Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Anna laughed, and for a moment, a last moment, she was just a kid, a sixteen-year-old girl, half laughing, half crying, happy, terrified.

  And then the Tinkerbell exploded.

  It wasn ‘t instantaneous. That was the horror of it.

  It washed over her, slicing her through, burning her out of her own skull. She could feel the modules of her brain, her mind, wiping clear, collapsing into the new vacuum beyond the light.

  Until there was only the deep, old part of her brain left, the animal cowering in the dark.

  Malenfant!

  And the light broke through.

  Reid Malenfant:

  The brighter areas — the older terrain, the highlands of the near side and much of the far side — looked much as they had always done, tracing out the face of the Man in the Moon. But the seas of gray lunar dust, Imbrium and Procellarum and Tranquillity, seemed to be imploding. Even from here he could see cracks spreading in the lava seas, sections of crust cracking, tipping, sliding inward. The Moon was two thousand miles across; given that, the speed of the process he was watching — and the scale of it, hundred-mile slabs of lunar crust crumbling in seconds — was impressive.

  The Moon had companions in this moment of convulsion, he saw: bright sparks that orbited slowly, like fireflies. Ships from Earth. He sensed they were helpless.

  It’s beginning, Michael murmured in his Seattle-tinged middle-aged voice.

  “What is?”

  The Moon is being collapsed to a new form: quark matter. The weaker areas of the crust, the areas crushed by the ancient basin-forming impacts, are imploding first. Michael hesitated. Do you understand? The Moon will become, briefly, a single giant nu-cleon, an extended sac of quarks at nuclear density that—

  “Who is doing this?”

  The children, of course.

  “Why, for Christ’s sake?”

  It is the fulfillment of humankind. Of this cosmos…Ah.

  Now the Moon’s ancient, cratered highlands were starting to crumble, too. Malenfant felt a stab of regret as the Moon’s bony geography collapsed into dust and light. Five billion years of stillness, Malenfant thought, ending in a few heartbeats. And we thought those Apollo footprints would last a million years.

  Now a light started to shine out of the heart of the Moon, out of the eyes and mouth of the Man, as if something were burning there. He could actually see shafts of light cast through lunar dust, as if the Moon were a Halloween lantern hanging in a murky room.

  And — with startling suddenness, in utter silence — the Moon imploded, shattered, burst into an expanding cloud of dust and rubble.

  The orbiting ships were immediately overwhelmed. So, Malenfant thought, people are already dying.

  The cloud began to disperse, spreading out along the Moon’s orbit. Maybe, given time, it would form a new ring around the Earth, Malenfant thought. And there would be spectacular meteor showers on the Earth, skies that would burn like a salute to the death of the Moon.

  But now the dispersing debris revealed a point of dazzling white light, difficult to look into even with Malenfant’s mysteriously enhanced vision. The dying Moon had birthed a new star: a terrible, brilliant companion to the sun.

  Just seconds now, Michael murmured, staring.

  Malenfant glanced at the boy’s face. The quality of light had become strange, sharper. “Michael, what is that going to do to the Earth? The heat it’s putting out will surely play hell with the climate. And—”

  You’re asking the wrong questions again, Malenfant. There will be no time for that. The quark nugget is only a tool.

  “A tool to do what?”

  To create a pulse of high-energy density.

  Malenfant longed to understand. “How high?”

  Would the numbers mean anything to you? The most energetic particles are cosmic rays: iron nuclei fleeing the explosions of stars, moving close to the speed of light. If an apple falls from a tree to the ground, the energy it gathers is shared over its billions of billions of atoms. The most energetic cosmic rays have comparable energy focused on a single nucleus. If two such nuclei were to impact head-on the energy released would be two orders of magnitude higher again. It is believed that no such event has happened in the history of the universe.

  “And the children—”

  Are seeking to create an event six orders of magnitude higher even than that. There are no natural processes that could produce such a thing. This is the first time there has been a mechanism — a mind, us — to deliver such gigantic energies. In this universe or any of those preceding it.

  Malenfant frowned. “Are you saying this is our purpose? The purpose of man, of life, is to produce a single unnaturally huge energy pulse, this one thing? That’s all?”

  The purpose is not the act. It is the consequence of the act.

  The light in the Moon wreckage grew brighter. It flared, electric blue, and then white.

  And the point burst, became an expanding bubble of light, pink-gray, ballooning into space. In a heartbeat it overwhelmed the debris cloud. Malenfant glimpsed its glare in the oceans of Earth, like a terrifying new sun born out of Earth’s lost companion.

  But it took only a second for the bubble to grow monstrously large, fifty or sixty times the size of Earth, dwarfing the planet.

