Transcendent (46 page)

“We know we have to stabilize the hydrate deposits,” Makaay said. “But this will not be the last time we will have to intervene on a massive, indeed global scale, if we are to ensure that the Earth’s systems do not transition into a condition that makes the planet uninhabitable for us. We must learn to manage the Earth, our home, even while we cherish it. . . .”

Edith Barnette leaned down to whisper to me, “Nice presentation. I enjoyed the focus on the green Sahara—nothing wrong with an unexpectedly positive image. But now he sounds like an EI corporate report. I suggest in the future he cuts to the chase.”

Now Makaay showed us blow-up images of our new baby, a glistening, complacent-looking mole. The moles had been trialled individually, but today was the first integrated trial of the system as a whole. A dozen moles would be dropped down defunct oil boreholes to begin the construction of an interconnected network, spreading out through hydrate strata, chattering to each other through sonar and other comms channels, and closing the complex loops around which the liquid nitrogen would flow.

For now the condensation plant and liquefaction gear would be based on the central oil platform. But that was only a stopgap design for this proof-of-concept pilot; in the future, working out “in the wild,” as Makaay put it, submersibles would install liquefaction and condensation gear on the seabed, to link up with the moles’ tunnels beneath. And so the network would grow, spreading across the ocean floor, until the pole was encircled.

Now we were shown live images of the old oil rig a couple of kilometers offshore where our nitrogen liquefaction plant had been installed. Big liquid-nitrogen tanks glistened in the sun, frost sparkling on their surfaces. A countdown clock appeared in the corner of our image and started to tick away the seconds before the insertion of the first moles. A hush fell over the room, as the show took on the feel of a space launch, a fond memory of my childhood. Makaay was never one to miss a trick, I thought respectfully.

There were about five minutes to go on the clock when Morag appeared to me again.

I could see her through the translucent wall of the marquee, out on the cold, dead ground: that slim, tall figure, the unmistakable shock of strawberry blond hair.

I left the vice president for dead and ran for the exit. Behind me, ignored, Ruud Makaay was still talking. Heads turned as I passed, concerned.

Tom caught up with me before the doorway. “Dad. What the hell are you doing?”

I pointed. “Can’t you see her?”

“I see—something. A woman out there. So what?”

“
You know who it is.
Come on, Tom. I just have to deal with this.”

“You mean
I
have to.”

I felt cold, determined. “Yes. You have to. Because if you see her, she’s haunting you, too.”

At the exit I found myself facing an EI security guard, a slab of muscle. The guard looked confused, but her job was to keep people out, not shut them in. She stood aside. I pushed out through the airlock, and into the fresh air outside, dressed in nothing but my flimsy suit. It was bloody cold. There were drops of rain in the air, or maybe it was salt spray off the sea.

I glanced around, getting my bearings. To get to where Morag had been standing I would have to cut around the base of the dome-shaped marquee, to my right. I ran that way, not bothering to check if Tom was following. I had to jump over guy ropes and skirt around blocks of equipment, generators, and heaters. More security guards watched me go by, and I saw them speak into the air. But I wasn’t impeded.

Around the limb of the marquee I stumbled to a halt. Tom came up beside me, breathing hard.

There she was: Morag, standing in an open area beside the wall of the marquee, looking back at me. She was dressed in a plain blue smock, her favorite color, the color that brought out her eyes, she always said. She didn’t seem cold, despite the Arctic breeze. She was no more than fifty meters from me, just fifty paces. She had never been so close.
And she wasn’t running away,
not drifting mysteriously down corridors, or disappearing into dust or mist. She just stood there. She was smiling at me. Her hands were open, as if to show me she meant me no harm.

For a heartbeat I drank in every detail of her, the hair that flopped over her brow in the breeze, the way the dress clung to her slim figure like a flag draped around a pole.

“It’s her,” said Tom. “It really is.”

“You do see her,” I breathed.

“Yes. Dad—what do we do?”

