Transcendent by Stephen Baxter Page B

die I’d try not to do anything I might have to regret forever.”
    “You’d become cautious.”
    “I wouldn’t make enemies. And I wouldn’t hurt my friends.” But I might not even
make
friends, she thought, if I knew I might be stuck with them forever—or, worse still, outlive them.
    Reath was watching her, as if trying to follow her thoughts. “What else? I know you are a Skimmer. I envy you that! But the real excitement of Skimming comes from the risk, doesn’t it? Now, as things stand, if you were to have an accident, if you managed to kill yourself, you would be giving up a few centuries of life. But what if you were risking millennia—an indefinite future?”
    She snorted. “I’d have so much more to lose. You don’t think about that consciously when you Skim, but—if I took your pill I’d never leave my room!”
    “Suppose your sister was here with us now, and she fell into the sea. Would you try to rescue her?”
    “Yes.”
    “You’d risk your own life to save hers?”
    “Yes!”
    “Even at the cost of a hundred thousand years of existence?”
    “I . . .” She shook her head.
    “How do you think other people would feel about you?”
    “They would hate me,” she said immediately. “They would envy me—turn against me.”
    “For your long life? Even if they knew that your longevity was for a purpose, for their own betterment?”
    “Even so. Nobody would see past the fact that I would live on when they were dust.
I
would think like that. I would have to hide. . . .” She shook her head. “Some gift it would be! I’d be paralyzed by the thought of all that future. I’d have to hide away.”
    “I think you’re beginning to understand,” he said. “To be given Indefinite Longevity, to be released from a finite life span, is a step change, like ice turning to water, a total transformation. And you would have to find a way to
act,
to contribute to the human world, to make a difference, even though this great weight of time was hanging over you.”
    “Why must I act?”
    “Because longevity is necessary for the greatest projects of all. A human life is just too short to accrue true wisdom. By the time you’ve figured out how things work, you’re aging, losing your faculties, dying.”
    “But Michael Poole lived less than a century.”
    “True. It’s amazing those poor archaics achieved as much as they did!”
    “Reath, if I were to become a Transcendent, what about my family?”
    “They couldn’t follow you,” he said gently.
    She would be alone, she thought, left stranded by time. One by one her family and friends would turn to dust—even Drea, even her new kid brother. Could she live with that? Only by shutting herself off, by closing down her heart. How could she possibly choose such a path?
    “Reath, you said I might discover wisdom within me. I’m not wise at all. I haven’t lived long enough. Ask my mother how wise I am!”
    “Your age isn’t the point. If you know you are undying, it’s not your past that gives you wisdom.
It is your future
—or your awareness of it. And I think you are already starting to acquire some of that awareness. You don’t have to choose now,” he said gently. “We’re only at the beginning, you and I, of our exploration.”
    “Reath—” She hesitated. “Are
you
a Transcendent?”
    “Me?” He laughed, brusquely, but he turned away.
    An alarm chimed. “Oh!” Reath said. “They’re arriving at last.”
    They hurried from the flitter.
             
    At first she could see nothing but the clamor of the waves as they swelled and subsided. But then she saw a sleek shape, pale white, passing just under the surface of the water. Another followed, coming up from the darker depths, and a third, skimming like the first around the platform.
    Soon there were a dozen of the creatures, perhaps more. Some of them were smaller—children, perhaps, calves with their parents. They were streamlined and coated with a thick fur; they moved