Reath had done her one great favor, though. He had allowed her to bring along her Witnessing tank.
She could watch Michael Poole any way she pleased. The basic wormlike chain of images, from Poole’s birth to death, was a simple four-dimensional representation, an index. She could allow a scene from his life to unfold inside the tank, with Poole, his family and friends, enemies and strangers, like tiny actors. Or she could magnify it and immerse herself in the scene, an unseen witness.
All of this was utterly authentic, so she understood, though she knew nothing of the technology involved: this wasn’t a reconstruction, this really was the life of Michael Poole as he had lived it, five thousand centuries ago, all of it from birth to death embedded deep in the irrevocable past, and locked up inside her tank for her benefit.
Reath reminded her it was the obligation of every citizen to keep up her program of Witnessing, as ordained by mysterious bodies at the heart of the Commonwealth, which he called “the Colleges of Redemption.” So he allowed her to believe she wasn’t after all being helplessly sentimental in clinging to Michael Poole, her childhood companion; it was her duty. Perhaps he was sparing her feelings, and if so she was grateful for his indulgence. But he did take the Witnessing very seriously indeed, for he said the Redemption was at the heart of the greatest ambitions of the Transcendence.
And so, in the bowels of Reath’s severe ship, as the stars sailed by, she spent long hours immersed in the bright Florida light of Poole’s long-ago childhood. She wished she could be there now, gazing not on this dismal water-world but on the sparkling seas of Earth.
Hundreds of kilometers of featureless ocean passed under the flitter’s prow.
“Reath, what is this world
called
?”
“Names are relative,” Reath said, smiling. “They depend on your viewpoint.”
Any world had a multiplicity of names, he said. The Commonwealth maintained formal catalogs, numbering every star and planet, comet and asteroid, every object of any significant size in the Galaxy. Some of these catalogs were based on antecedents that went back hundreds of millennia, to the days when the whole Galaxy had been an arena of war. There were other viewpoints, too. Those near enough to see this world’s star in their sky would give it a more formal name, as part of some constellation, say; they might even name the world itself if they could see it. Thus the world might have a dozen, a hundred such names, assigned from different interstellar viewpoints. But a world’s primal name (or names) was that given it by those who lived here.
Alia gazed down at the endless seascape. “So what do the locals call this world?
Wet
?”
“You’ll see,” he said evasively.
“And
why
is there no land here?”
He smiled. “Because the ocean is too deep . . .”
There was no world quite like this one in Sol system. This world was bigger than Earth, six times as massive. It had first formed far from its sun, so far out that water and other volatiles had not been driven off by its sun’s heat as it coalesced. As it cooled it was left with a rocky core about the size of the Earth, but that inner core was swathed in a blanket of water ice.
After its formation was completed, this world had been gathered in as the moon of a gas giant. Thus things might have remained, if not for the fact that the parent Jovian, its orbit impeded by the remnant dust cloud from which it had formed, migrated steadily in toward its sun. And the ice moon began to melt.
“At last almost all the ice went—there’s just a couple of islands of it at the poles now—leaving an ocean more than a hundred kilometers thick, over a remnant ice mantle. That’s, oh, ten times as thick as the oceans on Earth. And then a little outgassing created the atmosphere. Weather started, and—”
“And that’s why there is no land?”
“How could there be dry land, Alia? Even if the seabed was rock, you’d need a mountain a hundred kilometers tall to poke above the ocean surface to make an island. No such mountains are possible on Earth, let alone here, where the gravity is about fifty percent above standard. And besides the seabed is ice, not rock.
“Because of the lack of land, it was difficult for life to get started here. There
is
life here, though: life that kick-started on other, more hospitable worlds of the system, and drifted here as spores—”
“Panspermia.”
“Yes.” He nodded approvingly. “And then, of course, people came.”
People? But, she wondered, how could they live here?
Reath pointed. “There it is at last. Our destination.”
Adrift in the middle of the endless ocean was a scrap of bright orange—a rectangle, a man-made thing. Alia felt unreasonable relief to see this bit of human engineering in the immense emptiness of the sea.
