A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  New Chicago was on the site of Memphis, but there was no trace of that city here. With the wooden buildings, brightly painted signs, horse rails, and dirt-track streets, Bisesa was reminded of Hollywood images of towns of the old Wild West. The streets were a pleasant bustle, adults coming and going on business, children hanging around outside a schoolhouse. Some of the adults even rode bicycles—safety bicycles that they called “Wheels,” an invention only a few years old at the time of the Discontinuity. But many of the townsfolk were bundled up in furs, like Arctic seal trappers, and there were camels tied up outside the saloons alongside the horses.

  They were able to take rooms in the small Hotel Michigan, though Emeline and Bisesa would have to share. In the lobby hung a framed newspaper front page. It was a Chicago Tribune late edition, dated July 21, 1894, and its headline read: WORLD CUT OFF FROM CHICAGO.

  They left their bags. Emeline bought them a roast beef sandwich each for lunch. And in the afternoon they went for a walk around the new city.

  New Chicago was nothing but street after dirt-track street of wooden buildings; only one of the bigger churches had been built in stone. But it was big. Bisesa saw this must already be a town of several thousand people.

  There was a handsome clock fixed to a tower on the town hall, which Emeline said was carefully set to “Chicago standard railway time,” a standard that the Chicagoans had clung to despite the great disruption of the Discontinuity—even though it was about three hours out according to the position of the sun. There were other signs of culture. A note pinned on a ragged scrap of paper to the town hall door announced a meeting:

  A WORLD WITHOUT A POPE?

  WHERE NEXT FOR CHRISTIANS?

  WEDNESDAY, EIGHT O’CLOCK.

  NO LIQUOR. NO GUNS.

  And one small house was labeled EDISON’S MEMORIAL OF CHICAGO. Bisesa bent down to read the details on the poster:

  The FATE Of

  CHICAGO

  On the NIGHT

  The WHOLE WORLD FROZE

  JULY 1894

  A Production for the Edison-Dixon Kinetoscope

  U.S. Patent Pending

  A WONDER

  TEN CENTS

  Bisesa glanced at Emeline. “Edison?”

  “He happened to be in the city that night. He’d been advising on the world’s fair, a year or two before. He’s an old man now, and poorly, but still alive—or he was when I set out for Babylon.”

  They walked on, tracing the dusty streets.

  They came to a little park, overshadowed by an immense statue set on a concrete base. A kind of junior Statue of Liberty, it must have been a hundred feet tall or more. Its surface was gilded, though the gold was flecked and scarred.

  “Big Mary,” said Emeline, with a trace of pride in her voice. “Or, the Statue of the Republic. Centerpiece of the world’s fair, that is the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, which we held a year before the Freeze. When we chose this site for New Chicago, Mary was one of the first items we hauled down here, even though we barely had the capacity to do it.”

  “It’s magnificent,” Abdikadir said, sounding sincere. “Even Alexander would be impressed.”

  “Well, it’s a start,” Emeline said, obscurely pleased. “You have to make a statement of intent, you know. We’re here, and here we will stay.”

  There had been no real choice but to move from Old Chicago.

  It had taken the Chicagoans weeks, months to understand what Bisesa had learned from the Soyuz photographs taken from orbit. The crisis wasn’t merely some local climatic disaster, as had first been thought; something much more extraordinary had happened. Chicago was an island of human warmth in a frozen, lifeless continent, a bit of the nineteenth century stranded in antique ice. And as far as the ice cap was concerned, Chicago was a wound that had to be healed over.

  Emeline said the first emigrants from Chicago proper had left for the south in the fifth year after the Freeze. New Chicago was the product of thirty years’ hard work by Americans who for many years had believed themselves entirely alone in an utterly transformed world.

  But even in the heart of the new town, the wind from the north was persistent and cold.

  They came to farmland on the edge of the town. As far as the eye could see, sheep and cattle were scattered over a green-brown prairie that was studded with small, shabby farm buildings.

