Transcendent (55 page)

“And there is more still. By reaching around the curves of time,
the Transcendence is awakening to the past, too,
awakening to the rich experience of every human who ever lived. This is an extension of the Commonwealth in time as well as space, to kinds of people who once existed, as well as those who exist now. In the end the universe will be like a jewel held in the palm of the hand, its every facet and glimmering refraction—yes, and every flaw—fully known and understood. This is the ultimate prize.

“Why must the Transcendence aspire to this? Because it is essential if we are to survive. Alia, the more awake you become, the more control of your environment you acquire, and the more power over your destiny you acquire. We must escape from our long dreaming if we want to live!

“And then there is our greater fate. Beyond the walls of time there are greater minds still, Alia. We call them
monads.
Our universe might not have been; there were other possibilities. Why our universe?
Because of us
—because of our potential to grow into a full apprehension of the cosmos, an expression of the objective cosmos in subjective awareness. So you see, Alia, we humans, through the Transcendence, will become the consciousness of the universe itself—and we will, we
must,
fulfill the great project of the monads.

“And all of this is built on love!”

Once more Leropa had met Alia on Earth, beneath the ruin of the ancient Wignerian cathedral. After the intensity of emotions on the
Nord,
it was dismaying to return to the drab, subdued community of undying. Even Leropa was like a shadow. The undying aspired to something higher, but it was as if they had forgotten what it was to be human, Alia thought.

It was almost a relief to plunge once more into the mysteries of the Transcendence.

Now, with Leropa’s guidance, she thought she could see its immense transhuman ideas like vast clouds in the dark, and the thoughts that crackled like lightning between those clouds. And in every direction she could see the awareness of the Transcendence elaborating, multiplying, exponentiating, its vast intellect growing as she watched.

But as they floated through this sky of consciousness, Leropa was not literally a guide for Alia, her words not a literal whisper in Alia’s ear.
This was the Transcendence;
Alia and Leropa were both parts of a greater whole, and yet expressions of it, as Alia’s own consciousness might briefly be focused on a bruised finger. But the mote that had been Alia found it helpful to cling to the metaphor of novice and guide.

And now, here in the dark, Alia had come to learn the truth about Redemption, and she listened to Leropa speak of love.

“The Transcendence loves you. The Transcendence loves
every
human. It must, for love is the full apprehension of another, and so of oneself. Love is the foundation of everything, Alia. Can you see that? And it is love, the cherishing even of the unhappy past, that has led to the Redemption. For the Transcendence to become complete we must redeem the suffering of the past—we
must
—and we can only do that by apprehending it, loving it.

“First there is the Witnessing—a trillion tiny viewpoints like yours, Alia, each studying some corner of the past, some tiny lost life, and integrating it into a greater awareness of the whole. The next level of awareness is the Hypostatic Union, in which your consciousness is
merged
with your subject in the past—and you express your love for her by sharing every particle of joy in her life, absorbing every morsel of pain. A full Hypostatic Union of every soul in past and future with every other, the ultimate logic, would require an infinite effort. But the Transcendence will be/is infinite and eternal; for such an entity an infinite recursion is possible, and so it will/
must
come to pass. You understand that now.

“But all of this, even the fully realized Hypostatic Union, is a mere viewing. And even when viewed the suffering will still exist out there in the past.”

“Yes,” Alia said. She was on the verge of understanding—almost thrilled by the intoxicating ideas. “Even Hypostatic Union is not enough. We must do more.”

“Yes,” Leropa said. “And
we can do more.

“It is as if, up to now, we have viewed the past as a magnificent tapestry. We follow every thread, every life, as it weaves its unique way through the tremendous patterns of the whole. But we have seen the past as a fixed thing, frozen; we have never allowed ourselves to
tamper
with it, to change the slightest detail in the weave—not even to repair the most obvious flaws, or to amend the most grotesque suffering.”

Suddenly Alia saw what the next level of Redemption must be—what the Transcendence had done.

“We have touched the past,” she whispered.

“Yes.” Leropa’s eyes glittered.

Leropa showed her Michael Poole, in a glittering crowd of people, an explosion some distance away, out to sea, frozen in time like a deadly flower.

“Watch now,” Leropa said.

Chapter 46

The flash came first. The curtain-wall of the marquee turned black, saving my eyesight. For a fraction of a second we all stood there in the dark.

Then the shock wave hit us.
Bam.

The marquee was whipped away in the wind. Under the sudden sky the whole world was full of immense energies that roared over me, oblivi-ous to my presence. Around me VIPs fell like skittles, or went whirling away into the air. It was like being overwhelmed by some immense wave.

