He stepped through—and found himself suspended in deep space as the door swung closed behind him. Its closure cut off Excelsia's candlelight; with the darkness, the stars shone all around with preternatural clarity, and the ribbon of the Milky Way wound its snaky course in a great circle. To the rear, where the door had been, the sun blazed—but somehow it did not wipe out the other stars. He could see everything in a way never before possible.
"What do I do now?" he asked, noting that his cloak had spread out to protect him from the vacuum and radiation of deep space. It didn't seem to matter whether he was in reality or illusion; he was comfortable.
Squeeze, squeeze, squeeze.
Oh, yes—he had to figure it out for himself. "But I am safe here, whatever I do?"
Squeeze.
What he had to do was align his perception to reality. Evidently this chamber provided the mechanism, if only he could figure out how to use it.
Well, this was the naked universe. He was Chronos. He could take a better look at it, traveling in time. Since he knew he would have to travel far to see any significant change, he willed the Hourglass to virtually maximum effect, turning the sand to its most intense red. "Forward in time—to the end of the universe!" he proclaimed grandly. "Sning, give me a squeeze when each billion years passes, just so I know."
He started off. The location-spell remained on, so he remained where he was in the galaxy—but it changed about him. Individual stars waxed and waned, some becoming brighter, some dimmer, and their constellations distorted into unrecognizability. New constellations formed, flexed, and dissolved. He knew it was all in his perspective, as stars shifted positions relative to his location, but it did make for an effect of almost-living animation.
Every so often there were supernovas, flashing with phenomenal brilliance and vanishing. He realized that his accelerated time travel made them as brief to him as the flashes of flashbulbs, but still they were bright in passing! He began to perceive a pattern to the changing positions of the more stable stars, patches of stars, and clouds of gas and dust. The galaxy was rotating, turning more rapidly in the center than at the edge, as if stirred by a cosmic spoon. Once he realized that, his perception became truly three-dimensional, and he saw himself as part of the giant, viscous mix of material. The galaxy had seemed stationary when he had been fixed in time; now he saw it as a porridge of stars and dust. In fact, the dust was stretched out in great spirals, moving outward from the center, and at the fringes of those bands of dust the stars were thickest and brightest, for the dust was their raw material. Stars did not form from mere contractions of gas amidst vacuum; they were squeezed into life by the tidal fluxes of the galaxy itself, like eddy whorls against the shifting dust.
Squeeze.
Oh, yes—a billion years had passed! Entranced, he continued to watch. Having analyzed the pattern of the great rotating galactic disk, he was now able to perceive the broader universe beyond, the neighboring galaxies, moving and spinning in their own courses and gradually drawing together. Stars kept moving in on their dust banks and disappearing into them, while the bands themselves snaked out toward the extremes. The galactic centers grew brighter.
Squeeze.
Another billion years already! He was still accelerating in time, but also becoming more absorbed by the wonder of the universe about him, so that time seemed to pass faster, anyway. Objective, subjective—what was the truer definition of time? Fascinated by the moving panorama of space, Norton began to trace the patterns of whole galactic clusters. His perspective kept expanding as he came to understand the more fundamental motions of the universe.
Squeeze.
Now it was easier to see how the galaxies were all converging on a single region of space, like shining pinwheels rolling in to a rendezvous. And the galaxies themselves were changing as they went, their centers becoming brighter despite the flow of dust and stars out from them.
Squeeze.
After that he pretty much ignored the squeeze markers, for they were coming faster as his sphere of awareness expanded. It almost seemed as if the universe were shrinking.
Suddenly a band of dust and gas passed across his region, momentarily blotting out his vision. When it passed, the sun was gone. Startled, he cast about for it; he had tuned it out in his effort to perceive the patterns of motion of the farther galactic clusters. It was definitely gone.
Well, how many billions of years had passed now? Six, eight? Mankind would not feel the loss! He let the sun go with momentary regret and refocused on the universe at large, which was really more interesting.
