Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant, looking stunned, his mouth tight, just shook

  his head.

  “So this is the end,” Emma said. “The end of life.”

  “Oh, no.” Cornelius sounded surprised. “Not at all.” He

  pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the

  galactic corpse. ‘‘‘‘These seem to be normal stars: small, uniform,

  but still glowing in the visible spectrum.”

  “How is that possible?” Malenfant said. “I thought you said

  all the star stuff was used up.”

  “So it is, by natural processes,” said Cornelius.

  “Oh. So these stars can’t be natural.”

  “That’s right.” Cornelius turned to Emma, his pale eyes shining. “You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant medium, forming artificial birthing clouds. Somebody is still gardening the Galaxy, even so far downstream. Isn’t it wonderful?” “Wonderful? The wreck of the Galaxy?” “Not that. The existence of downstreamers. And they still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. They are still like us, these descendants of ours. Maybe they even remember us.” He rubbed his face. “But those stars are small and cold. Designed for longevity. Their worlds must be huddled close — probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark.”

  “Good God, Cornelius,” Malenfant said. “That’s a lot to deduce from one smudgy image.”

  “I’ve been thinking about this all my life,” Cornelius said. “Plotting the survival of humankind, of intelligent life, into the far future. Mind games played against an unyielding opponent — time — with the laws of physics as the rules. And the farther downstream we look, the more we are constrained by the laws of physics. The future has to be like this.”

  Now the image lurched. The wrecked Galaxy slid out of the frame, to be replaced by a glaring wash of light. The firefly adjusted its receptor to visible light, and the floodlit plain of Cruithne was revealed once more.

  There was no sign of the golden bubble, or the firefly patiently towing it.

  “The Sheena has gone,” Malenfant said immediately. “She must have gone back to the portal again.”

  “Christ,” Emma said. “She’s trying to get home.”

  “But she’s only succeeded in traveling farther downstream,” said Cornelius. The image lurched again as the firefly began to toil toward the portal once more. “And so, it seems, must we. The firefly doesn’t know what else to do.”

  Emma found she was making a fist, so hard her nails were digging into her palm. “I don’t want to see any more.”

  “I don’t think there’s a choice,” Malenfant said grimly.

  The image of the portal expanded out of the camera’s field of view, and once more that deep black, blacker than galactic night, confronted Emma.

  There was a flash of electric blue.

  Another black sky, another Cruithne. The patient firefly crept forward, shining its own fading light over the crumpled surface of the asteroid, seeking the Sheena.

  Emma would not have believed that the ground of Cruithne could look more aged than it had before. And yet it did, its craters and ridges and scarps all but invisible under a thick blanket of dust. As the firefly labored Emma could see how its pitons and cables kicked up great sprays of regolith.

  The three of them watched in somber silence, oppressed by time’s weight.

  “How long, Cornelius?” Malenfant asked, his voice hoarse.

  Cornelius was studying his data. “I don’t know. The relic temperature is too low to read. And…”

  And there was a dawn, on far-downstream Cruithne.

  Emma gasped. The sight was as unexpected as it was beautiful: a point of yellow-white light, sunlike. The light rose in clumsy stages as the firefly labored toward it. Shadows of smooth eroded crater rims and ridges fled across the smooth landscape toward her, like bony fingers reaching. It was so bright it seemed to Emma she could feel its warmth, and she wondered if somehow this long journey through time had looped back on itself, returning her to the dawn of time, the birth of the Solar System itself.

  But, she quickly realized, this was no sunrise.

  A glaring point was surrounded by a tilted disc, glowing red, within which she could trace a tight spiral pattern. And there seemed to be lines of light tracing out from the poles of that central gleam, needle-thin. Farther out she saw discs and knots of dull red matter, much smaller than the big bright core object. The central light actually cast shadows through the crowded space around it, she saw, shadows that — if this was a galactic-scale object — must have been thousands of light-years long.

  It was oddly beautiful, a sculpture of light and bloodred

  smoke. But it was chilling, inhuman, even compared to the last

  grisly galactic vision; there was nothing she could recognize

  here, nothing that looked like a star.

  “Our Galaxy?” Malenfant asked.

  Cornelius studied his data. “Perhaps. If it is, it’s extremely shrunken. And I’m seeing objects away from the disc itself now: a scattering of low-energy infrared sources, all around the sky. Stellar remnants, I think.”

  Malenfant said grimly, “What you said. Evaporated stars Right?”

  “Yes.” Cornelius studied the screen. “At a guess, I’d say ninety

  percent of the objects in the Galaxy have evaporated away, and

  maybe ten percent are gathering in the core object.”

  “The black hole. That’s what we’re seeing.”

  “Yes. We’ve come a long way, Malenfant, and our strides are

  increasing. These processes are slow….”

  Emma barely listened.

  The camera swung from the bright black-hole structure, to the folded asteroid dirt, to sweeping empty sky.

  “No sign of Sheena,” she murmured. “Maybe the portals don’t always work consistently. Maybe she’s been sent on somewhere else, out of our reach—”

  Malenfant briefly hugged her. “Emma, she’s been out of our reach since the first time she bounced through that portal. Whether we see her or not hardly matters.”

