Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

  She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. After she'd landed on the earth-craft the Friends had given her one of their flimsy, one-piece jumpsuits; she was sure it was quite adequate for this fake climate, but, damn it, she just didn't feel warm in it. But she suspected she'd feel just as shivery in the warmest clothing; it wasn't cold that was her problem, she suspected, but craving to return to the safe metal womb that the Cauchy had become. During her century of flight, whenever she had envisaged the end of her journey she had anticipated a pleasurable tremor on stepping out of a boat for the first time and drinking in the fresh blue air of Earth... even an Earth of the distant future. Well, she hadn't got anywhere near Earth; and surely to God anybody would be spooked by a situation like this. To be stranded on a clod of soil a quarter mile wide — with no enclosing bubble or force shell as far as she could tell — a clod that had been wrenched from the Earth and hurled back through time and into orbit around Jupiter—

  She decided that a healthy dose of fear at such a moment was quite the rational response.

  She heard footsteps, rustling softly through the grass.

  "Miriam Berg."

  Berg raised herself on her elbows. "Shira. I've been waiting for you."

  The girl from the future sounded disappointed. "I trusted you, Miriam. I gave you the freedom of our craft. Why did you send this message?"

  Berg squinted up at Shira. The Friend was tall — about Berg's height, a little under six feet — but there the similarity ended. Berg had chosen to be AS-frozen at physical age around forty-five — a time when she had felt most at home in herself. Her body was wiry, tough, and comfortable; and she liked to think that the wrinkles scattered around her mouth and brown eyes made her look experienced, humorous, fully human. And her cropped hair, grizzled with gray, was nothing to be ashamed of. Shira, by contrast, was aged about twenty-five. Real age, once and for all, thanks to the Qax's confiscation of the AS technology. The girl's features were delicate, her build thin to the point of scrawny. Berg couldn't get used to Shira's clean-shaven scalp and found it hard not to stare at the clean lines of her skull. The girl's skin was sallow, her dark-rimmed eyes blue, huge, and apparently lashless; her face, the prominent teeth and cheekbones, was oddly skeletal — but not unpretty. Shira was much as Berg imagined Earthbound city-dwellers of a few centuries before Berg's own time must have looked: basically unhealthy, surviving in a world too harsh for humans.

  Berg would have sworn that she had even spotted fillings, yellowed teeth embedded in Shira's jaw. Was it possible that dental caries had returned to plague mankind again, after all these centuries?

  What a brutal testament to the achievements of the Qax Occupation forces, Berg reflected bitterly. Shira was like a creature from Berg's past, not her future. And now that Berg was deprived of the medical facilities of the Cauchy — not to mention AS technology — no doubt soon she, too, would become afflicted by the ills that had once been banished. My God, she thought, I will start to age again.

  She sighed. She was close to her own time, after all; maybe — unlikely as it seemed — she could get back home. If Poole made it through...

  "Shira," she said heavily. "I didn't want to make you unhappy. I hate myself for making you unhappy. All right? But when I learned that you had no intention of communicating with the humans of this era — of my era — of telling them about the Qax... then of course I had to oppose you."

  Shira was unperturbed; she swiveled her small, pretty face to the wreck of the boat. "You understand we had to destroy your craft."

  "No, I don't understand that you had to do that. But it's what I expected you to do. I don't care. I achieved my purpose; I got my message off despite all of you." She smiled. "I'm kind of pleased with myself for improvising a radio. I was never a hands-on technician, you know—"

  "You were a physicist," Shira broke in. "It's in the history books."

  Berg shivered, feeling out of time. "I am a physicist," she said. She got stiffly to her feet and wiped blades of grass from her backside. "Can we walk?" she asked. "This place is depressing me."

  Berg, casting about for a direction, decided to set off for the lip of the earth-craft; Shira calmly fell into step beside her, bare feet sinking softly into the grass.

  Soon they were leaving behind whatever gave this disk of soil its gravity; the ground seemed to tilt up before them, so that it was as if they were climbing out of a shallow bowl, and the air started to feel thin. About thirty feet short of the edge they were forced to stop; the air was almost painfully shallow in Berg's lungs, and even felt a little colder.

