Stephen Baxter - Destiny's Children 3 - Transcendent

TRANSCENDENT

DESTINY'S CHILDREN 03

Stephen Baxter

ONE

The girl from the future told me that the sky is full of dying worlds.

You can spot them from far off, if you know what you’re looking for. When a star gets old it heats up,

and its planets’ oceans evaporate, and you can see the clouds of hydrogen and oxygen, slowly

dispersing. Dying worlds cloaked in the remains of their oceans, hanging in the Galaxy’s spiral arms like

rotten fruit: this is what people will find, when they move out from the Earth, in the future. Ruins,

museums, mausoleums.

How strange. How wistful.

My name is Michael Poole.

I have come home to Florida. Although not to my mother’s house, which is in increasing peril of slipping

into the sea.

I live in a small apartment in Miami. I like having people around, the sound of voices. Sometimes I miss

the roar of traffic, the sharp scrapings of planes across the sky, the sounds of my past. But the laughter of

children makes up for that.

The water continues to rise. There is a lot of misery in Florida, a lot of displacement. I understand that.

But I kind of like the water, the gentle disintegration of the state into an archipelago. The slow rise,

different every day, every week, reminds me that nothing stays the same, that the future is coming

whether we like it or not.

The future, and the past, began to complicate my life in the spring of 2047, when I got an irate call from

my older brother, John. He was here, in our Miami Beach house. I should “come home,” as he put it, to

help him “sort out Mom.” I went, of course. In 2047 I was fifty-two years old.

I had been happy in Florida, at my parents’ house, when I was a kid. Of course I had my nose in a book

or a game most of the time, or I played at being an “engineer,” endlessly tinkering with my bike or my

in-line roller skates. I was barely aware of the world outside my own head. Maybe that’s still true.

But I particularly loved the beach out in back of the house. You understand this was the 1990s or early

2000s, when there still was a beach in that part of Florida. I remember I would walk from our porch,

with its big roof-mounted swing chairs, and go down the gravel path to the low dunes, and then on to the

sandy beach beyond. Sitting there you could watch space shuttles and other marvels of rocketry from

Cape Canaveral rising into the sky like ascending souls.

Mostly I’d watch those launches alone. I was out of step with my family over that one. But once, I

believe around 2005, my uncle George, my mother’s brother visiting from England, walked out with me

to watch a night launch. He seemed so stiff and old, barely able to make it down to sit on the scrubby

dune grass. But I guess he was only in his forties then. George was an engineer, of sorts, in information

technology, and so a kindred spirit.

Of course that’s all gone now, thanks to the Warming, the rising sea levels, the endless Atlantic storms;

Canaveral is a theme park behind a sea-wall. I guess I was lucky to be ten years old and able to watch

such things. It was like the future folding down into the present.

I wonder what ten-year-old Michael Poole would have thought if he could have known what the girl from

the future told me, about all those old and dying worlds out there waiting for us in space.

And I wonder what he would have thought about the Transcendence.

I think over those strange events, my contact with the Transcendence, one way or another, all the time.

It’s like an addiction, something you’re aware of constantly, bubbling beneath the surface level of your

mind, no matter how you try to distract yourself.

And yet I can remember so little of it. It’s like chasing a dream after waking; the more you focus on it, the

more it melts away.

Here’s what I make of it now.

The Transcendence is our future—or a future, anyhow. A far future. The Transcendents had made (or

will make) themselves into something unimaginably powerful. And now they were on the cusp, the cusp

of a step to change into something new altogether.

After this point they would transcend to what we would think of as godhood—or they would subside to

defeat, at the hands of a foe I barely glimpsed. Either way they would no longer be human.

But at this point, on this side of the cusp, they were still human. And they were tortured by a very human

regret, a regret that had to be resolved now, before they proceeded and shed their humanity for good.

This was what I was drawn into, this strange inner conflict.

Everybody knows about my work on the climate disaster. Nobody knows about my involvement in

something much larger: the agonies of a nascent superhuman mind of the far future, in the culminating logic

of all our destinies.

