Transcendent (51 page)

“It’s all in here,” he said.

“I know. But I want to hear what you felt about it. You tracked down Rosa to the Order, I know that much. . . .”

He had found his way to Rosa, who had taken him into the headquarters of the Puissant Order of Holy Mary Queen of Virgins. The Order ran a vast subterranean complex, located beneath the Catacombs, the ancient underground Christian tombs on the outskirts of Rome. “It was nuclear bunker and Vatican crypt rolled into one,” George said.

It was in this environment that Rosa had been brought up.

“They called themselves sisters.”

“Like nuns?”

“No.
Sisters.
” The Order had been like one vast family, he said. They were mostly women in there, very few men. “Everybody was everybody else’s sister or cousin, aunt or niece.”

“Or mother or daughter,” I said.

“Oh, everybody was a daughter. But there were very few mothers. I called them the queens. Not that that was the language
they
used.
Matres
—that was the word.”

One advantage of reading too much old science fiction is that your head becomes stocked with concepts to help make sense of such obscure hints. Suddenly I saw it. “Shit,” I said. “You’re saying that the Order was a hive mind. Is that it?”

“There wasn’t much
mind
about it,” he said. “I don’t know what the hell it was. I’m no sociobiologist. But I can tell you this.
It wasn’t a human community.
” He tapped his manuscript again. “It’s all in there. And you know what? It was all an off-shoot of our family, from a deep root that seems to go back to the time of ancient Rome itself.
Our
family. That’s how Rosa got drawn into it. That’s how I did, I guess.”

No wonder Rosa had been intrigued by the strange collective organization of the Reef, I thought. I forced a grin. “You do always say we’re a funny lot.”

“And so we are.” His face was dark. “And now it’s happening again.”

“What is?”

“I once had a friend who helped me figure this stuff out. It’s in here.” He leafed through the manuscript, looking for a passage toward the end. “Here it is.
The great events of the past—the fall of Rome, say, or the Second World War—cast long shadows, influencing generations to come. But is it possible that the future has echoes in the present, too? . . .
I thought I saw the future of mankind in that hole in the ground in Rome, Michael. Or
a
future. I can’t say I liked what I saw. And maybe now it’s happening again, with you and Morag. Echoes of the future in the present.”

“But why now? Why us?” I didn’t quite want to say,
why me
?

“Maybe because we seem to be at a dangerous time in our history, Michael.” He looked at the back of his hand, poked at skin stained brown by age. “You know, when I was a kid I think I never believed I would grow old, like this. I was never interested in gardening, because I thought I would never live to see a tree grow tall. You know why? The threat of nuclear war, of extinction in a flash. It hung over my whole childhood like a black cloud. But the hard rain never fell, and eventually the cloud went away.

“Now a new cloud has gathered over us, every bit as dark and threatening as before. We’re at another tipping point in human history. And who is here trying to show us how to keep our balance?
You are,
Michael. A Poole. Who else?”

“And you think that’s why I’m getting these visitations?”

He reached out to touch my hand, but my VR presence made that impossible, and he pulled back. “Think about it. If you’re right about this hydrate threat—and if you manage to lead the drive to stop it wiping us out—then you will be remembered as one of the most important humans who ever lived. Now, if I was a time traveler from the future, this would be
exactly
the kind of era I would be drawn to, and you would be
exactly
the kind of person I’d long to meet.”

“Shit.” I remembered that Gea had said something similar, so had Rosa—so had George himself, when he talked about the strange circumstances of my birth, the coincidence of the discovery of the Kuiper Anomaly. Suddenly I felt extraordinarily self-conscious, as if a corridor a thousand centuries long had opened up before me, and a million eyes were fixed greedily on my every move.

“George, if this is true, what should I do about it?”

He shrugged. “Just accept it. I mean, it makes no difference. You just have to do your best even so, don’t you?”

“I guess.”

We just sat for a while. Then I said, “It’s morning in Alaska. I ought to go to work.” I stood. “Can I come visit tomorrow?”

