Last and First Contacts (Imaginings)

by Stephen Baxter

  I wondered about life. ‘Civilisations like our own could be rising and falling all around us and we’d never see them.’ It was true; we rushed by too quickly.

  Elstead picked on that. ‘If there is life out there, do you imagine there could still be people? Even if humanity survives, could our descendants still be anything like us?’ He glanced at my crucifix, which floated in the air before my throat. ‘Are you a practicing Christian, Susie?’

  ‘Sort of.’ I was brought up Catholic; I attended Mass with my parents. I welcomed the social glue of the Church, and I liked to think I had an open mind about the rest. ‘You?’

  He snorted. ‘No, but my parents were, as you can tell from my first name. Consider this. In our day Christianity was only, only, a couple of thousands of years old. Some gods have been around longer – but many more have been forgotten. We have no idea to what gods Stonehenge was dedicated, for example. Human culture seems incapable of keeping its gods alive for more than a few millennia.

  ‘But suppose humanity survives a million years – or ten million. Most mammalian species go extinct on such timescales. How will time change mankind? Is it even conceivable that the memory of any god could survive such a stupendous interval? Because that’s what you have to believe, you see, if you follow Christ, or Allah, a One True God.’

  I thought about that. ‘Either possibility – the abandonment of Christianity, or its enduring for a million years – is hard to get my head around.’

  ‘Yes, it is. But go even further. What happens if humanity goes extinct? Could the last man baptise an octopoid creature from Alpha Centauri? Can the flame be kept alive in alien heads? And what happens if intelligence fails altogether? Is there room for Christ in a universe altogether without mind, even without life? Because that is what you must believe. Or if you can’t believe it, then what is the purpose of your faith?…’

  He went on in this hectoring way for some time. Junge shot me sympathetic glances, but I wasn’t troubled; my residual faith isn’t deep enough for that.

  Anyhow I understood that Elstead was just picking on me because he was bored by this long day – bored, as he waited for the end of the universe.

  On the fifth day the stars went out.

  For a while the sky was full of their remains. There were black holes and neutron stars, the remnants of giants, while stars like our sun became white dwarfs, slowly fading to black. Occasionally a flare would light up the dark, as an unlucky dead star fell into a black hole, or dwarfs collided and ignited. But these were rare, chance events. Junge said that in the end our sun would collapse to a single, immense crystal of carbon, a diamond cool enough to touch. It was a wonderful image, but we weren’t able to see it.

  On the sixth day we watched the galaxy disintegrate. Chance encounters threw one star after another out of the galaxy’s gravity well, a relentless evaporation that turned our black sky even blacker. Junge said that the galaxy was dispersed utterly after some hundred billion billion years.

  That long day I spent some time trying to make such numbers meaningful. Such was the expansion of scales that as a single year was to the lifetime of the universe in my day, so the entire epoch from Big Bang to humans was to this new age. But any such comparisons, fleetingly grasped, were soon overwhelmed by our continued plummeting into ever more outlandish depths of time.

  And still the expansion continued, still the universe’s dreary physical processes unfolded. There was no sound in the Bathyscaphe but our own breathing and the whir of the air scrubbers.

  On the seventh day the ghosts of the last stars, mere infra-red traces, faded out one by one. The cosmic expansion, having long ago separated galaxies from each other, now plunged its hands deep into stellar neighbourhoods. There came a point when the remnant of the sun was left isolated within its cosmological horizon: the sun, alone in its own universe.

  And as the day wore on, even the diamond sun began to break up.

  Junge had a set of particle detectors mounted on the hull of the Bathyscaphe. He passed their signals through a speaker, and we heard soft pings from the cosmic dark.

  ‘Protons,’ Elstead breathed. ‘The decay of protons into their constituent quarks – on the very longest of terms, even solid matter is unstable. Another theory vindicated! They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for this.’

  ‘So what happens now?’

  ‘That all depends, Susie. On what we find tomorrow.’