When the shock passed I found myself on my back, all the air smashed out of my lungs, staring up at a racing sky. I struggled to sit up.

Over the sea, a mushroom cloud was gathering. Small, perfect, symmetrical, it was a return of a twentieth-century nightmare. Around its base great streamers of fire gushed up out of the water. I guessed that we had managed to destabilize some of the very hydrate deposits we were supposed to secure, that the flames came from the ignition of some of the released methane. Now a wind began to rush the other way, at my back, as the huge blast of heat over the ocean began to push the air skyward, and suck colder air in from the land.

I was surrounded by wreckage, scattered people. I couldn’t see Tom, or John, or Shelley, or any of the others. I had no idea what had become of Makaay and Barnette. There wasn’t a trace left of the low stage where they’d been standing.

A camera drone hovered before my face, not five centimeters from my nose. The camera was a spinning sphere the size of my thumb. A tiny portal dilated open and a jewel-like lens glinted down at me. I stared back, bemused.

I didn’t seem to be functioning. I was having trouble breathing, as if iron bands had been clamped around my chest. I couldn’t seem to feel anything, not even the hard ground under my back, or the Arctic chill, and I could hear nothing but a vague, dull roar. It was almost comforting to sit there, while running people, spinning drones, bits of ripped-apart marquee flapped all around me.

And Morag was beside me.

She sat on the ground, not a hair out of place despite the wind. But her face was creased with anxiety. “Are you OK?”

I could hear her, but I couldn’t hear any other damn thing. I answered her question. I flexed an arm, testing the joints. “I think so.”

And then the meaning of our mundane exchange hit me. She was here. I could even make out her words. I stared at her. “Shit. Morag.”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a heck of a thing, isn’t it?”

We sat there for one more heartbeat. Then I reached up, and suddenly she was in my arms, warm and real.

I think I blacked out.

THREE

Chapter 47

Sonia loomed over me. She was covered in mud and bleeding from a wound in her forehead, and she held her right arm clamped against her belly. She yelled, “Can you hear me, Michael? Can you move?”

I pushed myself upright. For a second the world grayed, as if reality were draining out of me again, but the feeling dissipated. Sonia reached down with her good arm to help me up, but she winced. I stood, unsteady. I don’t think I had ever felt so old, so drained of strength.

I leaned on Morag. She had always been strong, but now she felt very solid, like a stone pillar. She was wearing a simple white coverall, the kind of practical gear she had always preferred. But her coverall was mud-streaked and splashed by a spray of blood, somebody else’s blood, and her strawberry blond hair was mussed by the breeze. She was even more embedded in the world than before, when the wind hadn’t seemed able to touch her.

Somehow she had come back: not a ghost this time, not an elusive vision glimpsed from the corner of my eye, but
here.

“You’re real,” I said.

She looked down at herself. “Real?”

“You’re back in the world.” I touched a mud splash on her sleeve. “You weren’t before. You are now.”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it? How strange.”

Suddenly I had a head full of questions, and things I had waited seven-teen years to say to her. But even at that moment, behind it all was a single sharp memory, of what John had said to me about their affair, a grain of pain.

I glanced around. The crowd was actually thicker than it had been before the blast, I thought. Engineers and VIPs, covered in mud and blood, wandered around or sat in the dirt. The VR guests had been untouched by the blast, of course. They walked like glittering ghosts through the battlefield that our event had become; some of them even had drinks in their hands. I wondered if we had a few visitors who hadn’t been here before the blast. It was a common phenomenon: Bottleneckers, they were called, disaster-tourists.

I became aware of the others, Shelley, John, Tom. They all looked battered and muddy, but had no obvious serious injuries—none save Sonia herself, who was shepherding us, despite her damaged arm. She seemed to be the only one of us thinking clearly. I guessed her military training had kicked in, and I was grateful for it.

Everybody was staring at Morag. Maybe the shock of having just come through the explosion helped us; if we hadn’t been dulled by that I don’t know how we’d have coped.

Tom’s mud-streaked face was a mask of hurt and bewilderment. “Dad—”

I felt a stab of regret that I hadn’t been able to save him from this profound shock. “Later. We’ll deal with this.”

Something of his dry cynicism returned. “Well, we’ll have a lot to talk about, won’t we?”

Sonia tapped her ear; maybe she was getting information through her service-issue implants. “OK, EI security are getting ahold of things. Makaay and Barnette are dead. Many casualties on the rig. The EI people are doing a good job, but they are concerned about follow-up attacks. And they hope to get the VR facilities shut down so we can lose these Bottleneckers.”

“What about the police, the authorities?”

“See for yourself.” She pointed.

