Transcendent Read online

  Reath murmured, “My history’s a little rusty. Didn’t this Poole grow up in Baikonur? Or was it Florida? One of those paleological spaceports . . .”

  “I like watching him as a kid,” Alia blurted. “He’s so full of life. Full of ideas. Always tinkering with things. Like those toys. He would cut and shape them, trying to make them fly better.”

  “Yes. The shapeless dreams of youth, so soon replaced by the complexities and compromises of adulthood. But his life was so short. By the time he was your age Poole’s life was probably half over. Most of them could only follow one career, make one significant contribution before—” Reath snapped his fingers. “Imagine that! But we, who have so much time by comparison, often choose to do nothing at all.”

  He was trying to recruit her, Alia realized. But for what? “Why would I want to work, for you or anyone else?”

  “It’s a valid point,” Reath said. “In our society of limitless material wealth, what rewards can there be? Have you ever heard of money, child?”

  “Only historically.”

  “Ah, yes.” He turned to her Witnessing tank. “They still had money in Poole’s time, didn’t they?”

  “Yes.”

  “And Poole himself worked.”

  “He was involved in one of the big geoengineering projects—”

  “Yes,” Reath said. “The struggles to get past the great Bottleneck of his day. But what motivated Poole, do you think? I’m sure he was paid. But was it just money he wanted?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  She frowned, thinking. “His world was in trouble. Duty, I suppose.”

  “Duty, yes. Of course everything is different now. But even though money has vanished, duty remains—don’t you think? And I already know you do your duty, Alia, with your Witnessing. Tell me what you think of Poole.”

  “His legacy—”

  “Never mind his place in history. What do you think of him?”

  She studied the playing boy. To her, Poole was a stunted creature, living in a cramped, dark time. And his mind was only half-formed, his speech a drawl. Why, he was barely conscious most of the time. It was as if he walked around in a dream, a robot driven by unconscious and atavistic impulses. When tragedy hit, when his wife died, he was overwhelmed, quite unable even to comprehend the powerful emotions that tore him apart.

  Yet this flawed animal was a citizen of a civilization that was already reaching out beyond the planet of its birth, and Michael Poole himself had a grave, history-shaping responsibility; and yet this man, in a way, would save his world.

  Uncertainly she tried to express some of this to Reath.

  Reath said, “Just think how you would look to him. Why, you’re a different category of creature altogether. If Poole was standing before you now, I wonder if you’d even be able to talk to each other! You and Poole are as different as two humans could ever be. And yet you have always watched him. Do you think, Alia, that you could ever love him?”

  “Love? What are you talking about? What do you want, Reath?”

  His eyes were a deep, watery gold. “I have to be sure, you see.”

  “About what?”

  “If you really are what I’m looking for.” He turned in response to a faint sound. “I think your father is home.”

  Alia was happy to run from the room, fleeing from this strange man and his intense scrutiny, seeking her father’s reassurance. But in the end reassurance was the last thing she got from him.

  In the apartment’s living room, her mother and father stood side by side. Her sister Drea was here, too. Alia’s attention was distracted by the Witnessing tanks stacked up in one corner of the room, her parents’, and Drea’s. It struck her that she couldn’t remember when the others had done their Witnessing. Maybe Reath was right, she was unusual.

  Her family was staring at her.

  And then, as if noticing it for the first time, she saw that Ansec hadn’t come home alone. In her father’s arms, fresh from the birthing tanks, was a baby.

  Reath followed Alia, and stood discreetly to one side.

  Alia found it difficult to speak. “Well,” she said. “Quite a family gathering.”

  Her mother was anguished. “Oh, Alia, I’m sorry.”

  Ansec, her father, was calmer, though distress showed in his face. “It’s not a crisis,” he said. “At least it doesn’t have to be. An opportunity—that’s what we have.”

  Alia turned on her sister. “And you—did you know?”

