Time m-1

by Stephen Baxter

  Meanwhile she had heard other rumors that the Witnesses — as they were called — were being recalled for fresh “trials,” whether or not they had already recanted as required. And this time, it was said, when the Witnesses walked into custody, they were not coming out again.

  She was still a citizen of the United States. She had always regarded it as her duty to uphold and submit to her country’s laws, whatever she thought of their philosophical basis. Maybe she should pack up her bag and go home with the goon Marine, and submit herself, like Galileo, like Jesus. Maybe it would be an example that might even do some good.

  But Maura Della never had been good at turning the other cheek.

  She wasn’t without allies, even here. After six months on the Moon she had gotten to know most of the military types, NASA astronauts, and staffers who manned this cramped little base. There was a bunker mentality. At first she’d been the outsider. But she’d taken her turns with the chores, like hand cleaning the hydroponics feed lines. And she had brought them handfuls of fresh-cut grass from Never-Never Land, its green springtime scent making the unimaginative metallic confinement of this base a little more bearable.

  All this bridge building had been quite deliberate, of course. And now it wouldn’t be hard for her to get a little protection and assistance, enough to deflect this goon for a couple of hours.

  The question was, what to do with those hours.

  Never-Never Land, she thought. Anna and the children. That’s where I must go.

  Working on automatic, she reached for a bag, started to make mental lists of what she should take. Then, deliberately, she put the bag aside. Just go, Maura, while — if — you still have the chance.

  She stepped out of her cupboard-sized personal quarters and headed through the complex toward the bus docking port.

  Bill Tybee was there looking lost, hurt, frightened, fingering his silver med-alert pin. He was carrying a light, transparent briefcase that contained a set of big chunky plastic toys. For Bill, this had begun as just another working day. “Maura? What’s going on? They won’t let me on the bus.”

  “Take it easy,” she told Bill. “We’ll sort this out…”

  There was a military officer, a woman, blocking the way to the bus. She had her weapon exposed, and her hand lay on its stock. She looked young and scared and uncertain. It took Maura five minutes of patient negotiation, a mixture of reassurance and veiled threats, to get them both past the officer and onto the bus.

  Maura and Bill were alone here in this autonomous Moon bus. As the minutes wore away to the bus’ appointed departure time they sat on a bench and held hands in silence.

  Maura could think of any number of ways they could be stopped. But they weren’t. Maybe, for once, the frustrating layers of security here were working in her favor. When things went wrong fast, like this, nobody knew what the hell was going on because nobody knew whom they were supposed to be able to talk to.

  And in the meantime her own need to reach the children grew to an overwhelming obsession. That was the center of things, and that surely was where her duty — her deepest duty, embedded deep in whatever morality she had left — must lie now.

  Maybe this is how Bill Tybee, a parent, feels all the time, she thought. She felt a prickle of envy.

  At last the bus doors slid closed. Maura waited for the soft clunk of the docking tunnel disconnecting from the hull of the bus, and then came the jolt as the bus pulled away and drove itself off through the Moon’s marshmallow gravity.

  The sun was high, and unfiltered light, harsh and static, flooded down into the complex canyons and crevasses of the brutally folded surface of Tycho.

  Bill was shaking, sweat clustering on his forehead in great low-G beads. She got up and brought him a plastic cup of water. Slowly he calmed down. For now they were safe. You couldn’t mount a car chase through this ancient, hazardous maze of canyons. Besides, the military presence on the Moon remained small; she doubted the commanders would risk any kind of surface operation to intercept them en route to Never-Never Land.

  Anyway there was no need. All that was necessary was to wait until Maura and Bill arrived at Never-Never Land and take them out then; there was, after all, no other place to go.

  Well, she would deal with that eventuality when it came.

  Bill pointed upward. “Look.”

  A star was crossing the sky with ponderous slowness. It seemed to be sparkling, pulsing with light with slow regularity. It was, of course, artificial: a satellite, slowly rotating, new, bigger than anything she had seen before. She had absolutely no idea what its purpose might be.

