Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘Time,’ he said, glancing at his screen, the data and status summaries scrolling across it. ‘The great god of the Eaglets, remember? Time. Just a little more.’

  ‘How much time?’

  He checked. ‘Twenty-four hours would let me complete this download. That’s an outside estimate. Just stall them. Keep the coppers talking, stay here with me. Make them think you’re making progress in talking me out of it.’

  ‘While the actual progress is being made by that.’ I nodded at the screen. ‘What are you doing here, Wilson? What’s it about?’

  ‘I don’t know all of it. There are hints in the data. Subtexts sometimes …’ He was whispering.

  ‘Subtexts about what?’

  ‘About what really concerns the Eaglets. Jack, what do you imagine a long-lived civilisation wants? If you could think on very long timescales you would be concerned about threats that seem remote to us.’

  ‘An asteroid impact due in a thousand years, maybe? If I expected to live that long, or my kids—’

  ‘That kind of thing. But that’s not long enough, Jack, not nearly. In the data there are passages – poetry, maybe – that speak of the deep past and furthest future, the Big Bang that is echoed in the microwave background, the future that will be dominated by the dark energy expansion that will ultimately throw all the other galaxies over the cosmological horizon … The Eaglets think about these things, and not just as scientific hypotheses. They care about them. The dominance of their great god time. “The universe has no memory”.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘I’m not sure. A phrase in the message.’

  ‘So what are you downloading? And to where?’

  ‘The moon,’ he said frankly. ‘The Clarke telescope, on Farside. They want us to build something, Jack. Something physical, I mean. And with the fabricators and other maintenance gear at Clarke there’s a chance we could do it. I mean, it’s not the most advanced offworld robot facility; it’s only designed for maintenance and upgrade of the radio telescope—’

  ‘But it’s the facility you can get your hands on. So you’re letting these Eaglet agents out of their virtual world and giving them a way to build something real, in our world. Don’t you think that’s dangerous?’

  ‘Dangerous how?’ And he laughed at me and looked away.

  ‘Don’t you turn away from me, you fucker. You’ve been doing that all our lives. You know what I mean. Why, the Eaglets’ software alone is making a mess of the world. What if this is some kind of Trojan horse – a Doomsday weapon they’re getting us saps to build ourselves?’

  ‘It’s hardly likely that an advanced culture—’

  ‘Don’t give me that contact-optimist bullshit. You don’t believe it yourself. And even if you did, you don’t know for sure. You can’t.’

  ‘No. All right.’ He pulled away from me. ‘I can’t know. Which is one reason why I set the thing going up on the moon, not Earth. Call it a quarantine. If we don’t like whatever it is, there’s at least a chance we could contain it up there. Yes, there’s a risk. But the rewards are unknowable, and huge.’ He looked at me, almost pleading for me to understand. ‘We have to go on. This is the Eaglets’ project, not ours. Ever since we unpacked the message, this story has been about them, not us. That’s what dealing with a superior intelligence means. It’s like those religious nuts say. We know the Eaglets are orders of magnitude smarter than us. Shouldn’t we trust them? Shouldn’t we help them achieve their goal, even if we don’t understand precisely what it is?’

  ‘This ends now.’ I reached for the keyboard beside me. ‘Tell me how to stop the download.’

  ‘No.’ He sat firm, that trigger clutched in his right hand.

  ‘You won’t use that. You wouldn’t kill us both. Not for something so abstract, inhuman—’

  ‘Superhuman,’ he breathed. ‘Not inhuman. Superhuman. Oh, I would. You’ve known me all your life, Jack. Look into my eyes. I’m not like you. Do you really doubt me?’

  And, looking at him, I didn’t.

  So we sat there, the two of us, a face-off. I stayed close enough to overpower him if he gave me the slightest chance. And he kept his trigger before my face.

  Hour after hour.

