Phase Space

by Stephen Baxter

  She looked into her soul, seeking warm memories of the Afterglow. She found nothing.

  She looked back at the gravity mine.

  At its centre was a point of yellow-white light. Spears of light arced out from its poles, knife-thin. The spark was surrounded by a flattened cloud, dull red, inhomogeneous, clumpy. The big central light cast shadows through the crowded space around it.

  It was beautiful, a sculpture of light and crimson smoke.

  ‘This is Mine One,’ Geador said gently. ‘The first mine of all. And it is built on the ruins of the primeval galaxy – the galaxy from which humans first emerged.’

  ‘The first galaxy?’

  ‘But it was all long ago.’ He moved closer to her. ‘So long ago that this mine became exhausted. Soon it will evaporate away completely. We have long since had to move on …’

  But that had happened before. After all humans had started from a single star, and spilled over half the universe, even before the stars ceased to shine.

  Now humans wielded energy, drawn from the great gravity mines, on a scale unimagined by their ancestors. Of course mines would be exhausted – like this one – but there would be other mines. Even when the last mine began to fail, they would think of something.

  The future stretched ahead, long, glorious. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across trillions upon trillions of years.

  It was the Conflux.

  Its source was far upstream.

  The crudities of birth and death had been abandoned even before the Afterglow was over, when man’s biological origins were decisively shed. So every mind, every tributary that made up the Conflux today had its source in that bright, remote upstream time.

  Nobody had been born since the Afterglow.

  Nobody but Anlic.

  ‘ … Come back,’ Geador said.

  Her defiance was dissipating.

  She understood nothing about herself. But she didn’t want to be different. She didn’t want to be unhappy.

  There wasn’t anybody who was less than maximally happy, the whole of the time. Wasn’t that the purpose of existence?

  So, troubled, she gave herself up to Geador, to the Conflux. And, along with her identity, her doubts and questions dissolved.

  The universe would grow far older before she woke again.

  ‘ … Flee! Faster! As fast as you can! …’

  There was turbulence in the great rushing river of mind.

  And in that turbulence, here and there, souls emerged from the background wash. Each brief fleck suffered a moment of terror before falling back into the greater dreaming whole.

  One of those flecks was Anlic.

  In the sudden dark she clung to herself. She slithered to a stop.

  Transient identities clustered around her. ‘What are you doing? Why are you staying here? You will be harmed.’ They sought to absorb her, but fell back, baffled by her resistance.

  The Community was fleeing, in panic. Why?

  She looked back.

  There was something there, in the greater darkness. She made out the faintest of patterns: charcoal grey on black, almost beyond her ability to resolve it, a mesh of neat regular triangles covering the sky. Visible through the interstices was a complex, textured curtain of grey-pink light.

  It was a structure that spanned the universe.

  She felt stunned, disoriented. It was so different from Mine One, her last clear memory. She must have crossed a great desert of time.

  But – she found, when she looked into her soul – her questions remained unanswered.

  She called out: ‘Geador?’

  A ripple of shock and doubt spread through the Community.

  ‘ … You are Anlic.’

  ‘Geador?’

  ‘I have Geador’s memories.’

  That would have to do, she thought, irritated; in the Conflux, memory and identity were fluid, distributed, ambiguous.

  ‘We are in danger, Anlic. You must come.’

  She refused to comply, stubborn. She indicated the great netting. ‘Is that Mine One?’

  ‘No,’ he said sadly. ‘Mine One was long ago, child.’

  ‘How long ago?’

  ‘Time is nested …’

  From this vantage, the era of man’s first black-hole empire had been the spring time, impossibly remote. And the Afterglow itself

  – the star-burning dawn – was lost, a mere detail of the Big Bang.

  ‘What is happening here, Geador?’

  ‘There is no time –’

  ‘Tell me.’

  The universe had ballooned, fuelled by time, and its physical processes had proceeded relentlessly.

  Just as each galaxy’s stars had dissipated, leaving a rump which had collapsed into a central black hole, so clusters of galaxies had broken up, and the remnants fell inwards to cluster-scale holes. And the clusters in turn collapsed into supercluster-scale holes – the largest black holes to have formed naturally, with masses of a hundred trillion stars.

  These were the cold hearths around which mankind now huddled.

  ‘But,’ said Geador, ‘the supercluster holes are evaporating away – dissipating in a quantum whisper, like all black holes. The smallest holes, of stellar mass, vanished when the universe was a fraction of its present age. Now the largest natural holes, of super-cluster mass, are close to exhaustion as well. And so we must farm them.

  ‘Look at the City.’ He meant the universe-spanning net, the rippling surfaces within.

  The City was a netted sphere. It contained giant black holes, galactic supercluster mass and above. They had been deliberately assembled. And they were merging, in a hierarchy of more and more massive holes. Life could subsist on the struts of the City, feeding off the last trickle of free energy.

  Mankind was moving supercluster black holes, coalescing them in hierarchies all over the reachable universe, seeking to extend their lifetimes. It was a great challenge.

  Too great.

