Transcendent (33 page)

And its consciousness was not just a network of pooled minds. It arose
from
that network, like a frost pattern emerging from the interactions of ice molecules. She, the spark that was still Alia, felt bewildered by the scope and grandeur of its thoughts. The Transcendence was a symphony orchestra overwhelming her with its mighty themes—and yet own lone piping was an essential part of the whole.

She didn’t lose herself. She was still Alia. She was even aware of her own body, lying in its pallet. When she became more adept she would be able to function normally, live a fully human life, while still engaging in the greater community of the Transcendence. It was like—
more metaphors, Alia!
—it was like doing two things at once with different levels of awareness, like walking and holding a conversation at the same time. It would be a life lived on two levels, just as she had seen of the Transcendents on this worldlet.

And now she glimpsed the mighty purposes of the Transcendence, the design behind this grand architecture. She felt its tremendous ambition of joining every human mind into its own grand confluence of thought, a gathering into the ultimate embrace of the Transcendence. Then would come the day when the Transcendence, arising out of humanity, would become the highest form of this cosmic age, and it would apprehend the form of the whole universe. This was the dream of a young, unformed god—a dream of power, but not what to
do
with it, not yet. There would be time enough, a literal eternity of it.

And in the meantime there was reflection.

She found memories. There were the firefly sparks of individual lives—she sensed birth, death, love, sex, tragedy, triumph. Rising above these small rememberings were the vaster memories of the young mass mind itself, as it emerged from a misty unawareness to a cognizance of itself. The most striking note was a huge joy, surprisingly simple, a joy to be alive: a triumphant shout of
I am
!

And yet there was a grace note of sorrow, she saw, a trill of regret.

She became aware again of the host of bodies, the heads from which the mass mind had sprung. The awareness of the Transcendence lay over those minds like dew on blades of grass. But she saw that there were knots in the distribution of minds—knots of density, of resistance, of a kind of stubbornness, of
age.
They were the undying, the ancient core of the Transcendence. And it was here that the regret was centered. Alia was drawn to the pain, wary but curious, like the tip of a tongue probing an aching tooth.

And suddenly she was bombarded by blood, by screams, trillions upon trillions of terrified and anguished voices calling out together. She screamed in response.

Even in her torment she knew what this was. This was the Redemption, the Witnessing of the blood-soaked past. This dark pit, right at the heart of the Transcendence itself, was the place to which all those carefully retrieved memories drained. It was superhuman. It was unbearable. She spun and thrashed.
The Campocs were right.
This was wrong, terribly wrong—

She was awake, only Alia again, lying on a sweat-soaked pallet. A face hovered over her like a lantern, full of concern. It was Drea. Her sister brushed her brow, and Alia felt her hair plastered to her forehead.

Drea said, “You were yelling! Was it a nightmare? Are you all right? . . .”

Alia grabbed her sister and held her close.

Morning came.

Beyond the walls of the shuttle the worldlet looked even drabber, the people even more dull. There may have been fire in their heads, Alia thought, but their bodies were impoverished. It was impossible to believe that such complex magnificence as the Transcendence could arise out of the shabbiness of this thinly populated rock.

Nobody spoke to her, not Reath, not even Drea. They all seemed frightened of her. She had touched the Transcendence, but it didn’t seem to be making anybody happy.

Alia went to her Witnessing tank. It lit up to show her the wormlike thread of Poole’s whole life. At least he wouldn’t turn away from her. Impulsively she picked out a single moment.

Here was Poole, with his son, in a hospital ward. Their faces slack, they sat side by side, holding hands, subtly distant from each other, frozen in time. Seconds ago they had received the news that Poole’s baby had died, after only moments of life, and that Morag, Poole’s wife, had died with him. Alia believed that this was the crux of Michael Poole’s whole life—his personal singularity, his moment when the conic sections diminished to a point, a new quality. The moment when he lost everything.

