Transcendent (32 page)

“But I think it’s all a lot deeper than a simple matter of stay-at-home fathers and day-care nurseries—don’t you? After all profound instincts are being defied here: the instinct to propagate the tribe, to fill the world with your brood, all the antique Iron Age drives that have enabled us to cover the planet. But now some other, more mysterious motivation is taking hold. Once people came here in great waves, the Romans and the Visigoths, the Moors and the Christians. And now they are leaving again—not
going
anywhere, just disappearing into lost potentialities. And when they’ve gone, there will be nothing but this aching emptiness. But it feels
right.
Don’t you think? It suits the times.”

“I’m surprised you’re happy to live alone like this.”

“At my age, you mean? Oh, I’m safe enough. I’m surrounded by machines, as we all are. Pointlessly intelligent, all of them. Machine sentience is now omniscient and omnipresent, just as we once imagined God to be—ha! I am sure they would not let me come to any harm.”

“What about crime?”

“I have no fear of that. Criminals prefer crowds, too. If I ever really feel I need people, I go to the more popular parts of town—El Arenal by the river, where the Plaza de Toros still stages fights between men and robot bulls, or Santa Cruz, the old Jewish quarter. And that is where the criminals go, too. And the crows and the rats . . .”

“But you prefer to stay here,” I said. “Away from the lights, the people.”

“I go where they need me,” she said. “But, yes, I prefer the silence. Sometimes you can feel it rise up around you, the emptiness, coming out of a thousand abandoned buildings, a million rooms empty of everything but garbage. I feel as if I’m in a tiny lifeboat, adrift in emptiness.”

“And you
like
to feel that way?”

“Where I grew up was rather different,” she said. “Somewhat crowded. Perhaps, late in life, I am enjoying the contrast.”

“Aunt Rosa, I think you spend too much time on your own.”

That won me a laugh. “Perhaps I do. Am I morbid, do you think? But I still have work to do here. You asked me about experiences beyond the natural. . . .”

She told me a story.

She said that the city authorities were working their way through the depopulated districts, trying to make them safe. There was some demolition, but usually, more wistfully, what was called “mothballing,” as buildings were secured and sealed against the day when the people would return. And sometimes, in this patient cleaning-out, they found things that induced the firefighters or police officers or environment managers to call on the services of a priest like Rosa.

“In one case, as they approached a ruined old house, the workers thought they heard children singing, in harmony, like a school choir. But there were no children there. Then they found a cellar. It turned out that it had been used by a man who had taken children over a period of years. You don’t need to know the details. His crimes had never been discovered, not until now.

“The workers would not, could not enter that cellar. It wasn’t because of rot or decay or the danger of disease; their equipment would take care of that. But there was a deeper blight which they hoped I would confront, with my prayers.” She paused. Her small, closed-in face was quite unreadable now. “Have you ever been in the presence of evil, Michael?”

“I don’t think so—”

“You would know. In fiction, evil is portrayed as stylish, clever. The devil is a gentleman! But in fact evil is banal. In that cellar, the dirt, the blood, the bits of hair and clothing, even the scattered toys—it was nauseating, literally revolting, in a way a place of animals could never be.” She turned to me; her body stayed motionless while her head swiveled like an owl’s. “Your ghost. Your Morag. Is she evil, Michael?”

“No,” I said with certainty. “Whatever it is, she’s not that.”

She seemed to relax, subtly. “Good. At least we will not have to face
that.
Then we must seek out another explanation, a different interpretation. Perhaps you are a necromancer, Michael, in this capital city of necromancy; perhaps you are a man who speaks to ghosts to discern the future—what do you think?”

I thought I needed some more of that seawater wine.

