Origin m-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “The collision took about ten minutes,” Nemoto said softly. “The approach speed was tens of thousands of miles per hour. But a collision between such large bodies, even at such speeds, would look like slow motion.”

  A vast fount of material, glowing liquid rock, gushed into space from the impact. Emma glimpsed the impacting planetesimal’s grey curve, a last fragment of geometric purity, lost in the storm of fire. A great circular wave of fire spread out around the Earth from the impact point.

  A ring of glowing light began to coalesce in Earth orbit. As it cooled it solidified into a swarm of miniature bodies. And then spiral arms formed in the glowing moonlet cloud. It was a remarkable, beautiful sight.

  “This is how the Moon was born,” Nemoto said. “The largest of those moonlets won out. The growing Moon swept up the remnant particles, and under the influence of tidal forces rapidly receded from Earth. Earth itself, meanwhile, was afflicted by huge rock tides, savage rains as the ocean vapour fell back from space. It took millions of years before the rocks had cooled enough for liquid water to gather once more.”

  “You know a lot about this stuff, Nemoto.”

  Nemoto turned, her face underlit by the glow of Earth’s violent formation. “A few months ago a new Moon appeared in Earth’s sky. I wanted to know how the old one had got there. I thought it might be relevant.”

  Emma glanced at Mane. The Daemon stood with her knuckles resting lightly on invisibility. Her eyes were closed, her face blank. Julia’s eyes were closed too.

  “What do they see?” she whispered to Nemoto. “What do they hear?”

  “Perhaps more than this show-and-tell diorama. Manekato said this place, this tunnel in the Moon, was information-rich. Julia is as smart as we are, but different. Manekato is smarter still. I don’t know what they can apprehend, how far they can see beyond what we see.”

  “…Hey. What happened to the Earth?”

  The glowing, devastated planet had blown apart. Fragments of its image had scattered to corners of the chamber — where the fragments coalesced to new Earths, new Moons, a whole family of them. They hung around the chamber like Christmas-tree ornaments, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.

  Other Earths:

  Emma saw a fat, solitary world, banded with yellow cloud.

  Here was another cloud-striped world, but the clouds swirled around a point on its equator — no, it was a world tipped over so that its axis pointed to its sun, like Uranus (or was it Neptune?).

  Here was an Earth like Venus, with a great shroud of thick clouds that glowed yellow-white, nowhere broken.

  Here was a world with a fat, cloud-shrouded Moon that seemed to loom very close. This Earth was streaked by volcanic clouds. It lacked ice caps, and its unrecognizable continents were pierced by shining threads that must have been immense rivers. This world must be battered by the great tides of air, water and rock raised by that too-close companion.

  Most of the Earths seemed about the size of Earth — of the Earth, Emma’s Earth. But some were smaller — wizened worlds that reminded her of Mars, with huge continents of glowering red rock and brooding weather systems squatting over their poles. And some of the Earths were larger. These monster planets were characteristically wreathed in thick, muddy atmospheres and drowned in oceans, water that stretched from pole to pole, with a few eroded islands protruding above the surface, rooted on some deep-buried crust.

  The Moons varied too. There seemed to be a spectrum of possible Moons. The smallest were bare grey rock like Luna, those somewhat larger cratered deserts of crimson rock more or less like Mars. Some were almost Earth-like, showing thick air and ice and the glint of ocean — like the Red Moon itself. There were even Earths with pairs of Moons, Emma saw, or triplets. One ice-bound Earth was surrounded, not by a Moon, but by a glowing ring system like Saturn’s.

  Emma looked, without success, for a blue Earth with a single, grey, modest Moon.

  “The Big Whack collision shaped Earth and Moon,” Nemoto murmured. “Everything about Earth and Moon — their axial tilt, composition, atmosphere, length of day, even Earth’s orbit around the sun — was determined by the impact. But it might have turned out differently. Small, chance changes in the geometry of the collision would have made a large difference in the outcome. Lots of possible realities, budding off from that key, apocalyptic moment.”

  “What are we looking at here? Computer simulations?”

