Transcendent (39 page)

She said coldly, “The Campocs’ methods were primitive. Brutal. But the questions they raised are valid. Reath, I want to resolve all my doubts before the Transcendence swallows me up. Is that so hard to understand?”

Reath frowned. “Your language of ‘swallowing up’ is inappropriate. The Transcendence is an augmentation, not a diminishing.”

But I’d rather be alone and sane, Alia thought darkly, than conjoined into a vast insanity. I have to be sure. But she couldn’t possibly say that to Reath, of course.

“We go on,” she said firmly.

“Yes, but where to?” Drea asked uneasily.

The Listeners seemed to be getting used to the visitors’ presence. They scuttled back and forth across the floor of their chamber, their huge eyes capturing the flickering of their light beams.

Drea stared at them in disgust. “This is a terrible place.”

Suddenly Alia felt confined, trapped, buried under this great mound of tunneled-through dirt. She turned to Reath. “Let’s get out of here—”

Berra gasped. She staggered and reached out to Alia, who recoiled.

Reath took Alia’s arm. “Try to be calm,” he murmured. “Don’t alarm Berra further. We need her guidance to get out of here before—”

“Before what?”

“Before she fulfills her final duty to the hive.”

“What final duty? What’s wrong with her?”

“Why, don’t you see? She needs to keep us here, as long as she can. She needs
you,
Alia.”

Berra had been born with the potential for intelligence. But she had probably never been fully conscious, self-aware—not before Alia arrived.

“Because,” Alia said slowly, “it’s best if a drone doesn’t know she’s a drone.”

“Yes. Which is why in most hives, drones shed their higher cognition. But there are circumstances when intelligence is too useful to lose altogether—when the Coalescence is attacked, for example, or has to be moved.”

“Or when a Transcendent-Elect comes asking questions,” Alia said.

“Yes. Alia, Berra lucked out. She was just the interfacer who happened to be closest when we came calling. She may not even have known our language before she was needed. She probably didn’t even have a
name
before, because it was better that she didn’t. It was as if she woke up, for the first time in her life, the moment you walked through the door.”

“But now we’re leaving,” Alia said. “She can go back to the way she was. Can’t she?”

Reath shook his head. “Alia, Berra has served the hive well. But now she knows too much: she knows who she is,
that she is a drone.
And she has nowhere else to go. Alia, she will be dead before we leave the planet.”

Alia stared in horror at Berra. The little drone seemed to be folding over on herself, as if imploding, still staring at Alia.

Alia couldn’t stand it. She Skimmed away, right out of there, out of the heart of the hive. She found herself standing on the rusty plain once more. She ripped off her face mask and sucked in the dusty air.

Chapter 32

While we worked with Ruud Makaay on fleshing out EI’s involvement in our gas-hydrates project, Shelley and I stayed in Palm Springs.

We were guests of EI in a grand, somewhat faded hotel. Its outer shell had been Painted so that it glittered silver in the dry sunlight like a vast, complicated Christmas-tree bauble. Inside there was a gigantic pool, and an even bigger bar, where a robot pianist gently played Chopin. But no guests.

Shelley had a lot of work to do, as always. She worked eight or nine hours in every day, some of it with Makaay and the EI staff. But she also kept in contact with clients, suppliers, and contacts all around the world, and those nine work-hours were scattered randomly through each twenty-four. She worked in the hotel’s small computer-aided-design booth, in her swimsuit or a fluffy hotel bathrobe, surrounded by VR visitors, or ghostly circuitry plans, or mock-ups of intricate mechanical assemblies. She had an admirable capacity to function well at three in the morning, and catch up with a catnap at four in the afternoon.

So I spent some time alone. It was close to midsummer and off season, but even so Palm Springs had an echoing, empty feel. The twentieth-century wealth and ease of transportation that had built the place had drained away, leaving a glittering bubble in the desert air. It wasn’t so bad for me. I felt as if I’d been through a lot, and Palm Springs, big and depopulated, was a good place to let the tension drain away. If only I played golf the place would have been perfect, I thought.

