Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  The sun had set over the rim walls of Tycho, but the walls were lit by the eerie blue glow of Earthlight. The sun would linger for a whole day, just beneath the carved horizon, so languid was the Moon’s time cycle. There was no air, of course, so there were no sunset colors; but there was nevertheless a glow at the horizon, pale white fingers bright enough to dim the stars: she was seeing the light of the sun’s atmosphere, and the zodiacal light, the glimmer of dust and debris in the plane of the Solar System. It was calm, unchanging, unbearably still, austere, a glacier of light.

  She found Bill Tybee weeping.

  He let her hold him, like mother with child. It was remarkably comforting, this trace of human warmth against the giant still cold of the Moon.

  Reid Malenfant:

  His suit radio receiver was designed only for short distances.

  Nevertheless he tuned around the frequency bands.

  Nothing. But that meant little.

  If he couldn’t hear anybody else, maybe they could hear him. The backpack had a powerful emergency beacon. He decided that was a good investment of their remaining power. He separated it from the pack, jammed it into Cruithne soil, and started it up.

  Then he shook out the bubble shelter, zipped himself and Emma into it, and inflated it. Once more it was a welcome relief to huddle with Emma’s warmth.

  He took a careful look at Emma’s damaged leg. Much of the flesh seemed to have been destroyed by its exposure to the vacuum. But at the fringe of the damaged area mere was discoloration, green and purple, and a stench of rot, of sickly flowers. He drenched the bad flesh in an antiseptic cream he found in the backpack until the place smelled like a hospital ward. But at least that stink of corruption was drowned.

  And she didn’t seem to be in any pain. Maybe all this would be over, one way or the other, before they got to that point.

  He sacrificed a little more of their power on warming up some water. He mixed up orange juice in it, and they savored the tepid drink. They ate more of the backpack’s stores, dried banana and what seemed to be yogurt. He used scraps of cloth torn from their micrometeorite garments to improvise washcloths, and then he opened up their suits and gently washed Emma’s armpits and crotch and neck. Malenfant took their filled urine bags and dumped their contents into the military backpack’s water recycler, and he filled up their suit reservoirs with fresh water. Almost routine, almost domestic.

  He was, he realized, on some bizarre level, content.

  And then the shit hit the fan.

  “Malenfant.”

  He turned. She was holding his personal med kit. With her gloved hands, she had pulled out a blister pack of fat red pills. And a silver lapel ribbon.

  Oh, he thought. Oh, shit. There goes the Secret.

  “Tumor-busters. Right?” She let the stuff go; it drifted slowly to the floor. Her face was a yellow mask overlaid with Big Bang sunburn; her eyes were sunk in dark craters. “You’re a cancer victim.”

  “It’s manageable. It’s nothing—”

  “You never told me, Malenfant. How long?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

  “This is why. Isn’t it? This is why you washed out of NASA. And it’s why you pushed me away. Oh, you asshole.” She held out her arms.

  He pulled himself over to her, held her shoulders, then dipped his head. He felt her stroke his bare scalp. “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Why not? What did you think I’d do, run away?”

  “No. If I thought that I’d have told you immediately. I thought you’d stay. Care for me. Sacrifice yourself.”

  “And you couldn’t stand that. Oh, Malenfant. And the affair, that damn Heather—”

  “The cancer wasn’t going to kill me, Emma. But it screwed up my life. I couldn’t have kids, I couldn’t reach space… I didn’t want it to screw your life too — ow.”

  She’d slapped him. Her face was twisted into a scowl. She slapped him again, hard enough to sting, and pushed at his chest. She was weak, but she was pushing them apart. “What right did you have to mess with my head like that?” And she aimed more slaps at him.

  He lifted his hands, let her dismally feeble blows rain on his arms. “I did it for you.”

  “You control freak. And then, even after you engineer a divorce, for Christ’s sake, you still can’t let me go. You recruit me into your company, you even drag me into interplanetary space.”