  Sombrely, Geador showed her more.

  The network was disrupted. It looked as if some immense object had punched out from the inside, ripping and twisting the struts. The tips of the broken struts were glowing a little brighter than the rest of the network, as if burning. Beyond the damaged network she could see the giant coalescing holes, their horizons distorted, great frozen waves of infalling matter visible in their cold surfaces.

  This was an age of war: an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. Great rivers of mind were guttering, drying.

  ‘This is the Conflux. How can there be war?’

  Geador said, ‘We are managing the last energy sources of all. We have responsibility for the whole of the future. With such responsibility comes tension, disagreement. Conflict.’ She sensed his gentle, bitter humour. ‘We have come far since the Afterglow, Anlic. But in some ways we have much in common with the brawling argumentative apes of that brief time.’

  ‘Apes? … Why am I here, Geador?’

  ‘You’re an eddy in the Conflux. We all wake up from time to time. It’s just an accident. Don’t trouble, Anlic. You are not alone. You have us.’

  Deliberately she moved away from him. ‘But I am not like you,’ she said bleakly. ‘I do not recall the Afterglow. I don’t know where I came from.’

  ‘What does it matter?’ he said harshly. ‘You have existed for all but the briefest moments of the universe’s long history –’

  ‘Has there been another like me?’

  He hesitated. ‘No,’ he said. ‘No other like you. There hasn’t been long enough.’

  ‘Then I am alone.’

  ‘Anlic, all your questions will be over, answered or not, if you let yourself die here. Come now …’

  She knew he was right.

  She fled with him. The great black-hole City disappeared behind her, its feeble glow attenuated by her gathering velocity.r />
  She yielded to Geador’s will. She had no choice. Her questions were immediately lost in the clamour of community.

  She would wake only once more.

  Start with a second.

  Zoom out. Factor it up to get the life of the Earth, with that second a glowing moment embedded within. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth’s lifetime is reduced to the span of that second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again and again and again …

  Anlic, for the last time, came to self-awareness.

  It was inevitable that, given enough time, she would be budded by chance occurrence. And so it happened.

  She clung to herself and looked around.

  It was dark here. Vast, wispy entities cruised across spacetime’s swelling breast.

  There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. The last solid matter had long evaporated: burned up by proton decay, a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.

  For ages the black-hole engineers had struggled to maintain their Cities, to gather more material to replace what decayed away. It was magnificent, futile.

  The last structures failed, the last black holes allowed to evaporate.

  The Conflux of minds had dispersed, flowing out over the expanding universe like water running into sand.

  Even now, of course, there was something rather than nothing. Around her was an unimaginably thin plasma: free electrons and positrons decayed from the last of the Big Bang’s hydrogen, orbiting in giant, slow circles. This cold soup was the last refuge of humanity.

  The others drifted past her like clouds, immense, slow, coded in wispy light-year-wide atoms. And even now, the others clung to the solace of community.

  But that was not for Anlic.

  She pondered for a long time, determined not to slide back into the eternal dream.

  At length she understood how she had come to be.

  And she knew what she must do.

  She sought out Mine One, the wreckage of man’s original galaxy. The search took more empty ages.

  With caution, she approached what remained.

  There was no shape here. No form, no colour, no time, no order. And yet there was motion: a slow, insidious, endless writhing, punctuated by bubbles which rose and burst, spitting out fragments of mass-energy.

  This was the singularity that had once lurked within the great black-hole’s event horizon. Now it was naked, a glaring knot of quantum foam, a place where the unification of spacetime had been ripped apart to become a seething probabilistic froth.

  Once this object had oscillated violently, and savage tides, chaotic and unpredictable, had torn at any traveller unwary enough to come close. But the singularity’s energy had been dissipated by each such encounter.

  Even singularities aged.

  Still, the frustrated energy contained there seethed, quantum-mechanically, randomly. And sometimes, in those belched fragments, put there purely by chance, there were hints of order.

  Structure. Complexity.

  She settled herself around the singularity’s cold glow.

  Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took her longer to complete a single thought than it had once taken species to rise and fall on Earth.

  It didn’t matter. She had plenty of time.

  She remembered her last conversation with Geador. Has there been another like me? … No. No other like you. There hasn’t been long enough.

  Now Anlic had all the time there was. The universe was exhausted of everything but time.

  The longer she waited, the more complexity emerged from the singularity. Purely by chance. Much of it dissipated, purposeless.

  But some of the mass-energy fragments had sufficient complexity to be able to gather and store information about the thinning universe. Enough to grow.

  That, of course, was not enough. She continued to wait.

  At last – by chance – the quantum tangle emitted a knot of structure sufficiently complex to reflect, not just the universe outside, but its own inner state.

  Anlic moved closer, coldly excited.

  It was a spark of consciousness: not descended from the grunting, breeding humans of the Afterglow, but born from the random quantum flexing of a singularity.

  Just as she had been.

  Anlic waited, nurturing, refining the rootless being’s order and cohesion. And it gathered more data, developed sophistication.

  At last it – she – could frame questions.

