“The Transcendence chose me…”

“I know.”

“But I’m sorry, Tom.”

“For what?”

“Because I’m going off and leaving you again. Same old story.”

“OK. But at least I have warning this time. Have you got any dinner plans?”

That took me off guard. “I guess not. What are you thinking, a Last Supper?”

John and Shelley joined us. John said, “A last beer may be a better idea.”

Shelley put her arm around my waist. “Do you think it will make any difference if you have to go off and slay demons in the far future with a hangover?”

“It might actually help,” I said. “OK, first round on me. What do you prefer, water or wine?”

Leropa and Alia walked in the lengthening shadows of the cathedral’s titanic ruin.

“So you visited him.”

“It was — strange. Difficult.”

Leropa made no comment.

Alia said, “I believe Michael Poole will do what we ask of him.”

Leropa eyed her. “And that pleases you?”

“Shouldn’t it?”

“There is one corollary to our discussion I didn’t want to raise in front of your sister,” Leropa said.

“Corollary,”Alia said dismissively. “The Transcendence believes it is a creature of love. But its language is all logic.”

Leropa raised a hairless eyebrow. “Let us talk of logic, then. You are not the first to have pointed out the ultimate logical flaw in the Redemption program.”

Alia nodded. “No matter what you do, even if you change history to eliminate every element of suffering, the suffering will still exist—”

“In a wider universe of possibilities. Yes.”

“So Redemption is impossible.”

“Not necessarily,” Leropa said. “Your sister was right to intuit that the Redemption is not for those who suffered long ago; it is for the Transcendence itself. It is hoped — but it is only a hope — that somewhere in the Levels of Redemption might be found sufficient solace. At some point we might be able to say: this is enough. And with the past redeemed it will be possible to look to the future — to look outward, not inward.”

Alia nodded. It was a valid hope. But — “If that point is never reached? If there is no solace to be found? What then?”

Leropa sighed. “If suffering exists, no redemption may be possible. But need it have been so? What if humans had never existed at all? What if the Earth had remained lifeless, like the Moon? Then there would have been no suffering to atone, no evil to redeem — no sin to expiate. Perhaps that would be a better state of affairs than to allow ineradicable suffering to exist, without the possibility of healing.”

Alia stopped in her tracks. “Are you serious?”

“It is the final stage of Redemption, its ultimate logic. We call it the Cleansing. It is not that mankind will cease to exist,” said Leropa quietly. “It never will have existed. And it could be arranged quite easily. Remember, the Transcendence can restore the dead to life, with a mere gesture. This final solution is almost elegant. Economical.”

A cold anger burned in Alia. “Is this where the logic of love has led the Transcendence — to love mankind so much that it must be eliminated?”

“This is only a possibility,” Leropa said. “But in what is to come, you must always remember that this dark possibility is there — if Michael Poole fails.”

She raised her hand, curling fragile fingers. And Alia imagined consequences flowing from that gesture, flowing out across space and time, to the far future and into the deepest past. Leropa was a small, hunched-over woman in a worn, shabby robe, shuffling through the debris of an immense ruin. And yet she held the fate of all mankind in her bony fingers.

The first shock of Transcendence is -

I can’t say. The words don’t exist in my head. What is it like, then?

It is like stepping off a cliff. Or it is like suddenly plunging into a shocking new medium, like ice-cold water. Or it is like the instant your first child is born, and you hold him in your arms, and you know your life isn’t your own anymore, and never will be again.

It is like waking up.

When I looked back on my entire life up to this point, it was as if I had been dreaming. I saw all my perceptions of the world, and even my experiences of my inner world, for the partial fantasies that they truly were. But I knew that if I ever got out of this strange state of new consciousness, it would be this that seemed like a dream. But I felt oddly confident, even though I knew I had come to a place beyond my comprehension. I could cope with this, I thought.

But where had I come to? If I had awoken from the dream of human existence, if I had truly opened my eyes for the first time — what did I see?

For now, nothing. It was not as if I had my eyes closed, but more as if I had my gaze averted, my head full of thoughts of other things. I couldn’t see anything because I wasn’t looking; it was a matter of will. But it was waiting for me.

I lifted my metaphoric head. I focused my metaphoric eyes. And I saw -

Light.It flooded into my mind, brilliant, searing hot. All my brief confidence disappeared immediately. I was nothing but a mote of awareness, scorched, shriveled, blasted away. I tried to scream.

The light faded. I was back in my state of unseeing again.

“I know what you would have said if one of your junior engineers, or your students at Cornell, had gone plunging in like that.” The voice, gentle, dry, came out of nowhere, with no source. I wasn’t hearing it, I couldn’t turn my head toward it. Yet it was there even so, a voice in a dream.

“Morag?”

“Alia,” she said, a gentle regret shading her tone. “I am Alia. I am here with you, to help you.”

“I’m glad,” I said fervently. “So tell me what I’d have said.”

“You’d say, Walk before you run. ”

“Quite right, too. Is this the Transcendence, Alia?”

“What did you see?”

“It was like looking into the sun. It burned me out.”

“I blame myself,” she said. “When I was first immersed in the Transcendence, I had had months of training — of mental discipline, and of development of various faculties. Also I have half a million years’ evolutionary advantage over you, Michael. No offense. And I found it overwhelming, that first time. For you it is all but impossible.”

“So teach me how to walk, Alia.”

“One step at a time.”

I felt a gentle pressure, as if a hand had cupped my chin to lift my head, as if I were a child. Metaphor, metaphor. But metaphors are fine if they help you understand.

“Look now.”

I saw a black sky full of stars, all around me, above and below. It was as if I was a stranded astronaut taken far from Earth and left drifting in space. I had no sense of vertigo, though; perhaps that had been edited out. The stars were scattered deep through three dimensions, but they were all a uniform color, a kind of yellow-white. I began to make out patterns, groupings, tentative constellations.

“Stars. But they aren’t stars, are they? Just another metaphor.”

“A metaphor for what?”

It was obvious. “The Transcendents. The individuals who contribute to this group mind. Like us.”

“Like me,” Alia said. “Not quite like you.”

“Am I not a star?” I felt unreasonably disappointed. “Twinkle, twinkle.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “But a special sort of star.”

The stars began to drift around me. Now they were like fish in some vast dark aquarium. The patterns they made became clearer, swoops and whirls and sketches of light. And each of them was a mind, I marveled.

I knew the principle. The Transcendence was not a simple pooling of minds but a dynamic network, of which these stars were the nodes. The greater awareness of the Transcendence itself was an emergent property of the network, arising from the community of minds, yet not overwhelming them individually. It had something in common with an anthill, I thought — or even uncle George’s strange Coalescence.