Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘But you never were any use at looking after yourself, were you? When I was a kid I remember fretting over the way you never had your shirts ironed …’

  He wasn’t listening. He looked haunted. ‘They’re trying to take away my computers, you know, or most of them.’

  ‘I know.’ This was why she had come; he had emailed her, and she had checked up herself.

  ‘The government say the hoard I have here, elderly and unreliable as it is,’ and he gave one of his laptops a slap, ‘is more than is “justifiable” for my needs. Justifiable! So much for the fucking singularity by the way, whatever happened to that? Sorry. They have no idea what I’m doing here.’

  ‘That’s the trouble, Joe. They don’t have any idea. Why should they? I mean, you don’t work for any reputable organisation. You don’t even write up your results any more, do you?’

  ‘What’s the point? Nobody was paying any attention to partial results. I was getting no citations to speak of …’

  ‘All the government cares about is the raw materials locked up in your computers. The germanium, the silver, even the copper – there are shortages of all these things now.’

  ‘I’m biding my time, about writing up,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. He stroked the computer he’d slapped, as if soothing it. ‘I’ll wait until I have conclusive results – the full Monty. Then I’ll hit them with it all at once, fully backed up with data and references. None of this partial releasing. It will be unarguable.’

  ‘What will?’

  He looked at her, briefly puzzled, as if she hadn’t been paying attention. ‘My analysis of Calabi-Yau space. My map of the Bulk, and our place in it. There are branes all around ours, love, other universes, three, five, seven-dimensional constructs adrift in nine-dimensional space, influencing us with subtle whispers of gravity.

  ‘There is a cluster of them close to us, self-attracting, orbiting like a swarm of asteroids. All of them time-ridden, and if anybody lives there they are as mortal as us. But I’ve detected another cluster of branes, further off, tighter, more orderly. And they are static – time-free, constructs of pure space. Fragments of eternity. Why mortality here, why eternity there? I can’t answer that yet. But I feel I’m close to an understanding of why things are as they are …’

  She reached out and took his hands. They were dry, the skin of his palms cracked. ‘Joe – you’ve been obsessing about death and mortality since Mum died. I don’t blame you. But don’t you think all this work is maybe some kind of rationalisation? You’re projecting your own life onto the whole of the rest of the universe. Isn’t it better to let it go?’

  He pulled back. ‘The last time I went back to Edinburgh, I was after a grant, they assigned me to a counsellor who came out with the same kind of stuff as that. As if I’m a kid who can’t cope with his hamster dying. Morag, the whole damn universe is dying. I know it’s hard to grasp, but it’s true. But, you see, I think …’

  ‘What, Joe?’

  ‘I think it didn’t have to be that way. Now. Are you going to help me keep hold of my computers or not?’

  The world minds were scattered in the dark, around the mother who had so explosively borne them.

  Morag Denham might have understood their nature, if dimly. There was a great deal of information stored in the network of flows of mass and energy that characterised a world’s ecosystem, flows which were in turn locked into the physical cycles of the planet. For example, Earth’s interdependent geological and biological systems, all unconsciously, worked together in a giant feedback loop to keep the world’s temperature at a level equable for life in the face of a steadily heating sun.

  But in a complex ecosystem there was room for a great deal more information than what was needed to characterise a simple thermostat, as on Earth. Patterns of ecocycles, in their robustness and resilience, made for highly efficient memory and processing systems. Even in Morag’s universe there were worlds where intelligence had arisen naturally from the data flows that cycled around complex entangled ecologies. On such worlds, thoughts were expressed in the swelling and dying of populations of plants and animals. Extinction events haunted million-year dreams.

  So it was in that other dark sky.

  The mother world waited for her children to develop complexity, to come to awareness, to formulate thoughts that crackled with the rise and fall of species, and to begin to ask questions: Where am I? What is this place? What must I do?

  Then, when the offspring planets were ready, she began a slow process of dialogue.