  The wall of light swept across Earth, devouring it. And Earth was gone.

  Malenfant grunted, the breath forced out of him. He felt as if he had been punched.

  As suddenly, as quickly as that, it was over.

  The bubble was growing, larger and brighter every second, a cancer that seemed to be sucking energy out of spacetime itself, and Malenfant saw its light washing over Michael’s face, his round, childish eyes. It was huge, startling, already dwarfing the points of light that populated the universe.

  Michael said, The interface is growing at near light speed. It took a little more than a second to cover the Moon s orbit to reach Earth, just a twenty-fifth of a second to cover Earth itself. After five seconds it was as large as the sun. Light speed is fast, Malenfant. Now we have seven or eight minutes before the wave reaches the sun. The inner planets, Venus and Mercury, will be covered before that.

  The ballooning bubble wasn’t a perfect sphere, Malenfant saw absently. It was becoming blistered, growing irregularly, as if diseased. Its surface glowed pink-white and it was speckled, as if illuminated by laser light. The stars seemed to be shifting around the swelling edge, their position sliding, turning briefly to arcs of light before the shell obscured them — gravitational lensing, perhaps, as the shell distorted spacetime itself.

  …Earth gone, just like that, in a fraction of a second, as if it were no more substantial than a match stalk caught in a firestorm. Earth, all of its billions of years of geology and life, core and mantle and oceans and drifting continents, evolution and climate: all of it gone, as if it never existed, its story over.

  And the people. Billions dead, their stories summarily ended. The species already extinct, unless anybody had managed to get away to the outer planets, the stars.

  He felt numb, unable to believe it. Shouldn’t he have felt it, the brief cries of those billions of souls, caught in the middle of their lives, arguing or laughing or crying, giving birth or dying, making love or war?

  Michael was watching him, as if trying to gauge his reaction. They would have seen nothing. An instant of glowing sky, a moment of pain —

  “Michael, what’s inside the bubble? What happened to Earth when it passed the barrier?”

  Different physical laws. Anything of our universe that survived the unreality pulse itself would immediately decay into new forms. Physics, chemistry as we know it could not proceed.

  But even this new regime, the regime of changed matter, would not persist. The energy density in there is intense, the gravity field it generates very strong. In microseconds after the nucleation — even before the bubble expanded beyond the Moon itself, when the bubble was only a mile across — a gravitational co
llapse started.

  “Like a Big Crunch.”

  Yes. But none of the slow collapse and compression you witnessed in the precursor universes, Malenfant. Immediate. This is the true vacuum, Malenfant, the final state of the universe. . .

  When the universe was born, erupting out of its Big Bang, it went through a series of phase changes, the vacuum collapsing to new, more stable forms. And with each change, with the decay of each false vacuum, energy was released. Those monstrous energy pulses fueled the initial expansion of the universe.

  At last the phase changes ceased, and the universe stabilized.

  But the stability it reached was false.

  I was told a story of a princess who is imprisoned on top of a perfect crystal sphere. There are no iron bars to hold her there, yet she is trapped at the sphere’s highest point. As long as she stays there, at the point of maximum symmetry, she is safe. But if she steps aside in any direction, she will slip and fall. So it is with the universe. Maximum symmetry is unstable.

  “But now the children have disturbed that symmetry.”

  Yes. Their high-energy event allowed quantum tunneling to a state of true vacuum … Ah. There was a burst of light on the edge of the expanding bubble. Venus, I think…

  The unreality wall approached the sun. The bubble was now sixteen light-minutes across, two hundred million miles wide, dwarfing the sun. But the star seemed unperturbed, even as the great hull raced toward it.

  Light speed, Malenfant, Michael whispered. If you were standing on the surface of the sun, you would still see stars and Earth and Moon, the last photons reflected by the planet before its destruction. The wall arrives with the light itself. . .

  The wall blew across the sun, a tornado engulfing a brightly lit farmhouse. But the sun, a million miles across, was no mere mote of rock and water and life, like Earth. The wall took three, four, five seconds to overwhelm the sun’s glowing mass. Right to the end the surviving sector of the sun kept its spherical shape, kept shining, emitting photons generated by a fusion core that had vanished into unreality seconds before.

  Still, it took just heartbeats.

  When the sun was gone it grew darker. A final nightfall, Malenfant thought.

  And now there was only the sphere of unreality, growing ferociously and unevenly, sparkling, clumpy blisters bursting from its sides, stars curdling around its edge. Soon, he realized, it would become a wall, blanketing the universe.

  There will be little to see for a while, Michael said. It will sweep across Mars, the asteroid belt.

  “Cruithne?”

  Gone already. Then, in half an hour, it will reach us.