  At the edge of the world tufts of grass dangled over emptiness, stained purple by the light of Jupiter.

  "I think we have a basic problem of perception here, Shira," Berg said, panting lightly. "You ask why I betrayed your trust. I don't understand how the hell a question like that has got any sort of relevance. Given the situation, what did you expect me to do?"

  The girl was silent.

  "Look at it from my point of view," Berg went on. "Fifteen hundred years after my departure in the Cauchy I was approaching the Solar System again..."

  As the years of the journey had worn away the fifty aboard Cauchy had grown somberly aware that the worlds they had left behind were aging far more rapidly than they were; the crew were separated from their homes by growing intervals of space and time.

  They were becoming stranded in the future.

  ...But they carried the wormhole portal. And, they knew, through the wormhole only a few hours flight separated them from the era of their birth. It was a comfort to imagine the worlds they had left behind on the far side of the spacetime bridge, still attached to the Cauchy as if by some umbilical of stretched spacetime, and living their lives through at the same rate as the Cauchy crew, patiently waiting for the starship to complete its circuit to the future.

  At last, after a subjective century, the Cauchy would return to Jovian orbit. Fifteen centuries would have worn away on Earth. But still their wormhole portal would connect them to the past, to friends and worlds grown no older than they had.

  "I don't know what I was expecting exactly as we neared Sol." Berg said. "We'd run hundreds of scenarios, both before and during the journey, but we knew it was all guesswork; I guess inside I was anticipating anything from radioactive wastelands, to stone axes, to gods in FTL chariots.

  "But what I'd never anticipated was what we found. Earth under the thumb of super-aliens nobody has even seen... and look what came hurtling out to meet us, even before we'd got through the orbit of Pluto." She shook her head at the memory. "A patch of Earth, untimely ripped from England and hurled into space; a few dozen skinny humans clinging to it desperately."

  She remembered venturing from the steel security of the Cauchy into Jovian space, an envoy in her solo lifeboat, and tentatively approaching the earth-craft; she had scarcely been able to believe her eyes as the ship had neared a patch of countryside that looked as if it had been cut out of a tourist catalogue of Earth and stuck crudely onto the velvet backdrop of space. Then she had cracked the port of the boat on landing, and had stepped out onto grass that rustled beneath the tough soles of her boots...

  For a brief, glorious few minutes the Friends had clustered around her in wonder.

  Then Shira had come to her — related fifteen centuries of disastrous human history in as many minutes — and explained the Friends' intentions.

  Within a couple of hours of landing Berg had been forced to crouch to the grass with the rest as the earth-craft plummeted into the gravity tube that was the wormhole. Berg shuddered now as she remembered the howling radiation that had stormed around the fragile craft, the ghastly, mysterious dislocation as she had traveled through time.

  She hadn't been allowed to get a message off to the crew of the Cauchy. Perhaps her Cauchy shipmates were already dead at the hands of the Qax — if that word "already" had any meaning, with spacetime bent over on itself by the wormhole.

  "It has been
an eventful few days," she said wryly. "As a welcome home this has been fairly outrageous."

  Shira was smiling, and Berg tried to focus. "I'm glad you say that: outrageous," Shira said. "It was the very outrageousness of the idea that permitted us to succeed under the eyes of the Qax, as we planned. Come, let us talk; we have time now."

  They turned and began to stroll slowly back "down" the rim hill and toward the interior of the craft. As they walked Berg had the uncomfortable feeling that she was descending into and climbing out of invisible dimples in the landscape, each a few feet wide and perhaps inches shallow. But the land itself was as flat as a tabletop to the eye. She was experiencing unevenness in the field that held her to this quarter-mile disk of soil and rock; whatever they used to generate their gravity around here clearly wasn't without its glitches.

  Shira said, "You must understand the situation. We knew, from surviving records of your time, that your return to the Earth with the Interface portal was imminent. If you had succeeded a gateway to the free past might become available to us. We conceived the Project—"

  Berg looked at her sharply. "What Project?"