Shelley and I did spend our spare time together. We ate, swam, walked, talked. I was always extremely fond of Shelley. Competent, engaged, humorous, at ease in her life and her work, she was the kind of human being that I’d always aspired to be. And I think she was fond of me, too, even though compared to her I was a no-hoper—never reliable, always inclined to flakiness. But I was “never short of ideas,” she would sometimes say. You needed somebody around to come up with the impulse to
do
things, and I was a source of that—as witness our hydrate stabilization project itself.

For sure a life with Shelley, who was sane, engaged, and
alive,
would have been good for me—if not always for her. But it was never going to happen, because, as she had said herself, Morag was always there, for better or worse as attached to me as my right arm, and there was no point behaving as if it wasn’t so. I sometimes regretted that fact. I think Shelley did a little, too. But our relationship had its place in my notional spectrum of possibilities. So it goes.

I talked to Rosa in Seville a few times. She was “digging up old ghost stories,” she told me a bit mysteriously. Sometimes she spooked me herself: behind her small face, so accurately reproduced by the hotel’s VR systems, I felt I glimpsed the shadowy conclaves of the Vatican, great mounds of knowledge that had accumulated for two millennia—and, perhaps, even stranger archives still.

After seven days Ruud Makaay called us back to his Mojave headquarters, where, he said, he would be organizing a seminar on our proposals.

We gathered in a conference room in the EI compound. The room itself was a clear-walled cube. There was a long table with a dozen chairs, evidently a mix of real and VR seamlessly joined. That was all there was; the room felt unfinished, a sketch. But in a virtual economy you flaunted your wealth by showing less.

Makaay, Shelley, and I were the only flesh-and-blood attendees. Tom and Sonia Dameyer projected in from England. I took a seat beside Tom, real and unreal side by side at the same table. I was inordinately glad to see him; I still hadn’t got over that Siberia experience, if I ever would. Tom looked uncomfortable to be here, though.

Vander Guthrie from the Global Ecosystems Analyzer facility in Oklahoma materialized out of the air. He looked as awkward as ever, his hair’s sky-blue tint ridiculous, and he grinned nervously at me. And he carried a little toy robot that he set on the tabletop. The robot rolled experimentally back and forth, friction sparks emanating from its plastic belly. In a tinny space voice it proclaimed, “A little slippery, but I think I can cope.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Tom groused. “Dad, what is this, a freak show?”

“Gea is supporting us. It’s significant, Tom.”

“It’s ridiculous, is what it is. What am I doing here?”

I longed to touch his hand. “If not for you none of us would be here. Just take it easy and follow your heart.”

Tom snorted, but sat still.

On his other side, Sonia caught my eye and smiled faintly.
He’ll be OK.
I was grateful for the wordless message, and glad she was there, sane and calm. Sanity and calmness do seem to be in short supply in my bloodline.

Ruud Makaay, sleek and competent as ever, pinged the water glass in front of him with his fingernail. “May I call us to order? Thank you all for being here, one way or another. . . .”

Our purpose, he said, was to review the work done so far on fleshing out the hydrate-stabilizer scheme, and to decide on next steps.

Tom was immediately suspicious, even hostile. “Next steps? Such as you taking the whole thing over so you can get rich drilling fucking great holes in the North Pole?”

I said quickly, “Tom, take it easy. The EI people are helping us out here.”

“Oh,
sure.
”

If Makaay was perturbed by this unpromising opening he didn’t show it. “We’re here to review the work we’ve done on a problem we all accept as serious. So for now let’s build on what we have in common, rather than focus on our differences. Can we agree on that much?”

The Gea robot rolled back and forth. I wondered what she made of all this interpersonal, typically human bullshit. And yet, I supposed, she depended absolutely on people, with all our imperfections, to get things done; she had to put up with us.

Shelley took the cue. “Shall I start?” She stood, walked to the head of the table, and with waves of her hands began to conjure up VR images of complicated bits of engineering, gleaming and flawless. The core of it was a device shaped something like a bullet, with a complicated tracery of flanges and ducts engraved on its nose. At its heart I saw a spark, a soul in the machinery.