  The bubble continued to swell visibly, its light glaring.

  “It’s never going to stop,” Malenfant whispered. “It will consume the Solar System, the stars—”

  This isn ‘t some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually —

  “The future has gone,” Malenfant said. “My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy…” That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. “Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—”

  Because it was the wrongfuture. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble. There. Can you see that? It’s already starting…

  “What is?”

  The budding. . . The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum — remnants of our universe — isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—

  “Like black holes.” And in that instant, Malenfant understood. “That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.”

  Much better. Much. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.

  “And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?…”

  We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes — universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining — and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.

  “But we were the first.”

  Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind — the first intelligence of all — had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind.

  We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children — the maligned Blues — and we put it right.

  This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it.

  We were parents of the universe, not its children.

  Michael said softly, Isn’t this why you came to Cruithne, Malenfant? To discover purpose? And you had a role to play.

  “I never understood. Not until now.”

  Nevertheless you were a catalyst.

  Malenfant found he was bleakly exhilarated. “Life is no accident,” he said. “No second-order effect, no marginal creation. We — small, insignificant creatures scurrying over our fragile planet, lost in the Galaxy — we were, after all, the center of the universe.” It was, in its extraordinary way, an affirmation of all he had ever believed. “Hah,” he barked. “Copernicus, blow it out your ass!”

  Malenfant? I think I’m scared.

  Malenfant pulled the boy to him, wrapped his arms around this complex creature, the ten-year-old boy, the superbeing stranded here from a vanished future.

  “Will they remember us? The children. In the new universes.”

  Oh, yes, Michael said, and he smiled. He waved a hand at the bubble. This couldn ‘t have happened without mind. Without intelligence. Who knows? They might be able to reconstruct what we were like, how we lived our lives.

  “I hope they forgive us,” Malenfant whispered.

  Sheena 47:

  It was the hour.

  Sheena 47 prowled through the heart of the lens-ship. On every hierarchical level mind-shoals formed, merged, fragmented, combining restlessly, shimmers of group consciousness that pulsed through the trillion-strong cephalopod community as sunlight glimmers on water. The great shoals had abandoned their song-dreams of Earth, of the deep past, and sang instead of the huge, deep future that lay ahead.

  The diamond machines — transformed asteroid hulks — had worked without fault. Now the starbow arced around the lens-ship, complete and beautiful: the universe relativity-compressed to a rainbow that shone on the rippling water.

  The helium-3 store, laboriously mined from the great cloud ocean of Jupiter, was all but exhausted. Sheena 47 paid a final farewell to the brave communities who had colonized those pink seas and delivered the fuel for the exodus. Those cousins had stayed behind and would soon be overwhelmed by the anomaly, but they had gone to nonexistence proudly.

  Now was the time. Excitement crossed the great cephalopod communities in waves, and they crowded to the huge lenticular walls to see.

  And, just as they were designed to, the magnetic arms of the ramscoop opened, like the ar
ms of a giant cephalopod itself. The intangible limbs sparkled as thin matter was hauled into its maw, to be compressed and collapsed and burned.

  It was working. The lens-ship was cut loose at last of the system that had birthed it. Now its ocean was the thin, rich inter stellar medium that drifted between the stars. The fuel was limitless, and the cephalopods could run forever…

  Well, not forever, Sheena 47 knew. The great ship could approach but never exceed light speed; slowly, inexorably, the unreality tide must outrun the lens and wash over them all.

  But, so stretched was time by their great speed, that hour was many, many generations away.

  She felt a stab of regret for humanity: the flawed creatures who had given mind to the cephalopods, and who had now, it seemed, been consumed by the fire. But the cephalopods were young, hungry for time, and for them, the future was not done yet.

  The ramscoop was working perfectly. The future was long and assured. The great hierarchies of mind collapsed as the cephalopods gave themselves over to a joyous riot of celebration, of talk and love and war and hunting: Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine!…

  The city of water and light, pursued by unreality, fled into the darkness of the far downstream.

  Reid Malenfant:

  The bubble of glowing, laser-speckle light was looming now, a wall that cut across the universe, plummeting toward them at light speed. It could have been a mile away or ten million. Malenfant could feel nothing: no heat, no cold, no tug of the anomaly’s monstrous gravity. Maybe he was already falling into its maw.

  He wondered how long there was left. Then he put the thought aside. No more countdowns, Malenfant.

  Malenfant. There s something Ididn ‘t tell you.

  “What?”

  We might survive. We might get caught in one of the false-vacuum black holes. We are here, but not here, Malenfant. The information that comprises us might be preserved during —

  “Where would we be? One of the new universes?”

  I don’t know.

  “What would it be like?”

  Different.