  “But it feels like it does. Because we’re responsible for her being there.”

  “Yes,” he said at length.

  They fell silent, but they stayed close to each other. Emma welcomed Malenfant’s simple human warmth, the presence of his flesh, the soft wash of his breath on her face. It seemed to exclude the endless dark of the future.

  Meanwhile Cornelius was staring up at the image, interrogating the smart systems, speculating, theorizing, obsessing.

  “The light we see is coming from that central accretion disc, where matter is falling into the black hole and being absorbed. Intensely bright, of course; probably more energetic than the combined fusion energy of all the Galaxy’s stars in their heyday. The hole itself is probably a few light-months across. Those beams coming from the poles — perhaps they are plasma directed by the magnetic field of the disc, or maybe the hole itself. Like a miniature quasar.” He frowned. “But that’s wasteful. It’s hard to believe they don’t have a way to harness that radiant energy. Perhaps they’re signaling—”

  “Wasteful?” Malenfant snapped. “What are you talking about, Cornelius? Wasteful to who?”

  “The downstreamers, of course,” Cornelius said. “The down-streamers of this era. Can’t you see them?” Cornelius froze the camera’s shuddering image. “Can’t you see? Look at these smaller satellite holes. Look how uniform their size is, how regular the spacing.”

  “You’re saying this arrangement of black holes is artificial,” Emma said.

  “Why, of course it is. I suspect the downstreamers are using the smaller holes to control the flow of matter into the central hole. They must be regulating every aspect of this assemblage: the size of the satellite holes, the rate at which they approach the central core. I think the downstreamers are mining the Galaxy-core black hole of its energy.”

  “M
ining? How?”

  He shrugged. “There are a whole slew of ways even we can dream up. If you coalesce two black holes, you get a single, larger hole — with an event horizon ringing like a bell — but you also get a monumental release of gravitational energy. Much of a spinning hole’s energy is stored in a great tornadolike swirl of space and time, dragged around by the hole’s immense inertia. You could tap this energy by enclosing the hole in a great mesh of superconducting cables. Then you could thread the tornado swirl with a magnetic field, to form a giant electrical power generator. Or you can just throw matter into the central hole, feeding off the radiation as it is crushed… No doubt there are better ways. They’ve had a long time to work it out.”

  “How long?”

  Cornelius tapped his softscreen. “A guess, based on the nature of that black hole? Ten to power twenty-four years: a trillion trillion years. Ten billion times as old as the last images we saw, the age of the star farmers.”

  “Jesus,” Malenfant said. “A long time.”

  Cornelius said testily, “Remember the zoom factors. We just zoomed out again. The universe must have expanded to, umm, some ten thousand trillion times its size in our day. Compared to the age of the Galaxy remnant we see here, the evolution of our universe was as brief, as insignificant, as the first three hours after the Big Bang is to us.”

  “And yet there is still life.”

  “The Sheena,” Malenfant said.

  There was the golden beach ball, lurching over the surface, cables glimmering in the firefly’s floods. A cephalopod was clearly visible within, swimming back and forth, curious. The camera swept the Cruithne landscape as the firefly turned to follow the Sheena.

  “She’s going back to the portal,” Malenfant said. “She’s going on.”

  Something shrank, deep inside Emma. Not again, she thought.

  “Perhaps it’s a kind of morbid curiosity,” Cornelius said dryly. “To keep on going forward, on and on, to the end of things.”

  “No,” Emma said. “You saw her. She’s not morbid.”

  “Then what?”

  “It’s as if she’s looking for something. But what? The more I see of this future universe, the more it seems—”

  “Pointless?” asked Malenfant.

  She was surprised at that, from him. “Yes, exactly.”

  His face wore a complex expression. He’s taking it hard, she thought, this cold, logical working-out of his dreams. Malenfant campaigns for an expansive future for humankind: survival, essentially, into the far downstream. Well, here it is, Malenfant: everything you dreamed of.

  And it is appalling, terrifying: proof that if we are to survive we must sacrifice our humanity.

  Cornelius shrugged. “Pointless? What a trivial response. We are the first, the only intelligence in the universe. We have no objective, save endurance: nothing to do but survive, as long as we can.

  “And in fact this era may be the peak, when we learn to tap these giant energy sources, the greatest in the universe, sources so great they outshine our fusion-driven stars as if they were candles.”

  “The manhood of the race,” Emma said dryly.

  “Perhaps. And—”

  “And are they like us?” Emma asked.

  “What does it matter? Your thinking is so small. Modern humans could never handle such projects as this. We can’t imagine how it is to be such a creature, to think in such a way.

  “Perhaps there is no real comparison between them and us, no contact possible. But it does not matter. They are magnificent.”

  She was repelled. She thought: You’re wrong. There had to be something more to strive for than that, more than simple survival in a running-down universe.

  But then, she had no children. So these black-hole miners, however remote, however powerful, were not her descendants; she was cut off, a bubble of life lost in the far upstream.

  The firefly worked its painful way across the time-smoothed landscape toward the portal.

  Damien Krimsky:

  …Anyhow that’s why I went AWOL for so long, Mr. Hench. I hope you can understand that.