At first glance the platform seemed to be resting on a narrow stalk that protruded out of the ocean. But it turned out that the platform was studded with antigravity lifters, and the “stalk” was actually a cable anchored in the deep ice, under tension as the lifters endlessly tried to pull the platform into the sky. It struck Alia as a cheap and quick solution to the problem of stability on a watery world.
The flitter slowed, and dipped toward the platform. Alia felt reluctant to Skim; she hadn’t done so since leaving the
Nord.
So she and Reath climbed down out of the flitter the old-fashioned way, through a door.
The wind was strong and buffeting, and cold on her face, only a little above freezing. Reath seemed unperturbed, though he was so tall and skinny he looked as if he might blow away.
The air was mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide—scarcely a trace of oxygen; life was rare here. But of course there was Mist in the air, the invisible population of nanomachines and engineered bugs that infested the atmosphere and oceans of every human planet. She stood still to let the Mist suffuse her. Her bones and muscles tingled as they were strengthened to cope with the heavy gravity, and the air she drew into her lungs fizzed with oxygenation. The cold was kept out of her body, but she could taste the salt-laden air in her mouth, the sharp, heavily salted tang of the global sea.
She made her way cautiously to the edge of the platform. There was no rail, no barrier between her and the abyssal ocean. Near the edge the wind grew stronger, and in the ocean below waves growled back and forth.
“I’m glad we’re out of reach of those waves,” Alia said.
“So we are—most of the time. Remember there’s no land here, Alia, nothing to make the waves break. A wave system can just keep on traveling, gathering up more and more energy—”
“Like the hurricanes.”
“But we should be safe from being washed away for today.”
Though the platform was high above the waves it rocked and tipped subtly, its anchoring cable creaking noisily. The motion was slight, but very unsettling.
“Don’t worry,” Reath shouted over the wind, “we’re quite safe. It’s just that there’s a cable a hundred kilometers long beneath us! No matter how strong the tension in it is, you’re going to get vibrations, resonances. The cable is a string plucked by the ocean! Why, if the worse came to the worst and the cable snapped altogether, the antigravity lifters would just take us flying up through the clouds into space.”
“I think I’d prefer it if it did snap,” she said. She looked around the platform. Aside from the sleek form of their flitter, glistening with spray, there was only a huddle of automated sensors. “Reath, why have we come here?”
“Why, for the people,” he said. “Because people are here,
we
must come here. The Commonwealth, I mean. That is the mandate of the Transcendence.”
“How will they even know we are here? We can’t integrate them if we can’t find them!”
He held a hand to one ear. “Can’t you hear?”
She frowned, concentrating, expanding her hearing range. She made out a deep thrumming, subsonic, far below the standard human range.
“It is a beacon,” he said. “Audible for hundreds of kilometers underwater.”
“They live
underwater
?”
“Where else, on a world like this? They will come.”
“How? Will they swim here?”
He grinned, his face gleaming with the spray.
She stepped closer to the edge, peering out at the churning sea. But there was no sign of the swimming citizens.
Chapter 7
Suddenly I was standing in the open air.
I was on a plain. The ground was scrubby and pocked by pits, some like the holes you leave when you dig out a tree stump, some bigger than that. The sky was a lid of cloud, washed-out gray-white, that seemed to suck all the color out of the landscape. There was a breeze on my face, and I could taste and smell salt, overlaid with a fouler stench of bad eggs, marsh gas maybe. But your senses are always dull in a VR; nobody wants to pay good money for a bad smell, no matter how authentic.
Before me was some kind of industrial plant. It was a collection of squat concrete blocks crenellated by aluminium ducts and fans. A massive, rusting pipeline stalked away on spindly trestles across the landscape. The whole setup was surrounded by a chain-link fence at least twice my height; it looked to be backed up by an electrical barrier. There was no activity, nobody about; the concrete was stained, the buildings looked abandoned. Standing there, a ghost in the landscape, the buildings made me queasy just to look at them, though at first I couldn’t figure why.