Shelley produced a variety of representations of this thing, some transparent, cutaway, or exploded. “We call this a mole,” she said. “It’s the cornerstone of our design. But each mole will be small, no larger than a clenched fist. . . .”

To stabilize the hydrate strata it would be necessary to thread it with coolant pipes, just as in our original back-of-the-envelope sketch. The teams Shelley had gathered to flesh out the idea were adhering to that basic design. And they were still assuming that liquid nitrogen, drawn down as a gas from the air and then cooled and liquefied, would be the working fluid. You’d pass the nitrogen through the underground pipes where it would evaporate back to a gas, in the process drawing in heat from the hydrate layers, and then it would be passed out of the pipes for recondensing. That way you would effectively pump heat out of the ground.

But to stabilize a band of hydrates that passed right around the pole of the planet we would need hundreds of thousands of kilometers of pipe. It just wasn’t practical to fabricate and implant so much.

“Which is where the mole comes in,” Shelley said. “It will be like a self-propelled drill bit.” The flanged nose on the most solid representation whirred, its function obvious. “And it will lay tunnels, not pipes. It will simply burrow its way through the ground, just like a mole. But the tunnel it digs out won’t be allowed to collapse.” She indicated a range of little devices attached to the side of the mole. “We will shore up the tunnel as we go, using local materials. The precise technique will depend on what we find down there, which is going to vary according to the local geology. . . . The walls of the tunnel will themselves be smart, of course, and capable of some limited self-repair, though in case of major breaches such as through seismic movement we can always send down more moles.

“We will send in hundreds of moles, thousands maybe. Each mole will make most of its own decisions down there, learning as it goes. But we can communicate with it through the pipe it leaves behind. We’re also experimenting with sonar and electromagnetic pulses, so the moles can communicate with each other even without a direct connection.”

Sonia said, “So they will hear each other digging away in the rock. A whole community, tunneling, tunneling.”

“That’s the idea,” Shelley said. The overall design was straightforward. The moles wouldn’t be going terribly deep, and wouldn’t face challenging temperatures or pressures; the materials technology we needed was well within the envelope of experience of the mining industry. “And the smartness, of course, is trivial.”

Makaay asked, “And what about power?”

Shelley nodded at me. “That’s where Michael’s expertise comes in.” She tapped that glowing spark at the heart of her conceptual mole. “This is a Higgs-energy reactor, the most concentrated energy source we have. The mole’s heart will be a cube the size of a sugar lump, which will deliver it enough energy to tunnel through ten thousand kilometers—that’s our design goal, we may achieve more.”

Tom turned to me. “You can build such things, the sugar lumps?”

I said, “We can take them off the shelf, almost. We’ve been working toward such devices for a long time, Tom. For a while we’ve been good at making very small, very smart gadgets. So if you can make a power source equally compact you have a powerful technology. . . .”

Now that power supplies were catching up with miniaturization, the agencies and companies I consulted for were developing, among other things, miniature robotic engineers designed to go places humans couldn’t, such as to check out undersea pipes and cables, or the interiors of antiquated nuclear reactors. The space community was designing a new generation of unmanned exploratory robots, swarms of them the size of oranges or smaller, which could be scattered on the surface of Mars, or in the clouds of Venus or Jupiter, or sent swimming in the ice-cloaked seas of Europa. These tiny probes would work for years, individually and cooperatively, smart enough even to design their own science programs on the spot. Even on Earth tiny distributed sentiences were even making new kinds of science possible. You could spray smart motes around a forest, let them self-organize, and begin to gather data, in three dimensions and real time, on the detailed behavior of macro-climates and macro-ecologies across a significant volume. All of this would be enabled by Higgs technology, by grains of an energy field that had once caused the universe itself to expand, each providing years of power.

Tom seemed impressed despite himself. Perhaps he did have some engineer’s genes in him after all.

With most components coming off the shelf, Ruud Makaay thought it would be possible to have some kind of field trial up and running within mere weeks. Earth Inc. took on immense projects, but it was a nimble organization, it seemed, capable of reacting quickly.

The discussion descended into technicalities.

Vander, prompted by Gea, pressed Shelley with some tough questions.