Anyhow, it seemed, Einstein hadn’t thought far enough. The children seemed to be saying that the key was to regard particles not just as loops or folds in space but as folds in time as well. Such a fold necessarily creates a closed timelike curve. . .
So every electron was a miniature time machine.
. . . This has clear implications for causality. The properties of a fundamental particle would be determined by measurements that can be made on it only in the future. That is, there is a boundary condition that is in principle unobservable in the present… Imagine a skipping rope, some dusty academic had dictated, struggling to make herself understood. If a handle is jiggled, the shape of the wave created depends not just on what is happening at the perturbed end but what happens at the other handle. . .
In this worldview it was this breach of causality that provided uncertainty, the famous multivalued fuzziness of the quantum world.
And so on, at baffling and tedious length.
She sat in her chair, struggling with the concepts.
So the world around her, the familiar solid world of atoms and people and trees and stars, even the components of her own aging body, was made up of nothing more than defects in space-time. There was nothing but space and time, knotted up and folded over on itself. If that’s so, she thought, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at the eruption of all this acausal strangeness. It was there all along, just too low-level for us to see, too obscure for us to understand.
But was it possible?
Just accept it, Maura. The important thing, of course, is why the children are trying to communicate this to us.
… The children may be attempting to bridge the chasm in understanding between our patiently constructed but partial theories and their own apparently instinctive, or paradox-prescient, knowledge of the world’s structure. It may be they wish us to understand on a deeper level what has happened to us so far — or, possibly, what is to happen to us in the future. . .
A prediction, then.
Or a threat.
Maura shivered, despite the clammy warmth of her office.
Maura, skimming the transcript, found scraps of plain language interspersed with all this heavy stuff: We’re all right here. Please tell our parents we aren ‘t hot or cold or hungry but just right, and it s a lot of fun bouncing around on the Moon, like a big trampoline… You shouldn ‘t have done what you did when you dropped that big bomb on us and it just made us mad is all and some of us wanted to come back and hurt you the same but Anna said we mustn’t and it wasn’t really your fault that you cared for us underneath even if you didn ‘t know how to show it and. . .
A kid’s report from summer camp, beamed down by ultraviolet laser from the Moon, interspersed with theoretical physics so heavy-duty a gaggle of Nobel prize winners couldn’t make sense of it. She felt her heart break a little more.
Even while it scared the life out of her.
She closed the report and dropped it into the high-temperature incinerator that hummed softly under her desk.
The last report in her tray was color-coded — by hand, with a marker pen — as the highest category of secure. It was about how the new NASA lunar outpost at Tycho would be used as a base for infiltrating the children’s mysterious encampment.
The Trojan-horse children had been screened for the Blue syndrome from before they could talk or walk. There were more than a hundred candidate kids at this point, all of them infants or preschoolers. And now their education was being shaped with a single purpose: loyalty to Earth, to home, to parents. There was training, discipline, ties of affection, every kind of behavioral conditioning the psychologists could dream up, mental and physical. They’d even brought in advertising executives.
Nobody knew what was going to work on these kids — who would, after all, eventually be smarter than any of the people who were working on their heads. Eventually, when they got old enough, the conditioning would be tested, sample candidates put through a variety of simulated experiences.
Little human lab rats, Maura thought, being given mazes to run, with walls of loyalty and coercion and fear.
The objective was to have selected a final cohort of seven or eight individuals by the time the children had reached the age of five or six, and then to ship them to the Moon and offer them to the Blues up there. And then to have the Blues’ new friends betray them.
She came to a list of candidate infants. One of them was Billie Tybee: daughter of Bill Tybee, who, a thousand years ago, had turned to Maura for help, and June Tybee, who had died during the failed assault on Cruithne, and the sibling of Tom, one of the children who had gone to the Moon, lost forever to his grieving father.
As if we haven’t done enough to that family.
Maura hadn’t yet worn her conscience completely smooth. This is, she thought, a war against our own children. And we’re using every dirty method on them that we dreamed up in a million years of waging war against ourselves.
But she knew she had to put her conscience aside, once again.
The children on the Moon, whatever they were doing up there, had to be understood, controlled, stopped.
By any means necessary.
Anyhow, if these really are the dying days of humankind, at least we’re going out true to ourselves. God help us all, she thought, as she pushed the report into the incinerator.
Reid Malenfant:
Malenfant cradled Emma, gently helped her eat, drink, let her sleep, tried to answer her questions. But she seemed less interested in the fate of the multiple universes through which she’d traveled, unconscious, than in Cornelius and Michael.
“Poor Cornelius,” she said. “I wonder if he found what he
wanted, in the end.”
“I doubt it. But he gave his life for us.”
“But only because he knew immediately there was no other choice. That the trooper would otherwise have killed all three of us. He knew he was going to die, one way or the other.”
“It didn’t have to be that way,” Malenfant said.
