Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  “How did we get here?”

  “I’d guess that Cruithne evaporated out of the Solar System.”

  “Evaporated?”

  “It suffered a slingshot encounter, probably with Jupiter, that hurled it out of the system. Happens all the time. If it left at solar escape velocity, which is around a three-thousandth of light speed—”

  Emma worked it out first. “Seventy-five million years,” she said, wondering. “We’re looking at images from seventy-five million years into the future. That’s how long it took that damn asteroid to wander out there.”

  Cornelius said, “Of course if that isn ‘tow Galaxy, then all bets are off…”

  Seventy-five million years was a long time. Seventy-five million years ago on Earth, the dinosaurs were dominant. Emma’s ancestors were timid mammals the size of rats and shrews, cowed by the great reptiles. Look at us now, she thought. And in another seventy-five million years, what will we have achieved?

  Cornelius’ voice was tense, his manner electric. He’s waited all his life for this, Emma realized, this glimpse of the far future through an alien window.

  “This opportunity is unprecedented,” Cornelius said. “I’m no expert on cosmology, the future of the Galaxy. Later we have to consult people who can interpret this for us. There is probably an entire conference to be had on that Galaxy image alone. For now I have some expert systems. I can isolate them, keep them secure—”

  Emma said, “What did she mean, reef?” “I think she meant the Galaxy. The Galaxy has, umm, an ecology. Like a coral reef, or a forest.” He looked up. “You can make out the halo, the spherical cloud around the main disc: very ancient, stable stars. And the Population II stars in the core are old too. They formed early in the Galaxy’s history: the survivors are very ancient, late in their evolution.

  “Most of the star formation going on now is happening in the spiral arms. The stars condense out of the interstellar medium, which is a rich, complex mix of gas and dust clouds.” Checking with his softscreen, he pointed to the spiral arms. “See those blisters? The e-systems are telling me they are bubbles of hot plasma, hundreds of light-years across, scraped out by supernova explosions. The supernova shock waves enrich the medium with heavy molecules — carbon, oxygen, iron — manufactured inside the stars, and each one kicks off another wave of star formation.” “Which in turn creates a few new giant stars, a few more supernovae—”

  “Which stirs up the medium and creates more stars, at a controlled rate. So it goes: a feedback loop, with supernova explosions as the catalyst. The Galaxy is a self-regulating system of a hundred billion stars, the largest organized system we know of, generations of stars ending in cooling dwarfs or black holes. The spirals are actually waves of stellar formation lit up by their shortest-lived, brightest stars — waves propagating around the Galaxy in a way we don’t understand.”

  “Like a reef, then,” Emma said. “The Sheena was right.”

  Cornelius was frowning at his softscreen. “But…”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “There’s something not right. I — the e-systems — don’t think there are enough supernovae. In our time the hot plasma bubbles should make up around seventy percent of the interstellar medium… That looks a lot less than seventy percent to me. I can run an algorithm to check—”

  “What,” Malenfant said evenly, “could be reducing the number of supernovae?”

  Cornelius was grinning at him.

  Emma looked from one to the other. “What is it? I don’t understand.”

  “Life,” Malenfant said. “Life, Emma.” He punched the air. “I knew it. We made it, Emma. That’s what the supernova numbers are telling us. We made it through the Carter catastrophe, got off the Earth, covered the Galaxy.”

  “And,” Cornelius said, “we’ve started farming the stars. Remarkable. Mind has spread across the stars. And just as we are already managing the evolution of life on Earth, so in this future time we will manage the greater evolution of the Galaxy. Like a giant life-support system. Closed loops, on a galactic scale…”

  Malenfant growled. “I got to have this visual next time I give a speech in Delaware.”

  “If this is intelligence,” Emma said, “how do you know it’s human?”

  “What else could it be?”

  “He is right,” Cornelius said. “We seem to be surrounded by a great emptiness. The nearest handful of sunlike stars shows no signs of civilization-produced radio emissions. The Solar System appears to be primordial in the sense that it shows no signs of the great engineering projects we can already envisage: for example, Venus and Mars have not been terraformed. The face of the Moon appears to have been essentially untouched since the end of the great bombardment four billion years ago.

  “Even if They are long gone, surely we should see Their mighty ruins, all around us. But we don’t. Like an ant crawling around a Los Angeles swimming pool, we might have no idea what Their great structures are for, but we would surely recognize them as artificial.”

  Malenfant said, “Today, there’s just us; in the future, somebody spreads across the Galaxy. Who else but us? Anyhow seventy-five megayears is more than you need to cover the Galaxy. You know, we should look farther out. Another few megayears for the biosphere to reach Andromeda, three million light-years away—”

  Cornelius said, “The nearest large Galaxy cluster is the Virgo Cluster. Sixty million light-years out. It’s plausible the biosphere might have reached that far by now.”

  “We have to look,” Malenfant said. “Send through more fireflies. Maybe we could establish a science station there, on the future Cruithne.”

