Transcendent (57 page)

“Irrelevant to what?”

“To the great project of immortality—of personal survival. Alia, if you choose not to die then you are doing it for
you,
not your descendants—because you are choosing not to clear the stage for
them.
”

“So you compete with your own children.”

“You must. That is why only individuals muddled by sentimentality and doubt would choose to have children; it is contradictory to the basic goal of longevity.”

And even the impulses of the genes were served, in a sense, Alia thought. The genes strove for their own biochemical survival. If they could not be passed on to the young, then their only means of survival was in the body of their undying host. This was the final logic of immortality: an immortal must displace her own children.

If we were animals, Alia thought, we would eat our young. She said, “And you have no regret?”

Leropa looked at her scornfully. “Have you not listened? There is nothing to regret. Better to be alone than to be abandoned. No wonder all those out there are flattened by time! This is a choice you will soon have to make for yourself, Alia. To have a child is to open the door to death, for it means the dissolution of self.”

How cold, Alia thought, how selfish. So much for the love of the Transcendence.

They sat in the shabby tent, displaced in time and space, while the undying shuffled in the dirt.

Chapter 49

We were all held for a week, in the secure but smothering confines of the hospital at Fairbanks. We weren’t even allowed out to attend the funerals of Makaay and the others—not even the state funeral of Edith Barnette, a vice president assassinated like the president she had once served.

Morag was an unresolvable problem for the authorities.

As far as they were concerned she had just appeared out of nowhere. In their endless stocktaking of orderly births and deaths her sudden appearance was as jarring an event as a disappearance would have been, the mirror-image of a murder or an abduction. Immigration also needed an explanation for her presence on American soil. And they needed to understand how it could be that she had the DNA of an American citizen seventeen years in the grave.

Shelley muttered darkly about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind. “They’re bothered about a few anomalies in records of births and deaths. But Morag appeared out of nowhere. What about the conservation of mass? Shouldn’t we all be arrested for breaking that little law?”

There was certainly nothing Morag herself could tell them. She seemed to have a reasonably complete set of memories up to the moment of her death, seventeen years before. Past that point she seemed to have some partial information—impressions, not memories. On some deep level of her mind she seemed to know that seventeen years had worn away, but it wasn’t something she could articulate. The doctors hypothesized about parallels with amnesiac cases. I doubted that was going to lead them anywhere.

The FBI seemed eventually to settle on a hypothesis that she was an illegal clone of some kind. I was happy for them to lose themselves in that fantasy; I knew there was nothing else to find. Her legal status remained a puzzle. She certainly wasn’t Morag Poole, the person who had died so long ago, not in the eyes of the law. So she was assigned an open “Jane Doe” file—“like a faceless corpse fished out of the river,” as she said herself.

Morag wasn’t given her full freedom, not for now. She was released into my custody, but even that deal took some swinging, as the authorities had decided I was somewhat flaky myself. What saved the day was a surprise intervention from Aunt Rosa, who used the authority of the Church to back me up.

Anyhow after that week, we were all “released back into the wild,” as Shelley put it—all, to my astonishment, save John. He was sent to a more secure FBI facility down at Anchorage. There were “connections” the G-men wanted to investigate further. His legal status was dubious, but I wasn’t too concerned. If anybody could look after himself in a situation like that it was John. And anyhow, I had enough spite in me to be glad that the feds were giving him a hard time; I knew it was ignoble, but I felt he deserved it.

The rest of us were asked not to leave Alaska for the time being. We all went back to Prudhoe Bay.

What a strange crew we were.

Shelley and I threw ourselves back into the work. I was guiltily glad to have a distraction from the strangeness of Morag.

Tom and Sonia agreed to come back to the project, too. Tom said he didn’t want to see the bombers win, as he had seen for himself the damage the destabilization of the undersea hydrates could do. It pleased me deeply that we were going to continue working together, even though I knew the return of Morag was bound to put us under extraordinary, unprecedented strain.

