Leropa frowned. “If you have to ask that, as I told you, you don’t understand the nature of the Transcendence.”
“How many?”
“All of them,” the undying said simply.
It was the ultimate logic of Redemption. The purpose was atonement not for some of the past, for some of the human suffering it contained, but for all of it. And how could that be achieved piecemeal? So Alia, like every witness, would have to live through every human life that had preceded hers: Michael Poole, his second son, his family, his ancestors, and their ancestors all the way back to the point where humanity was lost, perhaps a hundred billion of them — and, looking forward, all his descendants, to the mighty Galaxy-spanning Exultant generation and beyond. And in the future, all those watchers would themselves have to be watched — and then there would be watchers to watch the watchers — on and on, a recursive chain of watchers upon watchers.
The ultimate logic was that every human being, undying, should live through the lives, and absorb the pain, of every other.
“No doubt the process will be made more efficient,” Leropa said, unperturbed. “But the number of encounters is always finite. And finitude withers to nothing in the face of infinity.”
Alia remembered Reath’s grave, sad voice: To understand the Transcendence, you must understand infinity, Alia. “But all that pain, multiplied over and over, combinatorially, forever—”
Leropa spread her hands. “This is atonement. Atonement must hurt. To a creature of infinite capacity like the Transcendence, what can serve as atonement but to pay an infinite price?”
Alia backed away. This is insane, she thought, but she dared not say it. “I don’t want this.”
Leropa’s frown deepened. “You choose death over life? Smallness over infinity? Are you sure?”
“I’m not ready.”
Leropa bowed her head. “Take all the time you need. But I will be here, waiting for you. Forever. And remember,” she called. “Redemption has more Levels you’ve yet to glimpse…”
Alia turned and ran for the shuttle.
It was a huge relief once more to get back to orbit. But Drea had some news from the Nord — bad news.
We got together to discuss what to do: George’s surviving family, John, Tom, my mother, me, even Rosa, all huddling like VR witches, muttering behind his back.
We’d been told that none of us were to fly out to England. George made it abundantly clear that us all going to such a fuss and expense would embarrass him. He didn’t even want VR visitors, he said. We all had our own lives to lead, et cetera, et cetera. I don’t think it fooled anybody. But then the guy was eighty-seven and he was dying; I guess he had a right to a little muddle.
We had to see him, of course, virtually at least. John agreed to dig into his pockets once more. But we decided we weren’t going to go over in a mob, VR or not, like a presaging of the funeral the doctors were saying wouldn’t be more than a year away. We would visit one at a time, or in pairs. Tom went first, with Sonia. George would surely want to meet her, but he had his pride; we knew he would feel happier about facing her while he was still able to put on a show.
While Tom visited I carried on with my work in Alaska, on the hydrate project. Rosa and Gea continued to analyze the Morag visitations, but for a while I spent no more time on that. The Morag business had always tended to make us fight, me against John, Tom against me; it drove us apart. At such a time as this it all seemed trivial, a sideshow, whatever its astounding implications.
Then, a week after Tom’s visit, I went over myself.
George was glad to see me. That was obvious, gratifying, painful.
He wanted to take another walk, which surprised me. So we stepped out of his house, trailed once more by his Gea-robot care assistant. George guided me away from the maintained silvertop roads, and I soon found myself walking down the greened center lane of one half of an immense dual carriageway, as they call them in England.
The road was a mighty ribbon that curled between banks of houses, shops, and factories. Traffic lights and road signs, the clutter of the roadside, mostly survived, but the green and white paint of the signs had long faded to illegibility. The tarmac itself was giving way to green. For long stretches it was broken up by weeds, grasses, and a few bright wildflowers — “pioneer species,” George said, nuzzling into the pores of the road surface.
It was the middle of the night for my body in Alaska, and I felt dislocated, faintly jet-lagged. The experience of that fresh English day, the quality of the virtual sunlight on my virtual cheeks, was enough to make my body respond, to wake me up. But it was strange to see that carpet of green unrolling before me like a long, thin stretch of parkland, completely empty, save for ourselves.
George was in a nostalgic mood. “Sometimes I miss the traffic,” he said. “When I was a kid — why, when you were a kid — the towns and cities were full of cars day and night, and there was this dull, continual roar. I used to think about the roads, how they joined up the country. You could drive your car out from your own garage, and then expect to be able to roll all the way to wherever you wanted to get to, from Cornwall to Scotland, without your tires ever leaving the tarmac. It was as if some great volcanic eruption had flooded the whole country with asphalt. And then it went away, just like that. Christ, Spaghetti Junction is a world heritage site now.
“All that noise went away, the roar of the rushing cars, the honking of horns, the sirens, brakes squealing, music blasting. I miss the noise, I think. I miss it the way I miss the smell of the stale cigarette smoke my parents would leave around the house; you know it’s bad for you, but it still reminds you of home. You know, if you’d told me as a kid that in my lifetime people would give up the car I’d have laughed at you, that would have seemed much more fantastic than going to Mars…”
Green kilometers slowly piled up behind us. George seemed to have plenty of energy, but he walked stiffly, in an ungraceful, asymmetric way. Walking had become an awkward, mechanical action he had to think about.
There was a tumor in his belly “the size of a tennis ball,” he said.
It might have been caught earlier if George had allowed the medics to insert the appropriate implants and nano-monitors. Like many people his age, though, he had a deep distrust of having such gadgetry inside his body; he had lived through an era in which technology had betrayed as much as it had delivered. So he lived, and died, with the consequences of his choices. “But at least they are my choices.”
He had been gratified by Tom’s VR visit, and he had been glad to meet Sonia. “She’ll be good for Tom. We need somebody to inject a little sanity in our lives, we Pooles… Speaking of which, how’s this business of Morag coming along?”
He knew about the language analysis, as far as it had got.
“We’re still trying to break down the encoding of Morag’s signal,” I said. “We meaning Gea and Rosa. It’s a scary thought that the combined resources of the top biosphere-modeling software suite and one of our most ancient religions are being devoted to figuring out my little ghost story.”
“And do you still think it’s just a ghost story?”
I thought it over. “No. I don’t think I ever did. Not even from the beginning.”
“What beginning?”
So, walking along the empty road, I told him about the prehistory of my haunting, back to when I was a kid in Florida. I think he felt hurt I’d never shared this with him at the time. But then I’d never told anybody about it at all before confiding in Shelley, only a few weeks ago, and he got over that quickly.