Transcendent (58 page)

It was hard to understand how a kid like Ben Cushman had got involved with a bunch like the Multipliers. But when you looked a bit closer, Cushman’s background was a bit more complicated than it appeared. His father, and the Cushmans for a few generations back, had worked in the steel industry that had imploded when America gave up on the automobile. A deep sense of failure, of abandonment and betrayal, had lodged itself in Ben’s head at a very young age.

He was a bright kid, of course. He had gone away to college; in fact he had won a scholarship from EI. With one part of his head he was attracted to the scale and ambition of EI programs. But there was a contradiction, for EI was a product of the world that had grown up after the collapse of the industries that had provided income and self-respect for Cushman’s family. There must have been a level on which he felt deeply uncomfortable with what he was doing.

“Like the child of a peacenik going to work on weapons systems,” Tom speculated. “The work might be fascinating. But you just know it’s wrong.”

So there was a deep conflict in Cushman, so far below the surface nobody was aware of it, not his family or employers—maybe not even himself.

“But the Multipliers spotted it,” John said sourly. “It seems they have become expert at rooting out people like Ben Cushman. They are predators, the feds say, feeding on emotional vulnerability.”

Tom said, “I still don’t understand what made him blow himself up.”

“I told you it was the organization,” John said. “The Multipliers. Suicide terrorism is an organizational phenomenon, not an individual one. It’s as simple as that.”

If the authorities had decades of experience in dealing with suicide bombers, so organizations like the Multipliers had decades of expertise to draw on in turning a confused kid like Ben Cushman into somebody prepared to kill himself for a cause he probably hadn’t heard of a year before.

John said, “They draw you in gradually. They present their case as a noble cause on behalf of a community—in this case, all those disenfranchised and impoverished by the Stewardship and other global projects. They argue you step by step into more extreme positions. They show you martyrs—nothing breeds a suicide bomber like previous bombers—who are made into heroes you would want to emulate. And they praise
you,
they make you part of the group, they get you to aspire to a certain kind of heroism.

“And
then
you make a public statement, on record.” Gloomily we watched as the tiny VR Cushman, smiling confidently, mouthed his selective quotations from the Bible. “This was really the moment Cushman killed himself,” John said. “Because once he had recorded this statement of intent, there was no way he could back down. Given the psychological investment he’d made in that recording, it was actually easier for him to die rather than suffer the loss of face of not following through.”

I said, “And he did all this while working on the project he was planning to destroy.”

John shrugged. “VR links make it possible to be with your brothers, your teachers, right under the nose of your enemy. Odd how advancing technology only makes it easier for us to hurt each other. . . .”

“OK,” I said. “But whatever this kid’s motivation, he still needed backup.”

As I had suspected it wasn’t easy to turn a Higgs-energy pod into a devastating bomb. Cushman had needed to use a tailored virus to break through the pod’s layers of protective sentience, and even then he had needed an elaborate triggering device to make the thing go bang. Cushman had been one of our best engineers, a bright kid, but there was no way he could have put this stuff together himself; he must have had support.

John wasn’t meeting my eyes. Tom looked from one to the other of us, uncertain.

I said, “And that’s where you come in. Isn’t it, John?”

He waved his hand. Cushman disappeared, and new VR images coalesced. “They found traces of DNA on bits of the bomb-making gear left behind in Cushman’s room, up in Prudhoe.” We saw faces in the display on the tabletop, faces extrapolated from the DNA traces: an embryo, a baby, a young child, a boy, growing to adulthood.

I wondered if this technology was something else that would startle Morag after her seventeen-year absence. It was now possible to take a DNA sample and compute how that genome would have expressed itself as a fully grown adult—or indeed any age you cared to choose. Thus the criminologists had been given the ability to re-create the faces of the victims or perpetrators of crimes from the slightest human trace, a fleck of spittle, a flake of skin under a fingernail.

I recognized who it was long before the reconstruction was finished: those broad features, the deep, eager eyes, the prominent teeth.

