Transcendent (7 page)

I knew how painful this was. Since the automobile had vanished from America, this had become an age when you stayed home rather than traveled, an age of villages, of local stuff. And for a close community to be broken up was difficult.

“We have a program of agreements with other population centers,” she said. “In Minnesota, for instance. John has helped negotiate the settlements.” I hadn’t known that. “Seventy-five here, a hundred there. Always family groups, of course.” It had to be planned, she said. You couldn’t let the community left behind just fall into decay. So there were incentive schemes to keep teachers, doctors, civil servants working here, even though there was no long-term career for them. “It’s a long-term program. A cultural achievement, in its way.”

“But Minnesota is a long way from the sea,” I said.

“Well, I know that, but it can’t be helped. What’s worse is that everything is being”—she waved her trowel vaguely—“dispersed. All the history here. The culture.”

“History? Mom, you’re a newcomer here. You’re from England!”

“Yes, but so is everybody a newcomer but the Tequesta Indians. That’s part of the charm of the place. I think it’s important that we stay, you know. We old ones. Isn’t that what old people are, symbols of the past, of continuity? If we go then the place will just die. And what will happen to people then? . . . It does feel very strange to live in a place which has no future, I admit that.”

“Mom—”

“You know, it’s odd. In my lifetime they’ve taken away so many of the things that used to kill you when I was young. Cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, even schizophrenia—
all
of those chronic diseases turned out to be caused by infection, all of them preventable once we targeted the right virus or retrovirus. Who’d have thought it? So with nothing left to kill you, you just live on, and on. But then they took away the world instead.”

She wasn’t really talking to me, I saw. She continued with her patient gardening, digging and digging.

I found John out back. He was sweeping windblown sand off the porch.

He had a distracted expression. I wondered if he was getting news about Tom. But it turned out he was listening to his personal therapist. He grinned, touched my ear, and I heard a gentle male voice: “John, you’re overly perturbed about a situation you can’t control. You know you have to accept what can’t be changed. Take an hour off, then let me play you some stuff on cognitive feedback which . . .”

I pulled away.

“You should try one of these things,” John said. “It can even prescribe pharmaceuticals, you know. Spin-off from the space program. Would you like me to set you up?”

“No, thanks.”

He stepped toward me. Our closeness of last night had dissipated back into the usual rivalry; his blocky face, in the slanting morning light, looked ugly, coarse. “You never did accept any drug therapy after Morag, did you? You know, it is possible to block the formation of traumatic memories altogether. You just take the right pill in the hours immediately after the event—you target the formation of proteins, or some such—I guess that’s too late for you now with Morag, but—”

“I suppose you fed pills to your kids after Inge left, did you?”

He flinched at that, but he snapped back, “They didn’t need it. You, on the other hand—”

My anger, frustration, helplessness came boiling out. “You know the trouble with you, John, your whole fucking life? You deal with symptoms, not causes. You fix your kids so they’ll never be sad. You listen to a tin voice in your ear and you pop your damn pills so you don’t carry scars from anything bad, even from your wife dumping you. And your work is all about symptoms, too. The coasts are flooded? Fine, spread what’s left of the wealth around a little more. The Atlantic coast is hammered by a dozen hurricanes a season? Fine, add a couple of zeroes to your lawsuit against the Chinese. You don’t do squat about the root cause of it all, do you?”

“It’s not my job,” he said. His voice was mild, as if I were no more than an irate client, which maddened me even more. “Michael, I understand how you are feeling—”

“Oh, fuck off.” I turned on my heel and stalked off.

He called after me. “If I hear anything about Tom I’ll let you know. Keep your implant switched on. . . .”

I wasn’t even gracious enough to acknowledge that. It was not one of my finer moments. I stomped around the house, trying to calm down.

In the yard, the kids were playing with their smart football again. Both of them wore masks, flimsy transparent things, presumably to guard them against the foul breeze from China. They welcomed me, and I joined in their game, volleying and heading. I was always lousy at football, and I always will be, but they were gallingly kind.

So I was spending time with them, with Sven and Claudia, John’s beautiful kids, my niece and nephew. But I felt uncomfortable.

