Timelike Infinity

by Stephen Baxter

  "Ah." Jasoft smiled. "And when they do come, they will find a message. A message left for them by the Friends."

  Harry laughed. "This conversation gets more and more bizarre. What will this message say? How do you strike up a conversation with godlike cosmic designers ten to power forty years in the future? 'Hello. We were here, and had a hell of a lot of trouble. What about you?' "

  Michael smiled. "Oh, you might be a bit more imaginative than that. What if you stored the human genome in there, for instance? The future consciousnesses could reconstruct the best of the race from that. And with a bit of tinkering you could store the 'message' in the consciousness of the reconstructed humans. Imagine that, Harry; imagine emerging from some fake womb, with your head full of memories of this brief, glorious youth of the universe — and into a cosmos in which the formation, life and death of even the last, shriveled star is a memory, logarithmically distant..."

  Shira smiled now. "There is no limit, given the technology," she said. "One could imagine converting an Earth-mass to data, lodging it within the event horizon. One would have available ten to power sixty-four bits — equivalent to the transcription of ten to power thirty-eight human personalities. Michael, one might imagine storing every human who ever lived, beyond the reach of the Qax and other predators."

  "But how would you store the data? We know already that a black hole is a vast source of entropy; if an object of whatever complexity implodes into a hole, all bits of data about it are lost to the outside universe save its charge, mass, and spin—"

  "Singularities themselves are complex objects," Shira said. "Unimaginably so. Our understanding of them has advanced enormously since your time. It may be possible to store data in the structure of the spacetime flaw itself—"

  "But," Parz said, his round, weak face broken by a sly smile, "with respect, my dear, you still haven't told us precisely what your message to these superbeings of the future would be. Even if you succeeded in transmitting it."

  Michael settled back in his couch. "Why, that much is obvious," he said.

  Shira watched him, utterly erect and tense. "Is it?"

  "You're trying to get a message to the Ultimate Observer." He heard Parz call out wordlessly, but he pressed on. "You want to influence the way the Observer selects the optimal lifeline of the cosmos; you want to ensure that data about humanity reaches the post-Qax future, and that the Observer selects world lines in favor of humanity." Michael smiled. "I'm right, aren't I? I have to admire your capacity for thinking big, Shira."

  Shira nodded, stiffly. "Our goal is a valid one, from a racial point of view."

  He inclined his head in return. "Oh, certainly. None more valid. And once the final Observation takes place, the events we have endured will not have taken place, and the means you have employed are justified... because if the end is met, the means won't even have occurred."

  "It's utterly outrageous," Parz said, green eyes sparkling. "But wonderful! I love it."

  Shira, sitting silently in the uneven thrust of the damaged Spline, waited, her eyes still locked disconcertingly on Michael's.

  "Well, at least we know what's going on now," Harry said brightly. "But now comes the difficult bit. Do we help them... or try to stop them?"

  * * *

  The basket of blue light at the zenith had grown to the size of a fist.

  Shira shrugged, almost casually. "I have no more influence to exert on you. I can only rely on your wisdom."

  "Right." Michael pursed his lips. "But you weren't so keen on trusting to that wisdom earlier, were you?"

  "We did not believe you would understand," she said simply. "We calculated it was more likely to yield success if we proceeded alone."

  "Yes," said Parz coldly. "Perhaps you were wise to attempt such a course, my dear. I have learned that these people, from fifteen centuries before our shared era, are behind us in knowledge and some experiences, but are our peers — more than our peers — in wisdom. I suspect you knew what the reaction of these people would be to your schemes; you knew they would oppose you."

  Shira looked at Michael uncertainly.

  He said, somehow reluctant, unwilling to be cruel to this young, earnest girl, "He's talking about hubris, Shira. Arrogance."

  "We are attempting to avert the extinction of the species," Shira said, her voice fragile.

