Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Malenfant shouted, “Privileged? Are you kidding?”

  “We’re watching the evolution of universes. Or rather, you are. A spectacle beyond comparison.”

  The pulsing cosmic collapses accelerated once more; the waves of light that washed down from the sky came so fast, one after the other, that it was as if they were caught inside some giant strobe machine. The three of them hung here, framed by the patient blue ring, their battered dust-stained suits bathed in the light of creation and extinction.

  Could it be true? Universes, born and dying in a time shorter than it took him to draw a breath, as if he were some immense, patient god?

  He turned to Emma.

  She was still starfished, silent. He tapped her suit’s chest-control panel, but that only told him about the condition of her suit — laboring, damaged, complaining about the loss of fluids from the ruptured leg. He couldn’t see her face, as he did not dare lift her gold visor; it glared in the light of dying cosmoses.

  Cornelius was curling into a ball. Maybe he was descending into some kind of shock. It wouldn’t be so surprising, after all.

  And how come your head is still working, Malenfant? If Cornelius wants to curl up and hide, why don’t you?

  Maybe, he thought, it was because he was too dumb to understand. Maybe if he did understand, like Cornelius, the knowledge would crush him.

  Being dumb was sometimes an evolutionary advantage.

  “Cornelius. How are you feeling?”

  “I’m heating up. These universes aren’t long-lived enough to allow our suits to dump their excess heat.”

  Malenfant forced a laugh. “I bet that’s one situation that isn’t covered by the manufacturer’s warranty.”

  Cornelius, folded over into a fetal ball, whispered: “Let me tell you my plan. …”

  The intensity of the light storm increased. Malenfant closed his eyes and huddled over Emma, trying to protect her a few seconds longer.

  The suit alarm sounded.

  And shut itself off.

  And the light storm died.

  Malenfant grunted. He opened his eyes and looked around.

  The sky was cooling in a soundless explosion of light, dimming as if exhausted from yellow to orange to red to a dull emberlike glow that was soon so faint he had trouble distinguishing it with his creation-dazzled eyes.

  He felt a huge relief, as if he had stepped out of a rainstorm.

  Cornelius whispered fretfully, “Not every universe will make stars, Malenfant. There may not even be atomic structure here. In our universe the various atomic forces are balanced so precisely you can have more than a hundred different types of stable nuclei. Hence, the richness of the matter in our world. But it didn’t have to be like that. Everything is contingent, Malenfant. Even the structure of matter…”

  The sky had become uniformly dark now, and the light, as far as he could see the only light in the whole of this universe, was the cold blue glow of the patient, unmarked portal.

  Malenfant hugged Emma to him. Her face was peaceful, as if she were immersed in a deep, untroubled sleep. But she looked cold. He thought he could see a frost forming on the inside of her faceplate.

  He sensed the growing universe around him, its huge, mean-inglessly expanding emptiness. And, it seemed, in all of this baby universe the only clump of matter and energy and light was here, the only eyes to see this his own. If he closed his eyes — if he died, here and now — would this cosmos even continue to exist?

  A hell of a thought. Therefore, don’t think it.

  “It’s damn cold,” he said.

  “You’re never satisfied, are you, Malenfant?” Cornelius, still hunched over, was fiddling with the controls on his chest, tapping at them.

  “What the hell are you doing there, Cornelius?”

  “Sending a message.”

  “Via the portal. Like the firefly we sent through. Radio waves into neutrino pulses.”

  “Yes.”

  “You think somebody is going to be able to come help us?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Then what?”

  “Turn to band six.”

  Malenfant changed the tuning of his suit radio, and there it was: a wash of static, broken up by Cornelius’ tapping. He was sending out a series of pulses, crudely controlled by the touchpad.

  He remembered where he’d seen a signal like this before.

  “3753, 1986. 3753, 1986. That’s what you’re sending, isn’t it, Cornelius? The message we picked up at Fermilab. You’re sending the Feynman radio message back to yourself.”

  Malenfant could hear a smile in Cornelius’ voice. “I always wanted to try something like this.”

  “And you’re not afraid of breaking causality? That, umm, the universe won’t explode or some damn thing to stop you?”

  “A little late for that, Malenfant.”

  “But how do you know what to send?”

  “You were there. I know what to send because I remember what I received. And since we did receive the message, we came here, and we can send it. So it’s all perfectly consistent, Malenfant. Just—”

  “Backward.”

  “I would have said looped. And the universe has reconstructed itself, knitting itself together quantum transaction by quantum transaction, around this central causal loop.”

  “So where did the message come from in the first place? The information in it, I mean. If you’re just copying what you received—”

  Cornelius stopped tapping and sighed. “That’s a deeper question, Malenfant. At any point in spacetime, at any now, there are an infinite number of pasts that could have led to the present state, and an infinite number of possible futures that flow from it. This is called the solution space of the universal wave function. Somewhere out in that solution space some equivalent of me figured out and wrote down the message, and sent it back with a Feynman radio.”

  “Even if I understood that,” Malenfant growled, “I wouldn’t like it. Information coming out of nothing.”