  None of us went to bed that night. We brought blankets from the cabins and sat in our couches, side by side, the only light in the universe shining on our faces. Nobody slept, I don’t think. Yet nobody had the nerve to suggest that we shut off the softscreens and exclude that terrible, unending night. I watched the clock. There wasn’t anything else to do.

  At last, the eighth day began.

  At the time we understood nothing of what happened to us. Later we reconstructed it as best we could.

  We stayed together that night because we thought we were alone in the universe. We were wrong. Humans had never been alone.

  From a hundred centres, life and mind spread across the face of the Galaxy. Gaudy empires sprawled; hideous wars were fought; glittering civilisations rose and fell. Yet what survived each fire was stronger than what had gone before.

  Humanity, born early, did not survive to participate in this adventure. But the wreckage of Earth was discovered; humans were remembered.

  Then came the collision with Andromeda, a ship of stars carrying its own freight of history and civilisation. The vast disruption inflicted deep wounds on two galactic cultures – wounds made worse by the wars of the dark days that followed.

  Yet out of these conflicts came a new mixing. Minds rose up from the swarming stars like birds from a shaken tree, and then flocked into a culture stronger and more brilliant than those which had preceded it – but a more sober one.

  In the long ages that followed, civilisation turned from conquest to consolidation, from acquisition to preservation. Vast libraries were constructed, and knowledge was guarded fiercely.

  But the universe wound down.

  As the galaxy evaporated, its unified culture disintegrated into fiefdoms. Worse, as the stars receded from each other, the universe shed its complexity, and it became impossible for the ancient catalogues to be maintained. Information was lost, whole histories deleted.

  Nobody even noticed when the last traces of humanity were expunged.

  The last cultures pooled resources and eventually identities, so that, within the cosmological horizon of the sun, in the end there was only a single consciousness, a single point of awareness, hoarding a meagre store of memory.

  And still the universe congealed. Elstead’s final cosmological discovery was that there could be no relief from the relentless expansion. The proton decay reduced all matter to a cloud of photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos – and at last the cosmic expansion would draw apart even these remnants. In the end, each particle would be alone within its own cosmological horizon. And at that point, when no complexity of any kind was possible, consciousness would cease at last.

  Think of it! There you lie, the last solar mind, trapped in spacetime like a human immersed in thickening ice. Dimly you remember what you once were, how you cupped stars in your hands. Now you can barely move. And the constant expansion of the universe bit by bit shreds your memories, your very identity, a process that can only end in utter oblivion. You have nothing left but resentment and bitterness, and envy for those who went before you.

  And yet there is, just occasionally, a moment of relief.

  In Earth’s oceans, life teemed close to the surface, where green plankton grew thick on sunlight, a minuscule forest that underpinned food chains. But as one fish ate another, scraps or droppings would fall into the deeper dark beneath. Here swam strange fish of the deep, with huge mouths and enlarged eyes and viper-like teeth. There were whole pallid ecologies down here, surviving on the half-digested morsels that rained down from the shell of
sunlit richness above.

  So it was in the ocean of time. In the bright, energy-rich ages of the past, time travel had been invented and reinvented many times. And wary travellers would venture into the far future, beyond the death of the suns …

  You are trapped in the cold and the dark. But, just occasionally, a morsel from the bright warm past falls down the ages to you, bringing with it a freight of mass and energy and, above all, complexity. Just for a while, you can live again – or at least, allow yourself the luxury of completing a thought.

  Elstead’s Bathyscaphe, this unwary time machine, is like a fresh strawberry in the mouth of a starving man. You bite. And yet the taste is bitter …

  The Bathysphere rolled and shuddered. The walls lit up with red alert signals. Junge and Elstead were shouting at each other. It was far worse than the gravity-wave wash of the galactic collision.

  But it wasn’t the condition of the ship that concerned me, but the state of my own head.