  “I know. I know, I know. I’m fucked up. I’m sorry. I wanted to let you go. But I couldn’t bear it. I could never let go. But I tried. I didn’t want to wreck your life.”

  “My God, Malenfant.” Now her eyes were wet. “What do you think you did? What do you think life is for?”

  “Emma—”

  “Get out. Leave me alone, you cripple.” And she turned her face to the wall.

  He stayed, watching her, for long minutes. Then he closed up his suit.

  He found remnants of human presence on Cruithne: footprints, scuff marks, even handprints. There were pitons stuck in the re-golith, dangling lengths of tether, a few abandoned scraps of kit, film cartridges and polystyrene packing and lengths of cable. There were a few fresh, deep craters that looked as if they might have been dug by the bullets of troopers’ guns.

  A few yards from the portal itself he found the battery of instruments which, a million years ago, Cornelius Taine had set up to monitor the artifact: cameras, spectrometers, Geiger counters, other stuff Malenfant had never been able to name, let alone understand. The instruments were still in their rough circle, centered on the portal. But they were uniformly smashed, lenses broken, casings cracked open, cabling and circuit boards ripped out. The regolith here was much disturbed. It was obvious somebody had deliberately done this, taken the time and effort to wreck the instruments. Tybee J., maybe, while she prepared to chase them into the portal.

  He picked up a busted-open camera. There was a fine layer of regolith over the exposed workings. The gold-foil insulating blanket was blackened, cracked and peeling, and the paintwork on exposed metal was flaking away. He ran his gloved finger under a plastic-coated cable that stuck out of the interior. The discolored plastic just crumbled away.

  He wondered how long an exposure to vacuum, the sun’s raw ultraviolet, and the hard radiation of space you’d need to do this much damage. Years, maybe. There was no guarantee that their subjective time during their jaunt across the manifold universes had to match up with the time elapsed here.

  Anyhow it sure looked as if nobody had been back here since they had left in such a hurry. He felt his heart sink at the thought.

  He placed the camera back where he had found it and let it resume its slow, erosive weathering.

  Taking up the familiar routine of moving around the asteroid — piton, tether, glide, always at least two anchors to the regolith — he glided over Cruithne’s claustrophobic, close-curved horizon, pressing on, farther and farther.

  There was little left of the O ‘Neill, or the troop carrier: just scattered wreckage, crumpled and charred, a few new blue-rimmed craters punched into Cruithne’s patient hide. He supposed most of the debris created by the various attacks had been thrown off into space. He rummaged through the remains of the ships and the hab shelters. What wasn’t smashed and vacuum-dried was crumbling from sunlight and cosmic irradiation. Still, maybe there was something he could use here.

  He came across a firefly, inert, half dug into the regolith. He tried to haul it out, but it was dead, its power-indicator panel black.

  He found only one body.

  It was a trooper, a young man — not much more than a boy, really — wadded into the shadow of a crater. He wasn’t in a suit. His body was twisted, bones broken, and his skin, freeze-dried in the vacuum, was like scorched, brittle paper. His chest cavity was cracked open, presumably by the explosion that had taken out the troop carrier. His heart, stomach, and other organs seemed to have desiccated, and the cavity in his body gaped wide, empty, somehow larger than M
alenfant had expected.

  Maybe Tybee had taken the time to bury her other fallen companions, Malenfant thought. Or maybe this was the only body that had finished up here, and the rest — burned, broken, and shattered — were somewhere out there in a dispersing shell of debris.

  And meanwhile, Cruithne spun on. How strange, he thought, that Cruithne had waited out five billion years in cold silence and then endured a few months of frenetic activity as life from Earth, bags of water and blood and flesh, had come here and built their enigmatic structures, fought and blown everything apart, and departed, leaving Cruithne alone again, with a few new craters and a scattering of shattered structures at the center of a dispersing cloud of glittering rubble.

  That, and the enigmatic blue circle put there by the downstreamers.

  He passed into Cruithne’s long shadow.

