A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  They scrolled through their displays. No harm had come to the ship. The Q-bomb was no more massive than a small asteroid—it had the density of lead—and the ship’s trajectory was not deflected significantly by its gravity.

  “But we learned some things,” John reported. “Nothing we didn’t expect. It’s a sphere to well within the tolerances any human manufacturing process could manage. Then there’s that usual anomalous geometry.”

  “Pi equals three.”

  “Yes. Our probe went into orbit around it. The bomb’s mass is so low that it’s a slow circuit, but the probe ought to stay with it all the way in from now on. And the lander is coming down—”

  The ship shuddered, and Edna grabbed her seat. “What the hell was that? Libby?”

  “Gravity waves, Edna.”

  “The pulse came from the Q-bomb,” John said, tense, almost shouting. “The lander.” He replayed images of a gray hemisphere bursting from the flank of the Q-bomb, swallowing the lander, and then dissipating. “It just ate it up. There was a sort of bubble. If Bill Carel is right,” he said heavily, “what we just saw was the birth and death of a whole baby cosmos. A universe used as a weapon.” He laughed, but without humor. “Strewth, what are we dealing with here?”

  “We know what we’re dealing with,” Edna said evenly. “Technology, that’s all. And so far it hasn’t done anything we wouldn’t have expected. Hold it together, John.”

  He snapped, irritable, scared, “I’m only human, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Libby, are we ready for pass two?”

  “All systems nominal, Edna. The flight plan calls for an engine fire thirty seconds from now. Do you need a countdown?”

  “Look, just do it,” John said tightly.

  “Please check your restraints…”

  Bisesa walked slowly around the chamber in the ice. It was a rough sphere, and the Eye filled it. She looked up and saw her own distorted reflection, her head grotesque in the spacesuit helmet. She could feel there was something there. A presence, watching. “Hello, boys,” she murmured. “Remember me?”

  Ellie, Alexei, Yuri, crowding with Myra into the chamber, exchanged excited, nervous glances. “This is why we brought you here, Bisesa,” Yuri said.

  “Okay. But what the hell is it doing here? All the Eyes in the solar system disappeared after the sunstorm.”

  “I can answer that,” said Ellie. “The Eye has evidently been here since before the sunstorm—long before. It is radiating high-energy particles in all directions—a radiation with a distinctive signature. Which is why I was brought in. I worked at the lunar alephtron. I am something of an authority on quantum black holes. I was thought a good candidate to study this thing…”

  It was the first time Ellie had spoken to Bisesa at any length. Her manner was odd; she spoke without eye contact, and with random smiles or frowns, and emphases in the wrong places. She was evidently the kind of individual whose high intelligence was founded on some complex psychological flaw. She reminded Bisesa of Eugene.

  The lunar alephtron was mankind’s most powerful particle accelerator. Its purpose was to probe the deep structure of matter by hurling particles against each other at speeds approaching that of light. “We are able to reach densities of mass and energy exceeding the Planck density—that is, when quantum mechanical effects overwhelm the fabric of spacetime.”

  Myra asked, “And what happens then?”

  “You make a black hole. A tiny one, more massive than any fundamental particle, but far smaller. It decays away almost immediately, giving off a shower of exotic particles.”

  “Just like the Eye’s radiation,” Bisesa guessed.

  “So what,” Myra asked, “have tiny black holes got to do with the Eye?”

  “We believe we live in a universe of many spatial dimensions—I mean, more than three,” said Ellie. “Other spaces lie next to ours, so to speak, in the higher dimensions, like the pages in a book. More strictly it’s probably a warped compactification of—never mind, never mind. These higher dimensions determine our fundamental physical laws, but they have no direct influence on our world—not through electromagnetism, or nuclear forces—save through gravity.

  “And that’s why we make black holes on the Moon. A black hole is a gravitational artifact, and so it exists in higher dimensions as well as in the world we see. By investigating our black holes we can probe those higher dimensions.”

  “And you believe,” Bisesa said, “that the Eyes have something to do with these higher dimensions.”