In Michael Poole’s time, you were born alone and you died alone, but you spent your life trying to get through to others, through love, through sex—or even through violence, the bloody intimacy of killing. In his love of Morag, in the oceanic few months in which their baby had come to term, Poole had come as close as he ever would to reaching through the barriers to another human. But with the deaths he was already falling back into himself, even now, just heartbeats after hearing the dreadful news. And Alia, with her unwelcome knowledge of his future, knew he would never recover, never get so close to anybody ever again.

What would Michael Poole make of the Transcendence?

What would he have thought of her, as she sat hiding in the cabin of a shuttle, cowering from her destiny? Would Poole envy her this opportunity to reach out to the Transcendence, and to allow it to embrace her? Would he have longed to touch other people so closely? Or would he understand her deepest, most fundamental fear, which she hadn’t even been able to express to Drea—that in joining so closely with others, she would ultimately lose herself?

And what would he make of the terrible, obsessive, self-inflicted pain of the Redemption?

Absently she let the image in the tank run on. Poole and his son sat side by side, heads down. But now he looked up vaguely, as if searching for something in the air, a disturbance in his world that somehow broke through to his consciousness even at this terrible moment. Again Alia had the strange impression that somehow
he knew she was watching him.

She waved her hand, and the images dissolved.

Reath approached her cautiously. “How do you feel?”

Alia frowned. “It’s as if I’m trying to remember a dream. But the harder I try, the more elusive it is.”

Reath said gently, “It was a superhuman experience. Literally.”

Or it was like being drugged, Alia thought uneasily.

“You have fulfilled the three Implications. You’re one of the Elect now, Alia. You have entered the outer circle of the Transcendence itself.” Reath’s expression was complex, full of pride and longing. “I envy you.”

“Then why don’t you join me?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, but that’s impossible. There are some of us who can never join the Transcendence, no matter how we try—or how much we might long to.” He tapped his skull with his forefinger. “Something missing in here, you see. The defect occurs on worlds scattered across the Galaxy, following patterns we can’t make out. Is it genetic? Or perhaps there are more subtle determinants of human destiny than genes.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We have our place, we
eunuchs.
Do you know that term? We can serve the Transcendence in a unique way. We are useful—for we are no threat to it, you see.”

She frowned. “The Campocs were right.”

“About what?”

“It’s full of regret. The Transcendence. That’s why it’s driving the Redemption. It’s as if it is tortured. . . . But I had thought all that regret arose from the Transcendence itself.”

“It doesn’t?”

Alia remembered now, a bit of her dreamlike experience becoming more lucid. She had glimpsed those deep dark knots of folded-over awareness, like pellets buried in a loaf of bread. And from those pellets, poison leaked. “Not from all of it.
From the undying.
”

Reath said, “Remember the undying initiated the joining in the first place. They are the foundation stones of the edifice of the Transcendence. And so, of course, they are shaping it. The Campocs are afraid of the impulse to Redemption. But you’ve seen it now. Are you afraid?”

“Perhaps. I don’t know enough to be afraid. The Transcendence may be like a god. But even as it is being born, it is a wounded god. Isn’t it rational to be afraid of that?” And maybe, she speculated now, somewhere in its deepest, secret heart the Transcendence was developing its obsessive Redemption in new and strange ways she had yet to understand.

Reath said, “Will you go back? You must, you know. It must be difficult—I can’t even imagine! But the only way to cope with it is to try, to grow—”

“I want to know more about the Redemption,” she said briskly. “Perhaps that way lies a deeper truth.” Perhaps, she thought, a truth not even known to the Transcendence itself. In which case, it was surely her duty as a good Transcendent-Elect to increase its own self-awareness.

Reath nodded gravely. “Then,” he said, “if that is your feeling, we must take you to the engine of the Redemption.”

Chapter 28

The dust storm cleared, and the forecasters said we could expect a clear twenty-four hours. At least I thought they said that; the forecasts were littered with unfamiliar symbols and novel dust-storm jargon. In a Spain slowly turning into a bit of Mars, the weather forecasters had to learn new tricks.

In that clear slot, Rosa offered to take me on a jaunt out of the city, to “a kind of outer suburb,” she said. “It’s become the heart of my mission here. Even though you won’t find it on any map.”

