Free Transcendent by Stephen Baxter Page A

keep up her program of Witnessing, as ordained by mysterious bodies at the heart of the Commonwealth, which he called “the Colleges of Redemption.” So he allowed her to believe she wasn’t after all being helplessly sentimental in clinging to Michael Poole, her childhood companion; it was her duty. Perhaps he was sparing her feelings, and if so she was grateful for his indulgence. But he did take the Witnessing very seriously indeed, for he said the Redemption was at the heart of the greatest ambitions of the Transcendence.
    And so, in the bowels of Reath’s severe ship, as the stars sailed by, she spent long hours immersed in the bright Florida light of Poole’s long-ago childhood. She wished she could be there now, gazing not on this dismal water-world but on the sparkling seas of Earth.
             
    Hundreds of kilometers of featureless ocean passed under the flitter’s prow.
    “Reath, what is this world
called
?”
    “Names are relative,” Reath said, smiling. “They depend on your viewpoint.”
    Any world had a multiplicity of names, he said. The Commonwealth maintained formal catalogs, numbering every star and planet, comet and asteroid, every object of any significant size in the Galaxy. Some of these catalogs were based on antecedents that went back hundreds of millennia, to the days when the whole Galaxy had been an arena of war. There were other viewpoints, too. Those near enough to see this world’s star in their sky would give it a more formal name, as part of some constellation, say; they might even name the world itself if they could see it. Thus the world might have a dozen, a hundred such names, assigned from different interstellar viewpoints. But a world’s primal name (or names) was that given it by those who lived here.
    Alia gazed down at the endless seascape. “So what do the locals call this world?
Wet
?”
    “You’ll see,” he said evasively.
    “And
why
is there no land here?”
    He smiled. “Because the ocean is too deep . . .”
    There was no world quite like this one in Sol system. This world was bigger than Earth, six times as massive. It had first formed far from its sun, so far out that water and other volatiles had not been driven off by its sun’s heat as it coalesced. As it cooled it was left with a rocky core about the size of the Earth, but that inner core was swathed in a blanket of water ice.
    After its formation was completed, this world had been gathered in as the moon of a gas giant. Thus things might have remained, if not for the fact that the parent Jovian, its orbit impeded by the remnant dust cloud from which it had formed, migrated steadily in toward its sun. And the ice moon began to melt.
    “At last almost all the ice went—there’s just a couple of islands of it at the poles now—leaving an ocean more than a hundred kilometers thick, over a remnant ice mantle. That’s, oh, ten times as thick as the oceans on Earth. And then a little outgassing created the atmosphere. Weather started, and—”
    “And that’s why there is no land?”
    “How could there be dry land, Alia? Even if the seabed was rock, you’d need a mountain a hundred kilometers tall to poke above the ocean surface to make an island. No such mountains are possible on Earth, let alone here, where the gravity is about fifty percent above standard. And besides the seabed is ice, not rock.
    “Because of the lack of land, it was difficult for life to get started here. There
is
life here, though: life that kick-started on other, more hospitable worlds of the system, and drifted here as spores—”
    “Panspermia.”
    “Yes.” He nodded approvingly. “And then, of course, people came.”
    People? But, she wondered, how could they live here?
    Reath pointed. “There it is at last. Our destination.”
    Adrift in the middle of the endless ocean was a scrap of bright orange—a rectangle, a man-made thing. Alia felt unreasonable relief to see this bit of human engineering in the immense