  She found herself shivering, and she clutched Bill’s arm.

  Strange lights in the sky, she thought. Scary. Even if we put them there.

  Especially if we put them there.

  It proved easier, oddly, to get into Never-Never Land than to get out of the NASA base. The troopers here seemed to be operating under radio silence. And besides, as Maura herself was quick to point out, once they were inside Never-Never Land they were effectively under house arrest anyhow. What were they going to do, climb out of a window?

  So she was admitted. Bill had to wait in the bus.

  At first glance nothing had changed here. The dome glowed its daytime sky blue, sun and Earth hung there like lanterns, and the grass was a livid green, almost shocking to the senses after the gray of the Moon. But nevertheless Maura sensed there was something wrong. The air seemed chill, and she saw the leaves of the fat, squat oak tree rustle. From somewhere there came an odd cry, perhaps human, perhaps animal.

  At the airlock’s inner door was the bulky blond German trooper whom Maura had come to know — and to dislike intensely — during her visits here. He was fingering the revolver at his waist. Anna stood before him, talking earnestly. Her wings were on the ground behind her. There were no other children in sight.

  Anna hurried to Maura. “You have to help me. I’m trying to make him understand.”

  Maura held Anna’s arms. “What do we have to understand?”

  “What is to come.”

  Maura’s skin prickled.

  Maura glanced at the trooper. He was staring at Anna. Leering, Maura thought uneasily, leering without speaking.

  Anna led her away, deeper into the dome across the grass, talking intently. It came out of Anna in broken fragments, scraps of speech. Occasionally the girl would lapse into metalanguage: shards of song, a few clumsy dance steps. “The arrow of time,” she said. “Inner time. Do you understand? This is the key. If you close your eyes you feel time. You feel yourself enduring. Time is essential to awareness, where space is not, and so is more fundamental. The flow of time, events happening, the future coming into existence.”

  “Yes.”

  “But you don’t understand time. Your scientists use time as a coordinate, a label. You even have theories that are time-symmetric, that work whether you run them forward or back in time.” The girl actually laughed at that.

  “And that’s wrong?”

  “Of course it’s wrong. It is trivially wrong. There is a severe discrepancy between your theories and what you feel is the reality of the world. And that is telling you, should be telling you, something quite fundamental about the physics that actually underlies your conscious processes.”

  “All right. Tell me about the arrow of time.”

  Anna danced, whirled, her dress lifting; and Maura was uncomfortably aware of the soldier’s eyes. “There are an infinite number of possible universes in the manifold,” Anna said. “Of those only a subset — nevertheless infinite itself — are capable of supporting self-aware substructures. And those universes are characterized by a flow of time, which is created by unfolding cosmic structure. Gravity is the key.”

  Maura was getting lost again. “Gravity?”

  “A universe with gravity is driven from smoothness to dumpiness because of gravitational collapse. And the arrow of time comes from this flow of matter and energy, from the gravitati
onal arrangement of the universe at its beginning, to the equilibrium state at its end. Life depends on a flow of energy and information, to be dammed and used. So the arrow of time, like perception itself, is intimately linked to the structure of the universe.”

  “Go on.”

  Anna was still talking, still dancing. “But structure and change are not restricted to a single universe. They span the manifold of evolving universes. And so, therefore, does life. Do you see?”

  “No.”

  “When this universe was spawned from the previous generation, it went through a series of phases. That is, the vacuum did.” Anna was watching her, seeking signs of understanding. “The vacuum is a complex thing. Space can be bent by gravity, but it resists with a strength far stronger than steel. The vacuum is a sea of energy, of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence.”

  “All right,” Maura said, struggling to keep up.

  “But it is possible for the vacuum to take different phases. Think of water. Liquid water may achieve a higher energy phase — it may flash to steam — or it may seek a lower energy phase—”

  “By freezing, forming ice.”

