He turned away from the wheels, the blue mist, and pulled himself back to the portal.
So they passed on, on down the corridor of universes.
… Until they came, at last, to a sky full of stars.
Malenfant let himself drift away from the portal. “At least I think they are stars.”
The sky was uniformly speckled with points of light, all around them, above and below. No glowing clouds, no black hole roses. It might have been a starry night on Earth.
But there was something wrong. “They look old,” Malenfant said. It was true: a handful of the stars were as bright as orange, one even seemed to be sparking fitfully yellow, but the rest were a dim red. When he donned the night-vision goggles, he made out many more starlike points, a field of them stretching beyond the visible. But they were dim and red.
“We’ve been expecting stars,” Emma said.
“We have?”
“Sure. Think about it. If the key to breeding universes is black holes, you need to come up with the best way there is of making black holes. Which is stars.”
“What about those giant black holes we saw in the rose universes?”
“But they looked like they had ripped up half of creation. Stars have got to be more efficient than that. How many black holes were there in our universe?”
“A billion billion. Round numbers,” Malenfant said.
“We’re going to see more universes full of stars now. Universes that are star factories, and so black hole factories.”
He gathered up the tethers.
More universes, many and strange. Most of them now contained stars of some kind, but they were generally dim, scattered, unimpressive if not dying or dead. And nowhere did they see anything to match the splendor and complexity of their home Galaxy, and nowhere did they see any evidence of life and organization.
Malenfant grunted. “I feel like I’m trapped in God’s art gallery.”
Emma laughed weakly. “Malenfant, how can you be bored? You’re being transported between universes. Not only that, you only have a few hours to live. What do you want, dancing girls? And what difference does it make? We’re surely going to die soon anyhow, in some chunk of emptiness or other. I don’t think you’re destined to die in your own bed, Malenfant.”
“I don’t own a bed. But I’d rather die in my own fucking universe.”
“Even a million light-years from home?”
“Yeah. Wouldn’t you?”
“You do take things personally, don’t you, Malenfant? As if all of this, the manifold of universes, is picking onyou.”
He fixed their tethers and faced the portal, its blank central expanse open, empty, somehow reassuring, a way onward. “Hell, yes,” he said. “What other enemy is there?”
So, holding on to each other, they moved on to another reality, then another.
More skies. More stars, mostly small and unspectacular.
At last they came to a place with a Galaxy. But it was small and knotlike, populated by stars that looked dull, uniform, and aging; it seemed to have none of the reeflike complexity of their own Galaxy.
They passed on.
Universe after universe, all but identical to Malenfant’s eye: small and uninspiring stars, untidy galaxies, skies littered with the corpses of red, dying stars.
“I wonder why the stars are all so small,” he said. “And why there are so few. And why they all got so old so quickly.”
“Because there’s no giant Galaxy to make new ones,” Emma said. “We saw it, Malenfant. The reef Galaxy. All those feedback loops. A way to make stars, and keep on making them, over and over.”
Maybe she was right. If the key goal was to make lots of black holes — and if black holes were best made in giant stars — then you wanted machines to make lots of giant stars, and reef galaxies were the best way they had yet seen.
But evidently it wasn’t so easy to make reef galaxies — or rather, to evolve them. Malenfant looked around another dull, uninteresting sky. He wondered what was missing, if there was some simple, key ingredient. Carbon, perhaps, or some other element essential to the great star-spawning gas clouds.
Malenfant paused again when they came to a new, different universe. But this time some of the galaxies were broken up, their outlying stars scattered and their central masses collapsing into what Malenfant was coming to recognize as the signatures of black holes. And there were patches of glowing gas marring the sky, as if some of the nearer stars had exploded.
Beyond the stars the sky was glowing. It was like one of the early phoenix universes he had seen, born only to die within seconds or hours or days or years. But it wasn’t a uniform glow, he saw.
There seemed to be hot spots, one directly above his head and one below his feet, like poles in the sky. And there was a cold band around the equator of the sky, a plane running through his midriff. There were two points on the equator, in fact — once again on opposite sides of the sky — that seemed to be significantly cooler than the average.
He described the sky to Emma. “It’s a collapsing universe. But the collapse doesn’t seem to be symmetrical. It’s coming in over our heads, flattening out at the sides.”
“Is that possible?”
“Maybe this universe is oscillating,” he said. “Like a soap bubble, before it bursts. Not collapsing evenly. Going from a sphere to a stretched-out ellipse shape to a flattened disc shape…
“You know, Cornelius said it might be possible to survive a Big Crunch in a universe like that. You have to take control of the universe. And then you manipulate it, mass and energy and gravity fields, to control the oscillations. If you milk them just right you can extract enough energy to live forever.”
“That sounds like Cornelius,” she said dryly. “Malenfant, does it look like life-forms are manipulating the universe here?”