  Emeline walked them to a kind of open-air factory she called the Union Stock Yards. The place stank of blood and ordure and rotting meat, and a strange sour smell turned out to be incinerated hair. “The core of it is from old Chicago, torn down and rebuilt here. Before the Freeze we used to slaughter fourteen million animals a day, and twenty-five thousand people worked here. We don’t process but a fraction of that now, of course. In fact it’s lucky the Yards were always so busy, for if we hadn’t been able to breed from the stock in its holding pens we would have starved in a year or two. Now they send the butchered meat up to feed the old city. Don’t have to worry about freezing it; nature takes care of that for us…”

  As she spoke, Bisesa looked to the horizon. Beyond the farmland she saw what looked like a herd of elephants, mammoths or mastodons, walking proud and tall. It was astonishing to think that if she walked off, beyond those unperturbed mastodons, she could travel all the way to the ocean’s shore without seeing another glimpse of the work of mankind, not so much as a footprint in the scattered snow.

  That night Bisesa retired to the shared hotel room early, exhausted from the traveling. But she had trouble sleeping.

  “Another day ahead of me and once again I don’t know what the hell it will be like,” she whispered to the phone. “I’m too old for this.”

  The phone murmured, “Do you know where we are? I mean, right here, this location. Do you know what it would have become, if not for the Discontinuity?”

  “Surprise me.”

  “Graceland. The mansion.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “But now Memphis will never exist at all.”

  “Shit. So I’m stuck in a world without Myra, and diet cola, and tampons, and I’m about to go jaunting over an ice cap to the decaying carcass of a nineteenth-century city. And now you tell me the King will never be born.” Unaccountably, she was crying again.

  The phone softly played her Elvis tracks until she fell asleep.

  40: SUNLIGHT

  May 2070

  In response to Athena’s mysterious summons, Myra returned to Port Lowell and was taken up to Martian orbit, where she rejoined the lightship James Clerk Maxwell.

  And she was wafted away on pale sunlight on a weeks-long jaunt back to the orbit of Earth—but not to Earth itself.

  “L5,” Alexei Carel told her. “A gravitationally stable point sixty degrees behind Earth.”

  “I had a whole career in astronautics,” Myra said testily. “I know the basics.”

  “Sorry. Just trying to prepare you.”

  It infuriated her that he wouldn’t say any more, and retreated once again into his shell of secrecy.

  There were in fact three of them aboard the Maxwell. Myra was surprised when Yuri O’Rourke tore himself away from his mission on Mars.

  “I wouldn’t call myself the leader of Wells Station,” he said slowly. “I mean, that’s actually my formal title on the contracts we signed with our backers, the universities and science foundations on Earth and Mars. But the others would kill me if I started acting that way. However, all of this is obviously affecting the station. And I have a feeling you’ll be coming back to trouble us further.”

  “I’m not planning to quit until I get my mother back.”

  “Fair enough. So I have the instinct that it’s right for me to accompany you.”

  “Well, I’m glad to have you along.”

  “Okay,” he said gruffly. “But I’ve told you, my ice cores are much more interesting than anything the bloody Firstborn get up to.”

  Yuri, in fact, was at a loss on the Maxwell. In the confines
of the lightship’s living quarters he took up a lot of room, a bear of a man with his thick tied-back hair and bushy beard and ample gut. And he fretted, cut off from his beloved Mars. Most days he sent picky demands down to Wells to ensure his crew kept up their routine of monitoring, sampling, and maintenance. He tried to keep up with his own work; he had his softscreens, and a small portable lab, and even a set of samples of deep-core Martian ice. But as the days wore on his frustration grew. He wasn’t bad company, but he sank into himself.

  As for Alexei, he was as self-contained as he had been since the moment Myra had met him. He had his own agenda, of which this jaunt to L5 was just the latest item. Clear-thinking, purposeful, he was content, even if he did get a bit bored when nobody played poker with him.

  Myra was allowed to try to make contact with Charlie, or even with Eugene, provided she didn’t give away anything sensitive. But her child and ex-husband weren’t to be found even by AI search facilities that spanned the solar system. Either that or they were hiding from her. She kept on looking, fitfully, increasingly depressed at the negative results.

