Seer said, “Nothing the Transcendence does is for your benefit, but for its own. You must always remember that.”
Alia frowned. “All right. So why is the Transcendence so interested in the Witnessing?”
“Because,” Bale said, “the Transcendence is tortured by regret.”
The Transcendence was at a cusp in its destiny, they told Alia.
Coalescing out of a gathering of humans, it already soared far above the capabilities, even the imaginations, of its constituent members. This was an extraordinary moment in the evolution of life itself, so it was believed, as the Transcendence looked forward to the possibilities of an unlimited future, to infinity and eternity.
Soon, in any meaningful sense, the Transcendence would become a god.
But not yet. In these final brief moments, the Transcendents were still human. And they were not content.
All this was an abstraction to Alia, a matter of theology. The Transcendence itself was still only dimly glimpsed in her imagination, despite her training with Reath. What could a god
want
? . . .
The Campocs thought they knew.
The Transcendence understood the cause of its own anguish very well.
It was the past.
Of the trillions who had lived, most humans’ lives had been dominated by pain and fear, their only saving grace being that they had been short. But the past was the root from which the mighty tree of the present had grown. So how then could the Transcendence give itself up to the bliss of an unlimited future, while its base was stained with the blood of all those near who went before, and had lived and died in misery? Somehow the past had to be
redeemed,
for if not the goal of perfect Transcendence could never be reached; there would always be a deep flaw beneath the shining surface, a worm in the apple.
And so, under great programs administered by the Commonwealth’s Colleges of Redemption, every human child was made a Witness, as Alia had always studied the life of Michael Poole. You were assigned one character, one life thread drawn from the tapestry of the past, perfectly imaged with unimaginable technology. Any and every life was available to be remembered in this way—and not just the significant and famous, like Poole. Every last one of them needed to be treasured, and remembered.
Every one.
Alia shook her head. “I never thought it through. To catalog the whole of the past, to make
everybody
a Witness—and to Witness
everybody
—”
Despite the tension of the situation Reath smiled. “We humans have always been bureaucrats. And the Transcendence must be supreme in this aspect of our nature, as it is in everything else!”
But it was expensive. Though it was far from complete, soon the Redemption program, in all its manifestations, was absorbing a significant portion of the energy budget of the Transcendence itself, and so of the combined powers of mankind.
Bale was watching her carefully. “And that’s what we’re worried about.” He stood up. “I will show you something. Come, we will walk to the statues. Your sister will be safe here, I promise.”
Alia glanced at Reath, who shrugged, out of control of events once more. Drea just sat passively. Reluctantly Alia pushed back her chair.
They returned to the fallen statues. Once more Alia stood before that monumental face.
Bale stepped forward. He bent and gathered up some of the strange bluish sand she had noticed piled by the mouth of the statue, and dug out a little more from its eye socket. “Alia, do you know what this is?”
“Sand,” she said bluntly.
He shook his head. “No.
This
is breath. And
these
are tears.”
The fallen forms were more than statues. They were humans.
In the age of Bifurcation that had followed the triumph of the Exultants, most post-human forms had been more or less similar to the basic human stock—like the heavy-gravity forms of the Rustball, or the aquatic creatures of the water-world, even Alia’s own low-gravity design. And rarely had the bounds of carbon-water chemistry been broken.
But in some places even those basic parameters had been ignored.
“Silicon isn’t an ideal information storage medium,” Bale said. “Not as good as carbon molecules. But in its crystalline form you can make complex structures, store as much data as you like. There are ways to copy the lattice structure, so you can reproduce; there can be divergent forms, mutations—evolution. Of course while we breathe out carbon dioxide such creatures would breathe out
silicon
dioxide—sand.”
Silicon chemistry was not as favorable a substrate for life as carbon. The properties of silicon compounds did not allow for as much complexity of molecular structure as carbon; and silicon did not bond so conveniently into forms that, like carbon dioxide, could be carried in the air or dissolved in the sea. That was why silicon-based life tended not to emerge even in places where there was far more silicon lying around than carbon, such as the crust of the Earth. But in some places, by chance, it did arise, such as here on Baynix II, the Dirtball.
