Timelike Infinity xs-2

by Stephen Baxter

  "And you, Miriam? You’ve been a century away yourself; this must be almost as great a dislocation for you as it is for me. What will you do?"

  She shrugged, rubbing her hair. "Maybe I’ll go with the Friends," she murmured. "Maybe I’ll take them to the stars and back, journey through fifteen centuries once more—"

  " — and see if Michael Poole emerges into the Qax Occupation future, dashing valiantly from the imploding wormhole?" He smiled.

  She looked up to the Jupiter-roofed zenith, trying to pick out the pieces of the shattered portal. "It might make me feel better," she said. "But, Jasoft, I know I’ve lost Michael. Wherever he is now I could never reach him."

  They sat for a moment, watching images of shattered exotic matter tumble through the discarded slates. At length he said, "Come. It is cold here, and the air is thin. Let us return to the Narlikar boat. I would like some more warmth. And food."

  She dropped her head from the sky. "Yeah. That’s a good idea, Jasoft."

  She stood, her legs stiff after so long curled beneath her. Almost tenderly Jasoft took her arm, and they walked together to the waiting boat.

  * * *

  Spacetime is friable.

  Wormholes riddle the fabric of spacetime on all scales. At the Planck length and below, wormholes arising from quantum uncertainty effects blur the clean Einsteinian lines of spacetime. And some of the wormholes expand to the human scale, and beyond — sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes at the instigation of intelligence.

  Spacetime is like a sheet of ice, permeated by flaws, by hairline cracks.

  When Michael Poole’s hyperdrive was activated inside the human-built wormhole Interface, it was as if someone had smashed at that ice floe with a mallet. Cracks exploded from the point of impact, widened; they joined each other in a complex, spreading network, a tributary pattern that continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.

  The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship bearing the lifedome of the Crab, Michael Poole, and a cloud of rebellious antibody drones emerged from the collapsing wormhole into the Qax Occupation era at close to the speed of light. Sheer energy from the tortured spacetime of the wormhole transformed into high-frequency radiation, into showers of shortlived, exotic particles that founted around the tumbling Spline.

  It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.

  Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light.

  There was already another macroscopic spacetime wormhole in the Jovian system: the channel set up to a future beyond the destruction of the Qax star, the channel through which Qax had traveled toward the past, intent on destroy ing humanity.

  Under the impact of Poole’s hammer-blow arrival — as Poole had expected — this second spacetime flaw could not retain its stability.

  The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exoticity ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass-energy of Michael Poole’s unlikely vessel. The icosahedral exotic-matter frame that threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at lightspeed; gravitational shock waves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like Xeelee starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons like insects in a gale.

  Through a transient network of wormholes that imploded after him in a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future.

  Chapter 16

  Chains of events threaded the future.

  A human called Jim Bolder flew a Xeelee nightfighter into the heart of the Qax home system, causing them to turn their starbreaker weapons on their own sun.

  The Qax Occupation of Earth collapsed. Humans would never again be defeated, on a significant scale, by any of the junior species.

  Humans spread across stars, their zone of influence expanding at many times lightspeed. A period known as the Assimilation followed; the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale.

  Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance.

  The conflict that followed lasted a million years.

  When it was resolved only a handful of humans, and human-derived beings, remained anywhere in the universe.

  The projects of the Xeelee, the inexorable workings of natural processes, continued to change the universe.

  Stars died. More stars formed, to replace those that had already failed… but as the primal mix of hydrogen and helium was polluted with stellar waste products the formation rate of new stars was declining exponentially.

  And darker forces were at work. The stars aged… too rapidly.

  The Xeelee completed their great projects, and fled the decaying cosmos.

  * * *

  Five million years after the first conflict between human and Qax, the wreckage of a Spline warship emerged, tumbling, from the mouth of a wormhole that blazed with gravitational radiation. The wormhole closed, sparkling.