  They were a silent and antisocial crew.

  But as she settled into the journey, Myra found she was glad to have been lifted up back into the light.

  She had gotten used to life at the Martian pole, with its endless night and its lid of unrelenting smoggy cloud. But now she gloried in the brilliant, unfiltered sunlight that swamped the ship. She was of the generation that had lived through the sunstorm, and she suspected she had been wary of the sun ever since. Now she felt, oddly, as if the sun had at last welcomed her back. No wonder half the Spacers were becoming sun-worshipers.

  So she made her calls to Charlie, and exercised, and read books, and watched virtual dramas, her skin bathed in the sunlight that blew her toward the orbit of the Earth.

  Before the time delays got too long, Myra spoke to Ellie, back on Mars.

  “Ellie, you’re a physicist. Help me understand something. What is Mir? How can another universe exist? Where is my mother?”

  “Do you want the short answer, or the long?”

  “Try both.”

  “Short answer—I don’t know. Nobody does. Long answer—our physics isn’t advanced enough yet to give us more than glimpses, analogies maybe, of the deeper truths the Firstborn must possess. What do you know about quantum gravity?”

  “Less than you can imagine. Try me with an analogy.”

  “All right. Look—suppose we threw your mother into a black hole, a big one. What happens to her?”

  Myra thought about it. “She’s lost forever.”

  “Okay. But there are two problems with that. First, you’re saying your mother, or more importantly the information that defines your mother, has been lost to the universe…” More importantly. That was classic Ellie. “But that violates a basic rule of quantum mechanics, which says that information always has to be conserved. Otherwise any semblance of continuity from past to future could be lost. More strictly speaking, the Schrödinger wave equation wouldn’t work anymore.”

  “Oh. So what’s the resolution?”

  “Black holes evaporate. Quantum effects at the event horizon cause a hole to emit a drizzle of particles, carrying away its mass-energy bit by bit. And the information that once defined Bisesa is leaked back that way. The universe is saved, hurrah. You understand I’m speaking very loosely. When you get the chance, ask Thales about the holographic principle.”

  “You said there were two problems,” Myra said hastily.

  “Yes. So we get Bisesa’s information back. But what happens to Bisesa, from her point of view? The event horizon isn’t some brick wall in space. So in her view, the information that defines her isn’t trapped at the event horizon to be leaked away, but rides with her on into the hole’s interior.”

  “Okay,” Myra said slowly. “So there are two copies of the mother-information, one inside the hole, one leaking away outside.”

  “No. Can’t allow you that. Another basic principle: the cloning theorem. You can’t copy quantum information.”

  Myra was starting to lose the thread. “So what’s the resolution to that?”

  “Non-locality. In everyday life, locality is an axiom. I’m here, you’re over there, we can’t be in two places at once. But the resolution of the black hole conundrum is that a bit of information can be in two places at once. Sounds paradoxical, but a lot of features of the quantum universe are like that—and quantum gravity is even worse.

  “And the two places in which the information exists, separated by a ‘horizon’ like the event horizon, can be far apart—light-years. The universe is full of horizons; you don’t need a black hole to make one.”

  “And you think that Mir—”

  “We believe the Firstborn are able to manipulate horizons and the non-locality of information in order to ‘create’ their baby universes, and to ‘transfer’ your mother and other bits of cargo between them. How they do this, we don’t know. And what else they’re capable of, we don’t know either. We can’t even map limits to their capabilities, actually.” Ellie paused. “Does that answer your question?”

  “I’m not sure. I guess I need to absorb it.”

  “Just thinking through this stuff is revolutionizing physics.”

  “Well, that’s a consolation.”

  41: ARKS

  “We found them, Mum. Just where your astronomers predicted.

