The Time Ships

by Stephen Baxter

  I saw that the fleet of Time Ships had gathered more closely together; they were rafts of green wire, silhouetted against the dazzling emptiness, and clustering as if for comfort. Tentacles — ropes of Plattnerite — snaked out across the glowing void between the Ships, and were connected, their terminations assimilated into the Ships’ complex structures. Soon, the whole armada about me was connected by a sort of web of cilia filament.

  Even at this early stage, Nebogipfel told me, the universe has structure. The nascent galaxies are present as pools of cold gas, gathered in gravitational wells… But the structure is imploding, contracting, as we travel back towards the Boundary.

  It is like an explosion in reverse, then, I suggested to Nebogipfel. Cosmic shrapnel, collapsing to site of detonation. At last, all the matter in the universe will merge in a single point — at some arbitrary center of things — and it will be as if a great Sun has been born, in the midst of infinite and empty space.

  No. It’s rather more subtle than that…

  He reminded me of the bending-about of the axes of Space and Time — the distortion which lay behind the principle of time travel. That twisting of axes is going on now, all around us, he said. As we travel back through time, it is not that matter and energy are converging through a fixed volume, like a gathering of flies at the center of an empty room… Rather, space itself is folding up — compressing — crumpling, like a deflated balloon, or like a piece of paper, crushed in the hand.

  I followed his description — but it filled me with awe, and dread, for I could not see how life or Mind could survive such a crumpling!

  The universal light grew in intensity, and it climbed the spectral scale to a glaring violet with startling speed. Clumps and eddies in that sea of hydrogen swirled about, like flames within a furnace; the Time Ships, connected by their ropes, were barely visible as gaunt silhouettes against that uneven glow. At last the sky was so bright I had only an impression of white-ness; it was like staring into the sun.

  There was a soundless concussion — I felt as if I had heard a clash of cymbals — the light rushed in towards me, like some encroaching liquid — and I fell into a sort of white blindness. I was immersed in the most brilliant light, a light which seemed to suffuse my being. I could no longer make out those mottled clumps, and nor could I see the Time Ships — not even my own!

  I called to Nebogipfel. I cannot see. The light —

  His voice was small and calm, in that clamor of illumination.

  We have reached the Epoch of Last Scattering… Space is now everywhere as hot as the surface of the sun, and filled with electrically charged matter. The universe is no longer transparent, as it will be in our day…

  I could see why the Ships had been joined up by those ropes of Constructor stuff, for surely no signal could propagate through this glare. The dazzle grew more intense, until I was sure that it must have passed far beyond the range of visibility of normal human eyes — not that a man could have lasted for a moment in that glowing cosmic furnace!

  It was as if I hung, alone, in all that immensity. If the Constructors were there, I had no sense of them. My feeling for the passage of time loosened and fell away; I could not tell if I was witnessing events on the scale of centuries or seconds, or if I was watching the evolution of stars or atoms. Before entering this last soup of light I had retained a residual sense of place — I had kept a feeling of up and down — of near and far… The world around me had been structured like a great room, within which I was suspended. But now, in this Epoch of Last Scattering, all of that fell away from me. I was a mote of awareness, bobbing about on the surface of that great River which was winding back to its source all about me, and I could only allow that ultimate stream to carry me where it would.

  The soup of radiation became hotter — it was unbearably intense — and I saw that the matter of the universe, the matter which would one day compose the stars, planets and my own abandoned body, was but a thin trace of solidity, a contaminant in that seething maelstrom of light and stars. At last — I seemed to be able to see it — even the cores of atoms fizzed apart, under the pressure of that unbearable light. Space was filled with a soup of still more elemental particles, which combined and recombined in a sort of complex, microscopic melee, all about me.

  We are close to the Boundary, Nebogipfel whispered. The beginning of time itself… and yet you must imagine that we are not alone: that our History — this young, glowing universe — is but one of an infinite number which has emerged from that Boundary; and that as we retreat all the members of that Multiplicity are converging towards this moment, this Boundary, like swooping birds…

  But still the contraction of it all continued — still the temperature climbed, still the density of matter and energy grew; and now even those final fragments of radiation and matter were absorbed back into the shearing carcass of Space and Time, their energies stored in the stress of that great Twisting.

  Until, in the end…

  The last, sparkling particles fell away from me softly, and the glare of radiation heightened to a sort of invisibility.

  Now, only a gray-white light filled my awareness: but that is a metaphor, for I knew that what I was experiencing now was not the light of Physics, but that glow hypothesized by Plato, the light which underlies all awareness — the light against which matter, events and minds are mere shadows.

  We have reached the Nucleation, whispered Nebogipfel. Space and Time are so twisted over that they are indistinguishable. There is no Physics here… There is no Structure. One cannot point and say: that is there, such a distance away; and I am here. There is no Measurement — no Observation… It is all as One.