  “It makes sense. The receding surface that doesn’t move. The anomalous pi-equals-three geometry. This thing doesn’t quite fit into our universe…”

  Like you, Bisesa thought, a little spitefully.

  “So maybe it’s a projection from somewhere else. Like a finger pushing through the surface of a puddle of water—in the universe of the meniscus you see a circle, but in fact it’s a cross-section of a more complex object in a higher dimension.”

  Somehow Bisesa knew this was right; somehow she could sense that higher interconnection. An Eye wasn’t a terminus, a thing in itself, but an opening that led to something higher.

  Myra said, “But what’s this Eye doing here?”

  “I think it’s trapped,” said Ellie.

  Once more the ship ran in at the Q-bomb. Deep in her guts antimatter and matter annihilated enthusiastically, and superheated steam roared.

  And at closest approach the ship swung around, engine still firing, so that its exhaust washed over the face of the Q-bomb. It was their first overtly hostile act; it would have been enough to kill any humans on that mirrored surface.

  The drive cut out, and the ship sailed on unpowered.

  “No apparent effect,” John reported immediately.

  Edna glanced at him. “Keep checking. But I guess we know the result. So do we use the weapons or not?”

  The final decision was the crew’s. A signal to the Trojan base and back would take a round-trip time of forty-five minutes, a signal to Earth even longer.

  John shrugged, but he was sweating, edgy. “The operational order is clear. We’ve had no reaction from the Q-bomb to a non-threatening approach, we’ve seen the destruction of a friendly probe, we’ve had no reaction to the exhaust wash. Nobody might get this close again. We have to act.”

  “Libby?” Officially the AI was the ship’s executive officer, and, formally, had a say in the decision.

  “I concur with Mr. Metternes’s analysis.”

  “All right.”

  Edna extracted a softscreen from her coverall, unrolled it and spread it out over the console before her. It lit up as it interfaced with the Liberator’s systems, and then flashed red with stern commandments about security. Using a virtual keypad Edna entered her security details, and leaned forward so the screen could scan her retinas and cheek tattoo. The softscreen, satisfied, turned amber.

  “Ready for the third pass,” Libby announced.

  “Do it.”

  Thirty seconds later the A-drive lit up again, and the Liberator became a blazing matchstick hurling itself through space. This time the burn was harder, the acceleration the best part of two G. Five seconds from closest approach Edna tapped a button on her command softscreen, giving the weapon its final authorization.

  The launch of the fusion bomb caused the craft to shudder once more, as if it were nothing but another harmless probe.

  With the weapon gone the Liberator sped away. Edna was pressed back in her chair.

  Bisesa’s imagination failed her. “How do you trap a four-dimensional object?”

  “In a three-dimensional cage,” Ellie said. “Watch this.” She had a pen clipped to her pressure-suit sleeve. She took this, lifted it toward the face of the Eye, and let go.

  The pen snapped upward, and stuck to the roof of the chamber.

  “What was that?” Myra asked. “Magnetism?”

  “Not magnetism. Gravity. If the Eye wasn’t in the way, you could walk around o
n the ceiling. Upside down! There is a gravitational anomaly wrapped around the Eye, obviously an artifact just as much as the Eye is. In fact I’ve been able to detect structure in there. Patterns, right at the limit of detectability. The structure of the gravitational field itself may contain information…”

  Yuri smiled. “This stuff can be rather fun to think about. You see, there are ways in which a two-dimensional creature, living in a watery meniscus, could trap that finger poking through. Wrap a thread around it and pull it tight, so it couldn’t be withdrawn. This gravitational structure must be analogous.”

  “Tell me what you think happened here,” Bisesa said.

  “We think there were Martians,” Yuri said. “Long ago, back when our ancestors were just smears of purple slime. We don’t know anything about them. But they were noisy enough to attract the attention of the Firstborn.”

  “And the Firstborn struck,” Bisesa whispered.

  “Yes. But the Martians fought back. They managed this. A gravitational trap. And it caught an Eye. Here it has remained ever since. For eons, I guess.”

