The Galaxy seemed to implode, becoming much dimmer.
At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash of light. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch, surrounded by a blood-colored river, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. That great central complex was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the center.
Further out still, the core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be set in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points towards the bloated central mass.
Emma said, "What happened to all the stars?"
"They died," Nemoto said bluntly. "They grew old and died, and there wasn't enough material left to make any more. And then, this." Nemoto pointed. "The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into black holes – those blisters you see in the disc. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core."
"When is this?"
Nemoto hesitated, thinking, and when she spoke again, she sounded awed. "Umm, perhaps a hundred thousand billion years into the future – compared to the universe's present age five thousand times older."
The numbers seemed monstrous to Emma. "So this is the end of life."
"Oh, no," Mane replied. She pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the galactic corpse. "These seem to be normal stars: small, uniform, but still glowing in the visible spectrum."
"How is that possible?"
"Those stars can't be natural," Nemoto said. She turned to Emma, her eyes shining. "You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant interstellar gases, forming artificial birthing clouds... Somebody is farming the Galaxy, even so far in the future. Isn't it wonderful?"
"Wonderful? The wreck of the Galaxy?"
"Not that," Nemoto said. "The existence of life. They still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. But their worlds must be huddled close to these small, old stars – probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark... I think this is, umm, a biography," Nemoto said. "This whole vast show. The story of a race. They are trying to tell us what became of them."
"A very human impulse," said Mane.
Emma shrugged. "But why should they care what we think?"
Nemoto said, "Perhaps they were our descendants..."
Mane said nothing, her eyes wide as she peered at the crimson image, and Emma wondered what strange news from the future was pouring into her head.
And now the Galaxy image whirled again, evolving, changing, dimming. Emma hugged the baby hominid and closed her eyes.
Manekatopokanemahedo
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone, and for ever after.
Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind – save what they brought with them or created – no other against which human advancement could be tested.
They were forever alone.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time's far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle..
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers – lonely, dogged, all but insane – reached to the deepest past...
Emma Stoney
Nemoto was muttering, perhaps to Emma or Manekato, or perhaps to herself, as she impatiently swept lianas and thorn tangles out of her path. "Evolution has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we ever imagined, of course. Well, everything is more complicated now, in this manifold of realities. Even though Darwin's basic intuition was surely right..." And so on.
Carrying the sleeping Nutcracker infant, Emma walked through the forest. Ahead she could see the broad back of Manekato.
Emma let Nemoto talk.
"...Even before this Red Moon showed up in our skies we had developed major elaborations to the basic Darwinian model. Darwin's 'tree of life' is no simple tree, it turns out, no simple hierarchy of ancestral species. It is a tangle – "
"Like this damn jungle," Emma said, trying to turn the monologue into a conversation. "Lianas and vines cutting across everywhere. If it was just the trees it would be easy."
"A criss-cross transfer of genetic information, this way and that. And now we have this Red Moon wandering between alternate Earths, the Wheels returning to different Africas over and over, scooping up species here and depositing them there, making an altogether untidy mess of the descent of mankind – and of other species; no wonder this world is full of what Malenfant called 'living fossils'. Surely without the Red Moon we would never have evolved, we Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo erectus was a successful species, lasting millions of years, covering the Earth. We did not need to become so smart..."
It had been some days since their jaunt into the tunnel in the Moon. Nemoto had spent the time with Manekato and other Daemons, struggling to interpret the experience. For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the aging Galaxy had started to blizzard over her – even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it.
But she remembered the last glimpse of all.
...It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.
But even now there was something rather than nothing.
The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth...
That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn't have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She ha
d come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.
Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. This was reality, of life and breath and senses.
Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind legs, sniffed the air and swiveled her ears, and belched with satisfaction. "Here," she said. "The Nutcrackers will come." With a massive thump she sat on the ground, and began exploring the bushes around her for berries.
Emma, gratefully, put down the infant Nutcracker and sat beside her. The leaves were slippery and damp; the morning was not long advanced. She considered giving the infant some more milk, but the child had already discovered Manekato's fruit, and was clambering up the Daemon's impassive back.
Nemoto sat beside Emma. Her posture was stiff, her arms wrapped around her chest, her right heel drumming on the ground. Emma laid one hand on Nemoto's knee. Gradually the drumming stopped.
And, suddenly, Nemoto began to talk.
"They made the manifold."
"Who did?"
"The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes – an infinite number of universes. They made it all." Nemoto shook her head. "Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it."
Manekato was watching them, her large eyes thoughtful.
Emma said carefully, "How did they do this, Nemoto?"
"The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast," Manekato murmured.
Emma shook her head, irritated. "What does that mean?"
Nemoto said, "Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities."
"And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery –"
"We don't know how they did it. But they changed the rules," Nemoto said.
Emma said hesitantly, "So they found a way to create a lot more universes."
Manekato said, "We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but an infinite number." The bulky Daemon studied Emma's face, seeking understanding.
"Infinity is significant, you see," Nemoto said, too rapidly. "There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, all logically possible universes must exist. And therefore all logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible will happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind."