  ‘ … Who am I? Who are you? Why are there two and not one?’

  Anlic said, ‘I have much to tell you.’ And she gathered the spark in her attenuated soul.

  Together, mother and daughter drifted away, and the river of time ran slowly into an unmarked sea.

  SPINDRIFT

  Or (Malenfant wrote to Michael) perhaps there is life all around us, even now. Perhaps there is life in the stars, the clouds, the rocks under your feet. But we just can’t see it. Wouldn’t that be strange?

  Look up at the full Moon.

  Look for the patch of bright highland at the centre of the southern hemisphere, nestling amid the darker seas. The highlands are old territory, my dear Svetlana, battered and scarred by five billion years; the seas are ponds of frozen lava, flooded impact wounds.

  Close to the lunar equator, a little to the left of the highland mass, you will find the Known Sea – Mare Cognitum. Here, through a good telescope, you might observe the Fra Mauro complex of craters.

  Here, for the last six years, I have made my home; and here, I am now certain, I will die.

  I am Vladimir Alexeyevich Zotov, first human being to walk upon the surface of the Moon. I will record as long as I can. Hear my story, Svetlana, my daughter!

  I left Earth on October 18, 1965.

  A mere ten thousand years after the great impact which budded it from young Earth, the Moon coalesced. The infant world cooled rapidly. Gases driven out of the interior were immediately lost to space.

  Planetesimals bombarded the Moon, leaving red-glowing pinpricks in the cooling rind. But soon the hail of impactors ceased. The first volcanism had already begun, dark mantle material pouring through crust faults to flood impact basins and craters and lava-cut valleys. But soon even the lava pulses dwindled.

  After just a billion years, the Moon’s heart grew cold.

  The living things which huddled there, of carbon and oxygen and hydrogen, grew still and small and cold.

  And the first ponderous rocky thoughts washed sluggishly through the Moon’s rigid core.

  Meanwhile life exploded over blue, stirring Earth.

  In my contoured couch I felt the shudder of distant valves slamming shut, the rocket swaying as the fuel lines were pulled away. Five minutes before launch they turned on the music. I felt peaceful.

  ‘Launch key to go point.’ ‘Air purges.’ ‘Idle run.’ ‘Ignition!’

  More vibrations, high whinings and low rumbles. The Proton booster began to sway to left and right, as if losing balance. Then acceleration surged, as if the rocket had been unchained.

  The weight lifted, and I was thrown forward. It was as if the rocket was taking a great breath. Then the core engines burned, crushing me, and I rose through fire and noise.

  The core stage died. Vostok Seven swivelled in space.

  I was in orbit. I could see the skin of Earth, spread out beneath me like a glowing carpet.

  I flew over the Kamchatka peninsula. A chain of volcanoes stretched from north to south, ice glittering on their summits and crests, and all surrounded by sky-blue water. It was very beautiful.

  The control centre told me I should prepare for the ignition of my last rocket stage: the Block-D, my translunar engine.

  Earth receded rapidly.

  I flew through Earth’s shadow. I could see the home planet as a hole in the stars, ringed by a rainbow of sunlight refracted through the atmosphere. And in the centre of the planet I could see a faint grey-blue glow: it was the light of the Moon, shining down
on the belly of the Pacific.

  Here came the Vice President of the United States, and NASA head honchos, and even a brace of Moonwalkers. Men in suits. They were on a guided tour of the lunar colony experiments in the Johnson Space Center back rooms.

  And here was Michaela Cassell, along with her buddy Fraser, two lowly interns tagging along.

  The first stop was a machine that could bake oxygen out of lunar rock. It was a cylinder six feet tall, with a hopper for ore at one end, and pipes for circulating hydrogen and water and dumping waste: a clunky-looking, robust piece of chemical-engineering technology.

  The NASA PR hack did the tour-guide stuff. ‘You see, you blow hydrogen across heated regolith. That reacts with the oxygen in an ore called ilmenite, an oxide of iron and titanium, to make water … You have basically standard parts here: a 304 stainless steel one hundred psi pressure vessel, swazelock fittings, copper gasket seals, steel tubing. Even the furnace is commercial, a nichrome-wound fuse design. This is a mature technology. But the Moon is a tough place. You need closed-loop fluid systems. In the low gravity you have larger particles than usual, lower fluidizing velocities, big, slow bubbles in the flow that makes for poor contact efficiencies. And you have to figure for minimum maintenance requirements – for instance, the plant has a modular design …’

  And so on. The old Apollo guys nodded sagely.

  The party walked on.

  Michaela couldn’t help but regard these greying, balding, gap-toothed mid-westerners with awe. Christ, she had even got to shake John Young’s hand, a man who had been there twice.

  New century, new Moon. After forty years, Americans were returning to the Moon, this time to stay, by God. It had been the results from Lunar Prospector, and the more ambitious probes which followed, which had kick-started all this.

  The probe results, she thought, and the corpse on the Moon. The body of a Russian, found by an autonomous Dowser in the shadows of a Mare Cognitum crater.