“I don’t know. It’s never been like this before.”

I spread my hands, mirroring her gesture. I took a step toward her, then another, cautiously. I was like a police officer approaching a suicide bomber, I thought. Still she didn’t recede from me, as in all those nightmare pursuits of the past. She just watched me approach, smiling.

A part of me was aware of glowing motes that danced before my eyes. We were saturated by surveillance by EI’s security systems. There could be no doubt that there would be a record of this encounter, full and clear. And there was no doubt in my mind that Morag was allowing this to happen, that this was her choice, to break through whatever barriers there were between us. She was just as I had remembered her before her pregnancy, the labor that had killed her. It had been seventeen years since her death, but she hadn’t aged a day. Oddly it might have seemed stranger to me, at that moment, if she had aged.

Now I was so close I could see the details, the tiny flaws in her skin, the beauty spot on her cheek, the small scar on her forehead. She seemed full of mass, somehow, dense with matter and light; she stood out of the background, as if patched into a faded photograph. And still she didn’t go away.

Ten paces from her I stopped. I feared what might happen if I pushed this too far. If I got too close, if I tried to touch her, would she pop like a bubble? And I wondered why she was doing this now, here. Was she here because of the hydrate project? Was Rosa right, that she was somehow an angel from the future, drawn to significance?

“Morag. Can’t you speak to me? What do you want? . . .”

She smiled, encouraging. Then she spoke. It was
her
voice, undoubtedly, light, airy, salted with a trace of her Irish background. But her words were a rapid gabble, just as they had been on the Reef, in the hotel corridor. Her tone was wistful, her eyes bright, her gaze fixed on me. I couldn’t bear to look away. But as the moment stretched, and as her only words were that strange compressed pseudo-speech, a kind of anxious sadness filled me.

A siren clamored, echoing across the flat sea. It was coming from the oil rig, out on the ocean. Distracted, I looked that way, and saw vapor venting into the air. I knew that the siren had been the signal for the start of the trial—and cheering from inside the dome, slightly muffled, told me it had been a success, that the moles had been launched and were doing their job. At that moment I couldn’t have cared less.

I turned back to Morag. And she was gone, gone, in that instant. Perhaps there was a trace of her, a profile of her figure in dancing dust, hanging in the air, sparkling; but even that dispersed on the wind. I was oppressed by guilt, for it felt as if it had been my fault that she had gone, as if I had broken the rules by looking away.

There was a soft whirring at my feet, a crackle of friction sparks. I looked down. The little Gea-robot rolled back and forth on the concrete at my feet.

“Gea, did you see all that? Did you see
her
?”

“I recorded everything, Michael,” the robot said. “But for now I think you should consider your son.”

Tom. I had forgotten him. I whirled around. Tom was hunched over on the ground. His whole body heaved as he wept. I ran toward him, but Sonia Dameyer got there first, and wrapped him in her arms.

And in that vignette you have the whole story of our two lives.

Chapter 39

Alia was immersed in some deep, dark, viscous ocean. She tried to struggle—but she could not, there was nothing to fight
with.
She tried to concentrate on her fingers, to move her toes, but there was no sensation. She felt no pain, nothing but a cushioning, cradling warmth.

She had no idea what had happened to her, where she was—if she was
anywhere
in any meaningful sense. Of course it was all something to do with Leropa, and her strange projects. Was this another hideous Skimming—or something stranger still? And what could it have to do with Redemption?

She couldn’t even feel herself breathe, she realized suddenly. She panicked. She looked deep inside herself, but she had no sense of her own pulse, the deepest rhythms of her body. Even her sense of her body, her arms and legs, her torso and head, was dissipating. She cowered, even more terrified. She was like a prisoner, she thought, unexpectedly released after years of captivity, longing to remain confined.

But a kind of acceptance began to steal over her. She floated, without her body, a mote adrift in this strange sea.

Was this mood of resignation itself part of the process? Without a bloodstream fizzing with adrenaline, perhaps it was impossible for her to
feel
fear: perhaps there was too little left of her even to be afraid. And if she had no body, did she have a self anymore?