“Oh, it did.” Her voice was steady, but weak. “Cornelius was dead from the moment he destroyed that troop carrier. As long as he left one trooper alive, one who knew she or he wouldn’t be going home again…”
“But for the trooper to follow us through the portal, through those multiple universes—”
“There is a human logic that transcends all of this.” She waved a hand. “All the incomprehensible cosmological stuff. And that’s what killed Cornelius.”
“Human logic,” he said. “You think there’s a logic that has brought the two of us here? Wherever the hell here is.”
“The only two souls in a universe,” she said weakly. “It would sound romantic if—”
“I know.”
She was silent a while. Then, “Malenfant?”
“Yeah?”
“You think we can find a way back home?”
He sighed. “I don’t know, babe. But we can try.”
“Yes,” she said, and she snuggled closer to his space-suited form, seeking warmth. “We can try, can’t we?” She closed her eyes.
He let her rest for six hours.
Then he sealed up their suits, collapsed the bubble, checked their tethers, attached trooper Tybee’s backpack to his waist.
Then, hand in hand, Malenfant and Emma slid through the blue-circle portal, steps of just a few feet taking them gliding between realities.
Universe after universe after universe.
Sometimes they encountered more chains of fast-collapsing phoenixes, imploding skies that washed them with a transient light, and they huddled in the portal as if escaping the rain. But most of the cosmoses they encountered now were long past their first expansion, far from their final collapse, and were empty even of the diseased light of creation or destruction.
Nowhere was there any sign of life: nothing but the empty logic of physical law.
Sometimes Emma slept inside her suit, allowing Malenfant to haul her back and f
orth through the portal, whole universes going by without waking her: not even looking, even though they might be, he supposed, the only conscious entities ever to visit these places, these starless deserts.
An immense depression settled on Malenfant. This desolate parade of universe after universe — spacetime geometries utterly empty of warmth and mind and life save for himself and Emma — seemed to have been arranged to demonstrate to him that even the existence of a place in which structure and life could evolve was an unlikely accident. All his adult life he had fought for the future of the species. What was his ambition now? That squads of humans should follow him through these portals and settle these dead places, wrestle with space and time and the physical laws to make another place to live?
He came to a place that was, at least, different. The sky was huge, black, without stars or galaxies. But there was something: a texture to the sky, a swath of redness, just at the limit of his vision. In trooper Tybee’s backpack he had found a visor attachment with a night-vision setting. He wrapped the attachment over his helmet; it fit like huge goggles.
He peered around. His own body and Emma’s shone like false-color stars, the brightest objects in the universe.
The sky itself showed a dull red glow, the relic Big Bang radiation of this pocket universe. And there were clouds — diffuse, without structure — that covered much of the sky. The clouds showed up as thin gray-white in Malenfant’s enhanced vision, something like high cirrus. “Almost like home,” he murmured. Actually, not. But it was better than bland nothingness.
“Malenfant.”
He looked into Emma’s helmet. She was awake, smiling at him.
“Did you dream?”
“No,” she said. “I wish that fancy backpack had a coffee spigot.”
“And I wish I could say it’s a pretty view.”
“I suppose it is, in its way,” Emma said. “At least there’s something”
“I wonder why there are no stars. There’s clearly some kind of matter out there, and it’s clumpy. But it hasn’t made stars.”
“Maybe the clumps aren’t the right size here,” she said.
“What difference would that make?”
“I don’t know.”
“It might be something more bizarre,” he said. He told her about Cornelius’ speculations on how physical laws, shaken up by each emergence from the Crunch-Bang cycle, might deliver different forms of matter. “For instance, those clouds might not even be hydrogen.”
She sighed. “I don’t think it makes a lot of difference, Malen-fant. All that matters is that this isn’t home. Do you think we’re getting any nearer?”
“I don’t even know what nearer means.” He checked his wristwatch. They had been traveling for hours through how many universes — dozens, a hundred?
“If not for the resources of this trooper’s backpack,” Emma said, “we’d be dead by now. Wouldn’t we, Malenfant?” Her voice was an insect whisper. “I wonder if Cornelius knew that, if he figured that we would need the backpack to survive.”
“To kill for a backpack—”
“Cornelius was the coldest, most calculating human being I ever knew. It was exactly the kind of thing he would do.” She closed her eyes. “I think I want to sleep now.”
He let her rest for an hour. Then they moved on.
They passed through more glowing-cloud universes. Sometimes the clouds would be sparser or denser, showing more or less structure. But they did not find galaxies or stars, nothing resembling the familiar structures of home.
Then they came to something new. They stopped, drifting in the unchanging blue light of the portal.
It was another red-sky universe. But this time it seemed as if the sparse clouds had been gathered up like cotton wool and wadded together into a single roseate mass that dominated half the sky. There was a single point of light at the center of it all, easily bright enough to be visible with the naked eye. Two splinters of light seemed to be protruding from the point, like lens flares, or poles from a toy globe. Malenfant thought he could trace structure in the cloud that surrounded the central point: a tight spiral knot at the center, glowing a brighter red than its surroundings, and farther out streamers and elongated bubbles, all of it swirling around the center. It was actually beautiful, in a cold, austere way, like a watercolor done in white, gray, red.