  The wreck — dark, almost bereft of energy — turned slowly in the stillness. It was empty of life.

  Almost.

  Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violent rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.

  * * *

  Humans would call it the anti-Xeelee.

  It was… large. Its lofty emotions could be described in human terms only by analogy.

  Nevertheless -

  The anti-Xeelee looked on its completed works and was satisfied.

  Its awareness spread across light-years. Shining matter littered the universe; the Xeelee had come, built fine castles of that shining froth, and had now departed. Soon the shining stuff itself would begin to decay, and already the anti-Xeelee could detect the flexing muscles of the denizens of that dark ocean that lay below.

  The function of the anti-Xeelee had been to guide the huge projects of the Xeelee, the projects whose purpose had been to build a way out of this deadly cosmos. In order to achieve their goals the Xeelee had even moved back through time to modify their own evolution, turning their history into a closed timelike curve, a vacuum diagram. The anti-Xeelee was the consciousness of this process, traveling — like an antiparticle — back in time from the moment of its dissolution to the moment of its creation.

  Now the job was done. The anti-Xeelee felt something like contentment at the thought that its charges had escaped, were now beyond the reach of those… others, who the Xeelee had in the end been unable to oppose.

  The anti-Xeelee could let go.

  It spread wide and thin; soon, with a brief,. nonlocalized burst of selectrons and neutralinos its awareness would multiply, fragment, shatter, sink into the vacuum…

  But wait. There was something new.

  * * *

  It didn’t take Michael long to check out the status of his fragile craft.

  There was some power still available to the lifedome from its internal cells. That might last — what — a few hours? As far as he could tell there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the Hermit Crab, nor had the links set up by Harry to the Spline ship survived… save for one glowing telltale on the comms desks that Michael studiously ignored; the damn rebel drones could chew the ship up as far as he was concerned, now.

  So he had no motive power. Not so much as an in-system boat; no way of adjusting his situation.

  He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future. Such as it was. It was a miracle he’d even survived his passage through the wormhole network… This was all a bizarre bonus.

  Harry was gone, of course.

  The universe beyond the lifedome looked aged, dead, darkened. The lifedome was a little bubble of light and life, isolated.

  Michael was alone, here at the end of time. He could feel it.

  Michael gathered a meal together; the mundane chore, performed in a
bright island of light around the lifedome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights.

  God alone knew where he was… if "where" could have a meaning after such a dislocation in spacetime. The stars were distant, dark, red. Could so long have passed? — or, he wondered, could something, some unknown force, have acted to speed the stars’ aging in the aeons beyond the flashbulb slice of time occupied by humans?

  There was no large-scale sign of human life, or activity; nor, indeed, of any intelligent life.

  Intelligence had had time to work, Michael reflected. After millions of years, with a faster-than-light hyperdrive and singularity technology in the hands of hundreds of species, the universe should have been transformed…

  The reconstruction of the universe should have been as obvious as a neon sign a thousand light-years tall.

  …But the universe had merely aged.

  He knew from the subjective length of his passage through the wormholes that he couldn’t have traveled through more than a few million years — a fraction of the great journey to timelike infinity — and yet already the tide of life had receded. Were any humans left, anywhere?

  He smiled wistfully. So much for Shira’s grand dreams of life covering the universe, of manipulating the dynamical evolution of spacetime itself…

  There would be no "Ultimate Observer," then. The Project of the Friends of Wigner could not, after all, have succeeded: there would have been nobody to hear the elaborately constructed message. But, Michael thought as he gazed out at the decayed universe, by God it had been a grand conception. To think of finite humans, already long since dust, even daring to challenge these deserts of time -

  He finished his food, set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water, went to the freefall shower, washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences.

  He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.

  The lights failed. Even the comms telltale from the drones winked out.

  Well, so much for reading a book.

  By the dimmed starlight, half by touch, he made his way back to his couch.

  It grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out into the immense sink of the blackened, ancient sky. What would get him first — the cold, or the failing air?