  Shira ignored the question. "The Qax authorities were evidently unaware of your approach, but clearly, once they detected your vessel and its unique cargo, you would be destroyed. We had to find a way to meet you before that happened.

  "So, Miriam. We had to build a space vessel, and in the full and knowing gaze of the Qax."

  "Yeah. You know, Shira, we're going to have to sort out which tense to use here. Maybe we need to invent a whole new grammar — future past, uncertain present..."

  Shira laughed without self-consciousness, and Berg felt a little more human warmth for her.

  They walked through a grove of light globes. The globes, hovering in the air perhaps ten feet from the soil, gave out sunlike heat and warmth, and Berg paused for a few moments, feeling on her face and in her newly aging bones the warmth of a star she had abandoned a subjective century before. In the yellow-white light of the globe the flesh-pink glow of Jupiter was banished, and the grass looked normal, wiry and green; Berg ran a slippered toe through it. "So you camouflaged your ship."

  "The Qax do not interfere with areas they perceive as human cultural shrines."

  "Hurrah for the Qax," said Berg sourly. "Perhaps they're not such bad fellows after all."

  Shira raised the ridges from which her eyebrows had been shaved. "We believe that this is not altruism but calculation on the part of the Qax. In any event the policy is there — and it is a policy that may be manipulated to our gain."

  Berg smiled, her mind full of a sudden, absurd image of rebels in grimy jumpsuits burrowing like moles under cathedrals, Pyramids, the concrete tombs of ancient fission reactors. "So you built your ship under the stones."

  "Yes. More precisely, we readied an area of land for the flight."

  "Where did you get the resources for this?"

  "The Friends of Wigner have adherents System-wide," Shira said. "Remember that by the time of the first encounter with the Qax, humans had become a starfaring species, able to command the resources of multiple systems. The Qax control us — almost completely. But in the small gap left by that 'almost' there is room for great undertakings... projects to match, perhaps, the greatest works of your own time."

  "I wouldn't bet on that," Berg said with grim confidence.

  They walked on, toward the heart of the craft. "So," said Berg, "you got your ship ready. How did you get it off the planet and into space?"

  "A stolen Squeem hyperdrive device," said Shira. "It cast a lenticular field around the craft, initially isolating it — and a surrounding layer of air — from the planet. Then the drive was used to hurl the craft into space, to bring it to the vicinity of your Cauchy. Then — after rendezvous with your ship — the drive was used to carry the craft through the Interface."

  "The Squeem. That's the race humans came up against earlier, right? Before the Qax."

  "And who, in their defeat, afforded us much of the basic technology we needed to get out of the Solar System."

  "How will we defeat them?"

  Shira grinned. "Read your history books."

  "So," Berg said, "is the Squeem drive operating now?"

  "Minimally. It serves as a radiation screen."

  "And to keep the air stuck to the ship, right?"

  "No, the craft's gravity does that."

  Berg nodded; maybe here was a chance to get a little more meaningful information. "Artificial gravity? Things have come a long way since my day."

  But Shira only frowned.

  They approached the dwellings and workplaces of the Friends. The buildings, simple cubes and cones built on a human scale, were scattered around the heart of this landscape ship like toys, surrounding the old stones at the center of the disk. The building material was uniformly dove-gray and — when Berg ran her fingertips over the wall of a teepee as she passed — smooth to the limit of sensation. But it was human-warm, without the cold of metal. This was "Xeelee construction material," one of the many technological miracles that had apparently seeped down to mankind — and their foes, like the Squeem and the Qax — from the mysterious Xeelee, lords of creation.

  Friends moved among the buildings, patiently going about their business. One small group had collected around one of the data capture devices they called "slates," and were arguing over what looked like a schematic of the earth-craft.

  They nodded to Shira, and to Berg with glances of curiosity.