“No.”
So they went on.
Emma slept again. Trying not to wake her, he drifted on to the next universe, and the next.
Until — without warning, after another routine transition — he landed on Cruithne.
At least, for a few seconds he thought it was Cruithne.
He and Emma were floating above a gray, dusty surface, dropping through ghostly microgravity. The portal was embedded in the plain, jutting out of it upright, just as it had before. There was a hiss of static in his headset.
His feet settled to the surface. There was the gentlest of crunches, transmitted through his suit fabric, as his boots crushed the regolith of this place. The dust seemed soft, easily compressed.
Standing straight, he grinned fiercely. The touch of gravity was feather-light, but even so it was pleasing to feel solid ground under his feet.
He laid Emma down carefully. The soft, loose dust billowed up around her, falling back slowly in the feather-soft gravity.
Of course, it wasn’t Cruithne.
He’d seen more exciting skies. There was a single star, small, spitting light. Its color was elusive, a blue-green. That was all: There was nothing else to be seen, anywhere in the sky.
He stepped forward. The surface was covered in smooth, flowing dust, like a folded-over sand dune. There were low hills, even what might have been the faded-out remnants of very ancient, very large craters, palimpsests. The dust wasn’t the charcoal black of Cruithne, but a bluish silver-gray. Malenfant dug his gloved hand into the dust. It was very fine, like talc, with none of the little knotty clumps he remembered from Cruithne itself. He scraped out a small pit He thought he could detect a subtle flow as the dust poured gently back into his hole, filling it in and smoothing it over.
He straightened up, slapped the dust off his hands, and bent over to brush it off his legs. Except that there was no dust there; it seemed to have fallen away from his suit fabric. In fact he could see, where Cruithne II dust was peeling away, lingering traces of coal-dark Cruithne I, still stuck there after so long, after all the exotic cosmoses he had seen.
Dust on Cruithne I stuck to suit fab
ric because it was electrostatically charged by the action of the sun. So how come this stuff didn’t act the same? No electrostatics? Maybe matter here wasn’t capable of holding a sizable electric charge . …
Why would that be, and what difference would it make?
He had, of course, absolutely no idea.
“This dust is soft, Malenfant. Like the finest feather bed you ever heard of. You remember the story about the princess and the pea?”
“I remember.”
“But I didn’t dream. I haven’t dreamed once since we went through the portal.” Her voice was a rustle. “Isn’t that strange? Maybe you have to be at home to dream. I think I finished my orange juice.”
“I’ll put up the habitat.”
“No… Ungh” Behind her visor, her face twisted with pain.
He rummaged in the trooper backpack’s medical kit and found an ampule of a morphine derivative. In the dim light of the green star he had to squint to read the instructions. Then he pressed it against a valve at Emma’s neck.
He watched her face. Her self-control was steely, as it always had been. But he thought he detected relief there.
“Now you made me a junkie,” she said.
“So sue me.” He bent and picked her up.
“I can hardly hear you. That static. Is there something wrong with the radio?”
“I don’t think so,” he said dryly. “The universe is broken, not the radio.”
Then, the mil spec backpack trailing behind him, he stepped a giant microgravity step through the portal.
As their consumables dwindled, Malenfant hurried through universes, dismissing billions of years of unique cosmic evolution with a glance, not bothering to try to figure out why this universe should be this way or that, subtly different, subtly wrong. The waste, the emptiness of these cosmoses where there were no eyes to see, oppressed him.
Sometimes Malenfant found himself landing on a Cruithne, more or less like his own Cruithne, sometimes not. Sometimes the stars shone bright and white, but they seemed oddly uniform. Sometimes he found himself in a dying, darkling universe where the stars seemed already to have burned themselves out, a sky littered with diminishing points of orange and red.
Once there was a Galaxy over his head, a roof of light, star clusters scattered around it like attending angels. And when he lifted his sun visor, he could see its complex light reflecting from his own cheekbones and nose, the bony frame of his face.
… But it wasn’t right. Not quite.
There was the core, glowing bright, the broad disc, even a hint of spiral structure. But only a hint. There were none of the massive blue-white sparks he’d been able to see in the images their firefly had returned, none of the great supernova blisters, holes blasted into the big molecular clouds by the deaths of giant stars.
Not quite right.
Malenfant hurried on.
Meanwhile Emma grew weaker. She spent longer asleep, and her waking intervals grew shorter. It was as if she was hoarding her energy, hibernating like the black hole farmers of the far downstream. But parsimony hadn’t worked out for the down-streamers. And it wasn’t going to work for Emma.
It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered.
“Wait.”
He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor.
“Emma?”
She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.”
No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?”
Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them — one of them a distinctive red — and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath…
“Holy shit,” he said.
She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.”
