Transcendent (59 page)

And even that wasn’t the end of it. Think it through, Alia, think it through to the end, to the fulfillment of the Transcendence’s infinite ambition.
If this goes on . . .

Some hundred billion humans had lived and died before the birth of Michael Poole, and most of those lives had been miserable and short. If you added infants who had died in the womb or at childbirth you might multiply that number by ten or twenty. If the Restoration was carried through, then
all
of those lost billions would be restored to time. And the descendants of all those restored ones would in turn be actualized from a universe of lost possibilities.

It wasn’t as if the Transcendence were meddling with alternate histories, spinning off different realities branching from decision points, from the life or death of an individual like Morag Poole. It was as if
every
possibility was being generated in some meta-reality, every human who might
ever
have lived under
any
contingency was to be born—and all these possibilities folded down, regardless of logic, into a single timeline.

“History will be meaningless,” she murmured. “The world will be a hall of mirrors, crowded out by the shining Restored. . . .”

“All wrongs righted,” Leropa declaimed. “All injuries averted. All deaths eliminated. Every human potentiality actualized, the realization of entelechy!”

Even cushioned by the Transcendence, Alia felt bewildered. For a start it would be the ultimate in overpopulation. How could all those crowding Restored be fed, even find room to stand on Earth or the human planets of the future?

But such problems were trivial for the Transcendence. The number of the Restored would be huge but finite—and any finite problem was trivial to a power of infinite capability. It could be done.

But getting Morag back wasn’t making Michael Poole happy.

That one hard fact cut through her chain of thought, and suddenly the bewildering madness of it all overwhelmed Alia. Suddenly she was aware of her body, a distant scrap of flesh in the shadow of a ruined cathedral, that thrashed and curled over on itself.

Chapter 51

I startled awake, spooked.

I turned over. Morag was sitting up in bed, a baggy T-shirt draped over her body. She rocked back and forth, her eyes closed, her face lifted up. I could see her quite clearly, the smooth lines of her arms, the oval of her uplifted face, even though the only light in that pokey Deadhorse hotel room was the dial of a small alarm clock. It was as if she were bathed with light from some source I couldn’t see, a warm glow, like the glow from a hearth.

Her lips moved and her tongue flickered. She started muttering, a kind of high-pitched gabbling. It was the high-speed “speech,” full of mysterious, unfathomable complexity, that we had been able to record before.

“Light,” I snapped. The room’s lights cut on with a buzz, and the room filled with the washed-out glow of fluorescents.

Morag stopped her rocking. In the flat bright light she just looked like a woman, like Morag, unreasonably sexy in my baggy T-shirt. But I could see the way the mattress was compressed under her weight. She smiled at me. “Are you OK?”

“No,” I said. “You know how that stuff freaks me out. Shit, Morag.” I sat up, pushing a pillow behind my back, and pulled the duvet up over my chest, protectively. “Don’t you ever sleep?”

“Not much,” she said. “We’ve been through this, Michael.” She was quite relaxed, her voice almost dreamy. She rocked gently, bathed in that light from nowhere. “I’m happy just to sit here. I like to watch you sleep.”

“Well, it bothers me.” It was true; it stopped me from sleeping. I was always aware of her watching me, no matter how silent and still she was.

She teased me. “We used to stay awake all night, once. You didn’t complain then. Remember that time in Edinburgh?” I did remember; as guests of a nuclear energy facility on the coast of the Firth of Forth we’d gotten to stay in Holyrood House, the seat of the old royals. She said, “You, me, a couple of bottles of champagne, a little baby oil—”

She said this in a seductive, silky way she had always reserved for our most intimate moments, and the memory of it turned me on immediately. “OK,” I said. “It’s as if I can smell the baby oil. But—”

But there was something wrong. She was Morag—I felt that deeply. But it was as if there were another presence in the room with us, another identity embedded in Morag. I had no idea how to express this. I wasn’t sure if the feelings were even clear to me.

And besides, at that moment I felt like shit, my eyes gritty, my throat dry, my head heavy with that overfull feeling you get when you haven’t given sleep a chance to clear it out. “I’m getting too old for this,” I said feebly.