Outside the footprint of the wrecked marquee, cops and military types swarmed, and as my hearing recovered I heard the roar of vehicle engines, the flap of chopper blades. They must have been on hand to provide cover for this VIP-heavy event anyhow, but they had been unobtrusive, and now they seemed to just melt out of the tundra.

Sonia began to herd us away from the marquee. “The Alaska State Troopers are taking charge of the incident for now. They want to get us out of here, the five of us—”

“Six,” I said. I got hold of Morag’s arm. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going to be separated from her.

“Six, then. The marquee area and the rig will be closed down as a crime scene. We’ll be flown out to a hospital. But we’ll be in military custody.”

Shelley said, “So we’re all suspects?”

We had all grown up with terrorism, and we knew the mantra: everyone is on the front line, everyone is a suspect. But it was depressing to be caught up in its dreary processing.

John said, “We’ll be held as witnesses at the minimum. I’ll make sure we get proper legal representation. I have contacts. . . .” He trailed off. He had struck his usual blustering competent-man-taking-charge pose, and it was briefly impressive despite the mud streaked across his face, his torn shirt, the way his fringe of hair stood on end, caked in dust. But Morag stood here, large as life, impossibly alive, watching him without expression. He crumbled, his words drying up, his personality imploding.

Sonia led us toward a site that was being marked out by troopers as a landing area. A chopper descended toward us, a big old Chinook in camouflage colors.

I asked, “Where are they taking us?”

“Fairbanks.”

“Fairbanks?” That was in the interior of Alaska, six, seven hundred kilometers from Prudhoe Bay.

Sonia shrugged. “Not my decision. It has a good hospital, I’m told. And we can be made secure there. You need to remember that the military’s response to situations like this is always to establish control. Dispersing key components isn’t a bad way to do it.”

Shelley forced a grin. “I’m a
key component.
Gets you right there, doesn’t it?”

Tom, freaked out, said, “Shut up, shut
up.
”

The chopper landed heavily, and a trooper waved at us. Sonia ran toward the chopper, holding Tom’s hand. They ducked to avoid the still-turning blades. Shelley and John followed, and then me and Morag.

I clung to Morag’s hand firmly. “I always did want a ride in a Chinook, ever since I was a kid.”

“I know,” she said. “On any other day this would be a thrill, wouldn’t it?”

I glanced at her. Was she joking? But that was how Morag would have reacted, with dry humor. “Come on, that trooper is starting to look pissed at us.”

We sat strapped into canvas slingback seats bolted crudely to the floor. Battered, bruised, bloodied, we looked like refugees from a war zone—as we were, I guess. Six troopers rode with us. Their faces hidden by faceplates like space suit visors, they watched us, calm and alert, cradling massive weapons.

We took off with an unceremonious lurch. It was true that I had always wanted to fly in a Chinook. It was a design so good it had been flying since before I was born, and was still in operation now, all over the world. But the interior of that old bird was hideously uncomfortable, a roar of noise.

From the air the sight of the rig was spectacular. We saw it through the open door of the Chinook’s cargo bay. The rig’s heart had been torn out by the Higgs-field suicide bomb, leaving a hollow tangle of rusted metal that stood precariously on bent stilts. Whatever there was left to burn was doing so, fitfully. Choppers, planes, and drones buzzed around the rig like flies, and launches skirted it nervously. Away from the rig the sea seemed to be boiling, with immense slow-moving bubbles of gas breaking the surface. The gas was methane, of course, escaping from the hydrate deposits we had meant to stabilize, but had only succeeded in breaking apart. But at least the flares that had ignited in the first moments after the detonation seemed to have burned themselves out.

The chopper slid away from the coast and swept south, heading inland toward Fairbanks, and I could see no more.

Sonia seemed to have run out of the adrenaline that had brought her so far. She was bent over her damaged arm now, grimacing with pain. I wondered if one of the troopers could give her a morphine shot or somesuch, but Sonia was capable of asking for that herself if she wanted it.

Tom, John, and I were locked in a tense silence. We avoided each other’s eyes. John just sat there with his hands clasped, staring at the floor. Morag herself sat, eyes wide, mouth a small bud, her expression unreadable. I wondered if she was going through some kind of shock, too. After all what greater trauma could there be than to be reincarnated?

As for me I felt utterly dislocated, battered by the blast we had lived through, and now suspended in midair in this antique military vehicle, with my dead wife at my side. I couldn’t have guessed even an hour before that the logic of my life would bring me to this situation, here and now, with everything turned upside down.

Shelley said at last, “I wonder what happened to our moles.”

I imagined all those moles burrowing in the dark, plaintively listening for each other with their fine acoustic, electromagnetic, and seismometric senses. Mostly they would have survived; they were surely far enough away from the detonation. “They are probably fine,” I said. “They’ll find each other. They’ll know something has gone wrong, and will go dormant.”