  I support Bootstrap. I’m a big fan of Reid Malenfant and everything he’s trying to do. The time I spent working with you on those BDBs in the Mojave desert was probably the most meaningful of my life.

  It’s just that when all that Carter stuff came out of the media, well, maybe I went a little crazy. If the world’s going to end anyhow, what’s the point of paying taxes?

  That was why I, umm, disappeared.

  Anyhow I saw what Malenfant broadcast, the galaxies and the black holes and all. And now I feel different. Who wouldn’t? Now I know my children have a chance to grow old and happy, and their children too, on and on until we’ve conquered the stars.

  Life is worth living again.

  I know there are those who say it doesn’t matter. That if the fu ture is going to be so wonderful anyhow we don’t need to do anything now. But I feel a sense of duty. It’s the same way I felt when I saw my own kid in my wife’s arms for the first time. At that moment I knew how I would spend the rest of my life.

  So I’m coming back to the Mojave. I have clearances from the rehab and detox clinics, as well as from the parole board. I hope you’ll welcome me back.

  Your friend,

  Damien Krimsky

  “Moondancer”:

  People have been arguing for months about whether this Carter stuff can be correct. And now they’re arguing about whether the far-future visions are hoaxes.

  Of course they can’t both be true.

  And it’s amazing that you have stock market crashes and suicide cults and wackos who think they need to rip up the cities because the end of the world is coming, and another bunch of nuts doing exactly the same thing because the end of the world isn ‘t coming.

  Of course the far future visions are all genuine.

  This is our fate. And it’s fantastic! Wonderful! Don’t you think so?

  Have you even thought where you’d like to travel if you had a time machine, and could go anywhere, past or future? Maybe you would go hunt T Rex, or listen to Jesus preach, or sail with Columbus. What do you think? I know what I’d do. I’d ride off to join the black-hole miners in the Incredible Year A.D. Four Hundred Billion. Man, will those guys party.

  What? How come I know the future stuff is real? Because I’ve seen it myself. Also, as you probably know, there were secret codes in the L.A. Times write-up comprehensible only by other Travelers, confirming the veracity of the pictures.

  I have a Cap — careful with it! — and when I wear it, it projects my sense of selfastrally…

  Emma Stoney:

  This time the golden beach ball was visible as soon as the firefly emerged from the blue flash of transition. The beach ball was standing on a smooth, featureless plain, square in the middle of the softscreen. An arc of the portal was visible beside the beach ball, a bright blue stripe.

  The sky was dark. The black hole rose had disappeared. The only light falling on the beach ball seemed to be the glow of the firefly’s dimming floods. The belt of horizon Emma could see looked like a perfect circular span, unmarked by ridges or craters.

  The squid swam through her bubble of water, lethargic.

  Emma watched the Cruithne landscape slide past the firefly’s panning camera lens. Its smoothness was unnerving, unnatural. She felt no awe, no wonder, only a vague irritation.

  “That damn asteroid has taken a beating,” Malenfant said. “Look at that mother. Smooth as a baby’s butt—”

  “You don’t understand,” Cornelius said testily. “I — or rather my electronic friends — think there’s more than simple erosion here. The gravimeters on the firefly are telling me the morphology of Cruithne has changed. I mean, the asteroid’s shape has changed. Out here in the dark, it has flowed into a sphere.”

  Malenfant said, “A sphere? How the hell?”

  “I thj.nk this is liquefaction. If that’s so, it means that proton decay lifetim
es must exceed ten to power sixty-four years — and that means—”

  “Whoa, whoa.” Malenfant held up his hands. “Liquefaction? You’re saying the asteroid flowed like a liquid? How? Did it heat up, melt?”

  “No. What is there to heat it up?”

  “What, then?”

  “Malenfant, over enough time, the most solid matter will behave like a very viscous liquid. All solid objects flow. It is a manifestation of quantum mechanical tunneling that—”

  Malenfant said, “I don’t believe it.”

  “You’re seeing it,” Cornelius said tightly. “Malenfant, the far future is not the world you grew up in. Marginal processes can come to dominate, if they’re persistent, over long enough time scales.”

  “How long?” Malenfant snapped.

  Cornelius checked his softscreen. “A minimum of ten to power sixty-five years. Umm, that’s a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Look. Start with a second. Zoom out; factor it up to get the life of the Earth. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth’s lifetime is like one second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again…”

  The camera image swept away from the beach ball, away from the blank liquefied ground, and swept the sky.

  Malenfant pointed. “What the hell is thatT

  It was a blur of gray-red light in an otherwise empty sky. The firefly switched to infrared, and Cornelius cleaned up the image. Emma saw a rough sphere, a halo of motes of dim light that hovered, motionless, around—

  Around what? It was a ball of darkness, somehow darker even than the background sky. It looked about the size of the sun, seen from Earth; the motes were like dimly glowing satellites closely orbiting a black planet.

  Cornelius sounded excited. “My God. Look at this.” He magnified the image, picking out a point on the rim of the central ball, enhancing as he went.

  Emma saw rings of red light running around the rim, parallel to the surface.