“Why do you ask?”
“You’re a rational man. You can’t believe in religious rituals.”
“No,” he told her, “I don’t believe. I know they are just rituals.”
“Why do it, then?”
He knew why, but he did not know how to give her that sermon. He did it because it was a gift. It was a liberating gift for him, because it was given with no thought of any profit or return. A deliberate gift with no possibility of return.
Those gifts were the stuff of history and futurity. Because gifts of that kind were also the gifts that the living received from the dead.
The gifts we received from the dead: those were the world’s only genuine gifts. All the other things in the world were commodities. The dead were, by definition, those who gave to us without reward. And, especially: our dead gave to us, the living, within a dead context. Their gifts to us were not just abjectly generous, but archaic and profoundly confusing.
Whenever we disciplined ourselves, and sacrificed ourselves, in some vague hope of benefiting posterity, in some ambition to create a better future beyond our own moment in time, then we were doing something beyond a rational analysis. Those in that future could never see us with our own eyes: they would only see us with the eyes that we ourselves gave to them. Never with our own eyes: always with their own. And the future’s eyes always saw the truths of the past as blinkered, backward, halting. Superstition.
“Why?” she said.
Borislav knocked the snow from his elegant shoes. “I have a big heart.”
Last Contact
STEPHEN BAXTER
Like many of his colleagues here at the beginning of a new century, British writer Stephen Baxter has been engaged for more than a decade now with the task of revitalizing and reinventing the “hard-science” story for a new generation of readers, producing work on the cutting edge of science that bristles with weird new ideas and often takes place against vistas of almost outrageously cosmic scope.
Baxter made his first sale to Interzone in 1987 and since then has become one of that magazine’s most frequent contributors, as well as making sales to Asimov’s Science Fiction, Science Fiction Age, Analog, Zenith, New Worlds, and elsewhere. He’s one of the most prolific new writers in science fiction and is rapidly becoming one of the most popular and acclaimed of them as well. In 2001, he appeared on the Final Hugo Ballot twice and won both Asimov’s Readers’ Award and Analog’s Analytical Laboratory Award, one of the few writers ever to win both awards in the same year. Baxter’s first novel, Raft, was released in 1991 to wide and enthusiastic response and was rapidly followed by other well-received novels such as Timelike Infinity, Anti-ice, Flux, and the H. G. Wells pastiche—a sequel to The Time Machine—The Time Ships, which won both the John W. Campbell Memorial Award and the Philip K. Dick Award. His other books include the novels Voyage, Titan, Moonseed, Mammoth, book 1: Silverhair, Manifold: Time, Manifold: Space, Evolution, Coalescent, Exultant, Transcendent, Emperor, Resplendent, Conqueror, Navigator, and The H-bomb Girl and in collaboration with Arthur C. Clarke: The Light of Other Days and Time’s Eye, a Time Odyssey, Sunstorm, and Firstborn. Baxter’s short fiction has been collected in Vacuum Diagrams: Stories of the Xeelee Sequence, Traces, and The Hunters of Pangaea, and he has released a chapbook novella, Mayflower II. Coming up are several new novels, including Weaver, Flood, and Ark.
Here he bids an autumnal farewell to everything, in a world counting slowly and relentlessly back to zero.
MARCH 15
Caitlin walked into the garden through the little gate from the drive. Maureen was working on the lawn.
Just at that moment Maureen’s mobile phone pinged. She took off her gardening gloves, dug the phone out of the deep pocket of her old quilted coat, and looked at the screen. “Another contact,” she called to her daughter.
Caitlin looked cold in her thin jacket; she wrapped her arms around her body. “Another super-civilisation discovered, off in space. We live in strange times, Mum.”
“That’s the fifteenth this year. And I did my bit to help discover it. Good for me,” Maureen said, smiling. “Hello, love.” She leaned forward for a kiss on the cheek.
