Transcendent (42 page)

“Ah,” she said, smiling. “Now that
is
an engineer’s question. What’s the function of all this? Oh, I can think of a whole range of interpretations . . . Try this. Everything about us, from our toenails to our most advanced cognitive functions, is shaped by evolution. You’ve heard me argue this way before. If a feature didn’t give us some selective advantage it wouldn’t have emerged in the first place, or would have withered away long ago. Do you accept that?”

I wasn’t sure I did. “Go on.”

“If that’s true, and if these visitations, and their timing coinciding with great crises, are real phenomena, then one must ask—what’s the evolutionary advantage? How can these visitors
help
us?”

“By providing continuity?”

“Perhaps. A linking of the better past to a hopeful future, through a desperate present . . . Perhaps an intelligent species needs some kind of external memory store, an external mass consciousness, to help it ride out the worst times.”

“That sounds very fishy to me,” I said. “I thought selection wasn’t supposed to work at the level of the species, but the individual, or the kin group.”

“Maybe so. But wouldn’t it be an advantage if it
did
emerge? If there were lots of bands of intelligent animals running around the planet—and a global crisis hit—wouldn’t the pack with the cultural continuity offered by a halo of ghosts, no matter how imperfect the information channels, have a clear advantage?”

She was smiling. I could see she was enjoying the speculation. But right now I felt I was floundering.

“So Morag could be a ghost of some kind. But not a ghost from the past.
A ghost from the future.
Is that what you’re saying? But how is that possible?”

Rosa said, “A Catholic thinker would have no real trouble with that idea. Theologians don’t believe in time travel! But we do imagine eternity, a timeless instant
outside
time altogether, like the constant light that shines through the flickering frames of our movie-reel lives. So a visitor from eternity, an angel, can intervene at any time, historically, she chooses, because it’s all the same—it is all one to her, all in one moment, like a reel of movie film held in your hand. There is no difference between past and future to God.”

“You think big, don’t you?”

With her right hand she pointed up to Heaven. “There’s nowhere bigger than Up There.”

We were disturbed by a chime, the VR equivalent of a knock on the door. I was almost relieved to take a break from all this spookiness.

It turned out to be my brother, John, who had logged on to give me a hard time.

Projected from his office in New York, John’s VR was of an altogether higher quality than Rosa’s. It was the middle of his working day, and he was dressed in a dark business suit. I was struck by how big and solid he looked, just like Ruud Makaay.

John greeted Rosa civilly enough. He even cracked a joke. “If you shared my VR protocols I could give you a kiss.” But their manner with each other was watchful.

I realized that I had no idea what contact there had been between the two of them. After all she was John’s long-lost aunt as well as mine. Was it possible this was the first time they had “met”? But I felt intimidated even to ask.

You could have cut the atmosphere with a knife, VR or otherwise. Two brothers and an aunt, suspicious, wary, facing each other down like rival gangland bosses: what a cold family we were, I reflected, what a damaged bunch.

“What do you want, John?”

He sighed. “It’s a little tricky. I saw you were logged on, and I saw who you’re speaking to. I don’t mean to snoop but I am paying for the calls. Can I speak freely?”

Rosa said sharply, “As long as you get to the point, fine.”

“Michael, people are concerned about you.” He waved a hand. “About all this. You know what I mean.”

“And they spoke to you, right?”

“Don’t be resentful,” he snapped. “I’m trying to help.”

“But I am resentful, you asshole. Who spoke to you?”

“Shelley Magwood, if you must know. And through her, Ruud Makaay.”

Of course I had to expect that John would hook up with a man like Makaay. They were of a type.

John said, “All this is a distraction. You have work to do, Michael. Responsibilities. This hydrate-stabilization proposal you’ve initiated seems to have some genuine merit. I think there’s every chance it will gain some support, and maybe even do some real good, if presented in the right way.”

“But if I disappear up my own backside in pursuit of the spooky stuff, I’ll be harming that process. Right?”