  Berg had counted about thirty Friends of Wigner aboard the craft, roughly split between male and female. They appeared to be aged between twenty-five and thirty, and all seemed fit and intelligent. Obviously this crew had been selected by the wider Friends organization for their fitness for the mission. All followed the shaved-skull fashion of Shira — some, Berg had noticed with bemusement, had even removed their eyelashes. But they were surprisingly easy to distinguish from each other; the shape of the human skull was, she was learning, as varied — and could be as appealing to the eye — as the features of the face.

  "You've done well to get so far," Berg said.

  "More than well," said Shira coolly. "Our craft has successfully traversed the portal, without significant damage or injury. Our supplies — and our recycling gear — should suffice to sustain us in this orbit around Jupiter for many years. Long enough for our purposes." She smiled. "Yes, we have done well."

  "Yeah." Berg sourly studied the busy knots of Friends. "You know, it might help me a lot to understand you if you told me what the hell your Project is all about."

  Shira studied her sadly. "That would not be appropriate."

  Berg took a stance before her, hands on hips, and set her face into what she knew would be a commanding scowl. "Don't hide behind platitudes, Shira. Damn it all to hell, it was my ship — my Interface — that you used to get as far as you have. And it's the lives of my crew, lost on the wrong side of the wormhole, that have paid for the success you so complacently report. So you owe me a bit more than that patronizing crap."

  Shira's pretty, paper-fine face creased with what looked like real concern. "I'm sorry, Miriam. I'm not meaning to patronize you. But I — we — genuinely believe that it wouldn't be right to tell you."

  "Why? At least tell me that much."

  "I can't. If you understood the Project, then you would also see why you can't be told any more."

  Berg laughed in her face. "Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to satisfy me?"

  "No," Shira said, grinning almost cheekily, and again, for a moment, Berg felt a tug of genuine empathy with this strange, secret person from the other side of time. "But it really is all I can give you."

  Berg scraped her fingers across her wiry stubble of hair. "What is it you're afraid of? Do you think that it's possible I'll oppose you — try to obstruct the Project?"

  Shira nodded seriously. "If you gained only partial understanding, then that is possible. Yes."

  Berg frow
ned. "I don't think you're talking about understanding — but about faith. Even if I knew what you were up to, I might oppose it if I didn't share the same irrational faith in its success. Is that it?"

  Shira did not reply to that; her gaze was clear and untroubled.

  "Shira, maybe you genuinely need my help," Berg said. "I'd rather not rely on faith that my ship is going to fly, if I've a chance of getting into the drive and making sure it does."

  "It's not as simple as that, Miriam," Shira said. She smiled disarmingly. "And I wish you'd stop pumping me."

  Berg touched the girl's elbow. "Shira, we're on the same side," she said urgently. "Don't you see that?" She gestured vaguely in the direction of the inner Solar System. "You've got the resources of five planets — of Earth itself — to call on. Once people understand what you're trying to avert — the nightmare of the Qax Occupation — you would be given all the help the worlds could muster. You'd have the strength of billions."

  "It wouldn't work, Miriam," Shira said. "Remember, we have developed fifteen centuries beyond you. There is little your people could do to help."

  Berg stiffened, drawing away from the girl. "We could pack a hell of a punch, Shira. What if the Qax follow us back in time, through the portal? Won't you need help to stave them off?"

  "We can defend ourselves," Shira said calmly.

  That sent a shiver through Berg, but she pressed on: "Then imagine a hundred violently armed GUT ships crashing through that portal, and into the future. They could do a hell of a lot of damage—"

  Shira shook her head. "A single Spline warship could scythe them down in a moment."

  "Then let's use the advantage of the centuries we've gained." Berg slammed her fist into her palm. "There's not a Qax alive at this moment who even knows humans exist. We could go and roast them in their nest. If you gave us the secret of the Squeem hyperdrive, we could build a faster-than-light armada and—"

  Shira laughed delicately. "You're so melodramatic, Miriam. So violent!" She made a wide cage of her hands. "At this moment, the Qax already operate an interstellar trading empire spanning hundreds of star systems. The thought of an ill-equipped rabble of humans from fifteen centuries before my time having any hope of overcoming that might is risible, frankly. And besides — we are not hyperdrive engineers. We could not 'pass on the secrets' of the Squeem drive, as you put it."