  Drea snapped back, sibling rivalry briefly flaring. “Don’t take it out on me.” She waved at Reath. “It’s you the Commonwealth wants, not me!”

  And all the time, in her father’s arms, there was the mute, incontrovertible existence of the baby. Bel’s eyes were shining now. “It’s a boy, Alia, a baby boy!”

  Ansec said, “You know how happy this will make us, don’t you? You know how we love children—how we’ve loved having you as you’ve grown.” He cradled the baby. “This is us, Alia. The two of us, Bel and me. Having children. It’s what makes us what we are.”

  “And what about me?” Alia said. “It takes two years for a gestation in the tank. So you’ve known this day would come for that long. And you’ve known what would happen then . . .” It was the Nord’s one iron rule. In its limited space, you were allowed two children; if you wanted a third, one of the others had to leave to make room, leave the ship altogether. “You kept it secret from me. You went to the tank. You planned it all—”

  Her mother took her hands. “It’s not like that, Alia, not at all. We weren’t supposed to tell you the Commonwealth was interested in you.”

  “Why?”

  “In case the Commonwealth didn’t want you after all,” Reath said gently. “You might feel rejected, you see. It is thought to be kinder this way.”

  “But we had to plan,” Bel said. “You see that, don’t you? We thought we would lose you. We had to plan for what would follow.”

  And Alia saw it all now. “So that’s it. The Commonwealth wants to take me away, and that’s an excuse for you to get rid of me and have a new child. You just assume I’m going to go with Reath. With this stranger. So you can stay home with this baby.”

  “But it’s a marvelous opportunity,” her father said. “An honor. Anybody would want to go.”

  “You will go,” her mother said. But she glanced at the baby, and there was an edge of panic in her voice. “Won’t you?”

  Reath stood beside Alia, a tall, calm presence. Suddenly she felt closer to him than she did to her own family. He said, “Don’t worry, Alia. It wasn’t supposed to be so difficult. We are all to blame. But I’ve seen enough of you to know that if you come with me you won’t regret it. I’ll take you to places you can’t imagine. The center of the Galaxy—worlds beyond number. You will be trained, your full potential brought out. Your mind will open up like a flower!”

  “But what for?”

  “Why, haven’t you worked that out yet?” He smiled. “I want you to become a Transcendent, child.”

  She gaped. “Me?”

  “You’re just the type.”

  To be a Transcendent—it was unimaginable. Her heart was tugged by curiosity, pride—and, yes, by awe. But she was afraid, too. “Can I choose to stay?”

  “Of course,” her father said. But her mother cast increasingly desperate looks at the baby, and Alia knew there was really no choice, none at all.

  Chapter 5

  The news of the disaster had come to me thirdhand, through a friend of a friend of Tom’s. Arriving out of nowhere, it was a punch in the head.

  John acted compassionate and concerned. What a jerk. I always thought that at times of difficulty like this my brother never really got it; he never really felt the deep emotions swirling around, and was never quite capable of understanding what you were feeling. He had a role to play in putting things right, a role he fulfilled. But he didn’t get it.

  And nor did his two Happified kids. With th
eir blank, pretty eyes they watched me to see what I would do, as if I were an animal that had been poked with a stick.

  My mother was a more complex case altogether. She fussed around making hot drinks for everybody, her self-control absolutely rigid. But she was hollow inside, and fragile, a china doll that had somehow survived nearly a century. John didn’t feel it at all; my mother felt it, but fought it. So who was more screwed up?

  Anyhow, I had things to do. I escaped to my room.

  I sat on my bed, the bed I’d slept in as a child, the bed Tom had used a few times when he stayed here, and spoke into midair, trying to contact my son.

  I couldn’t place a call to Tom’s implants, or to the office he worked out of. The local communications in Siberia were down, and the networks as a whole seemed to be suffering. I imagined a great gouge torn roughly out of the world’s electronic nervous system, waves of pain and shock rippling out, and flocks of counselors, artificial and human, swooping down to help the wounded artificial minds cope with their trauma. Sentience comes as a piece: if you want the smarts you have to accept the self-reflection, the angst.

