So much for theory. I wanted to see the Transcendence itself. I looked up.

I saw more stars, swarms of them flocking in patterns that elaborated scale upon scale, rising up as far as I could see. And at the very limit of my vision the shifting constellations seemed to merge into a mist, and then a bright point. That ultimate unity was the consciousness of the Transcendence itself, arising out of the interactions of the community of star-minds on which it was based.

When I looked around I could see the same point-like unity whichever way I looked. An impossible geometry, of course, but a neat metaphor.

At Alia’s subtle nudging, I widened my perceptual field further.

Moving through the flocks of stars were darker shapes, more elusive. Sometimes the stars would settle on their velvet surfaces, and I would make out the glimmer of an outline, a complex morphology. But then the stars would rise up again like startled birds, and the form would be lost.

“These are the structures of the mind of the Transcendence,” Alia said. “Ideas. Beliefs. Understandings. And memories — many, many memories.”

I saw one form that was a little different from the rest — compact, almost glimmering, like a multifaceted jewel, but of jet-black. It was like a bit of polished coal. “What’s that?”

Alia sounded as if she was smiling. “Take a look.”

I didn’t know how to. But even as I framed the desire I felt myself falling toward the jewel-like knot of knowledge.

I felt a surge of new understanding — a moment of insight, like a breakthrough after years of study in some arcane subject, or the sudden clarification when the solution of a puzzle becomes obvious. This glimmering knot of understanding contained all of physics — and I saw it all. I enjoyed a deep understanding of the fabric of the cosmos, from the minuscule symmetries of the fundamental objects from which space and time were ultimately constructed, all the way to the jewel-like geometry of the universe as a whole, folded over on itself in higher dimensions — although now I saw that those two poles of structure, large and small, were in fact one, as if all of reality were folded together again on some more abstract scale.

But even as I wallowed in this joyous understanding, a part of me noticed features a physicist of the twenty-first century would have recognized — even an engineer like me. Our basic map of the universe’s composition was here, the proportions of dark energy, dark matter, baryonic matter, as determined by our space telescopes; and I made out the familiar milestones of the universe’s evolution out of the initial singularity, through stages of expansion and cooling, all the way to the matter-dominated age that had given rise to humans. Some of our theories to explain this universal structure had contained glimmerings of truth after all, I realized. They were all partial, all gropings in the dark, each tentative explanation like the light scattered from one facet of this ultimate jewel of understanding. And yet we got some of it right, I thought with a surge of pride, we primitives on our single, muddy, messed-up little world.

But that sense of pride quickly dissipated when I saw that this jewel-like structure of knowledge, this “ultimate truth,” was ancient. The total understanding dreamed of by the physicists of my time, the limits of their imagination, had not only been achieved, but long ago — and it had been overshadowed by deeper mysteries yet.

But I wasn’t here for physics, but to confront mysteries of the human heart — and the superhuman. Reluctantly I pulled away. I tried to remember, to hold on to some glimmering of this ultimate understanding, but already it was melting like a snowflake cupped in my hand, its beautiful symmetries and unity lost. Already I was forgetting.

Alia said gently, “Michael, I think you’re ready now. It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

“To meet the undying.”

Dread gathered in my heart. But you have a duty, I told myself dryly. You asked for this, Poole.

“Let’s get it over with.”

“Hello, Michael Poole. I regret I was born too late to meet your most illustrious ancestor…”

This was Leropa, then. The undying spoke as if from shadows. I didn’t want to see her any more clearly.

“I don’t understand how I’m talking to you,” I said. “Or Alia, come to that. We’re all part of the Transcendence — aren’t we?”

“The Transcendence is a mind, Michael, but it is not a human mind. There is no reason why a mind must have a single pole of consciousness — as your pole of awareness feels like a mote lodged forever behind your eyes.”

But, I thought uneasily, even in my time minds aren’t so simple. Maybe we three are like multiple personalities screaming at each other inside the head of a schizophrenic.

“Or perhaps we are emblems,” Leropa said now. “We stand for certain traits of the Transcendence, as it tries to resolve the internal dilemma over the Redemption, which Alia so acutely identified.”

“In which case I might be no more real than a character in a Platonic dialogue? Charming. What traits?”

“I am the purpose of the Transcendence. Its will. And you, Michael, are its conscience. We are here to debate the Redemption.”

And to understand the Redemption, she said, I had to understand love. Again I felt that feather-touch on a metaphorical chin, a ghostly finger lifting my gaze to new horizons.

Through its completed cosmology the Transcendence was cognizant of the universe as a whole, of all of space and time, the whole of the human past. And now it showed the past to me.

I was dazzled by the great portrait; I longed to turn my metaphorical head away. But I began to make out broad aspects. It all sprang from a deep root, the long prehistory of humankind on Earth, a root that emerged from down deep, rising through other forms of hominid and ape and animal — not lesser, each of them was perfectly adapted for the environment it found itself in, but steadily acquiring an elusive quality of mind. That deep dark Earthbound taproot culminated in my own time, like a shoot bursting out of the soil. History after my day was a tangle of foliage that sprawled across the face of the Galaxy — knotted, fecund, vibrant, full of detail, from the rise and fall of empires and even species, down to the particular experience of a small child wandering along a beach by the light of a blue-white star a thousand light-years from Earth.

Again I longed to remember this. Just the fact that humans had lived so long, and come so far, would have been beyond the imaginations of most people alive in my own cramped and dangerous century.

But it was a saga full of tragedy. I saw the scars of war, and of mindless natural disasters, where trillions of human lives had been destroyed like needles on a burning pine tree.

Leropa said, “Look at it all, Michael Poole. Look at these particles of humanity trapped in the suffering of the past. And the Transcendence loves every one of them.”

I thought I understood. “It is unbearable.”

“Yes. How can the Transcendence face the infinite possibilities of the future, when its past is knotted up with blood and pain?”

It was the paradox of a god born of human flesh and blood. To achieve full awareness the Transcendence had to absorb every human consciousness, even far into the past. And that meant it had to absorb all that pain. The Transcendence needed Redemption, a cleansing of the pain of the past, before it could advance to the mighty possibilities of the future.

Leropa said carefully, “You see it, don’t you? You see it all. And you understand.”

“Yes,” I breathed. Of course I did. I had shrunk from the hubris of the project. But here and now, surrounded by the vast echoing halls of the mind of the Transcendence, I felt swept up, seeing only the magnificence of this great ambition.