At one point the ball rolled off the yard’s bare concrete floor and ended up in long scrubby dune grass. You could see it roll back and forth, trying to find its way back to the game, but its rudimentary sensorium was confused by the blades of grass that towered around it. After a time it started to sound its little alarm chime.

Sven and Claudia stooped over the thing as it rolled about. “Look,” Sven said. “When it sees us it comes toward us.”

“Get back out of its sight,” said Claudia. “Let’s see what it does.” They both stepped back out of the way.

The ball resumed its rolling, utterly baffled. There was a fragment of sentience in there, of genuine awareness. The ball could feel pain, the way a simple animal can, perhaps. Why, even the plaintive way it rang its stupid alarm chime was enough to break your heart. But those kids just stepped backward and forward, experimenting with it.

When I looked at Claudia, especially, I always felt a chill. It wasn’t so much what she did but what she
didn’t
do. There was nothing behind that pretty face, I thought, nothing but emptiness, like the endless black abyssal emptiness that lay between worlds. She made me feel cold, just looking at her.

In the end I picked up the ball myself and threw it back into the yard.

And John came running around the corner, wheezing. His assistant Feliz had called. It was news of Tom. My son was injured but alive.

Chapter 6

On this planet the clouds were tall, rising in soft mounds around the equator and gathering in immense creamy swirls toward the poles.

To Alia this was a pretty view, but meaningless. She knew nothing about planets. She had never even visited one before. The only planet she had ever studied in detail was Earth, the root of all mankind, with its layers of archaic planetary defenses, its skim of ocean, its clustering city-covered continents.

But there were no continents here. When the flitter dipped into the atmosphere of
this
world there was nothing but an ocean, a crumpled silver-blue sheet that spread to the horizon. Above, the clouds were heaped up in a vast three-dimensional array of sculpture. This whole world was water, she thought, nothing but water, water below, water in the air. And under the clouds the prospect was oppressive, gloomy, illuminated only by shafts of sunlight cast through breaks in the cover.

She was here, under this dismal sky, because the Transcendence had willed it.

The Transcendence: the godlike assemblage of immortals at the heart of human society, from whom all political authority flowed. Truthfully, Alia knew little about it, save that it was, so the creepy scuttlebutt had it, a project of ancients, of
undying.
But what was the Transcendence itself? In her head she vaguely imagined something titanic, superhuman, beyond comprehension, perhaps like the muddled light of the Galaxy Core occluded by its interstellar clouds. Nobody talked about it much.

But now, it seemed, the Transcendence had taken an interest in her own small life. And it had already brought her far from home.

With Reath, agent of the Commonwealth, she had already traveled thousands of light-years. This water-world’s sun was on the fringe of a giant stellar nursery, a huge glowing cloud of roiling dust and ice that was spawning one hot young star after another. The nursery was on the inner edge of the Sagittarius Arm, one of the Galactic disc’s principal star-birthing regions, and the water-world itself was a moon of a massive gas giant. So the sky here was crowded and spectacular—but right now, through those clouds, she couldn’t see a trace of it, not even the primary giant.

“Ah—look at that.” Reath pointed to the horizon, where a column of darkness, writhing visibly, connected the ocean to the sky. “Do you know what that is?”

“Is it
weather
?”

“Alia, that is a hurricane. A kind of storm, a vortex of air. It is fueled by heat from the upper levels of the sea. It twists and moves, you see—chaotically, but not unpredictably.”

“It is a phenomenon of a water-world.”

“Not just world-oceans. Any planet with extensive seas and a respectable atmosphere can spawn such twisters. Even Earth! If there is land, of course, the storm can track away from the sea.”

Alia had grown up in a bubble of air less than two kilometers wide, every molecule of which was climate-controlled and cleansed by the
Nord
’s antique, patient machines. She tried to imagine such a monstrous storm slamming into a town or a city on Earth. Her imagination was unformed, filled with images of catastrophic breakdowns of environment control systems. “How terrible,” she said.