The future folding down into the present. That ten-year-old on the beach would probably have loved it, if

he’d known. It still scares me to death in retrospect, even now.

But I guess even then I had my mind on other things. For the most remarkable thing I saw on that beach

wasn’t a spaceship being launched.

The woman who came to the beach was slim and tall, with long, strawberry-blond hair. She would wave

and smile to me, and sometimes call, though I could never make out what she said for the noise of the

waves and the gulls. She always seemed to stand at the edge of the sea, and the sun was always low, so

the sea was dappled with sunlight like burning oil, and I had to squint to make her out—or she would

show up in some other equally difficult place, hidden by the light.

When I was a kid she visited occasionally, not regularly, maybe once a month. I was never frightened of

her. She always seemed friendly. Sometimes when she called I would wave back, or yell, but the

crashing waves were always too loud.

I would run after her sometimes, but running in soft wet sand is hard work even when you’re ten. I never

seemed to get any closer, no matter how hard I ran. And she would shrug, and step back, and if I looked

away she was gone.

It was only much later that I worked out who she was, how important she would become to me.

Uncle George never saw her, not during his one and only viewing of a spaceship launch from the beach. I

wish he had. I’d have appreciated talking it over with him. I didn’t know much about ghosts when I was

ten; I know only a little more now. George knew a lot of things, and he had an open mind. Maybe he

could have answered a simple question: can you be haunted by spirits, not from the past, but from the

future?

For, you see, the mysterious woman on the beach, who visited me intermittently all my young life, was

another visitor from the future. She was Morag, my dead wife.

The future folding down into the present.

The girl from the future was called Alia.

She was born on a starship, fifteen thousand light-years from Earth. She lived half a million years after

Michael Poole died. And yet she grew up knowing Poole as intimately as any of his family.

She had Witnessed his life almost since her mother and father had first brought her home from the birthing

pods, when her hands and feet could grasp nothing but the fur on her mother’s chest, and the world was

an undifferentiated place of bright glowing shapes and smiling faces. Michael Poole had been there for

her even then, right from the beginning.

But she was thirty-five years old now, almost old enough to be considered an adult. Michael Poole was a

relic from childhood, his little life like a favorite story she listened to over and over. She would always

turn to him when she needed comfort. But he was a small, sentimental part of her life, his story tucked

away in the Witnessing tank, unconsidered for days on end.

What really mattered to Alia nowadays was Skimming.

She met her sister in the Engine Room, the deepest bowel of the Nord, in steel-gray light, where hulking,

anonymous machinery loomed. The sisters faced each other and laughed at the delicious prospect of

what was to come.

Like Alia, Drea was naked, the best way to Skim. Drea’s body, coated with golden hair, was neatly

proportioned, with her arms only a little shorter than her legs, and she had long toes, not as long as her

fingers but capable of grasping and manipulation. It was a body built for zero gravity, of course, and for

hard vacuum, the natural environment of mankind, but it was believed that this body plan was pretty

much the same as that of the original human stock of old Earth.

Drea was ten years older than Alia. The sisters were very alike, but there was more gravity to Drea, a

little more levity to Alia. As the light shifted, multiple lids slid across Drea’s eyes.

Drea leaned close, and Alia could smell the sweetness of her breath. “Ready?”

“Ready.”

Drea grasped Alia’s hands. “Three, two, one—”

Suddenly they were in the Nord ’s Farm deck.

This was a high, misty hall, where immense ducts and pipes snaked down through the ceiling, lamps shed

a cool blue-white glow, and green plants burgeoned in clear-walled hydroponic tanks. The Nord was a

starship, a closed ecology. The big pipes delivered sewage and stale air from the human levels above,

and carried back food, air, and clean water.

