Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Charles Sheffield

  If the array was working to specification, was something wrong with the basic theory? In principle a super-luminal signal would traverse the universe in hours; but confirmation of the theory had been made only in the home galaxy, over distances a millionth as far as current needs.

  His attention moved beyond the detector array to the far-off glow of stars and galaxies. His eyes could not see the change, but he knew that it was there.

  Not the end yet, but the subtle beginning of the end. Already the great dust clouds had been consumed, the blazing blue supergiant stars long ago exploded to supernovas or collapsed to black holes. Every main sequence star was far along in its lifetime, reduced from a bloated red giant to a white dwarf hardly bigger than the original Earth. Only the slow-burning low-mass stars remained, doling out miserly dribbles of radiation; their energy supply would be sufficient for another hundred billion years.

  Except that such a period was not available. The cosmos itself was evolving, changing. The ship reported to Drake that the universe was far past its critical point. The remote galaxies displayed a strong blue shift, a displacement of the light toward shorter wavelengths. The microwave background radiation, diluted and cooled during the earlier expansion of the universe, now revealed an increase in its black body temperature.

  The universe was warming up. The Great Expansion was far in the past. The collapse, toward the final singularity and the end of time, was under way.

  But thought’s the slave of life, and life time’s fool; and time, that takes survey of all the world, must have a stop.

  Drake halted his drift through space but permitted the slow rotation of his suited figure. He, like time, was taking survey of all the world. It seemed his task must have no stop — until the universe itself put an end to it.

  The current inspection was complete. He might as well head back to the ship. On the other hand, there was no hurry. When he returned he would be uploaded again to electronic storage. His new sleep might be for a million or a billion years, but he could expect little change when he awoke. The march from here to the end of the universe would be slow and stately, a multibillion-year progression. Only the final months and days would be spectacular. To anyone around to watch them, they would display unimaginable violence.

  The ship was a tiny gleam of gold at the center of the black web of the S-wave detection system. Drake headed toward it, glancing from time to time to his left. The dust cloud that had provided the materials for the detector still hung there, glowing faintly by its internal light. It was too small to collapse under its own gravitational attraction. That, and the constraining field placed in position by the ship, had been the key to its continued survival.

  Drake, occupied with his thoughts, had turned off the suit unit linking him with the ship. There was no danger in doing so. Communications could be activated in an emergency by the ship’s brain, although the many billions of years since entering the caesura had never produced a single override.

  He switched the communicator on when he was just a few kilometers from the ship, and was shocked to hear a brief repeated message.

  “Superluminal signal activity has been detected. Analysis is under way. Superluminal—”

  “What! Why didn’t you call and tell me?”

  “That seemed… premature.” The ship was oddly hesitant. “There are anomalies that require explanation.”

  “Then you’d better tell me about them.” Drake was sliding through the molecular interstitial lock at record speed. He felt a sense of exultation at his special good fortune. He had been the one embodied when the signal came! Then he felt stupid. Since every embodiment was one version of him, there was no way that he could not be the one embodied when an S-wave message was detected.

  “Where does the signal come from?”

  “It is multiple signals, from a galaxy about eight hundred million light-years away. In cosmic terms, that is rather close. It lies on the far side of one of the great gulfs, but in a super-cluster that is still one of our neighbors.”

  “What do the messages say?”

  “That is where the anomaly begins. First, the signals lack standard header records, identifying their source and destination. ”

  “Maybe they were broadcast.”

  “That cannot be the case. An S-wave signal is like any other, it must be tightly beamed to be read at more than a few hundred light-years. But even if the signals had been broadcast, they would carry a source identification. That, however, is not the most disturbing feature. The real problem is that the signals are unintelligible. We are not dealing with a single detected signal, where the problem might be one of resolving ambiguities. We are picking up millions of bit streams, an abundance of test data. Although we carry with us every known communication protocol, these superluminal signals conform to none of them.”

  “Maybe it’s a new protocol, something that came into use after we passed through the caesura. We’ve been gone for so long, changes are inevitable.”

  “True. But the signals are totally unrecognizable. Change is more than likely, it is even necessary to reflect new needs and new technology. However, just as the human body carries within it elements of your own most archaic history, from fingernails to body hair to embryonic gill slits, so any superluminal signal ought to carry at least some semblance of the old communication protocols. These do not. They are wholly unfamiliar. ”

  “Are you still working to crack them?”

  “Naturally. However, I am not optimistic. Already I have employed eighty percent of the analytical tools available to me, with no success. The most probable explanation is also the least satisfying.”

  Drake didn’t need to ask what it was. The possibility had been discussed with the ship’s brain during each of his embodiments.

  “Assume that it is an independent civilization, aliens who have never encountered humans but are advanced enough to use S-wave signaling. How would it affect our ability to send a signal to them?”