  “Christ, Malenfant,” Emma said. “It’s a one-way trip.”

  “Yeah, but there are resources on Cruithne, just as there are

  now. Enough to sustain a colony for centuries. We’d have no

  shortage of volunteers. For half a buck I’d go myself. Maybe we

  could contact the downstreamers directly.”

  Malenfant and Cornelius talked on, excited, speculating.

  But they are missing the point, Emma thought. Why are we

  being shown this? What do the downstreamers wanft

  There was a blur of movement in the corner of the softscreen image. It was out of focus, a flash of golden fabric.

  “There’s the Sheena,” Emma snapped. “Cornelius, the camera. Fast.”

  Cornelius, startled, complied. Again the agonizing wait as Cornelius’ command crept across space, through the portal, to this startling future.

  The picture tipped up drunkenly, and Galaxy light smeared across the image. But they could see that the beach ball was rolling across the surface toward the portal.

  Emma said, “She’s going to come back through.”

  “You don’t understand,” Cornelius said tightly. “She won’t

  come back anywhere. The portal isn’t two-way.”

  “So if she steps through it, she will go—”

  “Somewhere else.”

  On the screen, the golden beach ball sailed into the interface — reddening, slowing, disappearing.

  The firefly rolled forward, through soft Galaxy light, toward

  the downstreamer gateway.

  Maura Della:

  Open journal. October 22,2011.

  Can it be true? Can it possibly? Do we want it to be true?

  People seem to think I have a more privileged access to Malenfant and his projects than is the reality. I can’t tell whether those now-famous downstream images are a hoax, or a misinterpretation, or if they are real. I can’t tell if they represent the only future available to us, or one of a range of possibilities.

  I don’t even know whether it has been to Malenfant’s help or hindrance to release the images. When you’re trying to build credibility in Congress it generally does not help to have most of the media and every respectable scientist on the planet calling you a wacko.

  But I do know that the effect of the images on the world, r
eal or false, has been astounding.

  It has all been cumulative, of course: the hysteria over the Carter predictions; the strange, eerie, shameful fear we share over the Blue children; and now this downstream light show. And all of it wrapped up with Reid Malenfant’s outrageous personality and gigantic projects.

  We shouldn’t dismiss the more extreme reactions we’re seeing. Violence, suicide, and the rest are regrettable of course, and there are a number of “leaders,” even some here on the Hill, who need, I would say, to keep a clearer head.

  But how are we supposed to react? As a species we’ve never before had a proper debate about the structure of the future. And now we’re all online, all our voices joined, and everybody is having a say.

  None of us knows what the hell we’re talking about, of course. But I think it’s healthy. The debate has to start somewhere.

  Maybe it’s all part of our growing up as a race. Maybe every technical civilization has crises to survive: the invention of weaponry that can destroy its planet, the acquisition of the capability to trash its environment. And now here is a philosophical crisis: we must come to terms with the prospect of our own long-

  term destiny or demise.

  Just as each of us as individuals must at last confront death.

  Emma Stoney:

  Another flash of blue light. And—

  And nothingness.

  The darkness before Emma was even more profound than the intergalactic night. And there was no sign of the Sheena.

  “Shit,” Malenfant said.

  “Everything’s working,” Cornelius said evenly. “We’re actually retrieving an image. And I’m picking up other telemetry. That is what the firefly is seeing.”

  Emma said tightly, “Then where’s the Sheena?”

  “Have it pan,” Malenfant said.

  “I’ll try. But I don’t think we can communicate with the firefly any more. It’s passed through the portal again, remember, so it must have crossed a second Einstein-Rosen bridge. There’s no longer a line of sight connecting us. The communication is one-way now, through the Feynman radio—”

  “Then what do we do?”

  Cornelius shrugged. “We wait. The firefly has onboard autonomy. It’s programmed to investigate its own situation, to return what data it can.”

  A blur, a wash of light, passed over the corner of the screen before the image stabilized.

  Now Emma saw a battered plain, slightly tipped up, receding to a tight, sharp horizon. The craters and ridges were low and eroded, with shadows streaming away from the viewpoint.

  “The light’s too poor to return any color,” Cornelius said.

  “What’s the light source?”

  “Floods on the firefly. Look at the way the shadows are pointing away from us. But the use of those floods is going to exhaust the batteries fast. I don’t know why it’s so dark…”

  “Cruithne looks older,” Emma said. The firefly was panning its camera across an empty landscape; the shadows streamed away. “Those craters are eroded flat, like saucers.”

  Malenfant said, “Micrometeorite impacts?”

  “It’s possible,” Cornelius said. “But the micrometeorite sand-

  blasting must be slow. I assume we’re still out in intergalactic

  space. Matter’s pretty thin out here.”

  “How slow?”

  Cornelius sighed. “I’d say we’re farther into the future by several orders of magnitude compared to the last stop.”

  Emma asked Malenfant, “What’s an order of magnitude to a physicist?”

  Malenfant grimaced. “A power often.”