  “Yes. Systems lose energy, tend to seek the lowest energy state.”

  “I understand. And so the vacuum—”

  “After the Big Bang the vacuum itself descended through a series of energy states. This is the most primitive unfolding of all, the source of the time river, the source of life and mind.”

  “Until it settled on the lowest, umm, energy state. Which is our vacuum. Right?”

  Anna frowned. ‘Wo. Our vacuum is only metastable. It is not in the lowest level, not even now. This began in the Big Bang and continues now. But it needs, umm, help.”

  “Help? What kind of help?”

  The girl grabbed her hands. “You must see what this means. The evolution of the vacuum is a flow of information. But this is a flow that spans the manifold itself, and is therefore fundamental.” Anna’s eyes searched Maura’s. “Life spans the manifold. The vacuum metastability makes you what you are. This is the reason for what we are doing. And this is what you must tell them.”

  “Who?”

  “The people.” She waved a hand at the soldier, vaguely in the direction of Earth. “Make them understand this.”

  “What for?”

  “Consolation.”

  “My God, Anna—”

  And then, it seemed, time ran out for them all.

  It was as if a cloud had passed over the sun.

  Anna licked a finger and raised her hand. “There’s no breeze,” she said. “They turned the systems off.”

  Maura looked up. The dome had darkened. She could see the sun, just, a diffuse distorted disc, shedding no meaningful light. Perhaps the polarization had been switched to its night setting.

  Artificial lights sparked, flooding the dome with a cold fluorescent glow, a deadness that contrasted powerfully with the living green warmth of a moment ago.

  The German trooper touched Maura’s elbow. She heard the insect whisper of a speaker in his ear. “We have to get you out of here, ma’am.” He was pulling at her, firmly but gently, separating her from Anna; Maura, bewildered, let it happen.

  And Maura saw how his fat fingers had wrapped around the girl’s upper arm. Anna wriggled, obviously in pain. But the trooper was holding the girl’s fragile body against his battle dress.

  Ugly suspicions coalesced inside Maura; a subplot was reaching its resolution here. “Let her go.”

  The trooper grinned. He was tapping at a pad on his chest, perhaps calling for backup. “Ma’am, this is nothing to do with you. The bus will be waiting outside to take you back.”

  “I’m not going to let you harm her.”

  He just stared at her, holding the girl effortlessly despite her squirming.

  Maura braced herself, cupped her hand, and slapped the side of his head as hard as she could.

  “Ow… shit, Gott—” He pressed his hand to his damaged ear and let the girl go.

  “Run, Anna!”

  The girl was already fleeing over the darkened, gray-green grass, toward the center of the dome. Maura saw a giraffe, terrified, loping across the miniature veldt.

  “Ma’am.”

  She turned. The German was standing before her. His fist drove into her stomach.

  The pain slammed into her, doubling her over. She felt as if her intestines had been crushed against her spine, and perhaps they had. She wrapped her arms around her belly and tipped onto the grass, falling with lunar slowness.

  But Anna had gotten away.

  Now a klaxon started to sound: loud, insistent, a brutal braying, filling the dome with its clamor. Whatever was coming must be close.

  She could see the German. He looked after Anna. “Shit, shit,” he said, frustrated.

  He walked up to Maura. She saw a flash of leather and combat green. Her right knee exploded in pain, and she howled.

  Then he ran off, toward the exit.

  Her world was pain now, nothing but that. She was suspended between twin poles of it, at her stomach and her shattered knee, as if a lance had been passed through her body. She was unable to move. She even had to control her own breathing; if she disturbed the position of her body by as much as an inch the pain magnified, never to diminish again.

  The klaxon seemed to be growing louder. And lights were pulsing across the dome roof now, great alternating bands of black and white that rushed toward the exits. The light patterns were neat, clean, almost beautiful. Their message was unmistakable, but Maura knew she could not move.