Alia breathed deep. After the cold, static austerity of the Engine Room she was suddenly immersed in the

Farm’s vibrant warmth, and the deck plates thrummed in response to the huge volumes of liquid and air

being pumped to and fro. Even the quality of the gravity felt subtly different here. Alia had felt nothing of

the Skimming: no time passed during a Skim, so there was no time for sensation. But the transition itself

was delicious, a rush of newness, like plunging from cold air into a hot pool.

And this was just the start.

Drea’s eyes were bright. “Jump this time. Three, two, one—” Flexing their long toes the sisters sailed up

into the air, and at the apex of their coordinated jump they popped out of existence.

On the sisters fled, to all the Nord ’s many decks, shimmering into existence in parks, schools, museums,

gymnasiums, theaters. In each place they stayed only a few seconds, just long enough to lock eyes, agree

the next move, and jump or pirouette or somersault into it. It was really a kind of dance, the challenge

being to control the accuracy of each Skim and the mirror-image precision of their positions and

movements at each emergence.

Skimming, voluntary teleporting, was so easy small children learned to do it long before they walked.

Alia’s body was made up of atoms bound into molecules, of fields of electricity and quantum uncertainty.

Alia’s body was her. But one atom of carbon, say, was identical to another—absolutely identical in its

quantum description—and so it could be replaced without her even knowing. She was just an expression

of a temporary assemblage of matter and energy, as music is an expression of its score regardless of the

medium in which it is written. It made no difference to her.

And once you knew that, it was easy to see that she, Alia, could just as easily be expressed by a heap of

atoms over there as one over here. It was just a question of will, really, of choice, along with a little help

from the nanomachines in her bones and blood. And very little Alia willed was denied her.

Most children Skimmed as soon as they found out they could. Adults found it harder, or gave it up as

they gave up running and climbing. But few of any age Skimmed as skillfully as Alia and Drea. As the

sisters passed, scattering startled birds, young people watched them with envy, and older folk smiled

indulgently, trying to mask their regret that they could never dance so gracefully again.

And at each step, in the instant after the girls had vanished, two clouds of silvery dust could be seen

suspended in the air, pale and transparent, still showing the forms of the two sisters. But in the ship’s

artificial breezes these chimeras of abandoned matter quickly dispersed.

In one last mighty Skim the girls leapt all the way out of the Nord itself.

Alia felt the tautness of the vacuum in her chest, the sting of hard radiation on her face as delicious as a

shower of ice water on bare skin. With her lungs locked tight, and the Mist of biomolecules and

nanomachinery that suffused her body eagerly scouring for damage, she was in no danger.

There were stars all around the sisters, above, below, to all sides; they were suspended in

three-dimensional space. In one direction a harder, richer light came pushing through the thick veil of

stars. That was the Core, the center of the Galaxy. The Nord was some fifteen thousand light-years from

the center, about half the distance of Sol, Earth’s sun. Only ragged clouds of dust and gas lay before that

bulging mass of light, and if you looked carefully you could make out shadows a thousand light-years

long.

Alia looked down at the Nord, her home.

The ship beneath her feet was a complex sculpture of ice and metal and ceramic, turning slowly in pale

Galaxy light. You could just make out the vessel’s original design, a fat torus about a kilometer across.

But that basic frame had been built on, gouged into, spun out, until its lines were masked by a forest of

dish antennae, manipulator arms, and peering sensor pods. A cloud of semi-autonomous dwellings,

glowing green and blue, swam languidly around the ship: they were the homes of the rich and powerful,

trailing the Nord like a school of fish.

Their hands locked, the sisters spun slowly around each other, their residual momentum expressing itself

as a slow orbit. Complex starlight played on Drea’s smiling face, but her eyes were masked by the

multiple membranes that slid protectively over their moist surfaces. Alia savored the moment. When they

were younger the sisters had been the most important people on the Nord for each other. But Alia was

growing up. This was a cusp of her life, a time of change—and the thought that there might not be too

many more moments like this made this all the sweeter.

But Alia was distracted by a gentle voice, a whisper in her ear.

Her mother was calling her. Come home. You have a visitor. . . .

A visitor? Alia frowned. Who would visit her that could be important enough for her mother to call?