Rosa had promised me that the next day she would take me to see the sights of Seville. We would climb
La Giralda,
a Moorish tower stranded in the middle of a Gothic Christian cathedral, and view the city. Or, better still, perhaps we would ride up the Sundial, the symbol of Spain’s number one export industry, electrical power. I thought it was interesting that Rosa’s ideas for a day out were all about going to high places. She sought out isolation and height, a contrast, it seemed, to her strange early life, which, as far as I could make out, had been in conditions of crowding, and deep underground.

I looked forward to seeing the Sundial, though. It was a solar-power tower a kilometer tall, rising from gleaming hectares of solar-cell farms, a modern wonder. Air heated at its base rose up through the tower and drove turbines. It was a simple design, if horribly inefficient—but who cared about efficiency when the sunlight was to be had for free?

But in the end we didn’t go anywhere, for the next day was a “dust day.”

I was woken by a rumble of traffic that wouldn’t have seemed unusual save that it was
here.
It wasn’t long after dawn. Looking out through the closed balcony windows I saw robot water lorries rolling down the street, spraying water over the street surface. They were broadcasting warnings in precise, clipped Spanish. In the middle distance the whole skyline was obscured by an orange-red haze, and the rising sun was a pale disc that threw only faint shadows on the empty road surface. We would likely be stuck indoors for the day, Rosa said.

We had breakfast, watching the storm. I sat beside the closed window, with cups of coffee made of desalinated ocean water, and watched the dust roll in. It was coming on a wind from the north, from out of the peninsula’s desiccated interior, blowing the last of the country’s topsoil into the sea. When it hit us we were sunk in darkness.

The day after that, the dust still lingered. Holed up in Rosa’s apartment, we heard the buzzing of planes. They were seeding clouds over the reservoirs, Rosa said, spraying liquid nitrogen and silver iodide, trying to magic up some rain. Rosa was cynical. She said the planes were just a stunt, designed to reassure the populace that the government was doing something. There was a regional election coming, she said; that was why they were seeding the clouds.

At times it got so dark it was like being under the sea. I looked up at waves gathering and breaking on top of the layer of dust that overwhelmed the city, vast waves towering between earth and sky.

Chapter 27

There was no true night on this world of Transcendents.

Enclosed within the opaqued walls of her cabin, with her sister sleeping soundly nearby, Alia was restless. In the silent dark, with no distractions, it was even harder to shut out that unending roar outside the shuttle, and outside her own head.

But as she drifted between sleeping and waking, she found at last what she had been brought here to discover.

It was like a dream. She was aware of herself, lying comfortably on her pallet. She even knew that her sister lay still in the corner of the room, her body a warm mass, her mind folded over on itself.

But the nugget of consciousness that always lodged behind Alia’s eyes seemed to have dislodged, to float freely through the rooms of her mind. And the walls of those rooms were porous—flimsy, translucent—so that a brighter light shone through them, and she heard voices, many of them. It wasn’t the formless clamor that had upset her before, but like distant singing, a massed choir perhaps, the merged voices sweet but scattered by the winds. The glow out there was warm and welcoming, the voices gentle and harmonious.

With an effort of will she pushed her way out through the walls of her head.

Her mind threw up analogies for what she experienced.

She was floating over a landscape. It was dark, but over that velvet ground lay patterns of light, like a system of roads, a glowing threadwork in multiple colors that connected a multitude of brilliant points.

She wanted to see more. She rose up effortlessly.

The floor below was like a starry sky, but inverted, with a vast constellation map written over it. Here and there the links gathered more closely around tightly connected clusters of nodes, which glowed like cities. She saw that the map was not infinite. It closed on itself—not like a sphere, that would be much too literal for this dreamy vision, but with every point connected to every other. The map was dynamic, the links sparking, twisting, reconnecting, and changing constantly. The constant flux was part of the pattern, too; this was a map in time as well as space.

And though the topology of the network changed constantly, none of those shining points was ever left isolated. Each was always joined by two, three, four links to its neighbors, and through them to the totality.