“Yes. But they’ll be frightened.”

John raised his eyebrows. But Shelley wasn’t being anthropomorphic; you had to think about the mental state of your sentient engineering. I said, “We’ll get them back.”

Sonia said, “So we did more harm than good in the end.”

“We’ll fix it,” I said. I surprised myself by my firmness. “We have to. The issue of the hydrates hasn’t gone away, no matter what happened today.”

Shelley said, “But Ruud Makaay is dead. So is Barnette.”

“We’ll just have to fill Ruud’s shoes,” I said. “And, to be blunt, maybe we can leverage Barnette’s death to help us.”

“You think that will work?”

“I bet it’s what she would have wanted.”

John raised his head. After all we had been through, even a bomb blast, his mouth, where I had hit him, was still leaking blood. “That doesn’t sound like you, Michael.”

“Maybe I’m not the same person I was a couple of hours ago,” I snapped back at him. “Things sure don’t feel the same to me. How about you?”

He risked a glance at Morag. “I don’t know how we’re supposed to deal with this situation.”

“Then shut the fuck up,” I said.

He dropped his head again.

One of the troopers took a message from the Chinook’s pilot. The mass distribution was all wrong, she told us; the pilot was actually worried we might have a stowaway. So we were all searched, and the troopers combed the hold.

It turned out to be Morag. Her actual mass far outweighed the Chinook’s systems’ estimates, which were based on her external appearance.

The troopers looked at Morag, and at each other, and shrugged. We flew on.

We landed at Fairbanks International Airport. We clambered out of the Chinook while more choppers, military, police, and coast guard swooped out of the sky, and ambulances and military vehicles bustled on the ground.

Our trooper escort tried to hustle all of us into a military lorry, a heavy-duty armored job that stank of gasoline; the military had held on to the raw power of gas. Tom made a fuss about Sonia’s damaged arm, and demanded an ambulance. But Sonia herself brushed that aside, and we all got in the back of the truck.

Under escort, we were whisked away from the airport, and raced along a straight drag called Airport Way. We turned off before we reached Fairbanks’s downtown, such as it was, and pulled into the Memorial Hospital, where still more troops had gathered to meet us. I had to admire the speed with which all these resources had been mobilized.

Inside the hospital a serious young army officer told us we were to be treated for our injuries, and then interrogated about what had happened out at Prudhoe. He didn’t say anything about our legal status or our rights. John made some noises about legal representation, and he gave the officer some contacts he wanted called. But I already had the sense of being trapped in a vast, inhuman process that wouldn’t let up until I was spat out the other end, drained of any useful information—and hopefully cleared of suspicion.

We were to be separated, we were told, to be examined individually. But I wasn’t going to let Morag go. It wasn’t just my personal feelings; the situation seemed far too strange to allow it. At first the army officer wasn’t having any of it. But I pulled rank. I was a senior figure on the Refrigerator project, after all, and John weighed in with some support; he was always good at that stuff.

So while the others were taken away individually Morag and I were allowed to stay together, although our guard complement was doubled.

We were led to an examination room, where we were attended by a bewildered-looking doctor, a couple of nurses, another army officer, and a black-suited FBI agent from the local field office in Fairbanks. The doctor briskly put us through some medical checks. I was treated for cuts, bruises, a bang on the back of the head. My breathing had taken a battering, my chest crushed, and my lungs filled with smoke; they made me suck down pure oxygen for a while. Otherwise I was unharmed. Then I was put through more checks that had little to do with my health. My blood and DNA were sampled; I was X-rayed; all my implants were interrogated; I was even put through a full body scanner. I expected it all and endured it.

In parallel, the medics investigated Morag. She gave up blood when they stuck a needle in her, her cheek swabs offered up DNA, the X-rays showed she had bones and organs in the proportions you’d expect. But that business of her excess weight clearly baffled them all. And the scanning machines were puzzled when she showed none of the implants you’d expect in somebody her age, no spinal interface, no sonic chips in the bones of her skull, no medical monitors swimming around her bloodstream.

It wasn’t impossible to find people free of such gadgets. There were those who had religious or other moral objections to interfacing so directly with technology, and in many parts of the world such facilities weren’t available anyhow. Older folk especially resisted having electronics stuffed deep inside their bodies; I don’t think uncle George had a single implant his whole life. But for most citizens of the advanced societies of the West, the implants were so obviously convenient, and such a key interface to the services and products of your society, that you just took them without thinking, the way earlier generations had bought cell phones and transistor radios. Anyhow, Morag was bare.