Beautiful, and familiar.
“My God,” said Malenfant. “It’s a black hole. A giant black hole. Remember what we saw—”
“Yes. But black holes are made by stars. How can it be here, if there are no stars?”
He shrugged. “Maybe the matter here didn’t form stars, but just imploded into… that. Do you think it’s a good sign?”
“I don’t know. I never was much of a tourist, Malenfant. Tell me what Cornelius told you about black holes. That universes can be born out of them. That what goes on in a black hole’s center is like a miniature Big Crunch…”
“Something like that.”
“Then,” she said laboriously, “this universe could have two daughters. One born out of the black hole, one from the final Crunch.”
He frowned. “So what?”
“Don’t you get it, Malenfant? If universes with black holes have more babies, after a few generations there will be a lot more universes with black holes than without. Because they can multiply.”
“We’re talking about universes, Emma. What does it mean to say one type of universe outnumbers another?”
“Perhaps it’s all too simple for you to understand, Malenfant.”
“You mean too complex.”
“No. Too simple. Let’s go on.”
“Are you sure you’re ready?”
“What choice do I have?” And, feebly, she began to tug herself along the tether that joined them.
They passed on through the gallery of universes, barely noticing, comprehending little. Maybe Emma was right. Maybe they were working their way up a branching tree of universes — new baby cosmoses twigging off through every black hole. If that was so, how were the two of them being guided in their journey? By whom? Why?
Anyhow, on they went.
Even at the rate they traveled — a whole new universe, after all, every couple of minutes — the rate of cosmological evolution seemed damnably slow to Malenfant: a dim, undirected groping for complexity.
At first there were more red-sky universes. Most of them were adorned by black hole roses. Sometimes there was one all-consuming monster, sometimes an array of them studded
randomly around the sky.
Once they were so close to a hole center that its glare, seen through a dense mass of cloud, was dazzling, and Malenfant was sure he could see movement in the nearer clumps of gas, shadows thousands of light-years long turning like clock hands. Perhaps the portal itself was being dragged inward to the hole. He wondered what would happen then. Could even the portal survive falling into an immense black hole? Or did someone — some unimaginable agency of the downstreamers who built this chain — monitor the portals across the universes, repair them after cosmological accidents?
Then, fifty or a hundred cosmoses — they weren’t counting — from the first black hole rose, they came to something new. No infrared clouds, no black holes. But there was structure.
Malenfant pushed himself away from the portal. He drifted to the end of the tether, rebounding slightly. He shielded his eyes, trying to shut out the blue glow of the portal.
There were wheel shapes in the sky: rimless, but with regular spokes of the palest yellow light. It seemed to him there was a nesting here, structure on structure, the wheel shapes themselves gathered into greater, loosely defined discs, just as stars combined into galaxies, which gathered in turn in clusters and super-clusters.
His tether stretched beyond him, farther from the portal by six or seven yards. It just hung in space, coiled loosely. But there was a fine blue mist at its terminus.
Malenfant worked his way along the tether. The mist was made up of
very small particles, fine almost to the limit of visibility. At first he thought they must be flaking away from the tether, somehow; but it looked as if they were just condensing out of the vacuum. The mist was everywhere—
Except right in front of him. There was a rough disc shape directly ahead of him, where no mist was forming. Puzzled, he lifted his arm out to his left. The empty disc shape extended that way. It was a diffuse shadow of himself.
“I think it’s something to do with the portal light. There’s no mist here, where I block it out. Maybe the light is—” He waved his hands. “ — condensing.”
“How is that possible, Malenfant?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” He reached along the tether, meaning to pull himself farther.
‘Wo, Malenfant. Look at the tether.”
He let his gaze follow the rope to its end, a few yards ahead.
The tether was disappearing. It looked as if it was being burned away by some invisible, high-intensity ray. Occasionally he saw a flash of green light.
He pulled the tether back. The burning-off stopped. He was able to touch the end of the rope. It had been cut clean through. But the blue mist was still sparkling into existence, right where it had been before.
“There’s a limit out there, Emma. A barrier.” He looked around, but there was only the strangely structured sky. “Maybe the portal is protecting us. Like a shield.”
“A shield, Malenfant? You always did watch too much seventies TV”
“Then you explain it,” he said testily.
“Why does everything have to have an explanation? This is a different universe. Maybe the stuff from our universe is changing when it goes out there, past the portal’s influence.”
“Changing how?”
“The mass of the tether is disappearing. So maybe it’s being converted into something else. Light, maybe. And the mist—”
“—is the light from the portal. Condensing. Turning into some kind of matter. So,” he said, “how can light and matter swap over? Cornelius would have known.”
“Yes. This is a strange place, isn’t it, Malenfant?”
“There’s nothing for us here.”
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