  “It wasn’t a great diversion for the Liberator. To tell the truth we were glad of a chance to give the main drive a shakedown—and for a change of view out of the windows. Up here it’s not like the dramas. Space is empty…”

  It was a fleet of ships, slim pencils slowly rotating, glowing in the light of a distant sun. Moving through the wastes beyond the asteroids, they were moving too rapidly to be drawn back by the sun’s gravity; they were destined for an interstellar journey.

  “They’re human,” John Metternes said.

  “Oh, yes.”

  John peered at the images. “They have red stars painted on their hulls. Are they Chinese?”

  “Probably. And probably abandoning the solar system altogether.”

  Edna expanded the image. The ships were a variety of designs, seen close to.

  She downloaded analysis and speculation from Libby.

  “They don’t seem to have anything like our antimatter drive,” she read. “Even if they did, the journey time would still be years. There are probably only a few, if any, conscious crew aboard each of those ships. The rest may be in suspended animation; the ships may be flying Hibernacula. Or they may be stored as frozen zygotes, or as eggs plus sperm…” She scrolled down through increasingly baroque suggestions. “One exotic possibility is that there is no human flesh at all aboard the arks. Maybe they’re just carrying DNA strands. Or maybe the informational equivalent is being held in some kind of radiation-tolerant memory store. Not even any wet chemistry.”

  “And then you’d manufacture your colonists at the other end. Look, my bet is they’re using a variety of strategies for the sake of a robust mission design,” said John the engineer. “After all their bid for Mars failed. So they are giving up on the solar system.”

  “Perhaps it’s a rational thing to do, if the Firstborn are going to keep on hammering us. Ah. According to Libby, since we found them, we’ve had some contact with the Chinese authorities. The flagship is called the Zheng He, after their great fifteenth-century explorer—”

  “Do you think they will make it?”

  “It’s possible. We’re certainly not going to stop them. I’m not sure if we could; no doubt those arks are heavily armed. I think I rather hope they succeed. The more mankind is scattered, the better chance of survival we have in the long term.”

  John said, “But it’s also possible the Firstborn will follow them to Alpha Centauri, or wherever the hell, and deal with them in their turn.”

  “True. Anyhow it makes no difference to our mission.”

  “It’s a
nother complication for the future, Mum, if the world gets through the Q-bomb assault: an encounter a few centuries out, our A-drive starships meeting whatever society the Chinese managed to build out there under the double suns of Centauri.

  “Maybe Thea will have to deal with that. Give her my love. Okay, back to business, we’re now resuming our cruise alongside the Q-bomb. Liberator out.”

  42: CYCLOPS

  As they neared Cyclops Station Myra glimpsed more mirrors in space. They were lightships, swimming around the observatory. After many days suspended alone in the three-dimensional dark, it was a shock to have so much company.

  The Maxwell pushed through the loose crowd of sails and approached the big structure at the heart of the station. Alexei said it was called Galatea. It was a wheel in space.

  The Maxwell bored in along the axis of the wheel, heading straight for the hub. Galatea was a spindly thing, like a bicycle wheel with spokes that glimmered, barely visible. But there were concentric bands at different radii from the center, painted different colors, silver, orange, blue, so that Galatea had something of the look of an archery target. Galatea turned on its axis, in sunlight every bit as bright as the light that fell on Earth itself, and long shadows swept across its rim and spokes like clock hands.

  Alexei said, “Looks luxurious, doesn’t it? After the sunstorm an awful lot of money was pumped into planet-finder observatories. And this was how a good deal of it was spent.”

  “It reminds me of a fairground ride,” Myra said. “And it looks sort of old-fashioned.”

  Alexei shrugged. “It’s a vision from a century ago, of how the future was supposed to be, which they finally got the money to build, just for once. But I’m no history buff.”

  “Umm. I suppose it’s spinning for artificial gravity.”

  “Yep. You dock at the stationary hub and take elevators down to the decks.”

  “And why the colors—silver, red, blue?”

  He smiled. “Can’t you guess?”

  She thought it over. “The further you go from the hub, the higher the apparent gravity. So they’ve painted the lunar-gravity deck silver—one-sixth G.”