This was the Transcendence,
the shining nodes human minds, the links that joined them channels of shared thought and memory. This visual map was a crude analogy, and incomplete, for the merged mind was greater than a simple aggregate of individuals. And yet it helped her to begin to see. Reath had been right: location in space or even time was irrelevant to the Transcendence.
This
abstract realm was where the Transcendence existed, this no-place, and it was governed not by time or distance but merely by an effort of will.

She saw nothing threatening in this warm interconnectedness. Suddenly she longed to be one of those nodes, to be joined forever in the tremendous friendliness of that topology. She sank down, out of the invisible sky. She passed into the netting, through layers of it, until she was surrounded by glowing mind-nodes. Tendrils of interconnection reached out, probing at her from all sides.

She felt unexpected fear, and for a moment she was back in her body, which turned and twisted on her pallet.

But then the metaphor changed.

There were no more stars and laser-beam threads. Faces turned to her. They were all smiling. And they all looked like Drea, her sister, she thought—or even like Alia herself. As those familiar eyes shone, hands clasped hers, or rubbed her back, her neck, her arms. They moved in closer, until she was surrounded by a comfortable warmth. It was briefly suffocating, and she thrashed again, but the pressure eased. And that slow, reassuring approach began again.

Different metaphors now: hallways opened up all around her, as if doors were flung open to reveal them receding into the distance. Every way she chose to go was open, and every way looked inviting.

She picked a direction. She went that way—not walking, not even Skimming, simply traveling.

Now she was in a kind of library, a place where shelving and stacks receded in every direction as far as she could see, side to side, up and down. People worked here patiently, consulting records, moving them from one corner of this vast archive to another. The librarians’ forms were undefined, their attention devoted to their work. She couldn’t see how they moved about, as there was no floor to walk on—but that was irrelevant; it was only a dream. And though the archive stretched off to infinity in every direction, she could somehow see other archives beyond its remote walls, other centers of knowledge, remembrance, wisdom.

This was another obvious metaphor, constructed by her mind as it struggled to interpret the flood of new information it was receiving. This was memory, the pooled memory of the Transcendence. And all of it would be accessible to her, as accessible as her own memories always had been, whenever she willed it.

Now there was a change in the way the patient librarians were working, she saw. Some were making a space in one block of shelves, and others were bringing in a new stack of material, its details too remote to make out. She knew what they were doing. That was her own pitiful heap of memories, her whole life of a mere few decades dwarfed by the great banks of knowledge here. And yet she would be given a place here; she would be cherished. Others would be able to access her memories as easily as she could, just as she could reach the memories of others—and even the greater collective experiences of the Transcendence itself, which she perceived now as shadowy mountains of information looming beyond the bounds of the archive.

And, constantly remembered, the memories that defined her need not die with her—and so
she
need not die, not ever. She had no need of Reath’s “immortality pill”; in this chill, remembered sense, she was already an undying.

She rose again, lifting up through some impossible dimension, so that the whole of the Transcendence opened up around her. Now in her metaphoric perception it was as if she was in a starship, in a hold so vast she could barely make out its walls. Huge, dimly seen masses drifted through the receding gloom. But even this space was not the full extent of the ship, for corridors and walkways led away, receding in every direction, all around her, leading to hollow, silent spaces she could never reach, not if she explored for many lifetimes. This was the mind of the Transcendence. But all she saw was merely a fraction of the vastly complex infrastructure of this place, this mind.

Even now she was still outside the Transcendence, in a sense. She was still herself, still small and closed-over and complete. But there was a place for her here in this immense cathedral of mind. All she had to do was take one last step.

She had a final moment of doubt. It was as if she looked back at herself, her body lying peacefully now on its pallet.

And then she let the embrace of the Transcendence enfold her at last.

The Transcendence was a body. She could
feel
its limbs, the bodies of its human host already counted in the billions and scattered over thousands of worlds. And yet in another way she was barely more aware of the individual bodies that made up this great host than she was of the cells of her own tiny form.