Transcendent (44 page)

I landed at an airstrip outside a small town called, unpromisingly, Deadhorse.

My automated cab from the airport gave me a profoundly irritating commentary, as if it imagined it was a tourist bus in Manhattan. Once, the cab told me, the hotel I was heading for had been the only accommodation available to visitors. But now that the oil industry had imploded there was plenty of accommodation to be had on the old drilling pads. There were even theme parks, where you could play at being a rigger, with grubby jeans and a hard hat.

Outside the town, the ground was churned-up mud where nothing grew. Once this area had been a vast swathe of tundra, like Siberia. But as the permafrost melted, the delicate tundra ecosystem had just melted away, too, and just as in Siberia the people had gone, the subsistence-hunter types who had endured here for millennia.

Deadhorse turned out to be barely a town at all; grim, functional, it was like an industrial yard. Many of the small, boxy buildings were abandoned altogether, their roofs collapsed, concrete walls cracked. As we drove in through this decay and abandonment along a thin strip of silvertop, the light was failing, the day ending. It felt as if the walls of the world were closing in around me.

The hotel was basic, just a series of two-story blocks. There were long corridors of rooms that stretched on and on, like a prison, and the flat heavy light of the fluorescent strips embedded in the ceilings washed out any color, any vitality.

The automated reception facility told me a fault had developed with the systems in my room, where an oversensitive chemical toilet had developed a habit of spitting unwelcome waste back out at its unlucky user. An animist had been summoned from Fairbanks to administer therapy, but wouldn’t be here until the morning. In the meantime I could take a chance with the angst-ridden toilet, or switch to a room with a shared bathroom.

The hell with it. I took the switch.

My room was just a box. It was clean and reasonably bright, with a little alcove where you could make coffee. But everything was old, the pipes rusted, the plaster and skirting boards crudely repaired, and dirt and grease had accumulated in cracks in the walls.

I threw my clothes into the small cupboard, and headed down the corridor to find the shared john. The toilet was none too clean, the shower just a nozzle over a stained bath. The water looked clear, but smelled suspiciously of chlorine.

Back in my room, I used the very basic VR facilities to contact my party.

Everybody was here in Alaska, Tom and Sonia, Ruud Makaay and his people, Shelley and some of her colleagues, even Vander Guthrie. I was too tired to do any business that evening, but would have enjoyed company, I guess. I longed to see Tom again, a deep cell-level impulse. But he knew I’d been with Rosa “telling ghost stories,” as he put it, and he was pissed with me, and I didn’t feel up to any more rows. Meanwhile Shelley was finalizing details for the demonstration due the next day. Everybody else was working, or had crashed out. A bit wistfully, we all promised to meet up in the morning.

I rolled into bed and watched some news. There was actually a relevant item: more instances of localized hydrate release around the Arctic Circle, more water spouts and clouds of lethal gases. I guessed it was local interest up here.

I was dog tired, my eyes felt like they were coated with sand, but I found it hard to rest. My muscles ached from all the long hours of sitting around on planes, and I felt tense, full of energy that needed burning off. And though it was close to midnight the sun was still up; this was Arctic midsummer. The light that leaked around the edge of my curtains was bright, not quite like daylight, enough to throw off my body clock.

I just lay still, eyes closed. I tried to talk myself into sleeping. I felt myself drift inward, away from the poky reality of that dismal Alaskan hotel. But as my conscious mind receded I only seemed to uncover a deeper layer of anxiety, like a beach exposed by a low tide.

I needed the john.

I pushed my way out of bed, pulled on my pants, and fumbled my way in the dark to the door.

The light in the corridor was briefly dazzling. I stumbled along one wall. The only sound was the padding of my feet. There was an odd quality about the light. It was a dead and colorless glow, lacking any of the photosynthetic goodness of sunlight. Barefoot, shambling along alone, I felt like a convict.

The corridor seemed to stretch on, longer than I remembered. I wondered if I had come the wrong way, if I was somehow getting lost. But I kept on, figuring I had to get somewhere eventually.