None of her friends; any of them could wait. But there had been a gravity about her mother’s tone.

Something had changed, Alia thought, even as she had danced through the Nord. Drea clung to Alia’s

hands. Alia felt a surge of love for this sister, companion of her childhood. But Drea’s expression was

complex, concerned. She knew something, Alia realized. There was suddenly a subtle barrier between

them.

They swam toward each other, and they Skimmed one last time.

Like a clash of cymbals their bodies overlapped, the atoms and electrons, fields and quantum blurrings

overlapping. Of course this merging was frowned on; it was a dangerous stunt. But for Alia it was

delicious to be immersed in her sister’s essence, to become heavy with her, everything about the two of

them merged into a single cloudy mass, everything but some relic trace of separateness in their souls. It

was closer even than sex.

But it lasted only a second. With a gasp they Skimmed apart, and drifted side by side. And with that

moment of oceanic closeness over, Alia’s niggling worry returned.

Let’s go home,Drea said.

The sisters spiraled down toward the Nord ’s bright, complicated lights.

When I flew into Miami, all I seemed to see from the air was water. It was everywhere, the encroaching

sea at the coast, and inland shining ribbons that sliced the landscape to pieces. Much of downtown

Miami was protected, of course, but outlying districts, even just blocks away, were flooded. I was mildly

shocked.

But the place still worked. Impressive causeways linked up the new islands, and I saw pod buses in

chains like shining beads, navigating around the new archipelago much as in my childhood you could

drive down the Keys from Largo to West.

A dutiful if reluctant son, I was returning to Florida. I hadn’t been back here for, shame to say it, over ten

years. That’s a long time these days. It’s a changing world, and over such an interval change heaps up

like a head of water behind a sandbank, and then bursts all over you.

Out of the airport, I took a pod bus down to Calle Ocho, 8th Street, and then a ferry. It was a smart,

agile airboat, not much more than a sheet of plastic driven by an immense fan. My pilot was a girl, maybe

twenty, with not a word of English. She made that little boat skim like a skateboard; it was a fun ride.

We headed into Little Havana. We squirmed through swarms of boats and yachts. There were people on

Jet Skis and old Everglades swamp buggies and even battered tourist pedalos, many of them laden with

stuff. Along Calle Ocho the boats and junks had been ganged together to make huge, ragtag floating

markets: there were cafés and tabaqueros, and floating stores selling cheap clothes, even bridal wear.

Bugs and flies rose everywhere, great clouds of them, far more than I remembered from my childhood.

But there were still old men playing dominoes in the Maximo Gomez Park, and in Memorial Boulevard,

heavily sandbagged, the Eternal Torch still burned in honor of the Bay of Pigs counter-revolutionaries. All

this took place at the feet of the old buildings, many of which were still occupied, in their higher floors

anyhow. The aging building stock gleamed silver, coated in smart Paint, as if they had been wrapped in

foil. Beneath the tide marks you could see how the water was working away at the stone and the

concrete. Barnacles on skyscrapers, for God’s sake.

In places there were cleared-out swathes, great lanes of rubble over which kids and scavengers

swarmed. The tracks of hurricanes, probably, gaps in the urban landscape that would never be filled in.

A coast is a place of erosion, uncle George used to say to me, a place where two inimical elements, the

land and the sea, war it out relentlessly, and in the end the sea is always going to win. One day all these

grand old buildings were going to just subside into the ocean, their contents spilling into great mounds of

garbage in the patient water.

In the meantime, life went on. My pilot waved at rivals or friends, cheerfully yelling what sounded like

obscenities. Everybody had some place to go, just like always. Despite all the dirty water everywhere it

was still the Little Havana I remembered, a place I had always found exciting.

When we reached the coast I had the boat drop me at a small ferry stop a couple of kilometers from my

mother’s house. I had decided to walk the rest of the way, my pack on my back.