And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon.
It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit.
He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed.
It was a footprint.
He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain.
It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.
He looked down at Emma. But, as the sunlight played over her face, she had already closed her eyes. Gently he flipped down her gold visor. The light dazzled from it, evoking rich colors.
Maura Della:
The robot bus snaked across the folded floor of Tycho.
Maura gazed out, stunned, at gray-brown ground, black starless sky, a bright blue Earth, full and round like a blue marbled bowling ball. In the valleys, smooth rocky walls rose around her, hiding the Earth and the details of the land. As the shadows fell on the bus it cooled rapidly, and she heard its hull tick as it contracted, fans somewhere banging into life to keep the air warm for her. But there was light here, even at the bottom of the angular lunar chasms: not diffused by the air, for there was no air, but reflected from the rock walls at the top of the valleys.
The Plexiglas blister window was very clear, cleaned of Moon dust and demisted, and she felt as if she were outside the bus, suspended over the lunar ground. She saw dust, heavily indented by bus tracks that the bus was now following once more with religious precision. The dust was loose, fragile looking, flecked with tiny craters, with here and there the glint of glass. It was lunar soil: dead, processed by patient, airless erosion, passing beneath her feet like foam on a rocky sea. She longed to reach down, through the window, and run her fingers through that sharp-grained dirt.
But that was impossible.
When she had arrived at the dull, cramped, sour-smelling NASA base, dug into the regolith miles from the children’s encampment, she had been told that civilian types like herself weren’t expected to “EVA,” as they called it, to walk outside onto the surface of the Moon. Not once, not one footstep; she would pass over the Moon through an interconnected series of air-conditioned rooms and vehicles, as if the whole Moon were one giant airport terminal.
There were a dozen people in the bus.
Most of them were soldiers: hard-faced, bored men and women, their pressure suit helmets the pale blue of the United Nations. They carried heavy weaponry, rifles and handguns adapted for use either in the vacuum or in atmosphere, and Maura knew there were more weapons, heavier stuff, strapped to the bus’ hull. The sole purpose of this squad was to protect, or perhaps control, Maura. Nobody went to Never-Never Land unarmed or unescorted — not even someone as senior in this UN operation as, five years after Nevada, Maura had become.
Bill Tybee came to stand with her at the window. He was limping, and his silver med-alert lapel brooch glinted in the bus’ lights. He held a bulb of coffee in a polystyrene holder; she accepted it gratefully.
“Umm. Not too hot.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing gets too hot here.”
The low pressure, she thought. An old NASA-type cliche, but true nonetheless.
“Never would have put you down as an astronaut, Ms. Della.”
“Call me Maura. You’re hardly Flash Gordon yourself.”
“Yeah. But what the heck.” Bill Tybee had been brought to the Moon, along with
other parents, to work, in his inexpert way, on the interpretation of the Blues’ activities — and, of course, to be with his kids, as best he could. Anything that might work, help get a handle on the kids.
“Bill, why Tycho? Why did the children run here, from Nevada? I heard the NASA people complaining. We’re away from the lunar equator, so you eat a lot of fuel getting here. And the ground is so rugged it was difficult to make the first landings.”
He grunted. “Those NASA guys have their heads up their asses. You have to remember, Ms. Della — Maura. They’re children. At least they were when they flew up here. So where would a kid pick to go live? How about the most famous crater on the Moon?”
It was as good an answer as she’d heard. “Don’t you think they are children any more?”
“Hell, I don’t know what they are,” he muttered. “Look at that.”
The bus climbed a crest, and once more the landscape was set out before her, the blue of Earth garish against the subtle autumn colors of the Moon. The ground was folded and distorted; she could actually see great frozen waves in the rock, ripples from the aftermath of the great impact that had punched the Tycho complex into the hide of the Moon. But the sheets of rock were themselves punctured with craters, small and large, and strewn with rubble.
Tycho was young for the Moon, but unimaginably old by the standards of Earth.
The ride, on the bus’ big mesh wheels, was dreamy; the bus tipped and rolled languidly as it crawled across the broken ground. She felt light, blown this way and that. It was indeed a remarkable experience.
There were rings of security around Never-Never Land, concentric like the rocky terraces that lined the walls of Tycho.
The bus rolled through a tall wire fence — lunar alloy, spun fine — and drove on to a low regolith-covered dome. A fabric tunnel snaked out to meet the bus, like the walkway from an airport terminal, and it docked on the hull with a delicate clunk. When the door opened a uniformed UN soldier stood there, backed up by armed troops, ready to process them.
As she passed through the hatchway, Maura smelled burning metal where the hull had been exposed to space, and a hint of wood smoke: oxidizing moondust. The exotic reality of the Moon, intruding around this dull Cold War-type bureaucracy and pass checking.
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