  In the end it was time that defeated him, I think, the Eaglets’ invisible god. That and fatigue. I’m convinced he didn’t mean to release the trigger. Only seventeen hours had elapsed, of the twenty-four he had asked for, when his thumb slipped.

  I tried to turn away. That small, instinctive gesture was why I lost a leg, a hand, an eye, all on my right side.

  And I lost a brother.

  But when the forensics guys had done combing through the wreckage, they were able to prove that the seventeen hours had been enough for Wilson’s download.

  2040 AD

  After the explosion it took a month for NASA, ESA and the Chinese to send up an orbiter to the moon to see what was going on.

  The probe found that Wilson’s download had caused the Clarke fabricators to start making stuff. At first they made other machines, more specialised, from what was lying around in the workshops and sheds. These in turn made increasingly tiny versions of themselves, heading steadily down to the nano scale. In the end the work was so fine only an astronaut on the ground might have had a chance of even seeing it. Nobody dared send a human in, however.

  Meanwhile the machines banked up moon dust and scrap to make a high-energy facility – something like a particle accelerator or a fusion torus, but not.

  Then the real work started.

  The Eaglet machines took a chunk of moon rock and crushed it, turning its mass-energy into a spacetime artefact – something like a black hole, but not. They dropped it into the body of the moon, where it started accreting, sucking in material, just like a black hole – and budding off copies of itself, unlike a black hole.

  The governments panicked. A nuclear warhead was dug out of cold store and dropped plumb into Daedalus Crater. The explosion was spectacular. But when the dust subsided that pale, unearthly spark was still there, unperturbed.

  Gradually these objects, these tiny black holes, are converting the substance of the moon into copies of themselves. The glowing point of light we see at the centre of Clarke is leaked radiation from this process. As the cluster of nano artefacts grows, the moon’s substance will be consumed at an exponential rate. Centuries, a millennium tops, will be enough to consume it all. And Earth will be orbited, not by its ancient companion, but by a spacetime artefact, like a black hole, but not. That much seems well established by the physicists.

  There is less consensus as to the purpose of all this. Here’s my guess:

  The moon artefact will be a recorder.

  Wilson said the Eaglets feared that the universe has no memory. I think he meant that right now, in our cosmic epoch, we can still see relics of the universe’s birth, echoes of the Big Bang, in the microwave background glow. And we also see evidence of the expansion to come, in the recession of the distant galaxies. We discovered both these basic features of the universe, its past and its future, in the twentieth century.

  There will come a time – the cosmologists quote hundreds of billions of years – when the accelerating recession will have taken all those distant galaxies over our horizon. So we will be left with just the local group, the Milky Way and Andromeda and bits and pieces, bound together by gravity. The wider cosmic expansion will be invisible. And meanwhile the background glow will have become so attenuated you won’t be able to pick it out of the faint glow of the interstellar medium.

  So in that remote epoch you wouldn’t be able to repeat the twentieth-century discoveries; you couldn’t glimpse past or future. That’s what the Eaglets mean when they say the universe has no memory.

  And I believe they are countering it. They, and those like Wilson that they co-opt into helping them, are carving
time capsules out of folded spacetime. At some future epoch these will evaporate, maybe through something like Hawking radiation, and will reveal the truth of the universe to whatever eyes are there to see it. The Eaglets are conscious entities trying to give the universe a memory. Perhaps there is even a deeper purpose: it may be intelligence’s role to shape the ultimate evolution of the universe, but you can’t do that if you’ve forgotten what went before.

  Of course it occurs to me – this is Wilson’s principle of mediocrity – that ours might not be the only epoch with a privileged view of the cosmos. Just after the Big Bang there was a pulse of ‘inflation’, superfast expansion that homogenised the universe and erased details of whatever came before. Maybe we should be looking for other time boxes, left for our benefit by the inhabitants of those early realms.

  Not every commentator agrees with my analysis, of course. The interpretation of the Eaglet data has always been uncertain. Maybe even Wilson wouldn’t agree. Well, since it’s my suggestion he would probably argue with me from sheer reflex.