  She closed her eyes, longing for the oblivion of unconsciousness. But it didn’t come.

  Some Galileo you would have made, Maura.

  The light seemed to be fading, even the pain — if not dwindling, then at least growing more remote, diminished by distance.

  She looked within and sensed time flowing, as it always had: the blossoming of multiple universes reflected in her own soul. Well, soon the flow of time would stop, for her. How would ilfeelt

  But now there was something new. Hands, small hands, at her shoulders and knees and feet and head. She tried to focus her eyes. A face swam before her. Anna’s? She tried to speak, to protest. But she failed.

  Then they were lifting her — as children would, clumsily — and her knee erupted in white-hot agony.

  She was being carried across the veldt. This was still the Moon, and the low gravity was making it easy for the children to carry her quickly. But even so, every jolt sent new rivers of metallic pain coursing through her leg and belly.

  She looked up at the dome. It had turned transparent now, and there was a glaring sun, a blue marble Earth over her.

  They came to a glass fence. One section of it had been shattered, and the children hurried through. She was inside the central compound, the forbidden area, where the children’s bubble of spacetime had rested for five years.

  And now she was approaching a wall of silver that sparkled, elusive.

  She tipped up her head. Something else was in the sky beyond the dome. Beams of light, radiating from a complex, drifting point. The beams were red, blue, yellow, green, rainbow colors, a rotating umbrella. Laser beams? They must already have kicked up debris, she thought: ground their way into Tycho, filled the vacuum with vaporized rock, making the beams themselves visible.

  The beams were approaching the dome, rotating like an H. G. Wells Martian tripod.

  Now she was being pushed into something that gently resisted, like a thick, viscous liquid. She looked down. Her legs were disappearing into the silver wall, now her waist, arms.

  There was a glare of complex light, a sound of tearing, a ferocious wind that ripped over her face. The air was sucked out of her lungs. The dome had been breached. Seconds left—

  There was a flash of electric blue, an instant of searing pain.

  Reid Malenfant:

  Malenfant found himself falling.

  It was just a couple of feet,
but he landed on his belly, and his helmet slammed against the ground. He tasted copper. Maybe he’d bitten his lip.

  He’d fallen hard. His faceplate was badly scuffed, and he had trouble seeing out.

  He pushed at the surface under him, expecting to find himself floating upward, defying the feeble tug of Cruithne’s gravity. He could barely raise his upper body. He was heavy here.

  And where was here?

  The ground was purple. It had a furry texture. It was obvious this wasn’t the coal-dust regolith of Cruithne. Christ, it looked like carpet.

  “No.” His own voice sounded loud in his head. “No, no. I don’t want this.” He fumbled at his chest, probing at his ribs through the layers of the suit. There was no feeling of pain. “I just set off a damn grenade hi my face. I don’t want this.” It was true. He had been reconciled. It was done. This surreal coda was not welcome.

  He shut his eyes and lay flat on the floor, the ridiculous carpet. But the world didn’t go away; he could still hear the whirring of the faithful little machines of his backpack, the pumping of blood in his ears, his own reluctant breath; and he could feel, deep within himself, the slow pulse of time, the river bearing him endlessly downstream.

  He was still alive, still embedded in the universe, whether he liked it or not.

  Emma, I’m sorry.

  He started to feel ridiculous. Suppose there were a bunch of medics (or orderlies or guards or inmates) standing around laughing at the asshole who was trying to bury himself in the carpet? Angry, embarrassed, he opened his eyes and pushed himself upright to a sitting position. He glanced around. He got a brief impression of a room, shadowy bulks that must be furniture. There was nobody here, laughing or otherwise.

  He stayed there unmoving. He and Cornelius and Emma had not been too scrupulous in maintaining their zero G exercise routines. If he really was back on Earth he could expect to fall straight back over as the blood drained from his head and his weakened heart struggled to keep up. But he felt, essentially, okay.