At last I came to the bathroom. I pushed my way inside, used the facility, came back out. Again the corridor stretched away to either side of me, infinitely long, identical whichever way you looked. For a second I had to think which way I had come. My thinking seemed stuck in my head like glue in a pipe. I turned right. I figured that was the way. I began stumbling back down the corridor.

Then I saw her.

She was a slim figure, far off down the corridor. I heard her voice. She was speaking rapidly, just as she had at the Reef. But the thick-painted walls jumbled up her voice into whispers and echoes.

I ran, of course. I felt absurd running in my bare feet, with my pajama pants flapping around my legs, my belly heaving under my vest. But I ran anyhow, as I had run before, as I knew I always would run after her.

I kept my eyes fixed on Morag. I had the feeling she wanted me to reach her. She was just standing there. But though I ran as hard as I could, I didn’t get any closer. I felt no fear: none of that awful sucking banal cold of evil that Rosa had described. She was there
for
me. But I couldn’t reach her, no matter how hard I struggled to run down that endless corridor. She looked helpless, her hands spread.

She turned away from me and stepped into a room.

I tried to count, to remember which door she had chosen. Twenty, twenty-five down? I counted off the doors as I passed.

But a wall loomed before me.

I had to stop. I stood there panting, staring at the wall blankly. It was just a hotel wall; it had small arrowed signs pointing me to reception, and to a fire exit. It had seemed to come out of nowhere, materializing like a VR and cutting off the corridor.

I turned and looked back. The corridor didn’t seem so long now. I could even see the bathroom door I’d left open.

I knew I wouldn’t see Morag again that night. I stumbled back down the corridor, looking for my room. I longed to call Tom, but I knew I must not.

In the morning I was up early. I checked at the hotel reception for any records of last night. There were a few surveillance cameras dotted around the building, but none in the rooms, and only one to cover the length of that corridor.

After some electronic arm-twisting I persuaded the hotel’s sentience to show me images. I saw myself stumbling, running, staggering down that corridor. I had been half-asleep; I looked almost drunk. But there was no clear image of Morag. The cameras’ fields of view never quite stretched far enough, and the sound pickups were overwhelmed by noisy air-conditioning fans. Perhaps there was a shadow—a fleeting shape, a glimpse of ankle, a trace of voice on the audio recording. That was all.

Once again Morag had come and gone leaving scarcely a trace.

Chapter 37

The day after Alia landed on Earth, Leropa arranged to meet her in a township built out of a ruined Conurbation that she referred to by an old number, “11729.” It was apparently a place of great historical significance. Alia knew nothing of this, and didn’t ask. Buried at the heart of the solar system, she was beginning to choke on age and mystery.

When morning came, Alia flew alone in Reath’s shuttle. The little craft confidently skimmed north, and circular-plan cities fled endlessly beneath the shuttle’s prow. The sky was a washed-out blue, and in the day no stars were visible. There was no Moon in the sky either. Alia wasn’t sure if the Moon, so familiar from her viewings of Michael Poole’s time, had ever been visible in the daytime. And now, of course, the Moon was gone, detached as an accident of mankind’s endless wars. She wondered if Michael Poole could have got used to a sky without a Moon.

At last something altogether more grand began to loom over the horizon.

It was a framework, an open skeletal structure. It was pyramidal—no, tetrahedral, Alia saw, with three mighty legs plunging toward the ground. It was colored blue-gray, though its true shade may have been masked by the mist of distance. Streaks of cloud curled languidly around the apex of that immense tripod, but its base was still hidden by the horizon—the whole must have been kilometers tall.

As the shuttle swept closer this structure loomed ever taller in Alia’s sky, until at last her shuttle was flying through the vast open space cradled by the framework. At the heart of the triangular floor over which the tetrahedron loomed was a city: Conurbation 11729 itself. This city retained some of the ancient domed architecture, but the domes had been worn by time, cut through and patched up, over and over.

The shuttle descended. On the ground Leropa was waiting to meet her.

“So,” Leropa said, “you are the young Elect who has caused so much trouble.”

“I’m sorry,” Alia stammered. “I didn’t mean to.”

“Of course you didn’t.”

“And I’m grateful that you, the Transcendence, is giving me time.”

