Transcendent Page 11

  And yet the Unifier’s project had a long-lasting impact. If only briefly he had spread a common culture across a significant fraction of the Galaxy’s geography. Not since the collapse of the Coalition had the successors of mankind recalled that they all once shared the same warm pond.

  Reath said, “Retrospectively historians call the Unifier’s brief empire the Second Integrality of Mankind—the First being the Coalition. The Unifier planted the seeds of a post-Bifurcation unity. But it took a long time before those seeds took root.”

  It was ten thousand years, in fact, before mankind began to act once more with a semblance of unity. And once again that unity required a common cause.

  Mankind still controlled the Galaxy. But that Galaxy was a mere puddle of muddy light, while all around alien cultures commanded a wider ocean. Now those immense spaces became an arena for a new war. As in the time of the Unifier, disparate human types were thrown into the conflict; new subspecies were even bred specifically to serve as weapons. This war continued in various forms for a hundred thousand years.

  “An unimaginable length of time,” Reath said, shaking his head. “Why, those who concluded the war weren’t even the same species as those who started it! And yet they fought on.”

  The war didn’t so much end as fizzle out. Like the Unifier, mankind was defeated by the sheer scale of the arena and, exhausted, fell back to its home Galaxy—though relics were left stranded to fend for themselves, far from home. The long unity of the Third Integrality was lost.

  “But we didn’t return to complete fragmentation, not quite,” Reath said. “For now a new force began to emerge in human politics: the undying.”

  Almost since the time of Michael Poole, there had been undying among the ranks of mankind. Some of these were engineered to be so, by humans or even by nonhumans, and others were the children of the engineered. Of course none of these were truly “immortal”; it was just that they couldn’t foresee a time when they would die. They emerged and died in their own slow generations, a subset of mankind who counted their lives in tens of millennia or more.

  The hostility of mortal mankind to these undying was relentless. It pushed the undying together, uniting them for common protection—even if, often, in mutual loathing. But they were always dependent on the mass of mankind. Undying or not, they were still human; if the rest of humanity were to be destroyed, it was doubtful indeed if the undying could survive long. So while their view of the world was very different from that of the mortals, the undying ones needed their short-lived cousins.

  The undying had rather enjoyed the long noon of the Coalition. Stability and central control was what they sought above all else. To them the Coalition’s collapse, and the churning ages of Bifurcation that followed, were a catastrophe.

  When, two hundred thousand years after the time of Michael Poole, the storm of extragalactic war at last blew itself out, the undying decided enough was enough. In this moment of human fragmentation and weakness, they began to act. They set about knitting the scattered scraps of mankind into a new Integrality—the Fourth—which they would call the Commonwealth.

  The new Commonwealth crept across the bruised stars. It was a slow process. By Alia’s time, since the founding of the Commonwealth three hundred thousand years had worn away; it was a remarkable thought that the great project of the Fourth Integrality had already taken most of human history. But the undying were patient.

  And meanwhile they began a program to share their own longevity with as many mortals as possible. Even this was dedicated to the interests of the undying themselves—for, whatever their origins among the multiple subspecies of mankind, the new undying would quickly inherit the values and concerns of those who engineered their emergence.

  Reath was enthusiastic. “It’s really a wonderful vision, Alia. The undying are no elite. They are making us like themselves, giving us the gift of their own unimaginably long lives. . . .”

  But this cold calculation repelled Alia. It was as if the cold kiss of an undying transformed a mortal into one of them, causing her to become infected with their long inhuman perspectives. It was a plague of nondeath, she thought uneasily.

  Reath breathed, “And they conceived of another tremendous project. At the heart of the Commonwealth the undying began to build the Transcendence. The undying dream of a new form of human life, a higher form—the betterment of us all achieved through a new unity. A dream, a wonderful dream! . . .”

  Alia turned back to the Witnessing tank, set to a random moment in Poole’s sixth decade, a three-dimensional slice cut out of his four-dimensional life. How strange it was that she should be united in this way with Michael Poole—he at the very beginning of mankind’s great adventure, and she, perhaps, at its end. But she was not unique. In principle, the Transcendence ordered, every human child must participate in the Witnessing of the past.

  It was a strange fact that for most of mankind the business of the Witnessing, and the wider program of Redemption Reath had hinted at, was the most visible manifestation of the nascent Transcendence’s ambitions. But, Alia thought now, how strange it was that the Transcendents, while reaching for the future, should be so obsessed with the past.

  She tried to express this to Reath.

  “Redemption is the will of the Transcendence,” he said peremptorily. “And so to understand the Transcendence you must understand the Redemption.”

  “But what difference does it make? Michael Poole never knew I’ve been watching him all my life.”

  “It certainly makes a difference to us, doesn’t it? The only alternative to knowing is not to know, to ignore all the suffering of the bloodstained generations that preceded us. Wouldn’t that diminish us?”

  “I don’t know,” Alia said honestly.

  “We have time to explore this later.” He stood up. “This has been a rich conversation. You’ve given me much to think about, Alia.”

  “I have? But you’re the teacher.”