The rebuilding of the Refrigerator itself had already begun, even before Shelley and I got back to the coast. Many of the techs working on that project were very young—just like the suicide bomber, a technician himself—and a good number of them had been killed. But the deaths seemed to have welded the survivors together; there was a determination about them that “the bad guys” would not win, that we who remained would see this thing through as a memorial to those we had lost. Maybe that was a predictable reaction: we had all grown up sharing a world with terrorists, with the dreary knowledge that with every step forward you took there was somebody waiting to drag you back. But it was moving even so.

The work proceeded quickly. The network of tunnels we had already built, burrowed through cubic kilometers of the seabed, was intact save for the area beneath the rig itself. Shelley needn’t have worried about our moles; most of them still functioned, just as I had hoped. Once the signals stopped coming they just sat patiently in their tunnels, waiting for we contrary humans to figure out what we wanted to do next.

The oil rig we had used as the base of the project was wrecked beyond usefulness, however. A whole new project to dismantle it safely was soon under way, an enormous undertaking in itself. A new nitrogen liquefaction plant would be set up on a platform not far from the site of the rig, anchored to the seabed. Once that was in place and attached to our network we would start her up again, and finish the analysis of our prototype system, work we had barely begun on the fatal day of the explosion.

And after that, with our proof of concept in place, we would go cap in hand to the authorities for backing for a wider rollout. The loss of Barnette had been a huge shock, but the whole incident had raised the profile of the project, and we had every reason to hope that in the end the bombing would do us more harm than good.

As we began to move forward again, the work was pleasing. We were all helping each other recover—and we were, maybe, saving the world in the process. It was deeply satisfying and thoroughly absorbing.

In the middle of all this, I found Morag a distraction. Can you believe that?

We ate together, walked, slept together.

It was a joy, of course, to hold her, to immerse myself in her scent, her warmth, the way her hair curled against my chest—sensations my mind had forgotten but my body remembered. It was as if I was suddenly made whole again.

We didn’t have sex, though. I wasn’t sure why. My body responded to her closeness, and I thought hers did, too. But somehow it didn’t feel right. Maybe it was something to do with the strangeness of her new body, a density I could feel when I touched her. But the truth may have been simpler. I was seventeen years older since the last time, though she hadn’t aged at all; maybe I didn’t want to disappoint her.

Morag wasn’t freaked. “Give it time,” she said. “It’s not as if either of us is supposed to know how to handle this. I mean, how many support groups are there for husbands whose dead wives have come back to life? We’ll find our way through. . . .”

Just as I’d said to Tom. But soon I wasn’t sure I believed it myself.

When we talked we did fine, so long as we talked about the past, the years we had in common. She was interested in my work, because she was interested in me.

But if we talked about the wider world she quickly grew confused, and even, I feared, bored. She had been out of the loop for seventeen years, after all. She had no memories of 2033, for instance; she was like a coma victim who had slept through the whole thing, and the transformation of global society wrought by the Stewardship and the Happy Anniversary strike was something she was learning about, not something she had lived through, as I had.

I was ripped up by guilt to feel this way, as if I somehow wasn’t deserving of the strange miracle of her return. But being with Morag was—a dislocation. I really was relieved to get away from her, to get back to work, to normality.

She continued to be subjected to examinations by federal-agency scientists and doctors. I think they might have left her alone if not for that strange anomaly of her weight.

Rosa, too, or anyhow her VR presence, was a frequent companion for Morag, and so was Gea, manifested in the form of her little rolling robot. Charmingly, Morag remembered the toy that had gathered dust on uncle George’s shelf for decades. They would sit with her, hour after hour, the bent-over little old woman in black and the absurd robot, gently interrogating her. I was happy about this; I suspected they had a better chance of figuring out some aspect of the truth behind Morag’s reincarnation than any number of government doctors.

I was also keen for Tom to spend some time with his mother. He was very reluctant at first. He surely didn’t want to get hurt again. Or maybe some deeper instinct was operating, some aspect of Tom’s humanity blocking her out, because
this couldn’t be her.
But he accepted he had to deal with the situation. And so they spent time together, away from me, away from Sonia. I knew it wasn’t making him happy, though.

