Starplex

by Robert J. Sawyer

  Jag paused for breath. "It's the most massive engineering project ever undertaken," he said. "But it sure beats the alternative--which was to let the universe die." He beamed at the members of the bridge staff.

  "We did it. Regular-matter creatures--creatures with hands! In the end--correction, to prevent the end--the universe needed us!"

  The ceremony, held in their favorite Waldahud restaurant, was short.

  The audience was much bigger than their original family-only wedding in Madrid; any sort of celebration was welcomed aboard Starplex.

  Thoraid Magnor had been promoted to acting director for the day so that he could perform the service. "Do you, Gilbert Keith," he said, "again take Clarissa Maria, to love, honor, and cherish, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer?"

  Keith turned to face his wife. He remembered the day twenty years ago, the day they had first gone through this ritual, a wonderful, happy day.

  It had been a good marriage--stimulating intellectually, emotionally, and physically. And she was, if anything, more beautiful, more challenging today than then. He looked into her large brown eyes, and said, "I do."

  Thor turned to face her, but before he could speak, Keith squeezed his wife's hand and added, loudly, for all to hear, "For as long as we both shall live."

  Rissa smiled at him radiantly.

  Hell, thought Keith, twenty years was just scratching the surface .

  **EPILOGUE**

  Keith Lansing had been sleeping well for weeks now. He lay in bed, next to his beautiful wife, drifting off to sleep. So what if he and Rissa and Jag and Longbottle and Rhombus and all the other billions of Commonwealth citizens didn't yet amount to a hill of beans in this crazy universe? So what if they were a cosmic afterthought, an unexpected by-product of dark-matter art? Someday they would make a difference--they would make all the difference . . .

  Keith woke with a start. He pulled back the little card covering his clock face; it was 0143. He sat up in bed and listened to the white noise PHANTOM was playing through the room's sound system.

  Christ, he thought. Good Christ.

  Pushing billions of stars from the future back in time would change the past--change it radically, change it chaotically. There's no way the time line would unfold the same way as it had originally--no way this past would end up giving rise to the same future. You couldn't avoid a paradox--unless . . . unless . . .

  Unless you were going to come back in time yourself--back to a time before the first matter from the future appeared. Keith felt his heart racing. All the beings from the far future must be here already, somewhere in the present.

  He recalled the pictures he'd seen of that smooth ball of metal--metal that had once been the boomerang sent from Tau Ceti to the Tejat Posterior shortcut, metal altered by fantastically advanced science.

  The Slammers had indeed closed the door on the Commonwealth . . .

  closed the door on their own past. They'd made it very clear that they wanted to--needed to--remain isolated from the earlier versions of themselves.

  Using that shortcut--and doubtless countless others--were people from the future. And among those people would be the version of himself that had signed the message on the time capsule, the version who was apparently a leader of the project to save the universe--a multibillion-year-old Keith Lansing, a Keith Lansing who had become, quite literally, the grand old man of physics. How he would love to meet that other self . . .

  Keith looked at Rissa in the dim light. She was still fast asleep, but his movements in the bed had pulled the sheet off her. He gingerly replaced it, then lay back against the pillow, and slowly fell into unconsciousness, dreaming of a glass man.