It was definitely shrinking. He verified this by fixing his attention on one particular spot and gauging the contraction of galactic groups around it. His perception seemed to have accommodated the enormous distances separating galaxies, so that he could know where they were even though, theoretically, it took billions of years for the light of the farthest ones to reach him. Perhaps this was because he himself was traveling rapidly in time; he didn't have to wait on the normal speed of light. Or maybe it was simply another facet of the magic of the Hourglass.
Shrinking? How could that be? The universe was supposed to be expanding!
Yet as the billions of years squeezed by, ten, eleven, twelve, he became certain; the universe was indeed contracting. It became small enough for him to see completely, then smaller yet. Dismayed and enthralled, he watched it form into a giant globe perhaps four billion light-years across. The galaxies were becoming quasars, with hugely radiating centers and tenuous umbras of dust and gas, and these dissolved into formless waves, much as the individual stars had dissolved into the dust clouds before. The universe became a great ball of gases and energy that then compressed into a mass of plasma less than a billion light-years in diameter, a super-duper nova.
It shrank into the size of a single quasar, then, so rapidly it was an eyeblink, into the size of a single planet, and disappeared.
Norton stared at the distant point of nothingness. If this was to be the way the universe ended, winking out in fifteen billion years or so, how did that differ from the manner in which it had begun? Perplexed, Norton reversed directions, turning the sand its most intense blue, and willed himself back in time.
The universe reversed. The ball of plasma reappeared from nothing, expanding ferociously. He was unable to distinguish energy radiation from matter; they were inextricably mixed. Now Norton noticed some things he had missed before. In this version, a great deal of energy seemed to be forming from nothing, even as the expansion occurred, so that, though the ball was exploding at lightspeed, the universe itself was multiplying much faster than that. It was as if a shock wave were traveling out ahead of the light, triggering the condensation of energy from whatever unknowable recess it had hidden in. But, of course, he was traveling backward in time now, which meant that that energy had actually converted into nothing before the remainder squeezed into the singularity of the black hole and winked out entirely.
How could that be? He had understood that matter and energy were fairly permanent, and here they were disexisting freely. In the ripples of energy as he now perceived them, matter coalesced, as if light were being bent around so tightly that it rolled up against itself and formed tiny balls of energy that developed a certain stability of their own. But when two balls touched each other, one of them spinning in one direction, the other in another, they burst like soap bubbles and vanished in total energy. Thus the forming matter was promptly destroying itself, renewing the explosion, generating more turbulence and eddies that spun out more bits of matter. Except that in actuality, he reminded himself again, it was the other way around; energy was forming matter implosively, and the implosive condensation then unwrapped to form new beams of energy that arrowed in toward the final extinction of singularity, of nonexistence. This was nonsense!
He continued to watch as billions of years squeezed back. The turbulence of the explosion imparted a slight rotation, and this spin caused the majority of the lightballs
to curl up in one direction, so that soon all of the oppositespinning balls were eliminated by cancellation and matter stopped destroying itself. The remaining matter coalesced into dusty masses, still rushing outward from the common center. The masses had their own rotations and formed into crude disks that solidified in the centers, compressing until the pressure was so great that ignition occurred, and suddenly they were quasars. Still the centers intensified, until they became black holes that expanded, swallowing much of the brilliance and sucking additional matter in long spiral trails. Now they were galaxies, structured as spiraling fodder for their central appetites. There was no hunger in the universe like that of a black hole!
Except, again, that this was backward. How could a black hole spew out matter continuously like that, until it disappeared? That simply was not the nature of such things! A black hole, with certain very limited exceptions, was strictly a one-way affair. What went in did not come out. Except, the Bemme had said, in the case of magic. And the force of magic did not reach out on galactic scale; it was confined to the radius of a typical planet, like Earth. Everyone knew that. That was why they used matter transmitters for interplanetary travel. Even ghosts had to use such modern conveniences, as Gawain had. Had the Bemme told him wrong?
This bothered him. If the alien had lied or been in error, he, Norton, had placed his trust in the wrong entity. He was reluctant to believe that, partly because he liked the Bemme and partly because that would leave him back on circle one. How, then, could he rationalize her statement about magic and black holes?