  The stars wheeled over his head, the familiar constellations of his boyhood, but crowded now with the dense stars of deep space. At last, at the heart of the sparse constellation of Cygnus, he found a bright blue star. He gazed into that watery light, savoring photons that had bounced off Earth’s seas and clouds just seconds before entering his eyes. It was the closest he would ever come, he supposed, to touching home again.

  He thought of the lifeless corridors he had traveled, of the long, painful gestation of physics and fire, birth and collapse, that had finally, it seemed, evolved to this: a universe of carbon and supernovae and black holes and life, and that beautiful blue spark. But Earth was an island of light and life surrounded by abysses.

  In the shelter, he found Emma dying.

  He did what he could. He massaged her limp hands, trying to keep the blood pumping, and upped the oxygen concentration in the air. He pulled a lightweight silver-foil emergency blanket around her, did everything he could think of to keep her body from deciding this was the end. But her decline, rapid, seemed irreversible.

  Her fingertips had turned dead white, the skin pasty and lifeless, even bluish.

  Not yet, not yet. How can it end here? It’s wrong.

  The sun was a ball of light that glared through the fabric, its glow soaking into the warp and weft of the fabric. Malenfant watched as it edged across the dome of the tent. Cruithne was turning patiently, just as it always had.

  But the air in here was growing stale. The carbon dioxide scrubbers and other expendables built into the mil-spec backpack were presumably reaching the end of their design lifetimes; the pack wouldn’t be able to sustain this habitat much longer.

  She woke up. Her eyes turned, and her gaze settled on his face, and she smiled, which warmed his heart. He fed her sips of water. “Try to take it easy.”

  “It isn’t so bad,” she whispered.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Really. I don’t hurt. Not much, anyhow.”

  “You want some more dope?”

  “Save it, Malenfant. You might need it. Anyhow I’d prefer a shot of tequila.”

  He told her about the radio beacon. “Somebody will be coming.”

  “Oh, bull, Malenfant,” she said gently. “Nobody’s going to come. It wasn’t meant to end like that, a cavalry charge from over the hill. Not for us. Don’t you know that yet?” She gripped his hand. Her touch was like a child’s. “This is all we have, Malenfant. You and me. We’ve no future or past, because we don’t have kids, nobody who might carry on the story. Just bubbles, adrift in time. Here, shimmering, gone.” She seemed to be crying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Never apologize,” she whispered. “We’ve come a long way together, haven’t we? All those universes without life. And the downstream. Life slowly crushed out of existence… You need stars and supernovae to make black holes, to make more universes. Fine. You need those things to make life, too. But is that how come we’re here? Are we just a by-product? Are minds just something that happens to rise out of the blind thrashings of matter?”

  “I don’t know. Try to take it easy—”

  “But it doesn’t feel like that, Malenfant. Does it? I feel like I’m the center of everything. I can feel time flowing deep inside me. I’m not a kind of froth on the surface of the universe. I am the universe.”

  “I’m listening,” he said, wiping her mouth.

  “Oh, horseshit,” she hissed softly. “You never did listen to anybody. If you had you wouldn’t have fucked up our entire relationship, from beginning to end.”

  “Emma—”

  “Maybe the children know,” she said. “The new children. Michael, wherever he is now. You know. …”

  She drifted between sleeping and waking. He soaked a cloth in water and moistened her lips when he could. When she was asleep he infused her with more morphine. There was nothing he could do but watch as her body shut itself down. He had never seen anybody die this way before, up close, peacefully. She actually seemed to be getting more comfortable as the end got closer, as if there were mechanisms to comfort her.

  She licked her lips. “You know, I guess we couldn’t manage to live together, but at least we got to die together. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, Malenfant. For all the worlds …And wear your damn ribbon. It’s a med-alert. They gave it to you for a reason.”

  “I will.”

  “You really are an asshole, Malenfant. You were so busy saving the world, saving me, you never thought about yourself…” She opened her eyes, and smiled. But her eyes were unfocused. Her hand fluttered, and he took it.