  "Maybe. Shira, to my dying day I will honor the courage, the ingenuity of the Friends. To have constructed the earth-craft under the very eyes of the Qax; to have hurled yourselves unhesitatingly into an unknown past... Yes, you have courage and vision. But — what right do you have to tinker with the history of the universe? What gives you the wisdom to do that, Shira? — regardless of the validity of your motives. Listen, you scared us all to death when we thought you were just trying to create a naked singularity. That would have set off an unpredictable explosion of acausality. But in fact you're trying to disrupt causality deliberately — and on the largest scale."

  "You dare not oppose us," Shira said. Her face was a mask of anger, of almost childish resentment.

  Michael closed his eyes. "I don't think I dare allow you to go ahead. Look, Shira, maybe the whole logic of your argument is flawed. For a start the philosophical basis for the whole thing — that particular resolution of the Wigner paradox — is speculative, just one among many."

  Parz nodded. "And where is the evidence of this onward advance of life that you've based your hopes on? The most advanced species we know are the Xeelee. But the Xeelee don't fit the description, give no evidence of sharing the goals you've advanced. They show no signs of having the gathering and recording of data as their key racial motive. Indeed, their goal seems to be very different — the construction of their Kerr-metric gateway to another universe — and they seem prepared to destroy data, in the form of structures on an intergalactic scale, to do it. So how will this cosmic eye, this Ultimate Observer of yours, ever come about, if even the Xeelee don't want to lead us toward its formation?"

  Her nostrils flared. "You're not going to help us. You're going to try to stop us. Michael Poole, you are—"

  Poole held his hands up. "Look, don't bother insulting me again. I'm sure I'm a fool, but I'm a fool who doesn't trust himself where a final solution to the history of the universe is concerned. I'd do anything to avert the imposition of such a 'solution,' I think."

  "Perhaps the Project won't, or can't, succeed," Shira said. "But it remains humanity's best and only hope of removing the Qax yoke."

  "No," he said. He smiled, an immense sadness sweeping over him; he felt irrationally ashamed at his systematic demolition of this young person. "That's the clinching argument, I'm afraid, Shira. The fact is, we don't need your Project." He nodded to Parz. "Jasoft has told us. Humans will get out from under the oppression of the Qax. It won't be easy — and it will cost the Qax almost everything — but it will be done, we know that now, and it will come from the simple, surprising actions of a single man. From the unpredictability of humanity." He studied her empty face, the surface of an incomplete personality, he realized now. "Ordinary humanity will beat the Qax in the end, Shira. But that's beyond your imagining, isn't it? We won't need your grandiose schemes to sabotage history to win freedom."

  "But—"

  "And the only way that destiny can be subverted, as far as I can see," Michael pressed on, "is if we leave that portal open; if we allow the Qax themselves more chances to change history — in their favor. I'm sorry I had anything to do with building the damn thing, unleashing all this trouble in the first place. Now, all I want to do is to put that right—"

  "You'll be killed," Shira said, as if clutching at straws of argument.

  He laughed. "Funnily enough, that doesn't seem to matter so much anymore... But I don't want to take you all with me, if I don't have to. Harry, give me an option to get them off before we hit."

  "Working," Harry said calmly. "Thirteen minutes to the portal, now."

  Parz seemed to squirm, uncomfortable, in his c
hair. "I'm not certain I deserve such a reprieve," he said.

  "Then think of it as an assignment," Michael said briskly. "I need you to get this girl off the ship. Do you think she's going to go voluntarily?"

  Parz briefly studied Shira, who still stood before Michael, clenching and unclenching her small fists. "Perhaps not," he said sadly.

  "Twelve minutes," Harry said.

  Chapter 14

  FROM A SCARRED, BRUISED SOCKET in the elephant-gray hide of the Spline, a three-yard-wide eyeball popped into space, trailing a length of thick optic nerve. Antibody drones, squabbling and scrambling over each other, swarmed over the translucent surface of the eyeball and along the length of the nerve trunk. Red laser light sparked from the mouths of a dozen of the drones, sawing at the trunk; at last the trunk parted, with fully a yard of its length disintegrating into laser-sliced fragments. The warship surged up toward the blue mouth of the Interface portal; drones, scrabbling to hang on, slid away from the abandoned eyeball and from the severed trunk, still spitting at each other with tiny, fierce bolts of laser light.