  “We’ve tried to use your insights, Bisesa,” Ellie said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What you reported of Mir, and your journey back from it. You said the Eye functions as a gateway, at least some of the time. Like a wormhole perhaps. So we’ve experimented. We reflected some of the Eye’s own products back into it, using an electromagnet scavenged from a particle accelerator. Like echoing what somebody says to you.”

  “You tried sending a signal through the Eye.”

  “Not just that.” Ellie grinned. “We got a signal back. A regular pulsing in the decay products. We had it analyzed. Bisesa, it matches the ‘engaged’ tone from a certain archaic model of cell phone.”

  “My God. My phone, in the temple. You sent a message to my phone, on Mir!”

  Ellie smiled. “It was a significant technical success.”

  Myra said, “Why not share this with Earth?”

  “Maybe we’ll have to, in the end,” Alexei said tiredly. “But right now, if they found us, they’d probably just haul the Eye back to the UN Plaza in New York as a trophy, and arrest us. We need a more imaginative response.”

  “And that’s why I’m here,” Bisesa said.

  The acceleration was savage.

  Edna and John saw nothing of the detonation, when it came, because all the Liberator’s sensors were shut off or turned aside, the flight deck windows opaque. Pressed back in her couch, fleeing the explosion, Edna was reminded of training simulations she had run of the suicidal missions of Cold War attack pilots, when you were expected to fly your FJ4-B Fury fighter aircraft into enemy territory at three hundred knots, release the nuclear weapon strapped to your belly, and get yourself out of there, trying to outrun a nuclear fireball, forcing the craft up to speeds the designers never intended. This mission now had something of that feel—even though, paradoxically, she was safer than any of those heroic, doomed 1960s pilots could ever have been. There were no shock waves to outrun in the vacuum of space; nuclear weapons actually did more damage in an atmosphere.

  The acceleration cut out suddenly enough to throw Edna forward against her restraints. She heard John grunt. With a clatter of attitude thrusters the ship turned, and the windows cleared.

  The fireball from the nuke had already dissipated.

  “And the Q-bomb,” John briskly reported, “is unaffected. Apparently unharmed. It hasn’t deviated from its trajectory at all, as far as I can measure.”

  “That’s absurd. It isn’t that massive.”

  “Apparently something is—well, anchoring it in space more firmly than mere inertia.”

  “Edna,” Libby called, “I’m prepared for pass four.”

  Edna sighed. There was no point backing down now; if nothing else they had made their hostile intentions absolutely clear to the Q-bomb. “Proceed. Arm the fish.”

  Alexei said, “Look, Bisesa—if the Q-bomb is a Firstborn artifact, then we believe that the best way to combat the threat is to use the Firstborn’s own technology against them. This Eye is the only sample of that technology we have. And you may be our only way to unlock it.”

  As the conversation became more purposeful, Bisesa had the sense that something changed about the Eye above her. As if it shifted. Became more watchful. She heard a faint buzz on her comms link, and her suit seemed to shudder, as if buffeted by a breeze. A breeze?

  Myra, frowning, tapped her helmet with a gloved hand.

  Yuri looked up. “The Eye—oh shit—”

  “Thirty seconds,” said Libby.

  John said, “You know, there’s no reason why the bomb has to be constrained by the range of action it’s shown so far. It could just swat this damn ship like a fly.”

  “So it could,” Edna said calmly. “Check your constraints.”

  John reflexively snapped down his pressure suit visor.

  “Ready?”

  “Fire your damn fish,” John muttered.

  Edna tapped her final enable button. The A-drive cut in, and acceleration bit once more, driving them in their heavy suits back into their couches.

  Four torpedoes were fired in a single broadside from cannon mounted on the Liberator’s hull. They were antimatter torpedoes, so unstable they had to be armed with their H-bar pellets in flight, rather than back in dry dock.

  One detonated early, its magnetic containment failing.

  The others went off simultaneously in a cluster around the Q-bomb, as planned.

  The Q-bomb sailed on unperturbed. Mankind’s most powerful weapons, delivered by its first and only space battleship, had not been able to scar the bomb’s hide, or dislodge it from its chosen trajectory by a fraction of a degree.