  “Or windows into other possible realities. It is a glimpse of the vast graph of probability and possibility, of alternates that cluster around the chaotic impact event.” Nemoto seemed coldly excited. “This is the key, Emma Stoney. The Big Whack was the pivotal event whose subtly different outcomes produced the wide range of Earths we have encountered…”

  Emma barely understood what she was saying.

  Julia grunted. “Grey Earth,” she said. She was pointing to the tipped-over, Uranus-like Earth.

  Emma said, “Where you came from.”

  “Home,” Julia said simply.

  Nemoto said, “I recognize that one.” She pointed to the fat, solitary Earth, banded by Jupiter-like clouds. “A Moonless Earth, an Earth where the great impact did not happen at all. It may be the Earth they call the Banded Earth, which seems to be the origin of these Daemons.”

  Mane laid gentle, patronizing hands on their scalps. “Analyse, analyse. Your minds are very busy. You must watch, listen.”

  “Ooh.” It was the Nutcracker infant. She was crawling over the invisible floor, chortling at the light show.

  Emma glanced down. The various Earths had vanished, to be replaced by a floor of swirling, curdled light.

  It was a galaxy.

  “Oh, my,” she muttered. “What now?”

  The galaxy was a disc of stars, flatter than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars — a granularity of light and with dark lanes traced between the arms. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light years across.

  But the familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

  The five of them stood over this vast image — if it was an image — Daemon and Ham and humans and Nutcracker baby, squat, ungainly, primitive forms.

  “So, a galaxy,” said Emma. “Our Galaxy?”

  “I think so,” Nemoto said. “It matches radio maps I have seen.” She pointed, tracing patterns. “Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.”

  The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other “arms” were really just scraps, Emma saw — the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected — but still, she thought, the sun is in one of those scattered fragments.

  The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.

  Emma could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, she saw, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.

  “
A galactic day,” Nemoto breathed. “It takes two hundred million years to complete a turn.”

  Oh, Malenfant, Emma thought again, you should be here to see this. Not me — not me.

  Nemoto said, “But whose Galaxy is it?”

  “That is a good question,” Mane said. “It is our Galaxy — that is, it belongs to all of us. The Galactic background is common to the reality threads bound by the Earth-Moon impact probability sheaf—”

  “Woah,” Emma said. “Nemoto, can you translate?”

  Nemoto frowned. “Think of the Galaxy, a second before the Earth-Moon impact. All those stars have nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Whack, and will not be affected by it. The Galaxy will turn, whether the Moon exists or not, whether humans evolve or not…”

  Mane said, “Our Galaxy looks the same as yours. And it is unmodified.”

  Emma snapped, “What does that mean?”

  Nemoto said, “That there is no sign of life, Emma.”

  “But we’re looking at a whole damn galaxy. From this perspective the sun is a dot of light. The place could be swarming with creatures like humans, and you wouldn’t see it.”

  Nemoto shook her head. “The Fermi Paradox. In our universe, and Mane’s, there has been time for a thousand empires to sweep over the face of the Galaxy. Some of the signs of their passing ought to be very visible.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they might tamper with the evolution of the stars. Or they might mine the black hole at the Galaxy’s core for its energy. Or they might wrap up the Galactic disc in a shell to trap all its radiant energy. Emma, there are many possibilities. It is very likely that we would see something even when we peer at a Galaxy from without like this.”

  “But we don’t.”

  “But we don’t. Humanity seems to be alone in our universe, Emma;

  Earth is the only place where mind arose.” Nemoto confronted Mane. “And your universe is empty too. As was Hugh McCann’s. Perhaps that is true in all the universes in this reality sheaf.”

  Emma murmured, “The Fermi Paradox.”

  Nemoto seemed surprised she knew the name.

  “Something is happening to the Galaxy,” Mane said.

  They clustered close to watch.

  The Galaxy was spinning fast now. All over the disc the stars were flaring, dying. Some of them, turning to red embers, began to drift away from the main body of the disc.

  Emma picked up the Nutcracker infant and clutched her to her chest. “It is shrivelling,” she said.

  “We are seeing vast swathes of time,” Nemoto said sombrely. “This is the future, Emma.”

  “The future? How is that possible?”

  Suddenly the stars died. All of them went out, it seemed, all at once.

  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-coloured 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 centre.

  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 — reach
ed 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 other 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 ageing 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.