She felt herself spreading out. If the edges of her body had been erased, now so was the boundary of her mind, her very self. She was merging with this wider sea, she thought, like a drop of coloring dropped into a bottle of water, spreading out, growing more and more dilute. It wasn’t uncomfortable, just a subtle dissolving. It was like falling asleep.

Or it was like joining the Transcendence, she thought, like being immersed in that vast panoply of linked minds. But the Transcendence was something higher than mind. This bloody ocean was different; it was something
lower
than the body, lower than biology itself. Still she tried to fight it, to reflect back on herself.

It was her last conscious thought. After that, for an unmeasured time, there was only an endless, formless, oceanic dreaming.

And then something new.

Separateness.

There was no detail, nothing to be said about
this
which was separated from
that.
There was only the separateness itself, a relation between abstracts, beyond analysis or understanding. But that was something to cling to, a source of a deep formless pleasure—an exultance that
I am.

Then something more. A kind of growing. Splitting, budding, a complexifying of the
I,
of whatever it was that had separated out of the rest. The growth was geometrical: two, four, eight, sixteen, a doubling every time, rapidly exponentiating away to large numbers, astronomical numbers.
Cells:
they were the units of the dividing, specks of biological matter each with their walls and nuclei and complicated chemical machinery.

The cluster that was growing out of the doubling cells was an embryo.

But that was a wrong thought, an inappropriate thought. It was not something the
I
should understand, not now, not yet. And that realization of wrongness was
itself
wrong. A recursion set in, a feedback loop that multiplied that awareness of wrong. Here was another sudden separating, a distancing. Within the
I
—or around it, or beside it—was another point of view, separated from the I by an awareness that could never be part of the I itself. The viewpoint was a witness to this growing thing, this budding coalescing entity. It felt everything the I felt; it was as close to it in every sense as it was possible to be. And yet it was not
it.

The separated viewpoint was Alia. She knew herself, who she was. She even had a dim, abstract awareness of her other life, like a half-remembered dream.

And meanwhile the
I,
the subject of her inspection, continued to grow.

That relentless budding was not formless. In the final body there would be more than two hundred different kinds of cells, specialized for different purposes. Already an organization was emerging in this growing city of cells. Over
there
was a complicated cluster that might become a nervous system, with terminations flowering into what might become fingers, eyes, a brain. And over
there
were simpler clusters, blocks that might become kidneys and liver and heart.

This was a wondrous process, for there was nothing here to tell the cells
how
to organize themselves in this manner. As the cells split and grew and split again, they communicated with their neighbors through salts, sugars, amino acids passed from one cell’s cytoplasm to another’s. In this way the cells formed collectives, each dedicated to developing a special function—to become an eardrum or a heart valve—and, through a clustering of the collectives themselves at a higher level, to ensure that ears and hearts, arms and legs, all developed in the right place. Out of this mesh of interaction and feedback the organization of a human body developed.

The whole process was an emergence, an expression of a deep principle of the universe. Even the
I,
the wispy unformed mind that was lodged in this expanding, complexifying cluster, was itself an emergent property of the increasingly complex network of cells. And yet already there was consciousness here, and a deep, brimming, joyful consciousness of growth, of increasing potential, of being.

Now, strangely, death came to the differentiating cluster of cells. Succumbing to subtle pressures from their neighbors, cells in the shapeless hands and feet began to die, in waves and bands. It
hurt,
surprisingly, shockingly. But there was purpose to this dying; the scalpel of cellular death was finely shaping those tiny hands and feet, cleaving one finger from another.

The growing child lifted its new hand before its face. Not
its,
Alia thought—
his.
Already the processes of development had proceeded that far. His fingers were mere nerveless stumps yet, and could not be moved; and in this bloody dark nothing could be seen, even if the child had eyes to see. And yet he strained to see even so, motivated by a faint curiosity.