  Emma tried to take that in. Ten times seventy-five million. Or

  a hundred, a thousand times…

  The viewpoint was shifting. The landscape started to rock, drop away, return. Slowly more features — ancient, eroded craters — loomed up over the horizon.

  Cornelius said, “The firefly is moving. Good.”

  “The Sheena,” Emma said.

  The beach ball was sitting on Cruithne’s surface once more, complex highlights picked out by the firefly’s light. Within, a shadow was visible, swimming back and forth.

  “How extraordinary,” Cornelius said. “To see a living thing across such immense spans of time.”

  “She looks healthy,” Emma said. “She’s moving freely; she looks alert.”

  “Maybe not much longer,” Malenfant growled. “That damn water ball will freeze.”

  “Do you think she understands any of what she is seeing?”

  “I doubt it,” Cornelius murmured.

  Now that she looked carefully Emma saw that the shadows the floods cast on the golden ball weren’t completely dark. The shaded areas were lit by some deep red glow.

  “There’s something in the sky,” she said. “A light source.”

  The image started to pan away from the cephalopod, jerkily.

  More Cruithne craterscape slid across their field of view.

  Then the landscape dropped out of sight, leaving a frame filled with darkness once more.

  ‘The firefly’s panning upward,” Malenfant said. “Come on…” And a new image resolved. “Oh, my,” he said.

  At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch. It was surrounded by a blood-colored river of light, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. But the image kept breaking up into blocky pixels, and she wondered if the shapes she was per-

  ceiving were real, or artifacts of her imagination.

  “We’re right at the limit of the optical system’s resolution here,” Cornelius said. “If the firefly is smart — there. We switched to the infrared detectors.”

  The picture abruptly became much brighter — a wash of white and pale pink — but much more blurred, in some ways more difficult to see. Cornelius labored at his softscreens, trying to clean up the image.

  Emma made out that great central glow, now brightened to a pink-white ball. It was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the center.

  The core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be embedded in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points — yellow before, now picked out as bright blue by the enhancement routines — studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points toward the bloated central mass.

  “It looks like a Galaxy,” Malenfant said.

  Emma saw he was right. It was like a caricature of the Galaxy she had watched just minutes before. But that central mound was much more pronounced than the Galaxy’s core had been, as if it were a tumor that had grown, eating out this cosmic wreck from the inside.

  Cornelius was consulting his softscreen, asking questions of the hierarchy of smart software that was poring over the images. “It probably is a Galaxy. But extremely old. Much older than our Galaxy is at present — even than when we saw it at the Sheena’s last stop—”

  Malenfant said, “Is it the Galaxy? Our Galaxy?”

  “I don’t know,” Cornelius said. “Probably. Perhaps Cruithne entered some wide orbit around the center. Or Cruithne might have had time to reach another Galaxy. There’s no way of knowing.”

  “If that’s our Galaxy,” Emma said, “what happened to all the stars?”

  “They’re dying,” Cornelius said bluntly. “Look — all stars die

  Our sun is maybe halfway through its life. In five billion years or so, it will become a red giant, five hundred times its present size. The inner planets will be destroyed. The sun will span the sky, and Earth will be baked, the land hot enough to melt lead…”

  “But there will be other stars,” Emma said. “The Galaxy reef.”

>   “Yes. And the smallest, longest-lived dwarfs can last for maybe a hundred billion years, a lot longer than the sun. But the interstellar medium is a finite resource. Sooner or later there will be no more new stars. And eventually, one by one, all the stars will die. All that will remain will be stellar remnants, neutron stars and black holes and white dwarfs, slowly cooling.” He smiled, analytic. “Think of it. All that rich, complex dust and gas we saw before, locked up in the cooling corpses of dead stars…”

  Malenfant said grimly, “And then what?”

  “And then, this.” Cornelius pointed. “The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into the great black holes — those blisters you see in the disc. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core. Even in our time it has around a million times the mass of the sun. And it’s still growing, as star remnants fall into it.

  “You see the way the matter streams are straight, not twisted? That means the central hole isn’t rotating. Wait.”

  “What now?”

  “The firefly is returning the relic temperature. The Big Bang glow. Well, well. It’s down to one percent of one degree above absolute zero. A little chilly.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means I know where we are. Or rather, when. The universal temperature is declining as the two-thirds power of time.” He hesitated, and when he spoke again, even he sounded awed. “The data is chancy. But the consensus of my software colleagues here is that we’re around ten to power fourteen years into the future. That’s, umm, a hundred thousand billion years — compared to the universe’s present age, which is around twenty billion years — -five thousand times as far downstream as at present.” He nodded, as if pleased.

  The numbers seemed monstrous to Emma. “I can’t take that in,” she said.

  Cornelius glared at her. “Then try this. These powers of ten are zoom factors. With every extra power of ten you zoom out another notch, shrinking everything. You see? This downstream universe is so old that the whole history of our world — from its formation to the present — compares to this desert of future time as… let me see… as your own very first day of existence compares to your whole life.”