“What’s it called?”

She treated me to a little Spanish. “The locals call it
the Reef.
”

I was puzzled. “Sounds like a theme park.”

“Not quite,” she said dryly. “Oh—you’d better take this.” She handed me a pill.

I studied it dubiously. “What is it?”

“Protection. General-spectrum. Some gen-enged antibiotics, a little nanotinkering, that sort of thing. The U.S. Consulate insists you’re covered before you get within five kilometers of the Reef. Probably overcautious, but why take a chance?”

After three days with Rosa her ghoulish humor irritated me. And I was starting to feel nervous about this new leap into the dark. I took the damn pill.

A small cab pulled up outside Rosa’s apartment building. A sleek, silent bubble of plastic and ceramic, its hydrogen engine emitting the subtlest puffs of white water vapor, it was done out in papal yellow and adorned by a stylized Christian cross. We clambered inside. The air-conditioning was cool, crisp, and moist, the seats were soft and deep, and there was a fragrant new-carpet smell.

The pod slid silently away. The streets of Seville were empty as usual, and I was childishly disappointed; I don’t think I’d ever ridden in such luxury, and I would have been pleased to have an audience. This pod was actually a private vehicle, fabulously expensive, owned and run by a consortium of the local churches, to whom this Reef was evidently important.

As we moved out into the city’s hinterland I looked back. All but the grandest buildings were coated with Paint, silver or gold; in the harsh Spanish sunlight Seville shone like a gaudy movie set. Rosa told me that the photovoltaics attached to all those empty buildings garnered more energy from sunlight than the Sundial itself; even empty the city made a profit for the nation.

Traveling north, we left the city proper and headed into a landscape that opened up around us, bare and flat. Our road, modern, surfaced with silvertop, arrow-straight and quite empty, cut across the dirt.

We passed abandoned farms, where the dust had overwhelmed low walls or piled up in the lee of the buildings. There were signs of past dust storms, drifts like dunes that had been bulldozed from the road. In some places there had been attempts to stabilize the dunes with grass, but the grass looked yellow, sparse, dry. Along one stretch of road the dunes had been entirely coated with pitch. They looked very unearthly, like huge, oddly graceful black sculptures.

I saw a plume of smoke rising up from beyond the north horizon, where we were headed.

“Methane burn-off,” said Rosa simply. “Been burning for decades. Don’t worry about it. Your pill should protect you.” She tapped a small pack at her waist. “Or if not, I brought masks.”

We began to pass buildings. They were just shacks, boxy constructions with unglazed windows and chimneys, strung out beside the road. Spindly TV aerials poked at the sky. Some of the plots even had little gardens, where stunted olives or orange trees struggled for life. As we drove past children came running out of the houses to stare. Some waved, or made coarser gestures at us, sealed in our high-tech bubble.

When I looked more closely I saw that the shanties and shacks were made of ceramic and metal, sheets of it shaped and battered: material obviously sliced from the carcasses of automobiles. Those “windows” bulged, too; they were windscreens or side windows. One woman in her front yard ground some kind of corn on a metal bowl that had obviously once been a hubcap. A group of children ran by, playing with a kind of cart that ran on “wheels” made of sliced-up bits of an exhaust manifold.

The buildings were constructed almost entirely of bits of dead car.

As we drove on the shantytown shuffled closer to the edge of the road. Some of the shacks became shops and stalls with open fronts. I could see rows of bottles, and food cooking, meat turning on spits and skewers. There were still a few kids giving us the finger as we passed, but here they were crowded out by adults. Shopkeepers yelled at us and held out samples of their wares, unidentifiable bits of meat on sticks. They seemed to be of all races, as far as I could see, a real melting pot. And many of these people were young, it struck me now; there were plenty of teenagers, adolescents, young adults. Compared to the antique stillness of the traditional city, it was like being driven through a vast nursery.

Safe in our glass cocoon, we could touch, smell none of this. Even the voices were muffled. It didn’t seem real, like a VR theater arranged for our benefit.