“I know him,” Tom said. “I saw him at the launch event.”

So had I. The image was of Jack Joy.

“You were his first contact,” John said to me defensively. “After he met you on the plane. He looked you up, found out what you were doing, decided it was something his destructive little band might be interested in. It’s the way they work. Opportunistic, probing, looking for a way in.”

“I didn’t know he was in the Multipliers,” I said, “or anything like them. Obviously. He told me he was in the Lethe River Swimming Club.”

Tom asked, “So how did he get through to the project?”

John sighed. “He got in through me. I’m a Swimmer, too.”

Tom just gaped.

“Jack cross-checked the Swimmer membership with EI and the hydrate project, and out popped my name, as neat as you like. Couldn’t have been easier for him. Opportunism, you see. And that was the in he needed. He called me to introduce him to the project; he was talking about the Swimmers backing it financially. I couldn’t see any harm. It was only when he actually showed up, as a VR anyhow, that I started to feel uneasy.”

“I don’t get it,” Tom said. “If this guy wanted to destroy the project, why would he put money into it?”

“As a way in,” John said. “If you invest, you’re inside; the more you invest the closer to the center you get. And once he was inside it wasn’t hard for him to find Ben Cushman, who was already being groomed by the Multipliers.

“I couldn’t see the harm in the Swimmers,” John said miserably. “There is a whole spectrum of us, Michael. It helps you cope with a difficult world; you accept things, you find a way to make a living, you get on with your life, you try to enjoy the ride. There’s a lot of humor in there, you know—black, but it makes life a bit more bearable. . . .”

I wondered if he knew about the Last Hunters, another group in his “spectrum,” and what he would think of their expression of black humor.

“And because of this stupid indulgence of yours,” I snapped at him, “a suicide bomber got through to the heart of my project. Because of you, we nearly all got killed.”

“The FBI cleared me,” John said, still defensive.

“But the moral guilt is all yours,” I said heavily.

He looked at me for a heartbeat, as if he were going to fight back. But then he hung his head, beaten.

Tom touched my arm. “For God’s sake, Dad. Take it easy on him.”

I didn’t really want Tom to see me in this black mood. “I’ve got a lot I have to forgive John for right now, Tom. I guess I’m not big enough to do it.”

Tom sat back. “You’re talking about Mom.”

And there it was, the issue that divided and united us, out in the open.

John raised his head, and I saw true misery in his eyes. “Michael, if you want to know, if it helps you at all, I’m ripped up inside, too. And at least I told you what happened between us before—”

“Before her ghost came back to life to tell me herself? Do you think that makes it OK, what you did?”

“You have to see, Michael, that we, Morag and I, had reached a kind of settlement between us. We had decided what to do. She would have the baby, we would see how we all felt after that, and then we’d talk to you. It was all going to be OK; we would fix everything.”

A settlement, I thought: a verbal contract, a lawyer’s way of rationalizing away pain.

“But she died,” John said. “Death came down on us like a blade. After that everything changed, all the threads of our life cut short.

“And in all the time since then, I’ve had to deal with this in my head. Michael,
nobody
knew the truth about that pregnancy, nobody but me, once Morag was dead. I knew how much you had been hurt—and how much more you would hurt if you knew what I had done—and I couldn’t tell you. And, with time, we settled down to a new way of being in each other’s lives, you and me. That was my way of coming to peace with myself.”

“Some peace,” I snapped. “You found Inge, you had two kids. And she left you, didn’t she? Maybe you were just as haunted by Morag as I was.”

His eyes blazed angrily. “I didn’t choose any of this, Michael. But I had to cope with it. But now Morag has returned, she hasn’t lived through any of this, she can’t understand it—”

Tom blurted, “I’ve spoken to her, too. Mom.” His voice was strained. He was sitting with his legs crossed at the knee, hands neatly folded on his lap.

I hated to see him like that, to think how John and I had put him in this position—how we’d failed to protect him.

He said, “With me it’s the kid, the damn kid. My little brother who killed my mom.”