  “Then don’t accept it. Maybe the message just appeared, spontaneously.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “How do you know? We don’t have a conservation law for knowledge.” And he carried on with his patient tapping.

  The cold, the endless chill of this meaningless, empty cosmos seemed to sink deeper into Malenfant’s bones. “We’re going to freeze to death if we stay here,” he said.

  “Our suits aren’t made for extremes,” Cornelius whispered. “Not for extended periods of heat and cold, or for extremes of temperature. But this won’t last forever.”

  “Another Crunch?”

  “Yes. But it may not be for a while—”

  And there was no time to say any more, for there was a howl of radio static, a burst of sodium light that washed over them.

  Malenfant, grunting with shock, cradling Emma, tried to turn.

  Something came erupting out of the portal: complex, spinning, dazzling light flaring. It was a human. Dressed in a heavy black spacesuit, face hidden behind a gold visor. Spinning about its waist — crazily, not under control.

  The space-suited figure carried a gun, a snub-nosed pistol, raised toward Malenfant.

  Malenfant struggled to turn, to shield Emma with his body, but his suit, the tether, impeded him.

  The trooper was wearing a backpack much bulkier than Malenfant’s. It had small bronze nozzles and big wraparound arm units with what looked like joysticks. Maybe it was some kind of MMU, a manned maneuvering unit. Sodium light was flaring from lamps. The suit looked as if it had once been as black as coal, but now it was badly charred, the surface flaking off, so as the figure spun it gave off a shower of scorched flakes like a firework.

  Malenfant called, “Wait. Can you hear me? You followed us all the way here, through a thousand universes. I can’t believe you want to kill us—”

  Cornelius was moving. He had dragged at a tether and launched himself across space, directly at the trooper.

>   “Cornelius!”

  The trooper, still spinning, swiveled and fired at Cornelius. Malenfant saw the gun spark — once, twice — in complete silence. Cornelius crumpled about his middle. But he was still moving, still floating through space, his limbs still working, reaching.

  His belly hit the trooper’s legs. He clung on, groping at the trooper’s suit.

  Meanwhile the trooper continued to fire; Malenfant saw at least one more shot slice through Cornelius’ legs. But now Cornelius, clambering behind the trooper, was out of reach. The momentum of their combined bodies turned their motion into a clumsy, uncoordinated, complex roll.

  The trooper squirmed, trying to get hold of Cornelius. But Cornelius, laboring, had managed to reach down between the backpack and the trooper’s suit. He yanked loose a hose. Vapor vented into space, immediately freezing into crystals.

  The trooper’s motions became scrambled, panicky. Legs kicked helplessly, and gloved hands scrabbled at the helmet as if striving to pull it off.

  It took only a minute for the trooper’s struggles to diminish, a few last kicks, desperate scrabbles at helmet, chest panel, backpack.

  And then, stillness.

  Even before that, Cornelius was still too.

  There was blood inside Cornelius’ helmet. It had stuck to the visor and was drying there. Droplets of it seemed to be orbiting inside the helmet itself. Malenfant couldn’t see Cornelius’ face, and he was grateful for that.

  I’m going to miss you, he thought. Cornelius, the man who understood the future, even other universes. I wonder if you understand the place you have gone to now.

  The trooper turned out to be a woman. There was some kind of liquid over the interior of her depressurized helmet, and Malenfant didn’t look too closely. He did find a name tag sewn to the fabric of her suit: TYBEE J.

  He couldn’t find the gun.

  With loose loops of tether he tied together the bodies of Cornelius and the trooper.

  I ought to say something, he thought.

  Who for? For the corpses? They weren’t around to hear any more, and Emma was unconscious. Then who? Did this universe have its own blind, stupid God, a God whose grasp of the possibilities of creation had reached only as far as this dull, expanding box?

  Not for God. For himself, of course.

  He said, “This is a universe that has never known life. But now it knows pain, and fear, and death. You couldn’t get much farther from home. And I guess it’s right that you should stay here, together. That’s all.”

  Then, bracing himself against the portal, he shoved them gently. There was only the blue glow of the portal, which diminished quickly, and they were soon fading from sight.

  He wondered how long the bodies would last here. Would they have time to rot, mummify, their substance evaporate? Would the different physical laws of this universe penetrate them, making their very atomic nuclei decay? Or would they be caught up, destroyed at last, in the Big Crunch that Cornelius had promised would destroy this universe, as it had the others?

  The bodies drifted away slowly, tumbling slightly, the two of them reaching the limit of the tether and then coming back together, colliding softly once more, as if their conflict had continued, in this attenuated form, beyond death itself. As, perhaps, it would; their ghosts, trapped in a universe that wasn’t their own, had only each other to haunt.

  It doesn’t matter, Malenfant. Time to move on.

  The trooper’s MMU backpack, evidently built to mil spec, was considerably more advanced than Bootstrap hardware.

  There was a power source — lightweight batteries — that would long outlast Malenfant’s own, a significant supply of compressed air, a simple water recycler, and food pods that looked as if they were meant to plug into slots in the trooper’s helmet. And there was a med pack, simple field-medicine stuff. The MMU even contained a lightweight emergency shelter, a fabric zip-up bubble.