  And, just as our History has shriveled to a single, searing point, so the Multiplicity of Histories has converged. The Boundary itself is melting away — can you understand it? — lost in the infinite possibilities of the collapsed Multiplicity…

  And then there was a single, very brilliant, pulse of light: of Plattnerite green.

  [4]

  The Nonlinearity Engines

  The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about — stretched and battered — as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.

  Nebogipfel?…

  His voice was joyful — exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors…

  The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the gray-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unraveling of Space and Time.

  I was traveling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the center of the sun.

  The Time Ships no longer accompanied me — perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation — and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me — like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp’s burst — were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.

  Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?

  … Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?

  I am here.

  What is happening? Are we traveling through time again?

  No, he said. Still he had that note of exultation — of triumph — in his disembodied voice.

  Then what? What is happening to us?

  Do you not see? Could you not understand? We passed beyond the Nucleation. We reached the Boundary. And —

  Yes?

  Think of the Multiplicity as a surface, he said. The totalit
y of the Multiplicity is smooth, closed, featureless — a globe. And Histories are like lines of longitude, drawn between the poles of the sphere…

  And, in the Time Ships, we reached one pole.

  Yes. That point where all the longitude lines converge. And, in that precise instant of infinite possibility, the Constructors fired their Nonlinearity Engines…

  The Constructors have traveled across the Histories, he said. They — and we — have followed paths of Imaginary Time, paths scrawled sideways across the surface of the Multiplicity globe, until we have reached this new History…

  Now the cloud of Constructors — there were millions of them, I thought — drifted apart, like fragments of a child’s firework. It was as if they were trying to fill up the infant vacuum with the light and awareness we had brought from a different cosmos. And as the new universe unraveled, the afterglow of Creation faded to an immense darkness.

  It was the end-result — the logical conclusion — of my own dabbling with the properties of light, and the distortion of the frames of Space and Time that went with it. All of this, I realized, even the collapsing of the universe and this great progression across Histories — all of it had come about, growing inevitably, from my experiments, from my first, dear machine of brass and quartz…

  It had led to this: the passage of Mind between universes.

  But where have we come to? What is this History? Is it like ours?

  No, Nebogipfel said. No, it is not like ours.

  Will we be able to live here?

  I do not know… it was not chosen for us. Remember that the Constructors have sought, he said, a universe — out of all the in finite sheaf of possibilities that is the Multiplicity — a universe which is optimal for them.

  Yes. But what can “optimal “mean for a Constructor? I conjured up vague images of Heaven — of peace, security, beauty, light — but I knew these imaginings were hopelessly anthropomorphic.

  Now I saw a new light emerging, from the darkness all around us. At first I thought it was the returned glow of that fireball at the beginning of time — but it was too gentle, too insistent, for that; it was more like star-light…

  The Constructors are not men, the Morlock said. But they are the Heirs of Humanity. And the audacity of what they have accomplished is astonishing.

  Nebogipfel said, Among all the myriad possibilities, the Constructors have sought out that universe — the single one — which is Infinite in extent, and Eternal in age: where that Boundary at the Beginning of Time has been pushed into the infinite past.

  We have traveled beyond the Nucleation, to the Boundary of Time and Space themselves. And ape-fingers have reached out to the Singularity that lies there — and pushed it back!

  Star-light, now, was erupting from beneath the darkness, all around me; the stars were igniting everywhere; and soon the sky blazed, as bright everywhere as the surface of the sun.

  [5]

  The Final Vision

  An infinite universe!

  You might look out, through the smoky clouds of London, at the stars which mark out the sky’s cathedral roof; it is all so immense, so unchanging, that it is easy to suppose that the cosmos is an unending thing, and that it has endured forever.

  …But it cannot be so. And one only need ask a common sense question — why is the night sky dark? — to see why.

  If you had an infinite universe, with stars and galaxies spread out through an endless void, then whichever direction in the sky you looked, your eye must meet a ray of light coming from the surface of a star. The night sky would glow everywhere as brightly as the sun…

  The Constructors had challenged the darkness of the sky itself.

  My impressions had an adamantine hardness: there was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but that infinite brilliancy set with myriad acute points and specks of light. Here and there I thought I could make out patterns and distinguishing features — constellations of brighter stars against the general background — but the whole effect was so dazzling that I could never find a given pattern twice.

  My companion sparks of Plattnerite light — the Constructors, with Nebogipfel among them — receded from me, above and below, like green-glowing fragments of a dream. I was left isolated. I felt no fear, no discomfort. The buffeting I had experienced at the moment of Nonlinearity had faded, leaving me without a sense of place, time or duration…

  But then — after an interval I could not measure — I perceived I was no longer alone.

  The form before me coalesced against the star-light, as if a magic-lantern slide had been held up before me. It began as a mere shadow against that universal glare — at first I was not sure if there was anything there at all, save for the projections of my own desperate imagination — but at last it gained a sort of solidity.