  I could feel it in me, another awareness, like a hand rummaging inside my skull. It fed on my memories, my personality, my life – it tried to consume all I had. And at the same time I sensed it, a huge intelligence towering over me, a roomy mind like an abandoned museum, and as desolate. I sensed envy. I sensed pity. I sensed regret. I wept, for myself, and for it.

  And then it backed away. But my head was still cut open, my mind cold and exposed to the air.

  I saw Junge’s fist slam down on his panic button. Then I blacked out.

  We sat in blankets under an intense Mojave sun. After the Cristal Industries medics had pulled us from the half-wrecked Bathyscaphe they wanted to move us into a blockhouse hospital, but none of us would leave the light, the warmth of the young sky. The medics and techs fussed around us, but it was as if only the three of us sat there, still alone in the universe.

  Except we hadn’t been alone.

  All through the eight-day ascent back to the present we had been trying to piece together what had happened, trying to assemble our fragmentary impressions into a coherent whole. We were still arguing.

  ‘It could have destroyed us,’ Elstead said. ‘The time shark. But it didn’t. Why not?’

  ‘Because it pitied us,’ I said. ‘That’s all. It consumes time machines. But ours was early – as primitive as a hot-air balloon, perhaps – maybe even the first of all to get so far. It saw something in us it has lost in itself. Potential. Hope, even. It couldn’t destroy us, any more than a bitter old man could kill a newborn baby.’

  ‘That’s quite something,’ Elstead murmured. ‘To be the first.’

  ‘But it is us,’ Junge said. ‘It is the confluence of all the minds in two galaxies – or a fragment of that confluence anyhow.’

  ‘Not us,’ I said flatly. ‘Couldn’t you feel it? There was nothing of the human in it, nothing left of us.’

  We had been arguing about this all the way home. For all he had goaded me about it, Elstead just hadn’t wanted to believe humanity had had an end. ‘Maybe that’s so, maybe not.’ He was as beat-looking as any of us. But, under his blanket, he rubbed his hands. ‘What we have to do now is make sure it doesn’t turn out like that.’

  Junge and I peered at him. I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘We brought back a hell of a lot of data. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong for humanity. And then make sure it doesn’t happen.’

  I said, ‘But even if you achieve that – what about the ultimate end? When the expansion scatters the last particles, all complexity is lost –’

  ‘Does it have to turn out that way?’ And he began to talk of other theories of physics. The dark energy field could have decreased in strength, just enough to slow the expansion. Or an even more eerie force called quintessence could stop the expansion when the last fundamental particles were still in contact with each other – and life, and consciousness, could continue, though at a terribly slow rate. ‘But the story wouldn’t end,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t end.’

  ‘Elstead –’ After all we had been through I wanted to be gentle. ‘The universe isn’t like that. Cosmology doesn’t accord with that model. We saw it for ourselves.’

  He wasn’t daunted. ‘Then we have to find a way to fix it so it does accord. Or else ship out to another universe more to our liking. We’ve plenty of time to figure out the details. It’s always been my belief that however the future works out, Big Crunch or Rip or endless expansion, there has to be a way to preserve information through the terminal catastrophe – there has to be a way for life to survive. Anyhow, that’s my plan.’ He looked at us, his eyes huge in his gaunt face. ‘Are you with me?’

  All this was two years ago.

  I didn’t go back to England. I can no longer bear the dark and the cold – or the ocean. I took a house on a mountain-top in Colorado, a place bathed in light where I could hardly be further from the sea. I’m close enough to the summit that I can walk around it, and, every morning, I do.

  I wrote up our story. I earned my euros.

  I’ve found a partner. We’re planning kids. That way I can postpone the death of the universe, just a little, I guess. I’ve kept in touch with Walter Junge; I hope his kids will get on with ours.

  I’ve started attending Mass again. I don’t quite know what I’m feeling when I listen to the ancient lessons. But Elstead was surely right that the monumental existence of deep time, and the erasure of all things, is the ultimate challenge to any faith. I suspect that in a few million years we’ll be smart enough it figure it out, and I’m content to wait.