  Suddenly life was extended — not indefinitely, but through a few more hours at least. He was startled how much that meant to him.

  Malenfant pulled himself and Emma into the shelter and assembled it around them. It was just big enough for him to stretch out at full length. The fabric, self-heating, was a thin translucent orange, but a small interior light made the walls seem solid. Malenfant felt enormously relieved when he had shut out the purposeless expansion outside, as if this flimsy fabric emergency tent could shelter him from the universes that flapped and collapsed beyond its walls.

  When the pressure was right, the temperature acceptable, he cracked his own helmet and sniffed the air. It was metallic, but fine.

  He pulled off his gloves. He turned to Emma, opened up her helmet, lifted it off carefully, and let it drift away. Emma’s burned-red cheek was cold to his touch, but he could feel a pulse, see breath mist softly around her mouth.

  He took time to kiss her, softly. Then he used his own helmet nipple to give her a drink of orange juice.

  He tried to treat Emma’s wounded leg. He didn’t like the look of what he saw below the improvised tether tourniquet. The blood and flesh, exposed to vacuum, was frozen, the undamaged skin glassy. But at least she hadn’t bled to death, he thought, and she didn’t seem to be in any pain. He cleaned up the wound as best he could.

  “Malenfant?”

  The sound, completely unexpected, made him gasp, turn.

  She was awake, and looking at him.

  Maura Della:

  Life on the Hill had gotten a lot harder, even without the protestors. And the chanting of the protestors, cult groups, and other disaffected citizens in the streets outside, always an irritant, had become a constant distraction. There were times — even here, behind the layers of toughened glass — when she could hear the cries of pain, the smash of glass, the smoky crackle of small-arms fire, the slap and crash of grenade launchers.

  Maura believed there was something deep and troubling going on in the collective American psyche right now. She’d always worked on the belief that Americans liked to imagine themselves elevated from the general human fray, if only a little. Americans had the most robust political system, the best technology, the strongest economy, the finest national character and spirit. Of course it was mostly myth, but it wasn’t a bad myth as national fever dreams went, and Maura knew that Americans’ faith in themselves had, historically, tended to turn them into a positive force in the world.

  But there was a downside. Whenever things went bad, whenever the myth of superiority and competence was challenged, Americans would look outside, for somebody or something to blame for their troubles. And, whatever went wrong with the world, there was always an element who would blame the government.

  Fair enough. But how the hell was she supposed to concentrate with all that going on?

  But, of course, she had to.

  Just as she had to ignore the other inconveniences of the post-Nevada world. Such as the fact that she wasn’t allowed to use e-mail, photocopiers, scanners, or even manual typewriters and carbon paper. All government business relating to Bootstrap and the Blue children was now conducted by handwritten note: one copy only, to be destroyed by the recipient after use.

  Even her private diary was, strictly speaking, illegal now.

  Depressed, she turned to the first fat report on her desk. It was set out in a clear, almost childish hand, presumably that of some baffled, sworn-to-silence secretary. She skimmed through a preface consisting of academic ass-covering bull:… able to offer no assurances as to the accuracy of this preliminary interpretation that has been produced, according to this group’s mandate, as a guide for further decision making and. . .

  It was from the team of academics at Princeton who were trying to translate the messages the children had been sending to Earth. (She remembered Dan Ystebo’s apparently informed speculations on the subject, and she made a mental note to have one of the FBI plumbers dig out who was leaking this time.)

  The sporadic signals were in the form of ultraviolet laser light targeted on a
n antiquated astronomy satellite in Earth orbit. Why they chose that means of transmission nobody knew, nor how they had gotten hold of or built a laser, nor why they felt impelled to transmit messages at all. Perhaps all that would come after the graybeard academic types at Princeton and elsewhere had figured out what the hell the kids were talking about here.

  The message itself was text, encoded in a mixture of ASCII, English, other natural languages, and mathematics. But the natural-language stuff didn’t seem to bear much relation to the math, which itself was full of symbologies and referents whose meanings the academics were having to guess at.

  The math appeared to be some kind of diatribe on fundamental physics.

  Maura knew that for a century the theoreticians had been struggling to reconcile the two great pillars of physics: relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, and quantum mechanics, the theory of the submicroscopic world. The two theories were thought to be limited facets of a deeper understanding the academics called quantum gravity.

  It is impossible to delimit a theory that does not yet exist, the report writers noted pompously. Nevertheless most theorists had expected to find the quantum paradigm more fundamental than the relativistic. The speculations of the children contradict this, however. . .

  Maura skimmed on. Perhaps, the children seemed to be suggesting, fundamental particles — electrons and quarks and such — were actually spacetime defects, kinks in the fabric. For instance, a positive charge could be the mouth of a tiny wormhole threaded by an electric field, with a negative charge the other mouth, the flow of the field through the wormhole looking, from the outside, like a source and sink of charge. Einstein himself had speculated on these lines a century ago, but hadn’t been able to prove it or develop the theory to his satisfaction.