  It was a ball, apparently of flesh, dangling in space, as unsupported as I was. I judged it to be eight or ten feet from me (wherever, and whatever, I was) and perhaps four feet across. Tentacles dangled from its underside. I heard a soft, babbling sound. There was a fleshy beak, no sign of nostrils, and two huge eyelids which now wrinkled up like curtains, to reveal eyes — human eyes! — that fixed on me.

  I recognized him, of course; he was one of the creatures which I had labeled Watchers — those enigmatic visions which had visited me during my trips through time.

  The thing drifted closer to me. He held out his tentacles, and I saw those digits were articulated and gathered in two bunches, like distorted, elongated hands. The tentacles were not soft and boneless things, like a squid’s, but multiply jointed, and seemed to terminate in nails or hoofs — they were more like fingers, in fact.

  Now it was as if he gathered me up. None of this could be real — I thought desperately — for I was no longer real — was I? I was a point of awareness; there was nothing of me to pick up, in this way…

  And yet I felt cradled by him — oddly safe.

  The Watcher was immense before me. His flesh was smooth, and covered with fine, downy hairs; his eyes were immense — sky-blue — with all the beautiful complexity of human eyes — and I could even smell him now; he had a soft animal musk about him, a scent of milk, perhaps. I was struck by how human he was. This may seem odd to you, but there — so close to the beast, and suspended in all that unstructured immensity — his common points with the human form were more striking than his grosser differences. I grew convinced that this was human: distorted by tremendous sweeps of evolutionary time, perhaps, but somehow akin to me.

  Soon the Watcher released me, and I felt myself float away from him.

  His eyes blinked; I heard the slow rustle of his eyelids. Then his huge gaze tracked around the searing, featureless sky, as if seeking something. With the softest of sighs, he drifted away from me. He turned as he did so, and his tentacles dangled after him.

  For a moment a stab of panic flooded me — for I had no wish to be stranded again with my own company, here in the desolate perfection of Optimality — but in a moment I drifted after the Watcher. I went without volition, like an autumn leaf swept along by the passage of a carriage’s wheels.

  I have mentioned those suggestions of constellations I had seen, shining against the background of light-drenched, infinite space. Presently it seemed to me that one group of stars, in the direction ahead of us, was scattering apart, like a flock of birds; while another, behind me (I was able to turn my point of view) was contracting.

  Could it be so? I wondered. Could I be traveling with such enormous rapidity, that even the stars themselves moved across my field of view, like lamp-posts seen from a train?

  Suddenly there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam; they swirled all about me, and vanished again in a twinkling, far behind. I saw nothing of planets, or other rocky objects, in my time in that Optimal History, save for that shoal of dust-motes; and I wondered if the great heat and intense radiation here would disrupt the coalescing of planets from the general debris.
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  Faster and faster the universe rushed by, a hail of whirling motes against the general brilliancy. Stars grew brighter, to shine out, explode from points into globes that hurtled at me, only to vanish in moments behind me.

  We soared upwards, and hovered over the plane of a galaxy; it was a great Catherine-wheel of stars whose variegated colors shone, pale and attenuated, against the general whiteness of the background. But soon even this immense system was dwindling below me, now to a whirling, luminous disc, and at last to a minute patch of hazy light, lost amid millions of others.

  And, throughout all this astonishing flight you must picture it — I had the vision of the dark, round shoulders of the Watcher, as he bobbed through that tide of light just ahead of me, quite unperturbed by the star-scapes through which we traveled.

  I thought of the times I had witnessed this creature and his companions. There had been that faint hint of babbling during my first expeditions in time — and then my first clear view of a Watcher when, in the light of the dying sun of far futurity, I had watched that object struggling on the distant shoal — a thing like a football, glistening with the water. I had thought it, then, a denizen of that doomed world — but it had not been, any more than I. And, later, there had been those later visions — glimpsed through a glow of Plattnerite green — of the Watchers as they hovered about the machine, as I fled through time.

  Throughout my brief, spectacular career as a Time Traveler, I saw now, I had been followed — studied — by the Watchers.

  The Watchers must be able to follow at will the lines of Imaginary Time, crossing the infinite Histories of the Multiplicity with the ease of a steamship traversing an ocean’s currents; the Watchers had taken the crude, explosive Nonlinearity Engines developed by the Constructors and developed them to a fine pitch.

  Now we journeyed into an immense void — a Hole in Space — which was walled off by threads and planes, sheets of light composed of galaxies and clouds of loose stars. Even here, millions of light years from the nearest of those star nebulae, the general wash of radiation persisted, and the sky all around me was alive with light. And beyond the rough walls of this cavity I could make out a larger structure: I could see that “my” void was but one of many in a greater field of star-systems. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of foam, with bubbles blown into a froth of shining star-stuff.