"Why did they do this?"
"Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went – though perhaps they found life – they found no sign of mind, save for themselves."
"And then the stars went out."
"And the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance... But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and – well, some of them rebelled."
The infant crawled over Manekato's stolid head and down her chest, clutching great handfuls of hair. Then she curled up in the Daemon's lap, defecated efficiently, and quickly fell asleep. Emma suppressed a pang of jealousy that it was not her lap.
"So they rebelled. How?"
Nemoto sighed. "It's all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma."
"I was afraid it might be."
Manekato said, "Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. Handshakes across time. The story of the universe is like a tapestry, stitched together by uncountable trillions of such tiny handshakes. If you create an artificial timelike loop to some point in spacetime within the negative light cone of the present –"
"Woah. In English."
Manekato looked puzzled.
Nemoto said, "If you were to go back in time and try to change the past, you would damage the universe, erasing a whole series of consequential events. Yes? So the universe starts over, from the first point where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. As the effects of your change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake. The wounded universe heals itself with a new set of handshakes, working forward in time, until it is complete and self-consistent once more."
Emma tried to think that through. "What you're telling me is that changing history is possible."
"Oh, yes," said Nemoto. "The Old Ones must have come to believe they had lived through the wrong history. So they reached back, to the deepest past, and made the change – and the manifold was born."
Emma thought she understood. So this had been the purpose the Old Ones had found. Not a saga of meaningless survival in a dismal future of decay and shadows. The Old Ones had reached back, back in time, back to the deepest past, and put it right, by creating infinite possibilities for life, for mind.
She said carefully, "I always wondered if life had any meaning. Now I know. The purpose of the first intelligence of all was to reshape the universe, in order to create a storm of mind."
"Yes," Manekato said. "That is a partial understanding, but – yes."
"Whew," Emma said.
Nemoto seemed to be shivering, exhausted. "I feel as if I have been gazing through a pinhole at the sun; I have stared so long that I have burned a hole in my retina. And yet there is still so much more to see."
"You have done well," Manekato said gently.
Nemoto snapped, "Do I get another banana?"
"We must all do the best we can." Manekato's massive hand absently stroked the Nutcracker; the child purred like a cat.
"But," Emma said, "the Old Ones must have wiped out their own history in the process. Didn't they? They created a time paradox. Everybody knows about time paradoxes. If you kill your grandmother, the universe repairs itself so you never existed..."
"Perhaps not," Manekato murmured. "It seems that conscious minds may, in some form, survive the transition."
"Do not ask how," Nemoto said dryly. "Suffice it to say that the Old Ones seem to have been able to look on their handiwork, and see that it was good... mostly."
"Mostly?"
Nemoto said, "We think that we unwilling passengers on this Red Moon, are, umm, exploring a corner of the manifold, of that infinite ensemble of universes the Old Ones created. Remember the Big Whack. Remember how we glimpsed many possible outcomes, many possible Earths and Moons, depending on the details of the impact."
"It is clear," Manekato said, "that within the manifold there must be a sheaf of universes, closely related, all of them deriving from that primal Earth-shaping event and its different outcomes."
Nemoto said, "Many Earths. Many realities."
"And in some of those realities," Manekato said, "w
hat you call the Fermi Paradox was resolved a different way."
"You mean, alien intelligences arose."
"Yes." Nemoto rubbed her nose and glanced uneasily at the sky. "But in every one of those alien-inhabited realities, humans got wiped out – or never evolved in the first place. Every single time."
"How come?"
Nemoto shrugged. "Lots of possible ways. Interstellar colonists from ancient cultures overwhelmed Earth before life got beyond the single-cell stage. Humankind was destroyed by a swarm of killer robots. Whatever. The Old Ones seem to have selected a bundle of universes – all of them deriving from the Big Whack – in which there was no life beyond the Earth. And they sent this Moon spinning between those empty realities, from one to the other –"
"So that explains Fermi," Emma said.
"Yes," said Nemoto. "We see no aliens because we have been inserted into an empty universe. Or universes. For our safety. To allow us to flourish."
"But why the Red Moon, why link the realities?"
"To express humanity," Manekato said simply. "There are many different ways to be a hominid, Em-ma. We conjecture the Old Ones sought to explore those different ways: to promote evolutionary pulses, to preserve differing forms, to make room for different types of human consciousness."
Emma frowned. "You make us sound like pets. Toys."
Manekato growled; Emma wondered if that was a laugh. "Perhaps. Or it may be that we have yet to glimpse the true purpose of this wandering world."
Emma said, "But I still don't get it. Why would these super-being Old Ones care so much about humanity?"
Nemoto frowned. "You haven't understood anything, Emma. They were us. They were our descendants, our future. Homo sapiens sapiens, Emma. And their universe spanning story is our own lost future history. We built the manifold. We – our children – are the Old Ones."
Emma was stunned. Somehow it was harder to take, to accept that these universe making meddlers might have been – not godlike, unimaginable aliens – but the descendants of humans like herself. What hubris, she thought.
Manifold: Origin Page 51
