She had a final moment of doubt. It was as if she looked back at herself, her body lying peacefully now on its pallet.

And then she let the embrace of the Transcendence enfold her at last.

The Transcendence was a body. She could feel its limbs, the bodies of its human host already counted in the billions and scattered over thousands of worlds. And yet in another way she was barely more aware of the individual bodies that made up this great host than she was of the cells of her own tiny form.

And its consciousness was not just a network of pooled minds. It arose from that network, like a frost pattern emerging from the interactions of ice molecules. She, the spark that was still Alia, felt bewildered by the scope and grandeur of its thoughts. The Transcendence was a symphony orchestra overwhelming her with its mighty themes — and yet own lone piping was an essential part of the whole.

She didn’t lose herself. She was still Alia. She was even aware of her own body, lying in its pallet. When she became more adept she would be able to function normally, live a fully human life, while still engaging in the greater community of the Transcendence. It was like — more metaphors, Alia! — it was like doing two things at once with different levels of awareness, like walking and holding a conversation at the same time. It would be a life lived on two levels, just as she had seen of the Transcendents on this worldlet.

And now she glimpsed the mighty purposes of the Transcendence, the design behind this grand architecture. She felt its tremendous ambition of joining every human mind into its own grand confluence of thought, a gathering into the ultimate embrace of the Transcendence. Then would come the day when the Transcendence, arising out of humanity, would become the highest form of this cosmic age, and it would apprehend the form of the whole universe. This was the dream of a young, unformed god — a dream of power, but not what to do with it, not yet. There would be time enough, a literal eternity of it.

And in the meantime there was reflection.

She found memories. There were the firefly sparks of individual lives — she sensed birth, death, love, sex, tragedy, triumph. Rising above these small rememberings were the vaster memories of the young mass mind itself, as it emerged from a misty unawareness to a cognizance of itself. The most striking note was a huge joy, surprisingly simple, a joy to be alive: a triumphant shout of I am!

And yet there was a grace note of sorrow, she saw, a trill of regret.

She became aware again of the host of bodies, the heads from which the mass mind had sprung. The awareness of the Transcendence lay over those minds like dew on blades of grass. But she saw that there were knots in the distribution of minds — knots of density, of resistance, of a kind of stubbornness, of age. They were the undying, the ancient core of the Transcendence. And it was here that the regret was centered. Alia was drawn to the pain, wary but curious, like the tip of a tongue probing an aching tooth.

And suddenly she was bombarded by blood, by screams, trillions upon trillions of terrified and anguished voices calling out together. She screamed in response.

Even in her torment she knew what this was. This was the Redemption, the Witnessing of the blood-soaked past. This dark pit, right at the heart of the Transcendence itself, was the place to which all those carefully retrieved memories drained. It was superhuman. It was unbearable. She spun and thrashed. The Campocs were right. This was wrong, terribly wrong -

She was awake, only Alia again, lying on a sweat-soaked pallet. A face hovered over her like a lantern, full of concern. It was Drea. Her sister brushed her brow, and Alia felt her hair plastered to her forehead.

Drea said, “You were yelling! Was it a nightmare? Are you all right?…”

Alia grabbed her sister and held her close.

Morning came.

Beyond the walls of the shuttle the worldlet looked even drabber, the people even more dull. There may have been fire in their heads, Alia thought, but their bodies were impoverished. It was impossible to believe that such complex magnificence as the Transcendence could arise out of the shabbiness of this thinly populated rock.

Nobody spoke to her, not Reath, not even Drea. They all seemed frightened of her. She had touched the Transcendence, but it didn’t seem to be making anybody happy.

Alia went to her Witnessing tank. It lit up to show her the wormlike thread of Poole’s whole life. At least he wouldn’t turn away from her. Impulsively she picked out a single moment.

Here was Poole, with his son, in a hospital ward. Their faces slack, they sat side by side, holding hands, subtly distant from each other, frozen in time. Seconds ago they had received the news that Poole’s baby had died, after only moments of life, and that Morag, Poole’s wife, had died with him. Alia believed that this was the crux of Michael Poole’s whole life — his personal singularity, his moment when the conic sections diminished to a point, a new quality. The moment when he lost everything.

In Michael Poole’s time, you were born alone and you died alone, but you spent your life trying to get through to others, through love, through sex — or even through violence, the bloody intimacy of killing. In his love of Morag, in the oceanic few months in which their baby had come to term, Poole had come as close as he ever would to reaching through the barriers to another human. But with the deaths he was already falling back into himself, even now, just heartbeats after hearing the dreadful news. And Alia, with her unwelcome knowledge of his future, knew he would never recover, never get so close to anybody ever again.

What would Michael Poole make of the Transcendence?

What would he have thought of her, as she sat hiding in the cabin of a shuttle, cowering from her destiny? Would Poole envy her this opportunity to reach out to the Transcendence, and to allow it to embrace her? Would he have longed to touch other people so closely? Or would he understand her deepest, most fundamental fear, which she hadn’t even been able to express to Drea — that in joining so closely with others, she would ultimately lose herself?

And what would he make of the terrible, obsessive, self-inflicted pain of the Redemption?

Absently she let the image in the tank run on. Poole and his son sat side by side, heads down. But now he looked up vaguely, as if searching for something in the air, a disturbance in his world that somehow broke through to his consciousness even at this terrible moment. Again Alia had the strange impression that somehow he knew she was watching him.

She waved her hand, and the images dissolved.

Reath approached her cautiously. “How do you feel?”

Alia frowned. “It’s as if I’m trying to remember a dream. But the harder I try, the more elusive it is.”

Reath said gently, “It was a superhuman experience. Literally.”

Or it was like being drugged, Alia thought uneasily.

“You have fulfilled the three Implications. You’re one of the Elect now, Alia. You have entered the outer circle of the Transcendence itself.” Reath’s expression was complex, full of pride and longing. “I envy you.”

“Then why don’t you join me?”

He smiled sadly. “Ah, but that’s impossible. There are some of us who can never join the Transcendence, no matter how we try — or how much we might long to.” He tapped his skull with his forefinger. “Something missing in here, you see. The defect occurs on worlds scattered across the Galaxy, following patterns we can’t make out. Is it genetic? Or perhaps there are more subtle determinants of human destiny than genes.”

“I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”