She knew why Caitlin was here, of course. Caitlin had always hinted she would come and deliver the news about the Big Rip in person, one way or the other. Maureen guessed what that news was from her daughter’s hollow, stressed eyes. But Caitlin was looking around the garden, and Maureen decided to let her tell it all in her own time.
She asked, “How’s the kids?”
“Fine. At school. Bill’s at home, baking bread.” Caitlin smiled. “Why do stay-at-home fathers always bake bread? But he’s starting at Webster’s next month.”
“That’s the engineers in Oxford.”
“That’s right. Not that it makes much difference now. We won’t run out of money before, well, before it doesn’t matter.” Caitlin considered the garden. It was just a scrap of lawn, really, with a quite nicely stocked border, behind a cottage that was a little more than a hundred years old, in this village on the outskirts of Oxford. “It’s the first time I’ve seen this properly.”
“Well, it’s the first bright day we’ve had. My first spring here.” They walked around the lawn. “It’s not bad. It’s been let to run to seed a bit by Mrs. Murdoch. Who was another lonely old widow,” Maureen said.
“You mustn’t think like that.”
“Well, it’s true. This little house is fine for someone on their own, like me, or her. I suppose I’d pass it on to somebody else in the same boat, when I’m done.”
Caitlin was silent at that, silent at the mention of the future.
Maureen showed her patches where the lawn had dried out last summer and would need reseeding. And there was a little brass plaque fixed to the wall of the house to show the level reached by the Thames floods of two years ago. “The lawn is all right. I do like this time of year when you sort of wake it up from the winter. The grass needs raking and scarifying, of course. I’ll reseed bits of it, and see how it grows during the summer. I might think about getting some of it relaid. Now the weather’s so different the drainage might not be right anymore.”
“You’re enjoying getting back in the saddle, aren’t you, Mum?”
Maureen shrugged. “Well, the last couple of years weren’t much fun. Nursing your dad, and then getting rid of the house. It’s nice to get this old thing back on again.” She raised her arms and looked down at her quilted gardening coat.
Caitlin wrinkled her nose. “I always hated that stupid old coat. You really should get yourself something better, Mum. These modern fabrics are very good.”
“This will see me out,” Maureen said firmly.
They walked around the verge, looking at the plants, the weeds, the autumn leaves that hadn’t been swept up and were now rotting in place.
Caitlin said, “I’m going to be on the radio later. BBC Radio 4. There’s to be a government statement on the Rip, and I’ll be in the follow-up discussion. It starts at nine, and I should be on about nine thirty.”
“I’ll listen to it. Do you want me to tape it for you?”
“No. Bill will get it. Besides, you can listen to all these things on the Web sites these days.”
Maureen said carefully, “I take it the news is what you expected, then.”
“Pretty much. The Hawaii observatories confirmed it. I’ve seen the new Hubble images, deep sky fields. Empty, save for the foreground objects. All the galaxies beyond the local group have gone. Eerie, really, seeing your predictions come true like that. That’s couch grass, isn’t it?”
“Yes. I stuck a fork in it. Nothing but root mass underneath. It will be a devil to get up. I’ll have a go, and then put down some bin liners for a few weeks, and see if that kills it off. Then there are these roses that should have been pruned by now. I think I’ll plant some gladioli in this corner—”
“Mum, it’s October.” Caitlin blurted that out. She looked thin, pale and tense, a rea
l office worker, but then Maureen had always thought that about her daughter, that she worked too hard. Now she was thirty-five, and her moderately pretty face was lined at the eyes and around her mouth, the first wistful signs of age. “October 14, at about four in the afternoon. I say ‘about.’ I could give you the time down to the attosecond if you wanted.”
Maureen took her hands. “It’s all right, love. It’s about when you thought it would be, isn’t it?”
“Not that it does us any good, knowing. There’s nothing we can do about it.”
They walked on. They came to a corner on the south side of the little garden. “This ought to catch the sun,” Maureen said. “I’m thinking of putting in a seat here. A pergola maybe. Somewhere to sit. I’ll see how the sun goes around later in the year.”