  I suppose it’s possible to care deeply about the plight of hypothetical beings a hundred billion years hence. In one sense we ought to; their epoch is our descendants’ inevitable destiny. Wilson certainly did care, enough to kill himself for it. But this is a project so vast and cold that it can engage only a semi-immortal supermind like an Eaglet’s – or a modern human who is functionally insane.

  What matters most to me is the now. Little Hannah. The sons who haven’t yet aged and crumbled to dust, playing football under a sun that hasn’t yet burned to a cinder. The fact that all this is transient makes it more precious, not less. Maybe our remote descendants in a hundred billion years will find similar brief happiness under their black and unchanging sky.

  If I could wish one thing for my lost brother it would be that I could be sure he had felt this way, this alive, just for one day. Just for one minute. Because, in the end, that’s all we’ve got.

  ARTEFACTS

  You swim.

  Why must you swim?

  If you swim, where are you coming from, and where are you going to?

  Why is there a ‘you’ separated from the ‘not-you’ through which you swim?

  Why is there something rather than nothing?

  Who are you?

  You cannot rest. You are alone. You are frightened by the swimming. And you are frightened that the swimming must end. For – what then?

  Morag’s mother lay dead, behind the flimsy curtain that veiled her hospital bed, only feet away.

  The little waiting area wasn’t all that bad. It was carpeted, and had decent chairs and tables piled with newspapers and elderly magazines, Hello and Country Life and Reader’s Digest, and a pot plant that Morag had watered a couple of times. A little window gave her a glimpse of Edinburgh rooftops. She had been awake all night, and now it was a sunny June morning, which felt a bit unreal. There was even a little TV up high on the wall, stuck on a news channel that looped headlines about water riots in Australia. In the year 2026 the news was always dismal, and Morag, fifteen years old, generally did her best to ignore it. No, it wasn’t bad here, not as bad as you might have thought an NHS ward would be.

  But it was all so mundane. It seemed impossible that the same reality, the same room, could contain curling copies of glossy celeb mags and the huge event that had taken place on the other side of that curtain, the final ghastly process as the bone marrow cancer overwhelmed her mother.

  Her father, who always encouraged her to call him Joe, was helping himself to another cup of coffee. ‘Fucking thing,’ he said, as, not for the first time, he had trouble slotting the plastic coffee pot back into its little groove. He glanced at Morag. ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Like I never heard you swear before.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ He sat beside her.

  They were silent a moment, both beyond tears, or between them. She hadn’t seen him for a couple of years. His break-up with her mother had seemed to get more antagonistic as time passed, and his visits had become more sporadic and more fraught, at least until these final weeks and days. He was only forty-five. Tall, thin, always gaunt, Morag thought he looked hollowed out.

  On impulse she smoothed out his sleeve. ‘This shirt needs an iron.’

  ‘Yes.’ A flicker of a grin. ‘Actually I need a new shirt. Can’t afford it.’

  They hadn’t talked, not to each other, while Mum was still there. ‘You quit your job, didn’t you?’ Joe had been working on computer systems in the City of London – something like that. ‘Was it so you could be with Mum?’

  ‘Partly.’ He sipped his coffee, and grimaced at its strength. ‘That and the fact of the illness itself. When I understood your mother was dying, the reality of it sunk home, I suppose.’

  ‘The reality of what?’

  ‘Life. Death. The finiteness of it all. When you’re young you think you’re immortal. Forty was a big shock to me, I can tell you, and now this. Hacking predictive algorithms so some City barrow boy could get even richer suddenly seemed an absurd way to spend my time.’

  She thought she understood. ‘It doesn’t make any sense. There’s a copy of the Daily Mirror sitting on that table. But behind that curtain—’

  ‘I know. You go through life never facing up to the big questions. What is life? What is death? Why is there something rather than nothing? Anyhow, I’m going back to what I used to do.’