  As the Spline receded to a knot of bruised flesh Jasoft Parz turned and surveyed the interior of the eye chamber. His only companion, the Wigner girl Shira, floated somewhere near the eyeball's geometric center, her thin body curled into a loose fetal position, her eyes half-closed. Studying her, Parz felt suddenly vulnerable in this chamber, dressed as he was only in this ill-fitting, rather worn gown of Michael Poole's. The entoptic fluid had been drained, the eyeball hurriedly pumped full of air, to accommodate the two of them; and he had forgone his skinsuit, in order to share the dangers Shira would have to face.

  He shivered with a sudden chill of fear, of nakedness.

  He sought something to say.

  "You must not fear the future, my dear. Michael Poole has done his best to preserve us from the fate he has decreed for himself. We have air in this chamber sufficient for many hours, and Poole has given us heating elements, a packet of water and food. We should survive long enough to be picked up by the craft of this era. And I've every reason to believe you'll soon be reunited with your own people, on the earth-craft."

  Now she swiveled her head to face him; her watery-blue eyes seemed bruised, as if from the aftermath of weeping. "Cold comfort from a servant of the Qax, Jasoft Parz."

  He tried not to flinch. "I can't blame you for that," he said patiently. "But such labels are behind us now, Shira. We are here, you and I, in this ancient time frame; and here, after the destruction of the Interface, we will spend the rest of our lives. You must begin to accept that, and think forward—"

  "I accept I am trapped," she said. "I accept little else."

  "Trapped in the past? You shouldn't think of it like that. We have been brought to a new era — in many ways a better era, a golden age in man's history. Think of it, Shira; the humans of this era are looking outward, only beginning to explore the potentialities of the universe in which they are embedded, and of the resources of their own being. They have banished many of the ills — social as well as physiological, hunger, disease, untimely death — which, thanks to the Qax, our lost contemporaries endure. There are many projects here for you to—"

  "You don't understand," she snapped. "I do not mean trapped merely in the past. I mean trapped in the future. Thanks to the destruction of the Project by the insane arrogance of Michael Poole, I am trapped in this single, doomed timeline."

  "Ah. Your vision of globally optimized event chains—"

  "Don't speak to me of visions, collaborator." Her words were delivered in an even, matter-of-fact tone, and were the more stinging for that. "What visions have sustained you?"

  He felt the muscles of his cheeks twitch. "Look, Shira, I'm trying to help you. If you want to insult me, then that's fine. But sooner or later you're going to have to accept the fact that, like me, you're trapped here. In the past."

  She turned her head away again, quite gracefully, and bowed it toward her knees; her body rocked a little in the air. "No," she said.

  He began to feel irritated. "What do you mean, 'no'? Once the damn Interface is closed down you'll have no way back to the future."

  Now, unexpectedly, she smiled. "No shortcut. No, I accept that. But there is another way back. The longer way."

  He frowned.

  She went on, "I mean to accept AntiSenescence treatment here. If I'm offered it, or can buy it. And then—"

  "—and then it's a simple matter of living through fifteen centuries — fifty generations — and waiting for the reemergence of singularity technology. So you can start all over again. Is that what you mean?"

  Her smile lingered.

  "How can you think in such terms?" he demanded. "You got to know Michael Poole; after two centuries of life his head was so full of detritus, of layers of experience, that at times he could barely function. You saw that, didn't you? Why did you think he spent decades, literally, alone in that GUT ship in the cometary halo? And you're talking, almost casually, about lasting more than seven times as long. How can any purpose endure through such an immense time scale? It's — beyond the human..."

  The girl did not reply, but her smile lingered on, inwardly directed; and Parz, despite his superiority in years to this girl, felt as if he had become something weak and transient, a mayfly, beside the immense, burning purpose of Shira.