  “To send a signal? That would be very easy. Our S-wave detector can transmit as accurately and rapidly as it receives. That would not seem to be the issue here. The question is, What will happen to our signal when it is received in the other galaxy?”

  “That’s going to be my problem, isn’t it?” Drake saw no point in talking generalities any longer. “Once I’m back in electronic storage, how long will it take to transmit me superluminally?”

  “A few hours at the most. ”

  “Then let’s do it. You said eight hundred million light-years?”

  “Eight hundred and eighteen million, to be more precise. ”

  “How much travel time is that for you — allowing for fuel and maintenance and everything else?”

  “Most would have to be in coast phase, since between the galaxies there are no ready sources of materials or energy. Necessarily, that would imply long periods of low or zero acceleration. The travel time would be a billion years or more.”

  “You can survive that?”

  “Of course. Already we have endured tens of times that interval. However, I must mention two other anomalous features of the received signals. First, although there are many signals, million after million of them, they clearly fall into two different types.”

  “How do you know that, if you can’t understand what they say?”

  “By statistical analysis of the bit streams. That analysis clearly reveals two distinct types, although the content of either type remains unknown. And that is the second anomaly. In principle, my analytical tools should permit the interpretation of any possible signal whatsoever. It makes no difference if the sender is human or nonhuman, organic or inorganic, familiar or utterly alien. If the laws of logic, which we have always believed to be universal, are being followed, the signal should be intelligible.”

  “But these are not? Very curious. Chances are it will be easier to sort out what’s going on when we’re there to see it.” But Drake was expressing a confidence that he did not feel. He sensed old
memories stirring within him. Two kinds of signal that clearly were signals, but neither of which could be interpreted. Why did that sound familiar?

  “First, switch me back to electronic storage. Then send me on my way. After I’m gone, you can take the slow road and join me.” Signals that could not be understood. Algorithms that should be able to interpret anything, but failed to do so. He postponed the question. He would have time to consider it when he reached the signal source. “Let’s get me to electronic form, so I can go to work. Assuming that things work out all right, I’ll beam myself back here and tell you what’s going on.”

  Assuming that things work out all right.

  It occurred to Drake, rising to consciousness, that nothing had gone right for aeons. They had certainly not gone right this time. Rather than waking in some other galaxy, delivered as an S-wave and reconstructed to consciousness, he was still on board the ship. And although he was awake, he was certainly not embodied. Instead he was in electronic form, sharing sensors and processors with the ship. He was also aware of the hundred or more other versions of himself, dormant around him.

  “All right. It didn’t work. What’s happening now?”

  Part of the answer came to him even before the ship spoke. The visible light sensors revealed face-on the disk of a barred galaxy. From the way that it filled the sky ahead, they were within a few tens of thousands of light-years — touching distance, in intergalactic terms.

  Also, it was the galaxy. The ship’s signal-receiving equipment showed the spiral arms filled with the glittering sparks of S-wave transmissions. The galaxy flamed with them, bright flickering points of blue and crimson. They had been color coded by the ship into type 1 and type 2 — statistically different from each other, but equally mysterious.

  If the ship was here, so close to the source of the signals, then a billion years or more must have passed since he was last conscious.

  Why wasn’t the ship answering his question? And then Drake realized that the ship had answered. A new block of information had been transferred, and his electronic consciousness was already processing it, thousands or millions of times faster than his old organic one. He knew, without being told…

  The ship had remained for centuries at the focal point of the giant array. It had transmitted Drake as a superluminal

  signal — not once but a hundred times and more. It had waited patiently for a return signal. Nothing came into the array but the same endless stream of unintelligible communications.

  At last the ship had to make a difficult choice. If it left the array, all chance of receiving an intergalactic signal from Drake was lost. The ship would be forced to rely again on the simple S-wave detection system that it carried on board. On the other hand, to remain in one place and wait for a signal from Drake might take until the end of the universe.

  Finally the ship abandoned the array and set out on its lonely billion-year journey across the intergalactic gulf. In doing so, it lost the ability to pick up superluminal signals from its destination until the target galaxy was close enough for the on-board system to operate.

  How close?

  This close. Close enough for the ship to employ a synthetic aperture optical system, able to produce visible wavelength pictures of surface detail on planets the size of Earth.

  And now a new problem arose. It was baffling enough for the ship to know that it needed help. It had brought Drake to consciousness.

  And because he would need direct access to all sensor inputs, and because in any case there was no planet within twenty thousand light-years where an embodied organic form might prove useful, the ship employed a different procedure. It did not embody the aroused intelligence, but resurrected it in electronic form.