This was Siberia, the tundra, and it was spring. The landscape stretched to my left and right, and I had a sense of space, of immensity. This strip of tundra, between the sea to the north and the forests to the south, stretched a third of the way around the pole of the planet. But it was a petrolandscape, littered by oily lakes, pipelines, and rusting derricks.
Because of that breeze, I thought I must be near the sea. Looking away from the factory, I could see a line of iron gray, an ocean horizon. It made sense. This was the Yamal Peninsula, in the northwest of Siberia, maybe five hundred kilometers northeast of the Urals. Here, I had checked, the Arctic Ocean was known as the Kara Sea. Or I could be looking at the vast gulf at the mouth of the Ob River, a huge waterway that drained a continent. There was some kind of activity nearer the shore, low structures I couldn’t make out, people moving urgently around. Was that where Tom was working? I was ashamed that I didn’t know.
I hadn’t approved of him coming to as unstable a part of the world as this, and had hoped that my frosty silence would have deterred him from going. It didn’t. And now the result of my stubbornness was that he was hurt, somewhere in this depressing, worn-out landscape, and I had no idea how he had been injured or how badly, or even where he was.
In a VR projection you were stuck in the presence of your transceiver drone, which the service provider drops in the destination you ask for. Possibly this industrial plant was the nearest location logged in the provider’s database. It had been the time taken to fly my drone from Moscow that accounted for the delay before the link was established. But I saw no activity within the site. There was nobody here, nobody to ask about Tom.
Then I saw that one of those big concrete cubes was
leaning.
That immense building was tilted maybe ten degrees out of true, and one towering wall was cracked from top to bottom, yielding to the strain. The ground at the base of the tipping building looked as if it had melted, and was piled up in big static ripples, like warm chocolate. Further out, I saw, that pipeline dipped out of its line, too. That was why I felt faintly nauseous. The vast tilting had disturbed my sense of the vertical, already tenuous in my VR state. It was a strange sight, a surreal drunkenness. I imagined the whole plant slowly sinking out of sight, those immense concrete walls cracking and spilling their toxic contents, until the brown earth closed over the ruined buildings like a welcoming sea.
A helicopter flapped overhead, painted bright blue, UN colors. It flew so low it came on me suddenly, making me duck. It was heading toward that township near the coast.
I turned away from the plant and began to walk that way. As I walked the system glitched. The view around me would freeze and shatter into blocks, before reforming again, and I suffered a few strange smells and sounds, a bell-like ringing, and sharp smells of cinnamon or almond: VR synesthesia, bugs in the works. It was a sharp reminder that I wasn’t really here; this was only a phone call with special effects.
I didn’t grow up with immersive VRs. I could never get used to the pale washed-out sensation of the immersion, or the slight mismatch between the impulse to move and the motion itself, and I always imagined I could feel an itch at the top of my spine where data was pouring into my nervous system.
I was restricted to a walking pace, for such were the health and safety rules of the service. In theory you could fly around like Superman, and some people did, but nine out of ten threw up in the process. Cautious, I followed the rules of the game, but it seemed to take me an inordinately long time to tramp across that wounded landscape in search of my son. My anxiety built. It was unreal enough that I felt like I was trapped in a dream, unable to hurry, unable to run. I didn’t want to be here, dealing with this, a faulty VR projection in this awful, desolate, dreamlike place, where buildings melted into the ground.
It was at that low moment that I saw her: a slim figure, a pale dot of a face, a flash of strawberry-blond hair.
She was standing in my path, but ahead of me, perhaps as much as half a kilometer away. She was calling something, and pointing toward the coastal village. I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I tried to focus on her, but when I stared straight at her she seemed to disappear, to melt into shadows and clouds; I saw her clearly only when I wasn’t looking at her.
Phantoms weren’t so unusual in VR worlds. Often the system would wipe over something it was not expecting to see, editing it out of its reality altogether. Or, other times, the system would show you something that wasn’t really there, a construct of badly imaged shadows and highlights, an interpretation of objects it couldn’t recognize. She could be an artifact of the visual processing system.