I said, “I know—”

“I always felt second best to a fetus. To the
ghost
of a fetus. I grew up feeling that way. I always imagined she must have loved it more than me. Because she let it take her life, right?”

“And you talked about this to Morag?”

“She doesn’t listen. Or she
can’t.
To her it’s yesterday,” he said. “All that stuff when the baby was born. There’s something inside her that knows I grew up, I think, that knows all that time has passed, something deep down that recognizes me. But she doesn’t know how to talk to me. She remembers me as a happy kid of eight. She asks me about my life, about Sonia, like I was still a kid at grade school. She doesn’t know anything about how I spent seventeen years trying to cope with all this. I don’t want to hurt her. It isn’t
her
fault. And she’s my mom. But at the same time she isn’t.” He looked at John. “Do you know what I mean? My mom coming back hasn’t helped,” Tom said emphatically. “I’m sorry, Dad. That’s the way I feel.”

He was right, I thought. It was strange: a year ago, the fondest wish you could have granted me was to have Morag back in my life. And now she
was
back—and it was making nobody happy. It was as if Morag was a bomb that had been dropped into the middle of our tangled, multilayered relationships.

“Look at us, the three of us. What a mess.” I stood up. “Come on. Let’s get out of here. Now you’ve got your implants reprogrammed you can buy us both a beer, John.”

John stood, rapped on the door, and we were let out into the town.

Chapter 50

Drifting through the mind of the Transcendence, Alia and Leropa explored the Redemption, and how it had touched Michael Poole’s life.

“This is the Third Level of the Redemption,” Leropa said. “It is called the Restoration. It is the beginning of a new age, in which the Transcendence will assume full responsibility for the past. If you have the power of a god, you have a responsibility to use it. Can you not see the magnificence?”

To touch the past was easy for the Transcendence, Alia could see now, for it had a mastery of the finitude of the universe. If you saw correctly the chains of causality wrapping around the curve of the universe, you only had to make the slightest adjustment, and your touch would cause ripples that would wash out to the furthest future, and then around the arc of time to the deepest past, and up through the long prehistory of humanity: ripples at last focusing on one woman and her unborn child. A flawed gene which might have expressed itself
this
way no longer did so—and a child was born safely, a mother survived to a healthy long life. That was all that was needed.

And Morag Poole, her death averted, could walk through the walls of reality and back into the life of her astonished, still-grieving husband. Suddenly this part of Michael Poole’s life, embedded in the past and viewed many times through the lens of Alia’s Witnessing tank, was not as it had been.

It was a magnificent vision, Alia thought, as all of history, past and future, shifted and waved like a curtain in a breeze.

“We gave Michael Poole his Morag,” Leropa said. “Not a copy—she
was
Morag! Restored, identical in every way philosophy can identify. Morag was selected for the sake of Michael Poole.
And for you, Alia . . .
”

But Alia had learned that nothing the Transcendence did was for her, but only ever for itself. And she knew that if you wanted to understand the Transcendence, you had to think things through, to think like the Transcendence itself.

“History was changed,” she said.

“A defect in the tapestry of the past was repaired. Think of it that way.”

“But Poole
knew
Morag had been restored to him. It is not as if her death was eliminated from reality. He remembered her dying.”

“Of course. This is not some mere toying with reality strands. This is Redemption, Alia. Its purpose is atonement. And there can be no atonement for Poole’s loss if he isn’t
aware
of that loss. Morag was saved from death, and given back to him, who remembers that death.”

But that wasn’t the end of it. “In saving Morag you saved her child. So that child will now live out a life that should have been,
was,
terminated at a premature birth.”

“Yes. That life, too, will be redeemed in the fullness of the Restoration.”

“But there’s a second-order effect. That child will now go on to father children of his own, children who would never have existed. And those children in turn will bear more children, the actualizing of more lost possibilities . . .” A wave of shifting, of change, would wash down the river of history, as a new population of never-weres attained a life, a reality that had been denied them. All rising out of this one change, the restoring of Morag.