To Alia’s relief, during the journey on board Reath’s austere Commonwealth ship the Campocs kept to themselves, and didn’t try to discuss their strange obsession with Witnessing and the Redemption. They seemed ashamed of how they had treated Drea. Bale kept out of her way, and made no attempt to revive their physical relationship. Drea spent most of the journey asleep. She seemed to have been wounded on some deep level. Alia tended her sister with a complex mix of concern and shame.
And during the journey Reath continued his coaching of Alia.
He seemed irritated by the presumption of the Campocs in trying to figure out the motives of the Transcendence — even trying to manipulate it, through Alia. “The Transcendence is not a human mind at all,” he said testily. “It is already far, far greater than that. And it has ambitions reaching still further.”
At the heart of the Transcendents’ project was what he called entelechy, a belief that humans contained a potential, a stupendous possibility, that could be realized in full only through unity. “What is the purpose of the great churning of human history — all our striving, our wars and our peace, our colonizing and our retreats? Surely it is to explore ways in which humans can become the best we can possibly be. And the Transcendence is the highest expression of that deep ambition.”
For now the unifying of mankind was a process, Reath said, a gathering in, a connection and sharing. But that process was not simple, not linear. It was believed that when the interconnection of the community of Transcendents reached a certain level of complexity, a critical mass, it would go through a phase change.
“A phase change?” That didn’t mean much to Alia. “What will it be like?”
Reath looked absent. “I am not a Transcendent. I can’t imagine. But it will be a different order of reality, Alia.
“Think of a cone. Imagine taking slices through that cone, higher and higher, approaching the apex. You make circles, don’t you? They shrink as you get higher — but then when you reach the tip itself, those circles transmute suddenly into a point, a quite different geometrical entity. It is a discontinuity, a step change.
“So it is with the Transcendence. It will proceed from its present scattered imperfection to a new level of awareness, a totality that will be a crystallization of mind, a full comprehension of the universe, and of ourselves. When it goes through its phase change, the Transcendence will become infinite, and eternal. Literally. Already it is planning on such scales.”
This sounded wonderful to Alia, if scary, but baffling. “How can you plan to be infinite?”
“What do you know of infinities, Alia?”
“What do you think?…”
“Infinity is a way of thinking, not so much a number as a process.” And the processes of infinity shaped the way the Transcendence was laying its plans for the future,” he said. “Infinity gives you room.
“Imagine this. Suppose you owned a starship, bigger than the Nord, an immense ship with an infinite number of cabins. You number the cabins one, two, three… You have one passenger in each of the cabins — an infinite number of passengers. But now another ship docks, with a second infinite set of passengers, all of whom want lodging. What do you do?”
“Turn them away. I’m already full up.”
“Are you? Try this. You work along your infinite corridor. You tell the passenger in room one to move to room two. The passenger in room two goes to four. The passenger in room three goes to six…”
“Everybody shuffles up,” she said. “To the cabin with the number twice their old one.”
“Is there room for them all?”
She thought it over. “Yes. Because I have an infinite number of even-numbered cabins.”
“And how many cabins have you freed up?”
“All the odd ones.” She thought about it. “An infinite number of them, too.”
“So what do you do with the new set of passengers?”
“Welcome them aboard…”
He smiled. “You see? Infinity plus infinity equals infinity. Infinity lets you do things finitude would forbid. Infinity is a mapping; it is a way of doing things, a way of thinking, apparently paradoxical. The Transcendence is not yet infinite, but after its singularity it plans to be. So this is the way the Transcendence thinks, Alia. And if you wish to understand the Transcendence, it is the way you must think, too.”
“There isn’t an infinite amount of room in my head. So how can infinity fit in there?”
He held up his thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart. “How many real numbers are there between zero and one?”
“An infinite number?”
“An uncountably infinite number, in fact… There are many orders of infinity; we won’t go into that. So you can cram infinity into a finite space.”
“All right. But this is the real universe! What about the granularity of space and time, of matter and energy? What about quantum uncertainty?”
He winked at her. “I won’t worry about that if you don’t.”
They arrived in a spectacular sky.
They had come some distance into the Core, the Galaxy’s central bulge, and there were stars everywhere, stars and turbulent clouds of gas and dust. You could still see a curtain of darkness hanging behind the stars, a black sky not completely obscured by the light. But toward the center itself there was a still denser crowding. In that bath of light and sleeting radiation thousand-year battles had once been fought, and trillions of humans had lost their lives.
Against such an astounding background, the world of the Transcendents, as it loomed out of the crowded light, was unprepossessing. It wasn’t even a planet, really, not much more than an asteroid, even though inertial generators buried in its heart gave it a gravity close to standard, and a layer of air thick enough to breathe.
Reath’s shuttle swept over a landscape crowded with buildings that clustered in craters and ravines. Many of the buildings were massive, with walls of blown asteroid rock fixed on foundations that dug deep into the dirt. But the buildings were mostly dark, unadorned, with only small clusters of lights within their hulking shadows.
In a sky full of stars this worldlet didn’t even have a sun of its own. Alia learned that orphaned worlds were in fact common here, for the stars crowded so close that close encounters and even stellar collisions were frequent, and planets were often torn away from their parent systems.
But this nameless, homeless fragment had its own history. Huge energies had been spent in turning it into a munitions factory — and even vaster energies expended on flattening it again. The modern buildings were built into the relics of those long-vanished days, structures so massive and solid it was likely the asteroid itself would erode away before they did, leaving the blocky buildings to drift away.
And now these buildings once devoted to killing had been rededicated as the temples of a new god.
As the shuttle descended Alia grew increasingly uneasy.
With her new faculty for listening beyond the confines of her own head, she reached out, tentatively. She could see the bright minds of the Campocs, and she could read their poignant emotions as clearly as if they were her own — their apprehension at being here, their strange, complex concerns about the Redemption, and their muddled guilt over their treatment of Drea. In the foreground, too, were the minds of Reath and Drea. They were still mostly closed to her, like silvered spheres drifting in her mental sky; it would take her some time to build up her skills before she could see into the minds of non-adepts. But she glimpsed what lay within when a particularly strong emotion disturbed the surface of one of their minds — especially Drea’s love and concern for her sister, Alia saw with shame.