“Of course.” As my VR broke up, as his room turned transparent around me, I saw him in his chair, smiling, waving a gaunt hand, his fingers bent over and stiff.

As it happened the next day we hit a problem with the Higgs-field power plant of the moles, and I was kept too busy to get away. The following day was worse. By the third day I was putting off going to see George; I didn’t want to get immersed in all that difficulty again. Tomorrow, I told myself. Or the day after that.

I never saw him again. A week after that last visit, John called to tell me George was dead.

Chapter 43

Even at full speed the journey back to the
Nord
took two full days.

The sisters spent their time alone, shut away from the Campocs and from Reath. Alia didn’t want to talk to anybody else but Drea. She didn’t want Bale; she couldn’t bear the thought of him touching her. And she certainly didn’t want to join in the Campocs’ group consciousness, that pale echo of the Transcendence. She didn’t even want Poole, in his Witnessing tank.

To get through this, she felt, she had to retreat into herself, become again the woman she had once been. She had to be
Alia.
So the sisters sat together, limbs entwined, as they used to when they were small.

But her feelings were complicated.

Alia found herself thinking that if Drea had not been here, then her sister would surely have been on the
Nord
and shared the still unknown fate of her parents. And if that had happened, Alia would be alone. Then she was wracked by guilt that she seemed to spend so much time thinking of herself, rather than about those who had been hurt. If she was so shallow, so self-obsessed, then how could she possibly imagine she could deal with a Transcendence?

It made it worse that they had no real news. The fragmentary reports from
Nord
were little more than a cry for help. As the long hours wore on, that uncertainty was impossible to bear.

Drea thought Alia could ask the Transcendence.

“You could talk to the Campocs,” Drea whispered. “They might be able to contact Leropa. Or Reath might have a way to contact another Transcendent community, nearer to the
Nord.
For all I know there might even be a Transcendent or two
on
the
Nord . . .
”

Alia knew that was too simple. Drea still thought of the Transcendence as a kind of comms network, as if the Transcendents themselves were nothing but monitoring stations, their eyes cameras. But the Transcendence was more than that. The Transcendence was literally beyond human imagination. Indeed Alia herself didn’t have the words to express it. The only way to understand the Transcendence, she thought sadly, was to be part of it, as she had been, and even if she never went back to it again, there would always be a gulf between herself and her sister.

But, she felt instinctively, the Transcendence was not a place to seek help at a time of human crisis.

At last Reath alerted them that their journey was over.

The ailing
Nord
was surrounded by a multitude of craft, compact or slender, robust or delicate. The crowding visitors had come to give aid, Reath assured the sisters. “Your
Nord
has many friends.”

“But at least one enemy,” Drea said bleakly.

As they approached, cautiously picking their way through the crowd of ships and darting shuttles, their view became clearer. And even from a distance, Alia could see the
Nord
had been grievously harmed. The squat cylinder that was the core of the
Nord
’s architecture had survived—it would take the outright demolition of the ship to destroy that—but huge energies had been splashed against the hull, leaving blackened scars and deep notches cut into the
Nord
’s blunt symmetry. Away from the ancient core the superstructure of habs, antennae, sensors, and manipulators was tangled, as if a great wind had torn through that fragile artificial forest.

Some of the
Nord
’s ports were still functioning, at least. The semi-sentient machinery of the dock interfaced with the shuttle routinely, but a bit hesitantly, Alia thought. Perhaps machines could suffer shock, too.

The shuttle wouldn’t let them out until they donned face masks and gloves. Inside the
Nord
there were stretches of vacuum, and even where there was air it was likely full of toxins. With dread Alia pulled on her mask, the mask she had once worn to go into a Coalescence; it was terribly hard to have to don protective gear to enter your own home.

At last the hatches and locks slid open. A smell of burning washed over them, unfiltered by their face masks. And in the corridors, people in masks and gloves swarmed everywhere, cutting, patching, moving bits of equipment. The place was unrecognizable.