  “So that’s that,” Edna said. “Libby, log it.” While they waited for further orders from Achilles, the Liberator stood off at a safe distance from the Q-bomb, matching its trajectory.

  “Christ,” John Metternes snapped, releasing his restraints. “I need a drink. Another shower, and a bloody drink.”

  Mars dust and loose bits of ice were churning on the floor, whipping up to collide with the shining face of the Eye. Bisesa felt fear and exhilaration. Not again. Not again!

  Myra ran clumsily to her mother, and grabbed her. “Mum!”

  “It’s all right, Myra—”

  Her voice was drowned out in her own ears by a rising tone, a sweep up the frequency scale into inaudibility, loud enough to be painful.

  Yuri studied a softscreen sewn into his sleeve. “That signal was a frequency chirp—like a test—”

  Ellie was laughing. “It worked. The Eye is responding. By Sol’s light! I don’t think I ever believed it. And I certainly didn’t think it would work as soon as this woman walked into the Pit.”

  Alexei grinned fiercely, “Believe it, baby!”

  “It’s changing,” said Yuri, looking up.

  The Eye’s smooth reflective sheen now oscillated like the surface of a pool of mercury, waves and ripples chasing across its surface.

  Then the surface collapsed, as if deflating. Bisesa found herself looking up into a funnel, walled with a silvery gold. The funnel seemed to be directly before her face—but she guessed that if she were to walk around the chamber, or climb above and below the Eye, she would see the same funnel shape, the walls of light drawing in toward its center.

  She had seen this before, in the Temple of Marduk. This was not a funnel, no simple three-dimensional object, but a flaw in her reality.

  Her suit said, “I apologize for any inconvenience. However—”

  The suit’s voice cut out with a pop, to be replaced by silence. Suddenly her limbs turned flaccid and heavy. The suit’s systems had failed, even the servomotors.

  The air was full of sparks now, all rushing toward the core of the imploded Eye.

  Wrestling with her own suit, Myra pressed her helmet against Bisesa’s, and Bisesa heard her muffled cries. “Mum, no! You’re not running out on me
again!”

  Bisesa clung to her. “Love, it’s all right, whatever happens…” But there was a kind of wind, dragging at her. She staggered, their helmets lost contact, and she let go of Myra.

  The storm of light grew to a blizzard. Bisesa looked up at the Eye. The light was streaming into its heart. In these final moments the Eye changed again. The funnel shape opened out into a straight-walled shaft that receded to infinity—but it was a shaft that defied perspective, for its walls did not diminish with distance, but stayed the same apparent size.

  And the light washed down over her, filling her, searing away even her sense of self.

  There was only one Eye, though it had many projections into space-time. And it had many functions.

  One of those was to serve as a gate.

  The gate opened. The gate closed. In a moment of time too short to be measured, space opened and turned on itself.

  With a snap, it was over. The chamber was dark. The Eye was whole again, sleek and reflective in its ancient cage.

  Bisesa was gone. Myra found herself on the floor, weighed down by a powerless suit. She yelled into the silence of her helmet. “Mum. Mum!”

  There was a click, and a soft hum. A female voice said levelly, “Myra. Don’t be alarmed. I am speaking to you through your ident tattoo.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “Help is on its way. I have spoken to Paula on the surface. You two have the only ident tattoo. You must reassure the others.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I suppose I am the leader of what your mother called this ‘faction.’”

  “I know your voice. From years ago—the sunstorm—”

  “My name is Athena.”

  25: INTERLUDE: A SIGNAL FROM EARTH

  2053

  In this system of a triple star, the world orbited far from the central fire. Rocky islands protruded from a glistening icescape, black dots in an ocean of white. And on one of those islands lay a network of wires and antennae, glimmering with frost. It was a listening post.

  A radio pulse washed across the island, much attenuated by distance, like a ripple spreading across a pond. The listening post stirred, motivated by automatic responses; the signal was recorded, broken down, analyzed.