  “What is it?”

  “I saw a light,” she whispered. “Like the phoenixes. The light of creation, all around everything. And I could smell the high desert. Isn’t that strange?”

  “Yes. Yes, that is strange.”

  “And I think…”

  But she was asleep again.

  Her breathing changed. It became a gurgle, like a snore: intermittent, deep, very fluid. Her mouth was open, her skin sallow, her face very still.

  She stirred once more. She smiled. But, he knew, it was not for him.

  He assembled Emma’s suit around her, her helmet and gold visor and gloves and boots. When he was done she looked as if she were sleeping.

  He washed his face, drank some water, even managed to eat a little. He recharged his reservoirs and suited up.

  He collapsed the shelter. Since it was the last time he would be using it, he folded it up neatly and stowed it away in trooper Tybee’s backpack.

  Then he prepared his tethers and pitons and carried Emma around the curve of Cruithne, to the crater where he had found the body of the anonymous soldier. The only sound was his own breathing, the only motion the patient wheeling of the stars and sun and Earth in Cruithne’s splendid sky.

  He laid Emma down beside the trooper. She was so light in Cruithne’s toy gravity her body barely made an indentation in the soft regolith.

  It was easy to bury the two bodies. He just kicked over the crater wall and loosely shoveled dirt forward with his gloved hands, allowed it to settle over them.

  He seemed aware of every detail of the world: the grittiness of the regolith he had spilled on the bodies, the slow tracking of the shadows, the ticks and whirrs of the mechanisms of his suit — the meaningless texture of this, the latest of a parade of meaningless universes.

  He ought to say something. He had for Cornelius and Tybee J., after all, and they had died in a much stranger place than this, much farther from home. But he had no words.

  He left her there.

  For the last time he worked his way around Cruithne, and he stood, tethered, before the portal.

  He had searched Tybee’s backpack and had found a grenade: a simple, sleek thing, easily small enough to fit into a glove, with a pull-ring fat enough for a space-suited finger. Ten-second timer, he guessed. He cradled the grenade now, clutching it to his belly.

  He had no doubt it would work.

  Cruithne turned. Shadows fled toward him, and he was plunged into darkness. He heard pumps clatter and whir in his backpack as his battered suit prepare
d to fight the cold. He waited until Earth was high above the portal, blue planet over blue artifact.

  He pulled the grenade’s ring. Ten, nine, eight.

  He started his languid microgravity jump in good time. He would enter the portal headfirst, hands clutched to his chest, over the grenade. The complex, ancient ground of Cruithne slid beneath him.

  Then the portal was all around him. He grinned fiercely. Made it, by God. End of story.

  Two, one.

  There was a blue flash, an instant of searing pain—

  Maura Della:

  And, on the Moon, it took just six more months for it all to fall

  apart.

  The scrap of paper had been brought here, all the way to the Moon, by a burly-looking Marine. He looked as if he had been ordered to drag Maura out of here by her hair if necessary.

  She fingered the document suspiciously. It was written, by hand, on what looked like authentic White House notepaper, and was signed by the president himself. But she had a lot of trouble with any text that contained phrases like “U.S. Constitution as amended” and “emergency powers.”

  Maura Della was ordered to return to Earth — specifically, to submit herself to a Washington court within a couple of weeks. They wanted her to denounce the future. To deny that the information Reid Malenfant gleaned from his Feynman radio came from the future. To deny that the Blue kids were influenced by information from the future.

  Of course it wouldn’t be true. But America was run by a gov ernment now that had been elected, essentially, on a platform of removing all this stuff, this madness, from public life.

  It was impossible. But they were having a damn good try. An obvious method was to treat it all as a conspiracy by the people who had been close to it all. People like Maura.

  But such orders were easy to hand out in executive offices in Washington; this was the Moon, and after three days in space — presumably without proper training or orientation — this poor grunt was green as a lettuce leaf and looked as if he could barely stand up, here in the cold, antiseptic light of the NASA base.