There had been silicon-based life-forms on this silicon-rich world, native forms, long before humans arrived. And when humans came here, they chose to download their children into the silicon, rather than any carbon-chemistry medium: they had made them into these statues.
What a strange thing to do, Alia thought. She stroked the immense sandy cheek of the stone form before her. “Life would be so terribly slow.”
“Oh, yes,” Bale said. “But time is only perception. If you watch them over a century or so you can see them churn around in the sand. . . .”
“Why keep the human form at all?”
Reath shrugged. “Sentiment? We evolved with human morphology, after all; perhaps we are more deeply wedded to it than we know.”
Alia walked around the head of the statue. She felt compelled to keep away from the line of sight of those immense graven eyes, though surely they could not see her; to this chthonic man she would be a flash of motion, gone in an instant. “So now I know what these statues are. I still don’t know why you brought me here.”
Bale regarded her gravely. “These people made their children into crawling things of stone, a form as remote from the basic human as it is possible to imagine. Why do you think they would do such a thing?”
Alia thought it through. “Because they were refugees. They had to hide.”
“Yes. And by abandoning the carbon-chemistry substrate they made themselves all but undetectable, even by a remote sweep for life. Nobody would expect to find humans hiding in stone. . . .”
“Who were they hiding from?”
“Who do you think?” Bale said.
“Oh. Other people.”
Bale touched the huge hand of the statue. “We don’t know why they were fleeing. But after all this time, the desperation remains. Now can you see how much the Transcendence has to regret?”
Yes, Alia thought. And no matter how you try to achieve Redemption—no matter if every human who ever lived from now on spent her entire life on Witnessing, there would always be more pain: a bottomless pit of it.
Bale watched her sharply. “There. You see it, don’t you?
The Transcendence is striving for a goal that is unachievable.
That’s what we think. Yes, we are suspicious of it—and we aren’t the only ones. More and more of mankind’s resources are being poured into this sink of pointless ambition. Is there no better way to spend our wealth and power?
“And what if full Redemption
can’t
be achieved—what will the Transcendence do then? Alia, we think the Transcendence is approaching a crisis.”
Reath seemed shocked by this talk. “You must not anthropomorphize in this way.
The Transcendence is not human,
remember. It is more than human. And it has a cognizance beyond our petty comprehension. Even its regret is superhuman! You must not imagine you are capable of understanding it.”
Bale bowed his head. “Perhaps not. But we fear it. We are all affected by the Transcendence, as a planet is ruled by the power of the sun it circles. And if the sun becomes unstable . . .
We want to know,
Alia. We want to know what the Transcendence plans to do next—and perhaps we can have some influence over it.”
Reath said heavily, “And that’s where Alia comes in, is it? You see her as your way into the Transcendence.”
Bale spread his hands, looking helpless despite his squat, powerful build. “We don’t know what else to do.”
Reath stood before Alia, anger flaring in his eyes. “If you become a Transcendent, Alia, it must be for your own purposes, your own desires, not for
his.
”
Alia stared at them. Much of this discussion went far above her head, this philosophy, abstraction. But these theological disputes obviously meant a great deal to these men, enough for them to have put her sister’s life at risk.
So what was she supposed to do?
She looked inside herself for guidance—and she thought of Michael Poole, the subject of her own Witnessing.
What would Poole have thought if he could look ahead to this strange future of ours? What would he think of us, this obsession with the past—would he think we were insane?
There was only one way she could find out more, perhaps only one way to resolve all this.
She faced Bale and Reath. “I will go forward. I will continue on this path; I will go on to the Transcendence. But you are right,” she said to Reath. “If I do enter the Transcendence it will be for my own purposes, not anybody else’s. Not even yours, Reath.”
He bowed his head.
“Bale, I have listened to what you say. But I will promise you nothing.
Nothing.
And I will not act under duress. You will release my sister
now.