It was the middle of the afternoon. The road, a northwest drag following the line of the coast, was good

enough and had been resurfaced recently with a bright central stripe of self-maintaining silvertop. But you

could see that the sea sometimes came up this far: there were bits of dried-up seaweed in the gutters, tide

marks around the bases of the telegraph poles. There wasn’t a single car to be seen, not one, and the

silence in which I walked was dense. That was a jarring discontinuity with my memories of childhood: on

a comparable Tuesday afternoon in 2005, say, the cars would have been purring past, an endless flow.

The housing stock had changed, too. The timber-frame houses I remembered, each nestling in its

half-acre of lawn, were mostly abandoned, boarded up and in various states of decay, or they had gone

altogether, leaving vacant lots behind, as if they had been spirited up into the sky. A few had been

replaced by squat poured-concrete blocks with narrow windows: the modern style, fortresses against

hurricanes, each an integral block, seamless from its roof to its deep foundations.

The air was bright and hazy, and the wet heat settled on me like a blanket. I was soon sweating, and

regretting my decision to walk. There was an unpleasant smell in the air, too, a stink of salty decay, as if

some immense sea animal was rotting on the beach. But it couldn’t be that, of course; there were no

animals in the sea.

At last I bore down on my mother’s house, my childhood home. It was one of the few of the old stock

still standing. But it was surrounded by heaps of sandbags, all slowly decaying. Big electric screens

shimmered around the yard, designed to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and on the roof a wagon-wheel

home turbine languidly turned, barely stirred by the breeze.

And here came my big brother, around the corner of the house, large as life, paintbrush in hand.

“Michael! So you showed your face.” Instant criticism, but what could you expect? John wiped his palm

ostentatiously on his coveralls, leaving a silvery streak, and held his big hand out to shake mine.

I shook back, cautiously. John was a big man, built like a football player. He always towered over me. A

couple of years older than me, he’s balding, and his brown eyes are hard, set in a broad face. My

features come from my mother’s side, but where she was always tall, pretty, with gray eyes like smoke,

I’m small, round-shouldered, dark. Intense, people sometimes say. I’m more like my uncle George, in

fact. My mother always said I reminded her of England. I got her gray eyes, though, which looked good

in the fleeting years when I was almost handsome.

John takes after our father. As always, he intimidated me.

“I flew in,” I said lamely. “Quite a journey these days.”

“Isn’t it just? Kind of hot, too. Not good weather to work in.” He clapped me on the back, spreading

more Paint and sweat over my shirt, thus messing up my laundry and my conscience. He led me around

to the back of the house. “Mom’s indoors. Making lemonade, I think. Though it’s sometimes hard to tell

exactly what she’s doing,” he said with conspiratorial gloom. “Say hello to the kids. Sven? Claudia?”

They came running from around the side of the house. They’d been playing soccer in the yard; their ball

rolled plaintively along the ground, chiming softly for attention. They faced me and smiled, their eyes

blank. “Uncle Michael, hi.” “Hello.”

Sven and Claudia, in their early teens, were tall, handsome, well-fed kids with matching shocks of blond

hair. They were the products of John’s second marriage, to a German called Inge, now vanished after a

divorce; they had their mother’s coloring, though both had something of their father’s heavyset

massiveness. I always thought they looked like Cro-Magnon hunters.

For a couple of minutes I tried to make small talk with the kids about soccer. It turned out Claudia was

the keenest, and even had a trial lined up for her local pro club. But as usual the talk was strained, polite,

a formality, as if I were a school inspector.

We were all wary. I’d committed a faux pas a couple of Christmases back when I’d sent them packages

addressed to Sven and Claudia Poole. After the divorce my mother had taken to using her maiden name,

as had I. But when he left home John switched back to my father’s name, Bazalget—I’d never known

why, some row with my mother—and so these two were officially Bazalgets. John had a way of blowing

up at me about such things at family occasions, spoiling the day and upsetting everybody.

I’d learned to tread carefully. We are an unusual family. Then again, maybe not.