  As everybody knows, St John Elstead built a new vessel – Spacetime Bathyscaphe II – bigger and more capable than the first, and stocked it with people of a like mind to himself. I turned down the invitation to join him, but I did send him my crucifix pendant.

  Elstead descended once more into the abyss of time, to challenge the destiny he found so unsatisfactory. He has yet to return.

  Halo Ghosts

  ‘Black!’ said Bead, his face boyish with wonder. ‘Black as the inside of a skull.’

  I hid a smile. But he was right: the comet nucleus tumbled through the solar system’s depths like a bit of charred bone, its perihelion glory a memory.

  And our two-man ship was only metres away from it.

  ‘We’ve made it, Bead,’ I said. ‘The first men to the cometary halo.’

  ‘And maybe the first to see the birth of the solar system. Yeah…’

  We were that close –

  – when the ghost rippled through us.

  My console lights flared; my sensors screamed.

  Bead’s face emptied. ‘What…’

  ‘The processors have overloaded.’ I slammed in manual overrides. ‘Remember your training, damn it! Help me get her under control –’

  We hit the comet ice, hard. I heard metal peel back like orange skin. Stars slewed across the viewscreen, overlaid by whirling sparks. There was a distant grind.

  We came to rest.

  Bead’s voice shivered. ‘Slater, don’t do these things to me! Thank God that’s over.’

  I watched the sparks – half our water disappearing into interstellar space.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s all over.’

  He looked at me strangely.

  ‘Come on,’ I said briskly. ‘We’ll suit up and check the damage.’

  We drifted like bubbles in the comet’s micro-gravity.

  The ship had dug itself a pit about three metres deep. The slushy methane ice of the comet hadn’t done the drive tubes any damage.

  ‘Maybe your lousy piloting’s done me a favour,’ said Bead. His voice was high and quick; he took clownish bounds over the carbon-coated landscape. ‘I mean, the deeper I can take my cores for the Berry interferometer the older the material will be. I might even find some stuff from before the sun lit up. ‘Imagine that, Slater. We’ll get images of the sun’s birth – or even of the primordial nova that seeded it –’

  I shivered.

  There were
stars all around us, cold and distant. I felt like a child in a huge bedroom…

  I wondered if there were ghosts out here.

  ‘Listen to me, Bead.’

  Reluctantly he settled to the surface.

  I searched for words. ‘You know what happened. Right at the moment of landing the sensors picked up a ghost – a veil of nothing a thousand miles long. ‘There was a high-energy pulse – probably a trace from some old disaster, a nova maybe. The processors overloaded…’

  ‘Tell me about the damage,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yeah. Bead – we can’t both get home. We’ve lost too many consumables. There’s enough for one of us.’ I searched his face in the starlight. ‘Do you understand?’

  He half-smiled, his face slack.

  ‘Well, we haven’t got to face it yet.’ Or each other, I thought. ‘We’ve work to do – report to Earth, get the Berry cores done. And we could both use some sleep. Come on.’

  I turned to the ship and away from the situation.

  We set up the Berry core device. Like a bizarre insect it plunged its cylindrical tongue into the heart of the comet.

  Bead broke open trial cores on the surface. He nodded. ‘These are good. And very old.’

  I poked the ancient stuff with a toe. ‘Well, it’s your baby. Looks like slush to me.’

  ‘Yah.’

  An awkward silence stretched; without the distraction of words, the tension between us became tangible.

  ‘Listen,’ I said hastily, ‘I’ve never understood how this interferometer of yours works anyway.’

  He got to his feet clumsily. ‘Every particle of matter has a sort of memory,’ he said. ‘Each quantum mechanical wave function has something called a Berry phase – does that make any sense to you?’

  ‘Not a lot.’

  He waved his hands vaguely. ‘The Berry phase is like a record of the past history of the particle – what velocities it’s attained, what fields it’s been subject to. The interferometer can take this information from a collection of particles and, uh, decode it to give pictures.’