“Dad would have liked a pergola,” Caitlin said. “He always did say a garden was a place to sit in, not to work.”
“Yes. It does feel odd that your father died, so soon before all this. I’d have liked him to see it out. It seems a waste somehow.”
Caitlin looked up at the sky. “Funny thing, Mum. It’s all quite invisible to the naked eye, still. You can see the Andromeda Galaxy, just, but that’s bound to the Milky Way by gravity. So the expansion hasn’t reached down to the scale of the visible, not yet. It’s still all instruments, telescopes. But it’s real all right.”
“I suppose you’ll have to explain it all on Radio 4.”
“That’s why I’m there. We’ll probably have to keep saying it over and over, trying to find ways of saying it that people can understand. You know, don’t you, Mum? It’s all to do with dark energy. It’s like an antigravity field that permeates the universe. Just as gravity pulls everything together, the dark energy is pulling the universe apart, taking more and more of it so far away that its light can’t reach us anymore. It started at the level of the largest structures in the universe, superclusters of galaxies. But in the end it will fold down to the smallest scales. Every bound structure will be pulled apart. Even atoms, even subatomic particles. The Big Rip.
“We’ve known about this stuff for years. What we didn’t expect was that the expansion would accelerate as it has. We thought we had trillions of years. Then the forecast was billions. And now—”
“Yes.”
“It’s funny for me being involved in this stuff, Mum. Being on the radio. I’ve never been a people person. I became an astrophysicist, for God’s sake. I always thought that what I studied would have absolutely no effect on anybody’s life. How wrong I was. Actually there’s been a lot of debate about whether to announce it or not.”
“I think people will behave pretty well,” Maureen said. “They usually do. It might get trickier towards the end, I suppose. But people have a right to know, don’t you think?”
“They’re putting it on after nine so people can decide what to tell their kids.”
“After the watershed! Well, that’s considerate. Will you tell your two?”
“I think we’ll have to. Everybody at school will know. They’ll probably get bullied about it if they don’t know. Imagine that. Besides, the little beggars will probably have Googled it on their mobiles by one minute past nine.”
Maureen laughed. “There is that.”
“It will be like when I told them Dad had died,” Caitlin said. “Or like when Billy started asking hard questions about Santa Claus.”
“No more Christmases,” Maureen said suddenly. “If it’s all over in October.”
“No more birthdays for my two either,” Caitlin said.
“November and January.”
“Yes. It’s funny, in the lab, when the date came up, that was the first thing I thought of.”
Maureen’s phone pinged again. “Another signal. Quite different in nature from the last, according to this.”
“I wonder if we’ll get any of those signals decoded in time.”
Maureen waggled her phone. “It won’t be for want of trying, me and a billion other search-for-ET-at-home enthusiasts. Would you like some tea, love?”
“It’s all right. I’ll let you get on. I told Bill I’d get the shopping in, before I have to go back to the studios in Oxford this evening.”
They walked towards the back door into the house, strolling, inspecting the plants and the scrappy lawn.
JUNE 5
It was about lunchtime when Caitlin arrived from the garden centre with the pieces of the pergola. Maureen helped her unload them from the back of a white van and carry them through the gate from the drive. They were mostly just prefabricated wooden panels and beams that they could manage between the two of them, though the big iron spikes that would be driven into the ground to support the uprights were heavier. They got the pieces stacked up on the lawn.
“I should be able to set it up myself,” Maureen said. “Joe next door said he’d lay the concrete base for me, and help me lift on the roof section. There’s some nailing to be done, and creosoting, but I can do all that.”
“Joe, eh.” Caitlin grinned.
“Oh, shut up; he’s just a neighbour. Where did you get the van? Did you have to hire it?”
“No, the garden centre loaned it to me. They can’t deliver. They are still getting stock in, but they can’t rely on the staff. They just quit, without any notice. In the end it sort of gets to you, I suppose.”
“Well, you can’t blame people for wanting to be at home.”