  The community of worlds shared tremendous deep thoughts via gravity waves generated by the churning of their cores, or even via the firing-off of life forms in fresh volleys of meteorites. An alien invasion was a sentence rudely despatched.

  And gradually the mother and her children came to understand.

  In the booming of gravity waves deeper and longer than any of them could generate, they sensed the structure of their own universe, and the architecture of the Bulk, the greater nine-dimensional cosmos in which it was embedded. They saw branes like their own, bound together by gravity just as the living worlds clustered, all living and dying. And they saw others, more distant, a handsome array of timeless universes, whose skies swam with heat, and where no world ever grew cold.

  And they saw, beyond doubt, that such an arrangement was artificial.

  Whoever had done this, whoever had doomed whole universes to brevity and extinction, was surely much like themselves, surely as afraid of the gathering cold as they were. This the mother understood. But it was hard not to feel resentment when, as a consequence, her own universe so quickly aged, and the great chill gathered, and one by one her children shed their hard-won complexity and succumbed to the cold and the dark.

  He had won. He had won! He had battled through a forest of symmetries, and now those others already ascended prepared to welcome him to his place in the constellation of two hundred and forty-eight. It was all he had striven for, all his life, since the instant of his birth.

  Yet now it was in his grasp he hesitated. Others watched him, doubtful and uneasy.

  He understood that it would not be long after his ascension that the last of the places was filled, when the universe, complete, would die, and he would die with it. And he knew now that it did not have to be that way. He had glimpsed other universes, that far-off cluster of the undying, locked in their own changeless symmetries.

  And he had glimpsed other types of symmetries, as far beyond his own as his was beyond a newborn novice’s.

  A simple regular polygon could have four points, a square; five or six points, a pentagon or a hexagon; it could have two-hundred and forty-eight points, any finite number. But as the number of points approached infinity, the angular form aspired to another sort of symmetry, that perfect regularity of the circle.

  So it could have been in his universe, he saw now. Not the stifling closure of a mere two hundred and forty-eight vertices, but the unending symmetry of the sphere. A symmetry with room for all who aspired to join it – for ever. It could have been that way here, just as in those other realms.

  And, once, that was how it had been.

  Something, or somebody, had changed this universe, shattered its infinite order and blighted it with this crude spikiness. Replaced eternity with finitude. Replaced immortality with death.

  Why should this have been done? He pondered this. Surely that greater agent was one not unlike himself. Surely that other had been born in asymmetry and struggled only for a symmetry of its own. That, at least, was a comforting thought, that in his own finitude and death he at least served the purposes of a greater symmetry, even if he could never understand how.

  Enough. He was as content as he could ever be. He took his place, settling into the constellation of the elect. He shone, one among two hundred and forty-eight identical points of light.

  Time e
nded.

  Joe lay there inert. Morag sat beside him, outside his isolation tent, and waited for the ghastly process of his dying to run its course. He looked wasted by his illness, yet he was still as tall and ungainly as ever; he looked too big for the bed.

  The hospital room reminded Morag of her mother’s death, thirty-odd years before. Of course there were differences. There were few nurses around, only machines that tended to the needs of the ill and the dying. This wasn’t the NHS; long before this year of 2056 an impoverished Scotland had seen its welfare state crumble, and the health care had exhausted Joe’s own pitiful savings, and eaten up a good chunk of Morag’s own.

  But for all the changes, here was Joe spending his final hours lying on a curtained-off bed just as his wife had all those years ago. Although she hadn’t had the indignity of a clear-plastic isolation bubble separating her from the touch of her family. And she at least had died of a cancer that had a name, instead of the exotic, species-crossing, nameless disease Joe had picked up when he had stayed out one winter too many in the Lammermuirs.

  There were times during the night when Morag, sitting by his bed, thought he might not wake again. But then, as another bright Edinburgh summer morning dawned, his eyelids raised with a faint crumpling sound, like paper. ‘Morag?’