“Oh, humans mastered hurricanes long ago. All you have to do is cut off their energy supply before they do any damage. And of course by tracking on to land they detach themselves from the ocean that feeds them, and die of their own accord.”

“But not here, for there is no land.”

“Not here, no. Here a twister can live on and on, sucking up energy, spinning off daughters, tracking around the world. One twister system here—I’m not sure if it is
that
one—reaches right up to the top of the atmosphere. You can see it from space, like a glowering eye. And it has persisted for thousands of years.”

This was terribly disturbing for a ship-born girl like Alia. She was relieved when the storm receded from sight behind the horizon.

It was a month since she had agreed to follow Reath, to leave her home and begin the program of training that might, ultimately, remarkably, lead to her becoming that unknowable entity—a Transcendent, to become one of the host of godlike post-humans who governed mankind. A month since she had placed herself in the care of an agent of the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth! Before she had left the
Nord
it had been little more than a name to her, a shadowy authority that arched over human civilization, as lofty and remote and beautiful as an interstellar cloud, and as irrelevant. Now she was beginning to get a sense of the reality of it—and it was much more than she had ever imagined.

The Commonwealth was based at the most logical place for a Galactic capital: on a cluster of worlds that drifted amid the millions of crowded suns of the Core, where mankind had always anchored its Galactic empires.

The most visible sign of the Commonwealth’s presence was the Clock of Humanity. Lodged in the Core, this was a machine the size of the star. It used the decay of certain types of subatomic particles, called W and Z bosons, to produce pulses of neutrinos. These were the fastest known physical processes; no conceivable clock could be more precise. And as neutrinos passed like ghosts through all normal forms of matter, the pulses washed through the stars and dust of the Galaxy and never occluded or dispersed, so you could pick up the clock’s chiming wherever you were. Once, it was said, human clocks had been devised to fit the natural rhythms of Earth, its days and years. Now humans had scattered over millions of disparate worlds, and so the Clock was calibrated to a standard human pulse rate. Thus a civilization that encompassed a Galaxy marched in step to the rhythms of a human heart.

“And all of it,” Reath told her, “is driven by the Transcendence—a Commonwealth within the Commonwealth, a center within the center, the innermost heart of everything.”

The Transcendence was the source of all authority. As far as she could make out, it was itself a meshing of minds, a titanic superhuman mass around which human affairs pivoted, much as the Galaxy itself wheeled about the unmovable black hole at its very center. But the Transcendence needed agencies to carry out its will in the human world: it was a god embedded in bureaucracy.

The Commonwealth was more than a collection of dusty agencies, though, Reath said. The Commonwealth itself was an aspiration. As it worked on a Galactic scale, bit by bit, humans were drawn closer together, knit more integrally into the whole. Reath liked to say that whether you knew about it or not, if you were of human descent you were a citizen of the Commonwealth already. “And one day, it is hoped,” Reath said, “we will
all
be drawn in, not just into the Commonwealth, but even into the Transcendence itself—and then a new kind of human history will begin.”

But if it was to achieve such aspirations, the Transcendence had to grow. It had to recruit. Astonishing as it seemed, the Transcendence needed people like Alia.

If her ultimate goal was barely imaginable, Reath reassured her, the training would come in easy chunks. There were three formal stages, which he called Implications: the Implication of Indefinite Longevity, of Unmediated Communication, and of Emergent Consciousness. Needless to say she had little idea what any of these terms might actually mean, though they all sounded scary. But as well as the formal steps they would enjoy some “fun” together, Reath said: notably, travel to exotic worlds like this one.

She wasn’t happy.

It wasn’t the distances that troubled her. To a Skimmer, distance was supposed to be meaningless anyhow. No, it wasn’t the distance but the company she had to keep: her only companion, in his austere, joyless tube of a ship was the silent and watchful Reath.

Reath wasn’t
bad
company, really. He was attentive to her needs, and tolerated her moods, and much of what he had to say was even interesting. But his face was blank, expressionless, as immobile as if the nerve ends had been cut. He was a walking, talking emblem of the great severance she had undergone, her separation from the
Nord,
her whole world, and her rejection by her parents in favor of a baby brother she did her level best not to hate.