  * * *

  Harry crystallized into the empty couch beside Michael. The image was weak and wavering, the pixels crowding and of uneven size — evidently Harry didn't have available the processing power he'd used earlier — but there was at least an illusion of solidity, of another presence in the lifedome, and Michael felt grateful enough for that.

  Michael lay back in his couch, trying to achieve a state of inner, and outer, relaxation, but he was betrayed by knots of tension in his forehead, his neck, his upper back. He watched the Interface portal blossom open above his head. It spanned most of the dome now. The Spline warship, with the Crab embedded within, was moving along a trajectory that passed the cheek of Jupiter tangentially; and from Michael's point of view the portal now hung against a backdrop of velvet space, of distant, inhabited stars. The portal's clean blue-violet geometry — and the burnished-gold effect of the glimmering faces of the tetrahedron, the shadowy reflections of other times and places — were really quite beautiful.

  Harry said, his voice a scratch. "I suppose you do know what you're doing."

  Michael couldn't help but laugh. "It's a bit late to ask that now."

  Harry cleared his throat. "I mean, this whole caper has been improvised. I just wondered if you had any clearer ideas about your precise intentions than when, say, you were ramming a lump of comet ice down the throat of a Spline warship from the future."

  "Well, it worked, didn't it?"

  "Yeah, through sheer luck. Only because the Spline was bemused by causality stress, and poor old Jasoft started setting fire to the Spline's nervous system."

  Michael smiled. "It wasn't luck. Not really. What beat the Qax in the end was their own damned complacency. Jasoft was a loophole, a weakness, which they brought back through time with them. If it hadn't been for Jasoft Parz they would have left some other hole, another Achilles heel for us to exploit. They were so certain they could scrape us out of the Solar System without any trouble, so certain there was nothing we could do to resist them—"

  "All right, all right." Harry threw up his ghostly hands. Come on, Michael. How are we going to destroy the wormhole?"

  "I don't know for sure."

  "Oh, terrific." Harry's face turned fuzzy for a moment and Michael imagined more processing power being diverted from the image. Now the image downgraded further, until the illusion of a solid presence in the chair beside Michael was almost lost.

  "Harry, is there some problem? I thought we were on routine running until we hit the Interface."

  Harry's voice came to him through a sea of phasing and static. "It's those drones," he said. "They're just too damn smart."


  "I thought you had them under control. You organized them to cast off the eye chamber with Shira and Parz, cut the nerve trunk—"

  "Yeah, but I'm not experienced at handling them. Remember they're not simple remotes; they have a lot of processing power of their own. It's like — I don't know — like trying to get work done by a few thousand strong-willed ten-year-olds. Michael, one bunch of them has gone ape. They've formed into a raiding party; they're working through the carcass in search of the high-density power sources. They're being resisted because the damage they're doing is going to be detrimental to the functioning of the Spline in the long run. But the resistance isn't organized yet... and any drone that opposes them is chewed up by those damn little laser jaws of theirs."

  Michael laughed. "What's going to be the outcome?"

  "I don't know... The raiders are heading for the Heart of the Spline, now. And I mean the Heart, literally; a city block of power cells and muscle stumps centered around the hyperdrive unit. The area of greatest energy density. If the raiders get through there'll be hell to pay; the rest of the ship's systems will be too drained of power to be able to do anything about it, and ultimately they'll decommission the hyperdrive... But it might not get that far. Other drones are forming up to oppose them. It looks as if there's going to be a pitched battle, soon, somewhere in the region of the Heart. But at the moment my money is on the rogue, rebel drones; the defenders just haven't got the leadership—"

  Michael cut in, "Oh, for God's sake, Harry, will you shut up about the drones? Who cares about the damn drones, at a time like this?"

  Harry frowned, blurred. "Look, Michael, this isn't a joke. These rebels could disable the hyperdrive out from under us. And you want to use the hyperdrive in your scheme to wreck the Interface, don't you?"