  Drake examined one of the planetary images as the ship drifted steadily on through space. The world was superficially Earth-like, sufficiently massive and far enough from its primary to hold an atmosphere. It should have had air of some kind, nitrogen or methane or carbon dioxide or, if it bore life, oxygen and water vapor. No trace of any showed up in the gas spectral analysis. The surface, unobscured by clouds or a shroud of air, was black rock. It looked like volcanic basalt that had flowed under high temperature before pooling and hardening to grotesque formations. There was no sign of surface water, no sign of life or surface artifacts. Orbiting the world like a swarm of lightning bugs were hundreds of objects too small to be seen with the imagers. However, from time to time a flash from one of them showed that it was transmitting, and the ship was receiving, an outgoing S-wave signal.

  What was there to talk about in facilities that orbited long-dead worlds?

  Drake tracked the destinations of the outgoing data bursts, and the ship offered their images at his command: world after world, scene after scene of charred devastation. Every planet was in ruins. Each was clearly lifeless.

  “I have performed as complete a survey as possible from this distance.” The ship’s messages were clear and easy now that Drake knew how to listen to them. “The pattern repeats from one side of the galaxy to the other, from the outer rim to the central disk. Those worlds have in common what I have termed a type one superluminal message capability. Compare them with the type two worlds.”

  Another sequence of planets was offered for Drake’s inspection. From the ship’s point of view, there were large differences. From a human point of view, one similarity overwhelmed every other factor: organic life was absent.

  Drake examined a thousand type 2 planets where everything that humans had learned of physics, planetology, and biology suggested that life should have developed. The sun was an appropriate spectral type, surface temperature was in the right range, the planet had a low-eccentricity orbit, there was plenty of surface water, and a thick atmosphere of hydrogen, carbon dioxide, and nitrogen.

  Life should have developed — must have developed. And it had developed. The proof was in the swarm of active devices around each world, emitting and receiving their bursts of S-wave signals. No one would install such a system without a purpose. Life had once been on all these worlds. And somehow life had been destroyed, not as spectacularly as on the type 1 worlds, but just as finally.

  “The problem is one that we never anticipated.” Was that the ship speaking, or Drake’s own thoughts? The dividing line became blurred when they shared common storage and processing power. “We had always assumed that superluminal signal capability would be accompanied by a working technology. Now we find abundant S-wave capacity and nothing else. Do we wish to visit a galaxy that seems dead of organic life?”

  “Is it safe to do so?”

  The last thought was surely Drake’s alone. His thoughts were moving again to old memories and offering an uneasy

  synthesis.

  In an infinite universe, anything that can happen will happen.

  He had been talking to himself, but his thoughts were no longer private.

  “The universe is not infinite,” the ship said. “It is finite in time both past and future, and it is finite but unbounded in space.”

  “All right. Change that to things that you never expected to happen, when you were long ago on a world far away, can happen if you wait long enough and go far enough.”

  He not only hadn’t expected to see this — when he was young he had hardly taken notice of it. His interests revolved around music and Ana, and anything as dull as military policy or political strategy tended to be ignored. It was Ana, the social activist, who had educated him. He remembered one lazy October afternoon when they lay side by side in his little one-room apartment, with the Venetian blinds partly drawn and late sunlight casting elongated and distorted leaf shadows on the wall. Drake lay flat on his back. He didn’t want to talk or think about anything and would have quite liked a nap. He found it easier to say nothing and pretend to listen, but he had got away with that for only a few minutes.

  “You don’t care, do you?” Ana punched him on the left shoulder and propped herself up on her elbow so that she could see h
is face and make sure that he wasn’t going to sleep. “I’m telling you, it could happen again.”

  “Nah. Mutual Assured Destruction is a dead idea. And a dumb idea, too.”

  “It’s worse than dumb, but I’m not sure it’s dead. Brains and resources were wasted on it for two generations. Do you want to know why?”

  Not really. But Drake said only, “Uh-huh.”

  “It kept on going because it was a big fat money tree, where corruption could thrive and contractors could get very rich. And because no matter what you do, for paranoid people more is never enough. If they build more weapons, or even if you just think that they might, you have to build more. They’re as crazy as you are, so they have to build more, too; so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more, so they have to build more, so you have to build more…”

  She paused, rather to Drake’s disappointment. The cadence of the repeated phrase was relaxing, and he would happily have nodded off listening to it. Instead he said, “I don’t know why you’re still worrying about all this. It’s ancient history. MAD went away over twenty years ago, along with the Soviet Union.”

  She snuggled up against him and put her hand flat on his bare belly. “That proves how little you understand the military. I drank this stuff in with my mother’s milk. Four of my uncles and five of my cousins are regular army or air force. You should hear the talk at family reunions. You did me a big favor. They can’t stand your politics.”

  “I don’t have any.”

  “That’s almost worse. But they don’t want you around, and that gives me an excuse to stay away. I’ll never be able to thank you enough.”

  “You can thank me by letting me rest. Anyway, you shouldn’t be thanking me. Thank Professor Bonvissuto. He got you the scholarship.”