“Oh, you don’t need to be grateful. The Transcendence can’t help but devote its attention to you. Don’t you understand that? Perhaps your tuition hasn’t been as thorough as I imagined. Child, you are already part of the Transcendence. So your doubts and questions are
its
doubts. Do you see?”

“I think so—”

“And so the Transcendence must deal with you, to set its own mind at ease.” Leropa closed her eyes, and nodded, as Alia had seen Reath bow his head when naming the Transcendence.

Leropa’s face was very strange, small, round, her nose and cheekbones so shallow she was all but featureless, like a crater eroded to smoothness by great age. Her lips seemed without a drop of blood, and her eyes were gray orbs dry as stones. Alia wondered
how old
this person was—if she could still be called a person at all. In Leropa’s presence Alia felt transient, transparent. Leropa smiled at her; it was a cold grimace, inflicted on the muscles of her face by an act of will.

Together they walked through the great circular courtyards of the domes. From the ground the domes were peculiarly dull to look at: they were simply too big to be taken in, for Alia could only see to a dome’s horizon, and could make out nothing of its true scope. But over it all the great struts of the tripod, from here a vivid electric blue, swept up until they penetrated the sky.

Alia grew increasingly uncomfortable in Earth’s heavy gravity. She kept trying to break into a run, forgetting the economy of walking—and besides her body, no longer truly bipedal, was not designed for walking. After a time she settled on a compromise, taking some of her weight on her curled fists as she loped along.

Leropa smiled at Alia as she knuckle-walked through the ruins of Earth.

Leropa spoke, in a voice like dry leaves rustling. The tetrahedron was a ruin, too, of a sort, she said. It dated from the time after the fall of the Coalition. A religious group called
Wignerians
or
Friends,
having arisen illegally in the military colonies at the center of the Galaxy, had emerged as a unifying force in the aftermath of political collapse. In its glory days it returned here, to Earth, where it had erected the mightiest of all cathedrals over the ruined capital of the Coalition that had once banned it. In the end the Friends’ creed had become the most powerful and magnificent of all mankind’s religions; it converted a Galaxy, revealed and explored the depths of humanity’s soul, and now it was quite vanished.

Leropa said now, “At the heart of the religion of the Wignerians was a belief that all of history is contingent—that all possible world lines will be gathered together at the end of time, where history will be resolved in favor of the good, and all pain wiped away.”

“A Redemption,” Alia said.

“Yes. The Wignerians’ was a vision of entelechy that has perhaps influenced the thinking of the Transcendence.” She looked up at the cathedral’s skeleton, squinting in the light. “But everything passes, Alia. Once this was the capital of a government which ruled the Galaxy. Eventually nothing remained of the Coalition but the religion it had tried to ban, and in the end nothing remained of
that
but this one idea, a dream of entelechy. That and a few ruins.”

This was an appropriate place for the undying to gather, Leropa said. In time the cathedral had been looted, its walls crumbled—but not this central framework which, made of something called exotic matter, defied entropy itself. “The undying have contempt for mere stone, which in time rots in your hand.
This
deserves respect.”

Alia, faintly repelled, said nothing.

Then, in the shadows of the broken domes, they came on the undying.

There were few of them to be seen. They moved slowly, cautiously, each rounded figure surrounded by a cloud of servitor machines. But each walked alone. They had empty faces, blank expressions. They didn’t even speak, though some of them seemed to be mumbling to themselves. Just as she had glimpsed on that other Transcendent world in the Galaxy Core, the undying were weighed down by the huge burden of the past, Alia saw, they were each locked into a separate world.

It struck Alia how Leropa was different. Of all this shuffling crowd of ancients, it was only she who seemed even aware of Alia’s presence.

“What are you thinking, Alia?”

“All I see is what’s missing. There is
nothing here.
No art. No music—”

Leropa grimaced. “Can you imagine a single piece of art that wouldn’t appal you after a hundred viewings, a piece of music or verse of poetry that, after a thousand years of listening, wouldn’t sicken you with boredom? The very abstract endures longest, I suppose. Cold, voiceless music; pale inhuman art. But in time
everything wears away,
Alia. Everything visible turns to dust—and so you turn to what remains, the invisible.”