  And it didn’t help that right now, as was patiently explained to me, all available bandwidth was being gobbled up by the news networks. The Siberian disaster, caused by a detonation of something called “gas hydrate deposits” about which I knew nothing, seemed to have all the right hooks for the news: lots of gore, some kind of link to the Warming and therefore a grave if-this-goes-on angle, and, last but not least, the aid workers who had been caught up in the blast, a set of photogenic young western casualties.

  But none of that was any use to me. I left my systems trying to make the call to Tom, while I set off more search agents to book a flight.

  The cost of a plane ticket to Siberia, even one way, was frightening. In 2047 nobody flew, nobody but the very rich and very important, or if you really had to. It was cheaper to orbit the Earth in a tourist-bucket spaceplane than to fly the Atlantic. Tom, working for his genetic-legacy agency, had traveled out by cruise ship, taking weeks to crawl around the polar ocean, a way of traveling with a much smaller environmental footprint. But that would be too slow for me. The flight to Florida had already cleaned me out, but what else could I do?

  Of course booking the ticket was only half the battle. Actually being deemed worthy of a seat came next. The booking system referred me to the airline’s counseling service, a man’s voice sounding older than me, fatherly, stern. “Let’s work out why you really want to fly.”

  “My son is hurt!”

  “Flying is a generational aspiration, you know. In your youth you probably flew many times, as did your parents. But then you indulged in many unhealthy pursuits in those days. That doesn’t mean you should carry on now.”

  “I don’t want to fly. I just want to get there.”

  “Is it possible that what you really want is a flight, not to Siberia, but to your past? Is it possible it is not a destination you seek but an escape, a release from the responsibilities of the present? . . .” And so on.

  My phone was implanted; you couldn’t muffle over the handset and say what you really thought. So I let off steam by pacing around the room as this virtual Freud lectured me about the necessity for the “hidden extras” I would be paying for, in terms of environmental-damage costs, and compensation for communities I would disrupt with the noise of the plane, and even clean-up taxes relating to the disposal of the aircraft itself a few years down the line. It was all part of the social-responsibility package the airlines had had to accept years before, to keep flying at all. But it was difficult to wade through.

  “I don’t have to justify anything about my relationship with my son to you,” I snapped back.

  “Not to me,” the empathist said. “Not to the airline, or even your son. To yourself, Michael.”

  “No,” I insisted. “There are times when we need to be with people. It’s a deep primate thing.” I was having trouble keeping my voice steady. “It’s part of my programming, I guess. You ought to understand that.”

  “But your son has stated, on record, that he doesn’t need to be with you.”

  Tom had said that, and it wasn’t helping my application. “A child’s whole life after about the age of ten is devoted to establishing his independence from his parents. And in our case our relationship has been particularly strained ever since the death of his mother, in childbirth. Even you must have figured that out.”

  “Yes, I—”

  You don’t interrupt airline psychoanalytical machines, but I interrupted. “But we need each other. We’re all we’ve got. Tom’s words are only the surface. It’s what we feel underneath that counts. And if you aren’t a complete waste of memory you’ll understand that . . .” You aren’t supposed to insult the shrink machines either. But I meant everything I said.

  I had been with Morag when she died, on that grisly hospital table. And at that instant I had wanted nothing else in the world, nothing, but to be with Tom; it had been as if a steel cable had been lodged in my gut and was dragging me to him. But of course everything quickly became complicated. Tom was only eight; he was too young to deal with his own grief, let alone my own. And in the months that followed, as he watched me sinking into myself, some particle of his mixed-up feelings transmuted into resentment. That awful time had shaped our relationship ever since.

  “But that deep feeling remains,” I told the airline machine. “The tie. And I believe that’s true for Tom, too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. To every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law.”

  “But, you see, Mr. Poole, that overanalytical remark merely illustrates what I have been saying. . . .”