“Of course you will,” he said irritably. “You’re talking about a very expensive engineering project here; it’s a hard enough sell as it is without hints of flakiness from its initiator.”

Rosa watched us both. “You two really do have a deep-seated rivalry, don’t you?”

I said, “You have to remember that when we were kids John was a couple of years older than me. Now we’re in our fifties, and he’s
still
a couple of years older than me.”

Rosa laughed softly.

John glared at us. “Yeah, yeah. Just don’t forget who’s been bankrolling you. And look, Michael, it’s not just the project.” He clearly tried to soften his tone; he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. “You have to think about the effect you have on others. Tom, particularly. Your pursuit of this”—he waved a hand—“this chimera is hurting him. She was your wife, but she was his mother, you know.”

“You’ve got no right to talk about my relationship with my son.”

He held up his massive hands. “OK, OK.”

Rosa had an air of amused suspicion. “What is really going on here, John?”

“I’m concerned for Michael.” He glowered back.

“Oh, perhaps there is truth in that. But I am pretty sure you would be quite happy to see your little brother take a pratfall, as long as no permanent harm was done. So why are you interested in this business of Morag?”

Characteristically he went on the attack. “And what’s your angle, Rosa? What’s your motive in messing with my brother’s head?”

“Will you believe me if I say I actually want to resolve this issue, to help my nephew, that I have no higher motive? Other than simple curiosity, of course; I always did like a good ghost story . . . No, you probably won’t, will you?”

I was obscurely pleased that she wasn’t fazed.

John stared at her. “Do you actually believe in ghosts?”

It was a simple question that, in our increasingly sophisticated pursuit of the mystery of Morag, I’d never quite framed that way, and I was interested in her answer.

She thought for a moment. “Do you know what Immanuel Kant said about ghosts? ‘I do not care wholly to deny all truth to the various ghost stories, but with the curious reservation that I doubt each one of the sightings yet have some belief in them all taken together. . . .’ As a priest you soon learn that there is a whole spectrum of credulity, that the poles of total acceptance and utter denial are merely two poles, two choices among many.” She smiled. “Or to put it another way, I have an open mind.”

John seemed angered by this. He stood up. “You’re full of shit.”

I said, “John, watch your mouth. She’s your aunt, and a priest. She’s a priest who’s full of shit.”

He turned on me. “You really ought to get your head clear of this garbage, Michael. For your own sake, and the rest of us.” He clapped his hands and disappeared, like a fat, business-suited genie.

Rosa stared at the space where he had been. “So many issues, so many conflicts. Even for a Poole your brother is unusual.” She turned to me, her gaze direct, probing. “Michael, I think your brother is hiding something from you—something that’s troubling him about all this more than he’s telling you. You have to resolve this, the two of you, whatever it is. You are stuck with him, you know. Stuck with each other for life. That is the doom of family.”

I stared, surprised. I’d had this feeling about John before; it was disturbing to hear it confirmed. But in this dense, dark tangle of me and Morag, Tom and a ghost, what secret could John possibly hold?

Rosa stood up. Her chair vanished in a haze of pixels. “Perhaps that is enough for now.”

“OK. But our ghost story—what next?”

“I am sure you will agree that we need more data. I suggest you wait for another visitation. Or, if you have the courage, seek one out, as you did in York. But this time, make sure you record everything you can—especially that strange rapid speech.”

“I’ll try,” I said dubiously. “I don’t know how easy it will be.”

She smiled. “You’ll have help. Another of your friends contacted me.”

I frowned. “I really hate the idea of everybody talking behind my back. Who this time?”

“Gea,” Rosa said simply.

Even given the context of the conversation that surprised me. “So a sentient artificial intelligence is investigating the ghost of my dead wife. Could my life get any weirder?”

She leaned forward. The VR illusion of her presence was so good I thought I could smell her musty, exotic scent, a mix of old lady and priest, perhaps through some synesthetic confusion in my muddled head. “But we are all on your side, Michael. You are the hub of a wheel, you see. We are all connected to you. Even if we bicker among ourselves.” She stood straight and tucked her hands into her black sleeves. “We will speak shortly.” And she disappeared.