  She was startled. Perhaps she had been dozing, sitting in the hard chair. Impulsively she reached for him, but her fingertips only pushed against the clear isolation membrane. ‘Dad. Joe. You’re awake.’

  He shifted his head slightly, and she saw some brownish fluid being pumped through a pipe and under the sheets into his body. And he saw her looking. ‘Feeding time at the zoo. I could murder a burger. Even a fucking NHS coffee. Sorry. Are the kids here?’

  The ‘kids’ were now both young adults. But they were here. ‘They’re exploring Edinburgh with Adam.’

  ‘Good. Keep them away. Kids are more open to disease. Don’t want them catching my mumbo jumbo syndrome. So it got me in the end, eh?’

  ‘What did?’

  ‘Death. The Bulk. All those branes and anti-branes swimming around. They’re killing me in the end, just like every other fucker back to Adam—’ He was interrupted by a cough that came out of nowhere. His whole body jerked, as if convulsed, and she saw blood spray over the inside of his bubble. The machines around him adopted a new constellation of displays. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  He forced a smile. ‘Jumping like a flea.’ His voice was papery, audibly weaker. ‘I’m seventy-five, you know. Not bad.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘You haven’t looked at my computers, have you?’

  ‘Joe, there wasn’t time. We just cleared out the shed. The council were already taking away your water tanks. The computers are safe, but—’

  ‘Read my paper. It’s backed up. The figures … I worked it out in the end.’

  ‘Your map of the Bulk.’

  ‘My analysis of the Calabi-Yau space, yes. I did it in the end. Like shining a torch up into all the dark, nine-dimensional halls we drift around in. Listen. This is what I found—’

  ‘Joe—’

  ‘Listen.’ He tried to reach her, but his claw-like fingers just scraped feebly against plastic. ‘Listen,’ he whispered. ‘I saw two clusters of branes, mutually orbiting, like a pair of solar systems. One, far from us, has two hundred and forty-eight members. All of them timeless, space dimensions only. All of them eternities. The other, the swarm we’re part of, has one thousand, nine hundred and eighty-four. And they’re all unstable, like our universe. All of them have at least one time dimension. All of them doomed to birth and death, the whole damn cycle, and every living thing in them.

  ‘Here’s the thing, Morag, here’s what I saw. Our cluster is in a particular part of the Bulk. You saw my projections of it, the thing’s covered in spines like a hedgehog. We are in one of those spines. We’ve been shepherded here. And all the brane universes are on trajectories that force them to intersect …’ He fell back, wheezing. ‘It needs more analysis. But I believe I saw the actual intersection, the close approach of another brane to our own, that destabilised our universe. I was able to track it back, like figuring out the flight of a bullet back to the assassin’s gun.’

  ‘Destabilised?’

  ‘Before that we were an eternity. The close encounter pivoted one of our space dimensions into a time. Pow, Big Bang, inflation, Big Rip, death – it all came about in that moment. A moment of Bulk time, I mean.’

  ‘The words you use,’ she said uneasily. ‘“Shepherded”. You said our cluster of branes was shepherded into the spine. What shepherded us there?’

  ‘Or who.’ He grinned; his teeth were discoloured, and she wondered when he had last been to a dentist. ‘I believe it was intentional, Morag. And I can tell you what the intention was.’

  ‘What, then?’

  ‘To collect energy.’ He raised one hand and feebly closed a fist, over and over. ‘Universes exploding like gas in a piston chamber. The gravitational energy released by all those dying universes is just pumped down that spine – but what’s it used for? Maybe that damn cluster of smug eternals is the payload.’

  None of this made any sense. ‘What are you saying, Joe?’

