen over my lap.

The plane filled up quickly. The couches were not set in rows but in subtly randomized patterns, so you had at least the illusion of privacy. But still my neighbor, as he settled in, felt like he crowded into my space.

He was maybe forty, a round-faced man sweating so heavily his thinning hair was plastered to his scalp. His belly strained at his shirt. At one time you wouldn’t have glanced at him twice, but in these days when everybody walked everywhere he was bigger than most. He had a lot of stuff, a pack he crammed under his seat, another he shoved into the locker in front of him, and he spread out a softscreen and a pile of papers on his lap.

He caught me watching him. He stuck out his hand. “Sorry to disturb you. The name’s Jack Joy. Call me Jack.”

I shook his hand, powerful but hot and moist, and introduced myself.

He snapped his fingers to summon the steward—a human, a retro symbol of a vanished age. Jack requested a bourbon, and asked if I wanted the same; a bit uncertainly, but feeling crowded by this guy, I agreed.

Slightly breathless, he gestured at the heap of material on his lap. “Look at this crap. Every trip’s the same.” He winked. “But it costs so much to travel nowadays you have to make it worthwhile, even if somebody else is paying, right?” His accent was strong New York.

“I guess so.”

“You fly a lot?”

“I flew out here, to Florida. Otherwise, not for years.”

“It isn’t the unalloyed delight it once was. Watch this.” Without warning he slammed his fist against the fake leather armrest of his seat, making me jump. Immediately a metal band slid out of nowhere and snapped over his arm, and a blue light flashed over his head.

A stewardess came running, fingering the weapon in her holster.

Jack apologized, waving his other hand in the air, sloshing his drink. “Sorry, sorry. A nervous twitch! It always happens to me. What can I say?”

He had to submit to a scan from a handheld sensor. But eventually the stewardess spoke into a lapel mike, and with some reluctance, I thought, caused the restraint to release him and slide back into the body of his seat.

Jack turned to me. “You see that? By the time you get on the plane you’ve been through all the checks and the psycho profiling and all the rest, and you’re in your damn seat, and you think they’ll trust you at last. But no, no. One false move and wham, you’re pinned like a lab rat. I mean, what could you do? Scratch somebody’s eyes out? Lethe, even this shot glass is unbreakable. If I throw it against the wall—” He raised his arm.