The sisters clutched each other. Alia had been determined to be brave, but even in that first moment her strength seemed to drain away. Drea was wide-eyed, unnaturally still, not even trembling—in shock, Alia thought.

There was no welcome for Alia and Drea: no message, no news, no words of reassurance, or confirmation of their fears. It was as if this damaged place had forgotten they even existed.

Reath tried to keep them focused. “It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “The
Nord
’s in chaos. It’s only three days since the disaster. People are just too busy. . . . Don’t worry. I know the way. Just follow me.” As he made his way out of the shuttle he stumbled and drifted until he got hold of a rail: his body plan was designed for planet-living, not for this microgravity scramble. But he gamely got his orientation, beckoned to the sisters, and began to make his way through the corridors.

Alia followed. Drea moved mechanically.

The damage inflicted on the
Nord
had been internal as well as external. Corridor walls had been sliced through and rooms had burst open, their contents scorched and smashed. Great energies had been loosed here, Alia saw with a sense of outrage, vast clumsy mechanical energies poured out in this fragile human place. And if it was distressing now, it must have been a lot worse before, she saw from the ripped-open walls, the splashes of blood on the floor: those first few hours must have been dreadful indeed.

But she was being selfish again, she thought with a stab of shame, thinking only of herself, and how she had been spared the worst of it. If she had been
here,
where she was supposed to be, perhaps more lives could have been saved.

They clambered up through the
Nord
’s levels, heading for their home. Activity throbbed through the ship as partitions were patched, debris removed, fresh goods brought in. In emergency hospitals the wounded were arrayed in stacks, through which medic machines and human nurses drifted. The ship was badly hurt, Alia thought, but it was already recovering. But there were mortuaries, too, more arrays of bodies but full of ominous stillness.

Reath murmured, “I admit this is beyond me. I’m planet-born, an earthworm. Even on a planet the odd catastrophe strikes—an asteroid impact, a volcanic eruption, a quake. But at least the
world
survives; you can rely on that. Here, though, on this fragile ship, even while you were trying to save those around you, and cope with your own injuries, you had to try to stop the very fabric of your environment from unraveling around you. For if you failed . . .”

If they had failed, Alia thought bleakly, the
Nord
might have cracked open altogether, and tens of thousands of humans would have been sent scattering into the vacuum dark.

“You can see the patterns,” Drea said suddenly.

“What patterns?”

Drea pointed to an irruption through the roof of this corridor, a hole surrounded by smashed and distorted panels, and a matching hole at the angle of floor and wall. If you looked into one of those mighty gashes you could see how a crude tunnel had been cut through deck after deck, in rough straight lines. Peering down Alia thought she could make out the green of the Farm, even the hulking machinery of the Engine Room, far below.

Drea said, “They just came blasting through here, right through the fabric of the
Nord.
”

Reath said, “The
Nord
must be riddled with these wounds. The scars of energy weapons, perhaps?”

“No,” said Alia. “Oh, weapons were surely used. But these tunnels are too wide.” Any ship-born, in any ship across the Galaxy, would have recognized such signs.

“The Shipbuilders,” Drea whispered.

For ship-born children across the Galaxy, the Shipbuilders were bedtime monsters. But they had at last come here. And in their voracious machines they had eaten their way through the soft body of the ship.

Reath watched this exchange, excluded from their tradition, his eyes narrow.

At last they arrived at the upper level, just beneath the hull, where their home had been. The delicate superstructure of the
Nord
had taken even more of a battering than its robust interior. Alia and Drea picked their way through a tangle of melted and snapped struts, fragments of smashed dome, bits of broken furniture and machinery. Debris floated about, unrestrained in the absence of artificial gravity, contained by an emergency force shield that shimmered over everything like a huge soap bubble. People picked their way through the rubble, searching, inspecting. The regular light globes had failed, and the few emergency lanterns cast long shadows everywhere, making the place even more of a visual jumble.