“Then go back to sleep.” She closed her eyes, rocking gently.

I lay back and closed my eyes. In my head I sought the elusive rhythms of sleep, tried to dig up fragments of the dream state I’d been in before I woke. But I couldn’t ignore that heavy rocking, back and forth, back and forth, as the bed tipped this way and that, creaking gently.

I looked at her again. She had turned her face away, looking to the ceiling, as if seeking something I couldn’t see.

“I can hear them all the time, you know,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Voices . . . It’s like a river running, but just out of my sight, beyond a screen of trees, maybe. It’s always there in the background, and if I let myself hear it, it sort of washes through me. I sometimes think that if I could just push through that barrier, step through the last trees to the river—”

“What? What would you see?”

She closed her eyes, concentrating, peering inward. “I don’t know. Sometimes I feel I can almost understand. Like when you are at school, and you’re struggling to grasp some concept. You see it in outline, you grasp a few steps of the chain of logic. But then you drop it all, like juggling too many balls, and it all goes away. Or maybe it’s like a download.”

“A download? What are you talking about, Morag? Who is trying to download into your head?”

“I don’t
know.
” She smiled faintly. “Maybe the answer is in the download itself, and I’m too dumb to see it. Do you think that’s possible?”

“I really have no idea.”

She faced me. She held out her hands, and I took them; she was relaxed, but I could feel the strength in her fingers, the strange density of her warm flesh. “But the trouble we have has nothing to do with my dream-talking. Has it, Michael? Or even me keeping you awake.”

“It doesn’t help,” I said sincerely.

“I know.” She rubbed the backs of my hands with her thumbs. “There’s a barrier between us. Something that’s stopping us from connecting the way we used to.”

“Of course there is,” I said. “You were
dead.
I saw you die. You were dead for
seventeen years.
That can’t just be erased.” I was speaking more harshly than we had spoken before. But at that moment, under the cold hospital-like light of that dismal room, I felt too tired to care.

“We’ll get there,” she said now, unfazed. “We’ll talk through this. We have to confront the truth, that’s all. We just need time.” But as she spoke she seemed distracted again. She lifted her face to the ceiling, her eyes half-closed. And her lips began to work, her tongue to flicker like a tiny pink snake in her mouth, as she started up her strange speaking-in-tongues once more.

I felt excluded, even repelled. “Christ.” I tried to snatch my hands back. But I startled her, and she clenched her fingers. I heard the bones in my hands snap, and was screaming before the pain began.

The Deadhorse clinic was basic, but the work they needed to do on me was simple. The doctor numbed me, set the broken bones in the back of my hands, injected nanomachines to help promote the bones’ knitting together, treated the bruising, and then shoved my hands into blow-up casts, like inflatable gloves.

After that I sat in the out-patient area, waiting for Tom to come pick me up and take me back to the hotel. A clock on the wall told me it was still only five in the morning. “Shit,” I said.

“Indeed,” said Rosa. Her voice appeared before she did. Her compact body gathered out of the air, her robes so black they seemed to suck in the light. In the bright antiseptic light of the hospital she looked totally out of place. She eyed the bench beside me. “If you don’t mind I’ll stand,” she said. “The VR facilities at this hospital are limited. I wouldn’t want to alarm anybody by slipping through the chair to the floor.”

“You didn’t bring any grapes,” I said sourly.

She bent to inspect my boxing-glove hands. “Oh, dear. You have been in the wars.”

“It was fucking painful.”

“I’m sure it was.”

“She didn’t mean to do it,” I said. “Morag. It’s just she’s so
strong.
Her new body, whatever. She hasn’t got used to it yet. I’ve taken a few bruises before. We’re learning together, I guess. This is the first time she’s broken a bone, though.”

Rosa nodded. “The simplest test shows her strength is off the scale, for a person of her height and size. Like her mass, there is, umm, more of her than there should be.”

I looked at her reluctantly. “Do you think she’s even human?”

“I don’t know,” Rosa said. “I believe that inside
she
thinks she’s human, and perhaps that’s what’s most important in the end. But her body is something more than human.”