  He smiled. “I keep telling you. The wisdom you need is within yourself, not in me. And I think you’re learning how to find that wisdom very well . . . Do you feel you are ready for the Second Implication?”

  She took a deep breath. “Let’s do it.”

  “Tomorrow, then, we will make a new landfall.”

  After he left, idly she let the tank projection run forward.

  There was Poole, clambering over that strange reef of broken machinery. Hot, dirty, he seemed troubled, agitated; he seemed to be trying to reach something, or someone.

  And then he turned and looked up, out of the tank, directly into Alia’s eyes.

  She gasped. She clapped her hands, and the Witnessing tank cleared. The image of Poole disappeared, that stern accusing stare evaporating in a blur of cubical pixels.

  That was not supposed to happen.

  Chapter 11

  I ordered a pod bus to take me back to the airport.

  The pod, not much more than a dozen seats in a gleaming glass bubble and a hydrogen-fuel engine hidden in the floor, rolled silently up to my mother’s front door. There was one other passenger, apparently airport-bound like me. I clambered aboard with my suitcase. Embarrassingly my mother kissed me good-bye on the step. The pod sealed itself up and hissed away.

  We worked our way out into the road system, the bus’s own local sentience tying into a system-wide intelligence mediated by a sky full of satellites and an invisible lacing of microwave signals. The traffic gradually built up, until we had in view, oh, at least twenty vehicles whirring away along the silvertop: pod buses like mine, cabs, delivery trucks, transport for disabled people, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks. My bus, as it swam into this stream, attached itself to more of its kind, nose to tail, until we were in a train of eight or ten pods, rolling easily along the road. I could see the heads of my fellow passengers in the bright blisters of the other pods. Every so often other pods would join us, or the train would crack open, releasing a pod to peel off down a slip road to
perform some local pickup or dropoff.

  We moved pretty fast on the open road, maybe a hundred kilometers an hour, and in the few busy stretches we could be tailgating the vehicle in front, just centimeters away. It was traffic moving at speeds and with such closeness that would once have scared me to death. But of course nobody was driving, no human being. We passengers in our glass bubbles were precious treasures cradled by metal and ceramic and electronic intelligence, washed along the road system in safety and silence—and with no more pollution than a puff of water vapor here and there, the residue of hydrogen burning in oxygen.

  We kept to the silvertop stripe. Painted down the centerline of the old tarmac it was modern smart-concrete, embedded with miniature processors: self-diagnosing and self-repairing, it should need no maintenance for decades. But away from the silvertop whole lanes had been abandoned, and the old tarmac surface was crumbling, the defiant green of weeds pushing through the black, the first stage of nature’s recovery. There was a nostalgic tug when you looked out over those disintegrating acres of black stuff. I imagined the great unending streams of traffic, millions of tons of metal and glass and gasoline, that had once poured along these highways. And off the road you could see more haunting sights: abandoned gas stations and motels and shopping malls, all part of the vast infrastructure that had once sustained that river of traffic, and in turn fed off it.

  How strange it is that all the cars have gone!

  Of course it was economics, not environmental sensitivity, that killed the automobile.

  There was a tipping point in the 2020s. For decades the national economy, and our political freedom to move, had been utterly constrained by our dependence on oil. And now the oil was running out: the engineers had to start fires in the wells to force out the last of the oil, or send down microbes to detach it from pores in the reservoir rocks. At home we were suffering from price spikes, blackouts, sabotage, and we were getting drawn into increasingly messy conflicts over the last dwindling supplies, in the Middle East, Central Asia. And then there was the Warming, whose distressing effects, and link to the carbon economy, were increasingly apparent. In retrospect it was a ridiculous time, a time of hysteria and desperation—and of growing awareness. The coup in Saudi Arabia was the last straw. The non-OPEC oil had long since dried up, and the taps being closed on the world’s largest remaining fields, even briefly, was an economic blow that caused layoffs and stagflation.

  Enough is enough, said President Amin, the second woman head of state. By the time she took the White House in 2024, freeing America from its dependence on oil was at last politically possible. Amin, the right woman at the right time, articulated a profound but deceptively simple dream of an America accepting a new destiny—an America that cared about its responsibility for the future of mankind “as far as we, on our shining hill, can see.” One day this vision would lead to the Stewardship.

  But first we needed new strategies for energy and transport.

  Amin put together the first version of our modern power infrastructure strategy, with distributed generation and a reliance on hydrogen and nuclear power—and the nukes would soon be replaced by Higgs plants. Of course there was resistance. The political highlight of Amin’s first term was a stupendous battle between the legislators and Exxon-Mobil-Shell-BP, the last of the great carbon conglomerates. And as OPEC saw its power base disappearing we faced external threats, too.

  And, even more traumatically, we had to be weaned off the automobile.

  It turned out to be simple, politically. In the longer term we were to switch to a new transport paradigm based on hydrogen, biofuels, and electric cells. But for now, as we gave up the oil, Amin enforced drastically improved fuel efficiency, and imposed new environmental and future taxes, reflecting the true price of an auto from its manufacture through its injection of carbon into the air. This “Full Social Cost Pricing” as the economists called it, just priced private cars out of reach.