”
He faced her down for a heartbeat. Then he, too, bowed his head.
Alia heard a gasp. In the shadow of the tent, Drea had slumped forward. The Campocs were clumsily attending her.
Alia turned back to Bale. “We were partners. I thought you cared for me. But you betrayed me.”
“Oh, Alia—”
“If you ever harm any of my family again, I will make you pay.”
He said nothing, and he tried to keep his mind closed to her. But she sensed fear. Good, she thought. Perhaps there will be advantages to being a Transcendent after all.
She began to walk back to Reath’s shuttle. “Are we done here? What’s next?”
Chapter 23
I peered through the door into darkness.
I glanced back at my companions. Shelley watched me with a lively curiosity, Vander with obvious envy. In their different ways, both of them longed to step through this door. But it was me Gea had asked for.
I stepped through the doorway—
Wham.
I was standing in the open air, beside a riverbank. Under a glaring sun, the ground was crowded with vegetation. It was ferociously hot and humid.
When I looked back, the door and its frame had disappeared. I guessed I was in some kind of immersive VR. But there had been no sense of transition, none of the usual preparation, no lying down in a darkened place or a sensory-deprivation tank. I was simply here. Wherever
here
was.
I stepped forward, toward the river. My fake-leather shoes slipped on the bare rock, or stuck in patches of mud. Sweating hard, I felt ridiculous in my shirt and jacket, city clothes. I was
not
equipped for this.
There was nobody about, no sign of buildings or vehicles. As far as I could see nothing moved, no animals crawled; there was no sound but the chirping of some insect. And not a single bird flew in the sky.
The river was broad, meandering, sluggish, working its way through a wide valley littered by marshes and swamps. Vegetation crowded, green and lush, vigorous. But with the shock of my immersion wearing off, I started to tune in to strangeness.
There were lots of mosses and ferns, and lining the riverbank stands of what I thought might be bamboo, but on closer inspection looked more like horsetails. Away from the river itself taller trees crowded in thickets, surrounded by an undergrowth of ferns and mosses. The trees were some kind of fern, I thought, with a woody trunk and leaves clustered in strange starbursts at the ends of their branches. They looked like ginkgoes, maybe. Elsewhere there were patches of scrub, low-lying ferns and something like heather.
The place was oddly drab. Everything was a deep muddy green: there was no other color anywhere, no flowers. And there was no grass, oddly.
I stepped close to the water and squatted down. I rustled at the undergrowth, moving it aside. The leaves and fronds were heavy and damp; if this was VR the detail impressed me.
At last I saw something move. I disturbed plenty of insects: centipedes, cockroaches, beetles. Snails and worms crawled through the mud by the water’s edge, and a dragonfly fluttered into the air on filmy wings. Again I was struck by what was
not
here: no bees or wasps, no ants, not a single termite mound.
I made out a ripple in the water, a ridged back breaking the surface. It looked like a crocodile—but the head I glimpsed, the tail, didn’t look quite right.
Then something scuttled out from between my legs. I jumped back with a start. It was a little creature no larger than my hand, running on splayed legs. With four legs and a tail, it looked something like a lizard. But the shape of its head and body were subtly off, like a sketch made from memory. It scuttled back into the undergrowth.
And as I stared after the lizard thing, I heard a bellow, a deep, mournful sound. My heart pounding, I turned around.
Animals moved across the landscape, perhaps half a kilometer from me, a dozen of them in a scattered herd. They had massive barrel-shaped bodies, but their weak-looking limbs sprawled out to either side of them, and they moved slowly, clumsily. Their heads were big shovel-shapes with broad mouths. They were the size of cows, although there were a couple of smaller individuals, infants. But on those splayed legs they had a reptilelike gait; they looked like fat, land-going crocodiles.
The cow-crocs gathered around the tree ferns and dragged at their leaves with their big plated mouths. They didn’t seem to have any teeth. My anxiety subsided. Herbivores, then; I should have no trouble with them unless I got in the way of a stampede.