  He wasn’t afraid. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in a subjective century, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.

  Perhaps he was finding that peace of death, the readiness to abandon the cares of a too long life, which his father had discovered before him.

  And he found, at last, a gladness that he had lived long enough to see all he had.

  He crossed his hands on his chest. He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He closed his eyes.

  * * *

  Something like curiosity, a spark in a shard of its awareness, stirred the anti-Xeelee.

  Here was an artifact.

  How had this cooling wreckage got here, to this place and time?

  There was something inside it. A single, dimming candle of consciousness -

  The anti-Xeelee reached out.

  * * *

  There was a ship, another ship, hanging over the lifedome.

  Michael, dying, stared in wonder.

  It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet-black. No lights showed in the small, podlike hull. Night-dark wings that must have spanned hundreds of miles loomed over the wreck of the Crab, softly rippling.

  The Wigner Friends had told Michael of ships like this. This was a nightfighter, the wings sheet-discontinuities in the fabric of spacetime.

  Xeelee.

  The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision.

  Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the Xeelee ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please -

  The anti-Xeelee plucked the guttering candle flame from its wick.

  The last heat fled from the wrecked craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the abandoned body.

  The anti-Xeelee cupped the flame, almost amused by its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive.

  The anti-Xeelee spun the flame out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.

  * * *

  Michael was — discorporeal; it was as if the jewel of consciousness that had lain behind his eyes had been plucked out of his body and flung into space.

  He did not even have heartbeats to count.

  But there was something here with him, he sensed: some — entity. It was like a great ceiling under which he hovered and buzzed, insectlike. He sensed a vast, satisfied weariness in its mood, the contentment of the traveler at the end of a long and difficult road. For a long time he stayed within the glow of its protection.

  Then it began to dissolve.

  Michael wanted to cry out, like a child after its huge parent. He was buffeted, battered. It was as if a glacier of memories and emotions was calving into a hundred icebergs about him; and now those icebergs in turn burst into shards that melted into the surface of a waiting sea…

  And he was left alone.

  * * *

  It was impossible to measure time, other than by the slow evolution of his own emotions.

  He endured despair. Why had he been brought to this point in spacetime, preserved in such a fashion, and then so casually abandoned?

  The despair turned to anger, and lasted a long time.

  * * *

  But the anger faded.

  He became curious.

  He began to experiment with his awareness.

  Physically he seemed to be composed of a tight knot of quantum wave functions; now, cautiously, he began to unravel that knot, to allow the focus of his consciousness to slide over spacetime. Soon it was as if he were flying over the arch of the cosmos, unbound by limits of space or time.

  Throughout the Galaxy he found the works of man. He lingered over places and artifacts abandoned by history, dwelling as long over a drifting child’s toy as over some huge space-going fortress.

  Everywhere he found relics of war. Ruined stars and worlds, squandered energy.

  He found no people — no sentience — anywhere.

  * * *

  At first Michael labeled the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.

  All about him were quantum wave functions.

  They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced, and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.

  The functions filled spacetime and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.

  He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star’s gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons — or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves…

  Soon there was little of the human left in him.

  Then, at last, he was ready for the final step.

  Human consciousness was an artificial thing. Once humans had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles through human form. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Michae
l saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide.

  He, the last man, need no longer cling to such outmoded comforts.

  There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.

  With the equivalent of a smile he relaxed. His awareness sparkled and subsided.

  He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions that encompassed the universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows.

  * * *

  Time wore away, unmarked.

  * * *

  And then -

  There was a box, drifting in space, tetrahedral, clear-walled.

  From around an impossible corner a human walked into the box. A rope woven of bark trailed behind him, out of sight. The human was dressed in treated animal skins. He was gaunt, encrusted in filth, his skin ravaged by frost.

  He stared out at the stars, astonished.

  * * *

  Michael’s extended awareness stirred. Something had changed…

  History resumed.

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