I remembered how, when uncle George had come visiting, I would go running to him. But then George

always brought us gifts. Smart man. Of course it wasn’t my insensitivity as an uncle that made these kids

so bland. They were Happy kids, and this was the way Happy kids turned out. I’d never even dared

challenge John about his choices over that.

John waggled his paintbrush. “I ought to get on. And you ought to go see Mom,” he said, as if I’d been

putting it off.

So I walked back around to the front of the house, picked up my bag, and knocked on the door.

The front door was faded by the relentless sun, and in places the clapboards were peeling back, the nails

rusting and coming loose. The place wasn’t in bad shape, however. The coat of Paint that John was

busily applying was a silvery scraping over layers of creamy old gloss.

My mother opened the screen door. “It’s you,” she said. She stepped back, holding the door to let me

pass, with eyes averted to the floor. I stepped over rotting sandbags and dutifully delivered the kiss she

expected; her skin was crumpled, leathery, warm as melted butter.

She said she would make me a cup of tea, and she led me through the hall. We passed the old

grandfather clock that had come with her from England. It still ticked away with imperial resolve, even

though the world in which it had been manufactured had all but vanished.

My mother was a stick-thin figure, upright and stiff and animated by a fragile sort of energy. She was still

beautiful, if any ninety-year-old can be said to be beautiful. She had never dyed her hair, and it had

slowly faded to white, but even now, tied back, her hair looked lustrous, soft and full of light.

In the kitchen she had ingredients for fresh lemonade laid out over the working surfaces. She made me

tea, hot and strong and laced with milk, English style, and she sat with me at the breakfast table. We

sipped our tea in cautious silence. I enjoyed it, of course; it brought back my childhood.

I hadn’t neglected my mother. But I’d mostly seen her when she’d made her occasional, loudly

self-sacrificing pilgrimages to come visit me in my home with Morag, or later after Morag’s death in my

small apartment in New Jersey, or at holiday times at John’s brownstone apartment behind the

Manhattan seawalls. But those trips had got more rare as the years passed; Mother would say she

wasn’t sure if it was her getting old, or the world, or both.

She opened hostilities. “I suppose John called you in.”

“He was concerned.”

“You didn’t need to come here.” She sniffed. “Either of you. I’m ninety. But I’m not old. I’m not

helpless. I’m not gaga. And I’m not moving out.”

I pulled a face. “You always did get straight to the point, Mom.”

She was neither annoyed nor flattered, and she wasn’t about to be deflected. “You can explain that to

your brother. He’s just like your father. And there’s nothing wrong with this house.”

“Needs a coat of Paint, though. You’ll be able to make back the cost by selling solar power to the

microgrid. And you have to comply with the sentience laws; a house of this age needs a minimal

IQ-equivalent of—”

“I know the damn laws,” she snapped. “Just so we understand each other. I’m not moving out. ”

I spread my hands. “Fine by me.”

She leaned forward and inspected me. I stared right back. Her face was hard, all nose and cheekbones

and sunken mouth. It was as if everything else had melted away but this inner core, leaving nothing but

her one dominant central characteristic.

But what was that character? Energy, yes, determination, but all fueled by a kind of resentment, I

thought. She’d come out of England, heavily resenting her own flawed family and whatever had

happened to her there. She certainly resented my dad, and the way their marriage had broken down, and

even the fact that he had died leaving her with various complications to sort out, not the least her two

sons. She resented the slow drift of the climate, which had left her under pressure here in the family home

in which she had always hoped to die. She was one against the world, in her head.

Her eyes, though, her beautiful eyes belied the harshness of her expression. They were clear and still that

startling pale gray. And they revealed a surprising vulnerability. My mother had built a kind of shell

around herself all her life, but her eyes were a crack in that shell, letting me see inside.

Not that she was about to let up on me. “Look at you. You’re round-shouldered, your hair’s a mess,

you’re overweight. You look like shit.”

I had to laugh. “Thanks, Mom.”