“No. Actually Bill’s packed it in. I meant to tell you. He didn’t even finish his induction at Webster’s. But the project he was working on would never have got finished anyway.”
“I’m sure the kids are glad to have him home.”
“Well, they’re finishing the school year. At least I think they will; the teachers still seem keen to carry on.”
“It’s probably best for them.”
“Yes. We can always decide what to do after the summer, if the schools open again.”
Maureen had prepared some sandwiches, and some iced elderflower cordial. They sat in the shade of the house and ate their lunch and looked out over the garden.
Caitlin said, “Your lawn’s looking good.”
“It’s come up quite well. I’m still thinking of relaying that patch over there.”
“And you put in a lot of vegetables in the end,” Caitlin said.
“I thought I should. I’ve planted courgettes and French beans and carrots, and a few outdoor tomatoes. I could do with a greenhouse, but I haven’t really room for one. It seemed a good idea, rather than flowers, this year.”
“Yes. You can’t rely on the shops.”
Things had kept working, mostly, as people stuck to their jobs. But there were always gaps on the supermarket shelves, as supply chains broke down. There was talk of rationing some essentials, and there were already coupons for petrol.
“I don’t approve of how tatty the streets are getting in town,” Maureen said sternly.
Caitlin sighed. “I suppose you can’t blame people for packing in a job like street sweeping. It is a bit tricky getting around town, though. We need some work done on the roof; we’re missing a couple of tiles. It’s just as well we won’t have to get through another winter,” she said, a bit darkly. “But you can’t get a builder for love or money.”
“Well, you never could.”
They both laughed.
Maureen said, “I told you people would cope. People do just get on with things.”
“We haven’t got to the end game yet,” Caitlin said. “I went into London the other day. That isn’t too friendly, Mum. It’s not all like this, you know.”
Maureen’s phone pinged, and she checked the screen. “Four or five a day now,” she said. “New contacts, lighting up all over the sky.”
“But that’s down from the peak, isn’t it?”
“Oh, we had a dozen a day at one time. But now we’ve lost half the stars, haven’t we?”
“Well, that’s true, now the Rip has folded down into the Galaxy. I haven
’t really been following it, Mum. Nobody’s been able to decode any of the signals, have they?”
“But some of them aren’t the sort of signal you can decode anyhow. In one case somebody picked up an artificial element in the spectrum of a star. Something that was manufactured, and then just chucked in to burn up, like a flare.”
Caitlin considered. “That can’t say anything but ‘here we are,’ I suppose.”
“Maybe that’s enough.”
“Yes.”
It had really been Harry who had been interested in wild speculations about alien life and so forth. Joining the cell-phone network of home observers of ET, helping to analyse possible signals from the stars in a network of millions of others, had been Harry’s hobby, not Maureen’s. It was one of Harry’s things she had kept up after he had died, like his weather monitoring and his football pools. It would have felt odd just to have stopped it all.
But she did understand how remarkable it was that the sky had suddenly lit up with messages like a Christmas tree, after more than half a century of dogged, fruitless, frustrating listening. Harry would have loved to see it.
“Caitlin, I don’t really understand how all these signals can be arriving just now. I mean, it takes years for light to travel between the stars, doesn’t it? We only knew about the phantom energy a few months ago.”
“But others might have detected it long before, with better technology than we’ve got. That would give you time to send something. Maybe the signals have been timed to get here, just before the end, aimed just at us.”
“That’s a nice thought.”
“Some of us hoped that there would be an answer to the dark energy in all those messages.”
“What answer could there be?”
Caitlin shrugged. “If we can’t decode the messages we’ll never know. And I suppose if there was anything to be done, it would have been done by now.”
“I don’t think the messages need decoding,” Maureen said.
Caitlin looked at her curiously but didn’t pursue it. “Listen, Mum. Some of us are going to try to do something. You understand that the Rip works down the scales, that larger structures break up first. The Galaxy, then the solar system, then planets like Earth. And then the human body.”
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