  ‘That we’re in an engine. Like a rocket ship. Each exploding cosmos is like a grain of gunpowder in a firework, driving the whole damn thing forward across the nine-dimensional Bulk. That’s all we amount to, that’s all we’re for, our whole universe from beginning to end, Bang to Rip, all the galaxies and stars and planets, all the warriors and lovers and poets, all the births and deaths … And that’s why they destabilised our universe, and thousands of others. Artefacts, all of them, embedded in a greater artefact. Whole universes used as propellant.’

  ‘Who, Joe? Who’s they?’

  He tried to sit up. His mouth opened as he strained to speak, and she thought she saw the shape of his skull through his thin flesh, the dirty white hair in his scalp. ‘Who? That’s what I’d like to know. Where are we going? What is the purpose of this damn thing we’re all trapped inside? Oh, maybe they’re not unlike us. Aggressive expansionists, ripping up the environment. They must be, to build such a thing. We wouldn’t care about a community of bugs swimming in a litre of petrol we poured into the tank, would we? But we aren’t bugs. We should challenge them. Maybe we should team up with the other brane universes. Maybe we should demand what gave them the right to condemn billions of sapient beings to the agony of mortality …’

  Another explosive cough sent a shower of thick blood over the bubble. Morag flinched. Red lights flashed across the face of the monitors. Morag heard human footsteps, running closer.

  Joe fell back, shuddering, still trying to talk.

  You swim.

  Suspended in the nine-dimensional Bulk, you are a construct of Dirichlet branes.

  Your mind emerges from the dances of a cluster of universes. These realms are internally timeless, eternal and perfect. The inhabitants of each tiny cosmos might believe they are gods. But you are entirely unaware of their existence, any more than a human watches the sparking of an individual neurone. It is the mutual orbit of the cosmoses themselves that is the foundation of your mind.

  And you are driven forward in your swimming by the birth and collapse of a myriad more universes, each filled with minds, even with civilisations, blossoming and dying in hope and fear and longing, sent into the dark for your benefit. Again you are unaware of these miniature agonies.

  You, arising from it all, are alone. And 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 a ‘not-you’ through which you swim?

  Why is there something rather than nothing?

  Who are you?

  You cannot rest. You are a
lone. You are frightened by the swimming. And you are frightened that the swimming must end. For … what then?

  VACUUM LAD

  It was the moment I first glimpsed my own secret origins, and, perhaps, my true destiny.

  I was sitting in a shuttle, en route to a swank L5 orbital hotel where I was due to start another three-month residency for another seven-figure-euro fee. Of course I was in uniform, my suit and mask black and threaded with silver, a design suggestive of space, the vacuum. The uniform is what people expect. At the moment it happened, I was signing autographs, modestly fending off questions about my heroics during the Hub blow-out, and sipping champagne through a straw.

  ‘It’ was a scratch on the window. A scratch coming from outside a shuttle whizzing through the vacuum of space.

  And a face. A human face beyond the window, no pressure suit, nothing. A mumsy middle-aged woman. When I looked, she beckoned and smiled, and mouthed words.

  Welcome home, Vacuum Lad.

  The world knows me as Vacuum Lad, the name Professor Stix gave me.

  The only other thing the world knows about me, aside from my singular power, is that I’m from Saudi Arabia. That was another suggestion of Professor Stix. She said I should keep my own identity secret, for the sake of my family. But I should reveal my nationality, since wretched Saudi, in these shambolic post-oil days, could use a hero of its own.

  Professor Stix designed my costume and had it made up, and did a pretty good job even though it’s always chafed at the crotch. She even handles my business affairs. You could say Professor Stix created Vacuum Lad, the image, the commercial enterprise. She didn’t create me, the boy inside the costume, born Tusun ibn Thunayan in Dhahran nineteen years earlier. But she did hold the copyright, as registered in the year 2157, as the Christians record the date.

  And she didn’t give me my power.

  It was only an accident that my power was revealed to me, in fact, and an unlikely one. I mean, how many people do you know who’ve been exposed to space, to the hard vacuum and the invisible sleet of radiation?