Chapter 35

Alia had never cared much
where
she was. She grew up on a ship, sailing on an endless journey; she had been born in transit. And through Skimming she had learned that all differences in space could be banished with an act of will.

But now she was coming to the one place in the Galaxy where she couldn’t help but know exactly where she was. As Sol itself loomed out of a sparse Galaxy-rim dusting of stars, she was already seeing a sky Michael Poole himself might have recognized, even though the constellations had shifted and morphed since his day, and the stars themselves showed signs of the passing of mankind: some of them greened by orbiting shells of habitats, others lined up in rings or belts, still others detonated and scattered in the course of one war or another.

And soon she would come to the very center of it all: Earth, the home world of mankind—the place where, it was said, in the end all the undying flocked.

Reath’s ship cut across the plane of Sol system, like a stone rolling across a plate. The sun’s planets, so significant in memory and legend across the Galaxy, were scattered in their orbits about their star. Alia was disappointed; she had no instinct for the dynamics of planetary systems, and somehow she had expected all the solar worlds to be lined up in a neat row ready for inspection.

One world did swim by to become bright enough briefly to rival the still-distant sun. They all crowded to the windows to see. The planet remained a mere point of light to an unaided eye, but they used the ship’s enhancement features to see better.

It was a giant, a ball of murky gas that swathed a rocky core larger than Earth. The planet’s color was a dull, washed-out yellow-brown, but you could see streaks and whorls in the cloud tops, sluggish storms curdling that thick blanket of air. Reath pointed out moons, balls of rock and ice that were minor worlds in their own right. And, strangest of all, the planet was circled by a ring, a band of light centered on the planet.

This planet, Reath said, was called Saturn. It was the system’s largest surviving gas giant; there had been one larger, but that had long been destroyed, and was anyhow hidden on the far side of the sun. Saturn had once been central in the planning for the defense of Earth itself. “It’s a fortress,” Reath said, “a vast natural fortress circling on the boundary of the inner system.”

Alia asked, “And what about the rings?”

“Orbital weapons systems, very ancient. They break down, collide, smash each other up. In time their fragments have been shepherded into those ring systems by the perturbation of the moons’ gravity. It’s odd,” he said. “Once Saturn was one of Sol system’s most spectacular sights, for it had a
natural
ring system—fragments of water ice from a shattered moon. When mankind came here, bringing war, those rings didn’t last long. But now Saturn’s rings have been reborn in these bits of smashed-up weaponry.”

On the planet itself, huge machines of war had been constructed beneath the cover of the eternal clouds. But the war had never come here; those immense machines had never been activated.

“But the machines are still waiting for the call to arms,” Reath said.

Bale said, “I wonder if they will know who to fight for, after all this time. Would they recognize
us
as the heirs of their builders?”

None of them, not spindly Reath or the squat Campocs or furry, long-limbed Alia and Drea had an answer. Saturn swam away into the dark.

It was half a million years since mankind had first ventured to the stars. For much of that time humanity had been locked in war—and although in the end a Galaxy had been won, it had always been Sol system, even Earth itself, that had been the principal mine for the resources for that war. So the system was left depleted.

Once, between Jupiter and the inner rocky worlds, there had been a rich asteroid belt: now it was impoverished, mined out, and scattered. The iron of the innermost world, Sol I, called Mercury, had been dug out and shipped away for so long that the little world had been left misshapen by quarries and pits. Earth’s two neighbors, Sol II and IV—Venus and Mars—had been used up, too. Mars had been stripped of what volatiles it had retained from its chill birth, and even Venus’s thick air had been transformed to carbon polymers and removed. Now, abandoned, both worlds looked remarkably similar, two balls of rust-red dust, naked save for only a thin layer of air, and with no signs of life save the abandoned cities of a departed mankind. It was a strange thought, Alia reflected, that in a mere half-million years after the humans arrived, all these worlds had suffered a greater transformation than any in the vast ages since their births.

At last the ship made its final approach to Sol III: Earth.