“I know what’s wrong with you,” she said. “You’re still moping.” That was the only word she ever used

to mean grief. “It’s been, what, seventeen years? Morag died, and your baby son died, and it was

terrible. But it was all those years ago. It wasn’t the end of your life. How’s Tom? How old is he now?”

“Twenty-five. He’s in Siberia, working on a genetic sampling of—”

“Siberia!” She laughed. “Could he get any further away? You see, by mourning your dead son, you’ve

pushed away the living.”

I stood up, pushing back my chair. “And your amateur psychoanalysis is a crock, as it always was,

Mom.”

She closed her eyes for a moment. “All right, all right. Your old room is made up for you.”

“Thanks.”

“You might fill a few sandbags. The tide’s out.” She pointed to the cupboard where she stored empty

sacks.

“OK.”

“It isn’t so bad here. Even now. We still have doctors and dentists and police. So-Be isn’t a ghost town

yet, Michael.” She said absently, “Not to say we haven’t had our problems. You know what the most

awful thing was that happened here? In one place the water table rose so high a cemetery broke open.

Boxes and bones just came bubbling out of the ground. It was the most grotesque thing you ever saw.

They had to bulldoze it all out of sight. And I miss the birdsong. Everywhere you go the birds seem to be

missing.”

I shrugged. Birds were bellwethers of the Die-back. In 2047, their vanishing was banal. I said carefully,

“Mom, maybe you really should think about moving away.”

She eyed me with a bit of humor in her expression. “You’re claiming it’s any better anywhere else?”

“Not really, no.”

“Then stop wasting time.” She sipped her tea, dismissing me.

My old room was small, but it looked out to sea, and I’d always loved it.

Of course it wasn’t really mine anymore, and yet there had never been a precise date when it had ceased

to be mine. I just slept in here less and less frequently, and at some point my parents had had to make

decisions about sorting it out without consulting me.

Well, they had stripped it. Now, replacing my turn-of-the-century gadget-age décor, it was done up in

the faux-naturalistic style that had been so popular in the 2020s, with a bamboo-effect wallcovering and a

green carpet of soft-bladed artificial grass. In those days, before I had started to work on the commercial

development of Higgs-energy, I was a consulting engineer for the nuclear-energy industry, and I had

stayed in a lot of hotels. This style of decoration had been everywhere, endless lengths of tropical-parrot

wallpaper and crocodile-skin-effect floor covering, adorning anonymous concrete blocks in Warsaw or

Vancouver or Sydney. It was as if we were mourning the loss of all the green stuff, even while the real

thing was imploding into the Die-back all around us.

I dumped my bag on the bed and opened the wall cupboards, looking for somewhere to hang my few

shirts. But the cupboards were piled high. Some of this was my mother’s clothing. The materials felt

brittle to the touch, the clothes very old and rarely worn.

But there was still a relic of my own old stuff stored here. There were no clothes. No doubt they had all

disappeared into the maw of charity, and my old T-shirts and trousers might even now be adorning some

refugee child from flooded Bangladesh or parched Egypt; it was an age of refugees, plenty needing to be

clothed. But there were computer games, books, and a few of my classier-looking models, such as the

huge mobile of the International Space Station that had once hung over my bed, now neatly disassembled

and stored in bubble wrap. Some toys had survived, mostly tie-in figurines and die-cast models, all

carefully stored inside their boxes.

It was, to my eyes, an eclectic mix; parents sorting out their children’s middens are a random filter. It

seemed my mother had selected objects not of sentimental value but that might be worth money

someday: a toy survived the cull only so long as it was in good condition and if she could find its

packaging. But those mint-condition auction candidates, of course, were precisely the toys I had spent

the least time with. Still, her eye for value had been good. A lot of the computer games could have raised

some cash; there was a whole industry of silicon-chip archaeology turning out readers for such things,

gizmos several electronic generations old and yet still precious to sentimental old fools like me.

I did come across one chance fossil that had escaped the cull, despite having no discernible value. It was

Stephen Baxter - Destiny's Children 3 - Transcendent

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