  The transition happened overnight, like a change of fashion. It was amazing how, when the cost of gas got high enough, you suddenly discovered you really didn’t need to drive so much after all. Instead you caught the bus and the train, of which there were suddenly plenty, or you walked. You shopped where you lived: there was a revival of “village ethic,” as local clinics and schools and shops started to flourish, providing everything you needed within walking distance. And there was a boom in comms facilities. As our physical transport capacity declined we all engaged in a “virtual economy”: telecommuting suddenly matured.

  It felt easy. We were all surprised by how little we actually needed to drive. But of course the dislocation was staggering.

  The impact on Detroit alone was bad enough, as the old factories either closed or painfully retooled for the manufacture of a much reduced volume of smart new hydrogen-economy vehicles like pod buses. A whole slew of supplier industries had to pivot or fold. The oil infrastructure had to be renovated or replaced to handle the new hydrogen and biofuel paradigm. Meanwhile there was a massive relocation of businesses out of the city centers, and of people back in. Some more modern communities, such as whole stretches of Greater Los Angeles, were suddenly rendered impractical, uninhabitable without the car; property values went crazy. Agriculture was an industry as dependent on its distribution networks as any other, and food supplies boomed and crashed as we all tried to adjust.

  Of course it was a huge risk. The nation as a whole had grown rich and powerful in a world economy built on hydrocarbon fuels; shifting that fundamental basis posed dangers politically and economically. But we had made it through vast economic transitions before, such as when oil had overtaken coal around 1900. After just a few years things began to get better, and the change became so embedded it seemed odd we hadn’t taken the leap much earlier. In the end it was just a matter of will, which Amin managed to assemble.

  I was pursuing my nuclear-engineering career through this whole period, and I had to work my way through it. Despite the boom in VR technology I found myself spending a lot more time than I would have wanted to away from home. Maybe that contributed to the crisis my family faced later. Anyhow, we all got through it. I guess it was a necessary adjustment, whatever the cost.

  But Amin’s policies, focusing on domestic issues, had a downside. America had turned inward on itself during a particularly nasty decade. It was the Warming, of course. Access to water was the focus of many battlegrounds, from the Nile to the Amazon and even the Danube, but energy wars were also increasingly a hazard. The changing climate wiped out whole nations—even the Netherlands was depopulated. America wasn’t immune; there were droughts in the corn belt, one-off calamities like the New Orleans hurricane. All over the planet there was famine, disease, and desertification, and drifting flocks of refugees. When the oil economy collapsed the petrostates began to implode with startling rapidity, causing a whole new set of problems.

  And in all this America, the only nation with the real power to help, obsessing over losing the automobile, did nothing. Our inwardness ended only with the Happy Anniversary flash-bombing of 2033, a real wake-up call. After that came the launch of the Stewardship under Edith Barnette, once Amin’s veep: America’s “Marshall Plan for a bruised world.” It began by us baling out the petrostates as a few years earlier we had baled out Detroit.

  By then President Amin had paid her own price, in her assassination a week after she left office. But she had changed the world.

  I used to try to explain all this to Tom. He was ten years old when Amin was assassinated; he remembers that trauma even if the greater geopolitical transformations passed him by at the time.

  I thought he would want to know about the lost freedoms of the automobile age, a time when you could go where you wanted as fast as you wanted. It had been part of our birthright, we thought. I still remember how proud I was of my first car, a beat-up 2010 Ford, which I used to polish until it shone in the Florida sun. I missed driving—not just the freedom of it, but driving itself, a socia
l interaction of a unique kind you got as you wrestled your way through heavy traffic on a Friday rush hour. Vanished skills, abandoned pleasures.

  But Tom would stare at images of the vast streams of traffic that had flowed along the abandoned roads only a few years before, and at the poison that spread out from those crawling rivers of red lights and shining metal, blackening the land and turning the air over the cities the color of a Martian sky. And he would flick on links to accident statistics: how many died every year? No dream of freedom could possibly have seemed worth the price to Tom, who had never owned his own car, and never would.

  I only saw one private car during that ride to the airport. I recognized the model. It was one of the new Jeeps, with six tires as tall as I am and a slick waterproof underside, and a little chimney stack from which it would vent its harmless hydrogen-fuel exhaust, water laced with a few exotic hydrocarbon by-products. Its cabin was perched on top of its body, a bright glass bubble. Some of these models had seats that turned into bunks, and little kitchens and toilets, and windows you could opaque to a silvery blankness. You could live in there. I felt an unwelcome stab of envy.

  Its driver must have been seventy at least. Perhaps when the final generation of driver-nostalgics died off, I thought, so would the very last of the private cars. In the meantime, that guy was no doubt paying plenty for his fix.

  But I still miss that old Ford of mine.

  At the airport the check-in process was thorough, with cheek-swab DNA verification tests, neurological scans, and full-body imaging to make sure I wasn’t carrying a pathogen in my bloodstream or a knife in a hollowed-out rib.