Gea’s and Rosa’s studies were bearing fruit, she said.

“Gea will give you the physics. When we draw Morag’s blood, we find human DNA. Her molecules are made of atoms, of protons and neutrons and electrons every bit as mundane as yours and mine. And yet there is the mystery of this extra mass. Her weight is measurable, so the mass responsive to gravity, yet it is invisible to our eyes, all our senses. Gea tells me that there are many forms of invisible matter in the universe. Perhaps Morag’s visible body is like the bright swirl of a galaxy, cradled in a wider pool of dark matter.”

“And what do you think?”

She folded her hands neatly in her sleeves. “There are older ideas which may help. Theologians have a long history of distinguishing between the form of an object and its substance, its true nature. It’s an analysis that goes back to Aristotle, of course. The Church subsumed his philosophy to find a way to think about the Eucharist.”

“The Holy Communion.”

“Yes, the host that is at once a piece of bread, and at the same time the flesh of Christ. Morag’s remarkable new body may have something of the qualities of Christ’s resurrected body—indeed, the bodies promised to us all on resurrection. It is a body, but something more. The resurrected body is
impassible,
beyond pain,
agile,
so that you move as you like, and it has
subtility,
so it is totally subject to the desires of the soul. And in its glory, it shines like the sun.”

All this was so much ancient bullshit to me. But I thought of Morag’s body in the dark of the hotel room, shining with a warm light of its own. “Oh, hell, Rosa. Do you
believe
any of this stuff?”

“Not everybody who lived before the age of enlightenment was a fool, you know. Whatever is going on here, whatever her origin—what if Morag is
not
the first manifestation of her kind? If there have been earlier Morags in history, the thinkers of the day will have tried to explain her away in the language of the time, in concepts alien to us. But their analysis may record some imperfectly understood aspect of the truth.”

This was overwhelming me. Exhausted, still in pain, I shook my head.

Rosa was watching me. “I don’t think it’s the nature of Morag’s transmogrified body that is troubling you, though. Is it, Michael? You have her back,” she said gently. “And it isn’t as you imagined.”

It was hard for me to answer this, for I hadn’t yet admitted it to myself, and Morag and I had come nowhere near talking it through. But she was right. “We can’t talk,” I said. “Not really. Oh, we can talk about our old lives, what happened to us, what we shared before she, well,
died.
But even that is odd. For her it’s recent; for me it’s seventeen years ago. Even the memories don’t feel the same anymore. Then there are the trivial things, the little things. We trip up all the time. The world has moved on while she was away, and I lived through it all. But I have to explain everything, like she’s a tourist from some other place.”

Rosa said, “She was taken out of the world, but the world kept turning. And the more the years have passed, the more has happened that she simply did not see, did not share with you.”

“The dead get deader,” I said somberly. “I feel ashamed that I can’t—”

“That you can’t love her? Don’t be ashamed, Michael. You didn’t ask for this situation; you may be in a situation nobody has
ever
had to face before. No wonder your emotions are all over the place. But you’re doing your best, for everybody, including Morag. Just as you always do. I have faith in you, you know.”

“Thank you.”

Rosa watched me carefully. “What about your work, Michael? Is all this getting in the way?”

Of course it was. I glanced at the clock. Not yet five-thirty, but I knew I had a breakfast appointment at seven
A.M
.

I was working hard, because I believed in it all. Since the bombing, as I had immersed myself in the hydrate project, I had thought harder than I had ever before about the context of my life, the meaning of my work. I had discovered conviction in myself, for the first time since I was a kid, before cynicism knocked it all out of me. We had to do this; it was as simple as that. And I was central to it all.

“Gea keeps telling me she believes I am a fulcrum of history,” I said. “
Me.
And you’ve said the same might be true. Even George said it. Now I’ve started to believe it, to believe my own myth. Is that crazy?”

“Not necessarily. But Morag is getting in your way.”

“I guess so.”

“The restoration of a lost wife is a fantasy of redemption. I daresay it was
your
fantasy. But has it made you happier?”