  John came to the door. He leaned against the frame, hands in pockets, watching me pacing. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “The counselor can probably detect your motion. A dissonance between your body posture and your words is a real giveaway.”

  “I feel like I’m wading through cotton wool.”

  He shrugged. “That’s the modern world. Energy-deprived. Constrained.” He stepped forward. “Let me help.” He reached out his finger toward my ear, my implant.

  I flinched; I couldn’t help it.

  For once John seemed to understand. “What’s more important, sibling rivalry, or getting through to Tom? Let me win this one.”

  I nodded. He touched my face, just in front of my ear, and I felt a slight electric shock as his systems interfaced with mine. He took over my calls, and with a few soft words transferred them to his company in New York.

  It took only five minutes or so for his company’s systems to come back with a reply. John, standing easily in the corner of my bedroom, turned to me regretfully. Not even John’s powerful reach could cut through the mush into which a sector of the global communications net had melted, so he couldn’t put me in touch with Tom, and he hadn’t had much more joy with the flights. “No availability until the middle of next week.”

  “Next week? Jesus. But—”

  He held up his hand. “I can get you a VR projection in twenty-four hours. I think it’s the best we can do, Michael.”

  I thought that over. “OK. How much?”

  “Let me cover it.”

  “No,” I snapped reflexively.

  He seemed to suppress a sigh. “Come on, Michael. He’s my nephew as well as your son. Lethe, I can afford it. And you don’t know what you might need your money for in the future.”

  I conceded this second defeat. “OK,” I said. “But, John, I still don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t even know that much.” I hated to ask him for more help like this. But he was right. Better to let him win; what did it matter?

  He nodded. “I’ll keep trying to get through. Leave it with me.” He walked out to his own room, talking quietly to his own implant.

  It was still only ten P.M., too early to try to sleep. I wandered downstairs, where my mother was sitting with the children, watching VR images of a mountain
ous landscape. “Non-immersive, you’ll notice,” my mother said to me. “Immersion’s bad for them so close to bedtime.”

  I told them the news, or nonnews, about Tom. When my mother heard that John was helping me out, she wrapped her thin bird’s-talons fingers around her cup of tea, and raised it to her lips for a cautious sip. She looked satisfied, though she was too smart to say so openly. After we left home she had always tried to encourage her sons to have a close relationship, to keep in touch; she had even tried to engineer ways for that to happen. And even now, even in this awful time when it was possible that her grandson lay dying somewhere, she was calculating how to exploit this latest shift in our relationship.

  I watched the VR images with the kids for a while. They were holiday pictures, of a trip the kids had taken with their father, up into the Rockies. It was a beautiful place where whitewater rapids that tumbled into limpid pools, and doll-like VR manifestations of the kids clambered past sheer rocky walls. I remembered some spectacular vacations we had had as kids, when my parents had taken us to the Galapagos Islands, Australia, the African game parks—places full of exotic life-forms that had astounded and excited me. But nobody went in search of wildlife anymore, because it wasn’t there to be found. There were still beautiful places in the world, where rich people went to vacation, but they were inanimate, like this, landscapes of rock and water.

  But even dead landscapes had changed. You could see how the faces of the rocks had been fenced off and wired over. Rising temperatures were destabilizing high-altitude rock faces by thawing the deep permafrost beneath them. Climbers were another endangered species nowadays.

  I had got lost in thought. Both the children were looking at me, calm concern marking their perfectly smooth faces. They looked as if they had been coached to sit like that.

  I got out of the room.

  I rattled around the house. Maybe I could call a water cab and go into town for a while. Find a bar, preferably nonfloating. Or maybe just walk the shore. But I didn’t want to stray too far from John and his calls. Even then, even at such a dreadful time in my life, I was in his power, and my mother’s. I was in a kind of prison, I thought, trapped into immobility by all the unspoken rules and treaties that had been laid down in my fifty-two years of life with my family.