Transcendent by Stephen Baxter Read Free Book Online

Siberian disaster, caused by a detonation of something called “gas hydrate deposits” about which I knew nothing, seemed to have all the right hooks for the news: lots of gore, some kind of link to the Warming and therefore a grave if-this-goes-on angle, and, last but not least, the aid workers who had been caught up in the blast, a set of photogenic young western casualties.
    But none of that was any use to me. I left my systems trying to make the call to Tom, while I set off more search agents to book a flight.
    The cost of a plane ticket to Siberia, even one way, was frightening. In 2047 nobody flew, nobody but the very rich and very important, or if you
really
had to. It was cheaper to orbit the Earth in a tourist-bucket spaceplane than to fly the Atlantic. Tom, working for his genetic-legacy agency, had traveled out by cruise ship, taking weeks to crawl around the polar ocean, a way of traveling with a much smaller environmental footprint. But that would be too slow for me. The flight to Florida had already cleaned me out, but what else could I do?
    Of course booking the ticket was only half the battle. Actually being deemed worthy of a seat came next. The booking system referred me to the airline’s counseling service, a man’s voice sounding older than me, fatherly, stern. “Let’s work out why you
really
want to fly.”
    “My son is hurt!”
    “Flying is a generational aspiration, you know. In your youth you probably flew many times, as did your parents. But then you indulged in many unhealthy pursuits in those days. That doesn’t mean you should carry on now.”
    “I don’t
want
to fly. I just want to get there.”
    “Is it possible that what you really want is a flight, not to Siberia, but to your past? Is it possible it is not a destination you seek but an
escape,
a release from the responsibilities of the present? . . .” And so on.
    My phone was implanted; you couldn’t muffle over the handset and say what you really thought. So I let off steam by pacing around the room as this virtual Freud lectured me about the necessity for the “hidden extras” I would be paying for, in terms of environmental-damage costs, and compensation for communities I would disrupt with the noise of the plane, and even clean-up taxes relating to the disposal of the aircraft itself a few years down the line. It was all part of the social-responsibility package the airlines had had to accept years before, to keep flying at all. But it was difficult to wade through.
    “I don’t have to justify anything about my relationship with my son to you,” I snapped back.
    “Not to me,” the empathist said. “Not to the airline, or even your son. To yourself, Michael.”
    “No,” I insisted. “There are times when we need to
be
with people. It’s a deep primate thing.” I was having trouble keeping my voice steady. “It’s part of my programming, I guess. You ought to understand that.”
    “But your son has stated, on record, that he doesn’t need to be with
you.
”
    Tom had said that, and it wasn’t helping my application. “A child’s whole life after about the age of ten is devoted to establishing his independence from his parents. And in our case our relationship has been particularly strained ever since the death of his mother, in childbirth. Even you must have figured that out.”
    “Yes, I—”
    You don’t interrupt airline psychoanalytical machines, but I interrupted. “But we need each other. We’re all we’ve got. Tom’s words are only the surface. It’s what we feel underneath that counts. And if you aren’t a complete waste of memory you’ll understand that . . .” You aren’t supposed to insult the shrink machines either. But I meant everything I said.
    I had been with Morag when she died, on that grisly hospital table. And at that instant I had wanted nothing else in the world, nothing, but to be with Tom; it had been as if a steel cable had been lodged in my gut and was dragging me to him.