  She frowned. ‘Back to university?’

  ‘I was a researcher,’ he said. ‘A whiz at maths. I went into theoretical cosmology. Let me tell you something.’ He put his arm around her, the way he used to hold her when she was little. ‘All of this, everything we see and feel, our whole three-dimensional universe with its unfolding arrow of time, is only a fraction of reality. Of course that was the message my father beat into me when I was your age, or tried to. He was a Presbyterian minister. When I started questioning his picture of the universe we fell out good and proper …’

  Morag had only fragmentary memories of her grandfather, whom she’d met a mere handful of times.

  Joe said, ‘Our universe is like a snowflake in a storm, one among a myriad others, all floating around in a nine-dimensional continuum called the Bulk. The universes are called branes – after membranes – or D-branes, Dirichlet branes … Those other universes might be like ours, or they might not. Some of them might have one space dimension, or three or five or seven. They might have a time dimension, like ours, or none at all, so they’re just static and eternal. We know all this is out there, you see, because of the effects of the higher reality on our universe. Primordial inflation, patterns in the cosmic microwave background radiation: all of these are influences from other universes approaching our own …’ He glanced at her. ‘I’m getting too technical.’

  ‘No. But it’s like when I was small and you’d distract me from the dark with fairy tales.’

  He ruffled her hair. ‘Well, all this stuff is real, as far as we can tell. Anyhow, it’s out there, out in the Bulk, that the answers to the fundamental questions will be found some day. That’s why I’m going back. I got sick of the academic life, the bitchiness and the infighting, the treadmill of always having to find a bit more money to keep going for a few more years. Nobody wanted to put money into fundamental research anyhow. But at least doing that I was closer to the big questions than slaving in the damn City.’

  It all sounded foolish to Morag, a dream. But Joe had always been a dreamer. She wondered if he ever thought about how she was supposed to be supported through the rest of her schooling, her own college years. Well, she had Auntie Sheena, Mum’s sister, cold, disapproving, but solid and generous enough. She wished she were a bit older, though, not so dependent on all these flaky, short-lived adults.

  And she said, ‘Joe – none of this stuff about D-branes and the Bulk will bring Mum back.’

  ‘No. No, love, i
t won’t.’

  For some reason the tears came after that.

  A nurse came to refill the coffee, and she dabbed with a tissue at the pot plant that Morag had overfilled with water.

  It was a universe not unlike humanity’s universe. But it was dark.

  It lacked stars, for the intricate coincidence of fundamental constants that enabled stellar fusion processes had not occurred here; the dice had fallen differently. Yet complex elements had spewed out of this cosmos’s equivalent of the Big Bang, atoms that combined, nuclei that fissioned. Rock formed, and ice. Grains gathered in the dark, drawn by gravity.

  There were no stars here. But soon there were worlds.

  On one of these worlds, creatures not entirely unlike those on Earth rose from the usual chemical churning. They were fuelled not by sunlight but by the slow seep of minerals and heat from the interior of their rocky planet. Crawling, swimming, flying, consuming each other and the world’s raw materials, they built an ecology of a complexity that itself increased with time. There were extinctions as rocks fell from the sky, or when the cooling world spasmed as it shed its primordial heat, but each time life recovered, complexity was regained.

  To those with minds this was a beautiful world, that empty sky a velvet heaven. They knew no different. Some of them dreamed of gods.

  Few ever imagined, however, that a greater mind than any of theirs arose from the intricate workings of their ecology itself.

  And that mind was troubled.

  For she felt the grand cooling of her planetary body, and ached with the slow decay of the radioactive substances that replenished that heat. She remembered a time of hot youth, and she foresaw shrivelling cold, when the creatures that swarmed over her continents and oceans would die back, and her own thoughts would simplify and die back with them.

  She remembered the birth of her universe. She anticipated surviving, in some reduced form, to see its end. To a being built on such a grand scale that future time of cold paralysis was not so terribly remote.