After a couple of weeks we got a call from John in Anchorage. He was to be released at last, and the FBI had reconstructed the story of the bombing. So Tom and I flew down to Anchorage to collect him, and to learn the truth.

Tom, John, and I sat in a small room in the Anchorage FBI field office.

John looked healthy enough. He was clean-shaven; he had even managed to get his hair cut. But you could tell he had been living in the same set of clothes for a couple of weeks, even though they had been laundered and repaired; there were faint traces of bloodstains on one jacket sleeve.

And there was a hunted look in his eyes, almost indefinable, but there. After all he had spent fifteen days in custody at the whim of a vast system, without charges, without information on the process he was being put through. “Did me good to see the other side of the bars for once,” he told me when we met up. But I could see that was just a front, that he was never going to sleep so easily again. My stab of unholy glee when I first heard he was going to be detained now made me ashamed.

But I knew that Morag had spent some time with John, as a VR projection from our base at Prudhoe Bay. When I turned up in Anchorage I had no idea how those sessions had gone. All John had said was how awkward she seemed with the VR technology, which had moved on hugely since she had disappeared from the world. I had yet to work through my issues over this; we didn’t discuss it.

We studied VR images of our bomber. His name was Ben Cushman. He had been twenty-three years old. I hadn’t known him personally, but his personnel file described him as one of EI’s best and brightest young talents. Not only that, I was shocked to learn, he was married. He even had a kid, a three-year-old girl, a cute little button. His young wife, a college sweetheart in her pretty newlyweds’ house in Scranton, was now a widow, and that little girl would probably not even remember her father.

Tom said, “My God, he was younger than me. And he seems so normal. I thought he’d be some kind of zealot, or so stupid he was easily manipulated, or else he’d just be crazy. But he was none of those things, was he?”

No, he wasn’t. Cushman was intelligent, from a reasonably secure background, successful in his own career. There were none of the usual risk factors of suicide in his background: no mood disorders or schizophrenia, no substance abuse, no history of previous attempts on his own life.

“And he had a kid,” I said. “Who kills himself if he has a three-year-old daughter? That’s what I can’t figure out.”

John said grimly, “But you don’t need to be crazy, or ignorant, or desperately poor, or blinded by ideology, or in any way disturbed to become a suicide bomber. They are just like you and me—like Ben Cushman, here. The feds understand; they’ve had to figure it out. And in the last couple of weeks I’ve learned more about it than I ever wanted to know . . .”

There had been suicide bombers throughout history, he said, all the way back to Jewish Zealots who had attacked the imperial Romans back in the first century, and the Islamic Assassins in the Middle East in the eleventh century, even the Japanese kamikaze pilots of the Second World War. The modern wave of suicide attacks had begun with a truck-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the 1980s. Since then the psy-chologists and anthropologists and others had had sixty years of experience in figuring out the patterns behind such attacks, and the individuals behind them.

“Except it’s not usually the individuals that count,” John said. “It’s the organization.”

Tom leaned forward. “What organization?”

Cushman, it turned out, had been a member of a radical anticonservation group who called themselves the Multipliers. John showed us a VR clip of Cushman himself, speaking brightly, standing at attention, a smile on his face.
“Be fertile and multiply. Fill the Earth, and instill fear and terror into all the animals of the Earth and birds of the sky. . . .”

“This is from his ‘suicide note,’ ” John said.

“Biblical,” Tom said.

“Yes. God’s mandate to Noah.”

The Multipliers were an extremist group who embraced the changes the world was going through. Let the climate collapse, they said, let the Die-back finish off the animals and plants and birds and fishes. After all there was no likely scenario in which
people
would go extinct. We should follow Noah’s mandate to be fertile and multiply—even if the end result was that we would finish heaped up in vast domed arcologies on an otherwise uninhabitable planet. And so they opposed organizations like EI with their vast ambitions to change the course of events, to save things.