Aha! Black holes come in all sizes, from supergalactic to pinhead. A pinhead black hole could be used for experimental purpose, even moved about, provided one did not do anything foolish like poking a finger at it. The better laboratories had pinholes. Certainly it was possible to test magic on a hole. So the Bemme had not been refuted. That was a relief, and he could proceed with his current tour.
How could a black hole be reversed? Answer: not this way! Theoretically, a black hole could become overheated so that it exploded, but it could not pay out material a bit at a time. So either what he was seeing was wrong, or—
Or he was, in fact, seeing it backward.
He looked at the Hourglass. The sand was intense blue. He was supposed to be traveling backward, from normal future to normal past—but was he?
Then he had another revelation. Satan was the Father of Lies and the Master of Illusion; why couldn't he craft an illusion that changed the colors of the sand of the Hourglass? Obvious answer: he could—and he would! That would be far, far easier than creating a whole world that ran backward. That explained how Norton was able to relate one-to-one with the role players here—they were living forward, while he was living backward—for him.
He remembered how the sand of the Hourglass had shown green upon his return from a prior visit—the color of universal time. He had not set it there—not consciously: Obviously he had set it there—thinking the color was white, his normal backward course. Satan had tricked him into supposing green was white and red was blue. Black and yellow seemed to have been left alone; that change would have been too obvious. If he had gone to black to freeze time, and found himself careering through space instead, he would have known something was wrong. So only the directions of time had been changed—the normal and accelerated modes. Very neatly done; it had certainly fooled him. Each visit to the "contra-terrene" frame must, in fact, have been a reversal of time he had just spent on Earth. Satan had had to free him before he overlapped a prior reversal and ran afoul of the three-person limit.
How long did he have this time? He wasn't sure, because he had been operating in the drawkcab mode, undoing Satan's damage of eight years in the past. He had been about six hours between the departure of Satan's minion horn-demon and the onset of his effort to neutralize that minion; did these periods cancel out or add on, in the present? Evidently the latter, since he lived subjectively through both of them. But didn't some of that time already overlap his adventure with Excelsia and the Alicorn and the Sword Elf? He wasn't sure how to figure it, but suspected that Satan had made sure to allow enough time for this present diversion so that Norton would arrive back on Earth too late to foil his mischief. Probably if he got the null-psi amulet and took it to the Genius, the Genius would agree to transport him back to Earth just as his allotted time was up, anyway. What a conniving rogue was Satan!
Now he was zooming along the temporal length of the universe and knew that his perception of the sand of the Hourglass was wrong. Yet nothing had changed. How could he cancel the illusion?
Probably he had to be absolutely certain he was right, for uncertainty was the grist for exploitation by Satan. At the moment, he was not at all certain. He had figured out a theory to account for the discrepancies he had noted, but a theory was not a fact. He needed solid corroborative data.
Well, what in the universe was more solid than the universe itself? Suppose he explored it to the very end of time and satisfied himself that he knew its directions in time—shouldn't that be enough for certainty? If it wasn't, what was?
If he could not believe in the universe, he could not believe in anything. This chamber might be part of an illusion, but he suspected it was also a window to reality. He would travel to the end of the universe he saw here, seeking certainty.
He willed the sand to turn an even more intense blue, knowing that was reverse in color but correct in thrust. The universe accelerated, and Sning's squeezes came more and more rapidly, until the billions of years were passing in seconds and Sning became more of a shudder than a series of squeezes. The universe flew apart at an awesome rate, the galaxies separating so rapidly they appeared blurred. Soon the local section of space was clear. In a sphere ten billion light-years across, there was no longer any matter at all, and very little energy. The hole in the torus.
Norton turned his attention to the retreating outer fringe. Again he was able to adapt, to spread his awareness to perceive objects on a vaster scale than any human being had perceived them before. The torus of galactic motes was now a hundred billion light-years out, and still expanding. This was an open universe, seemingly without end.
But those galaxies were still evolving themselves, getting consumed by their black-hole centers. The process was slow while the available free matter diminished, but it continued. In due course the ring of galaxies became a ring of black holes, each spaced a hundred billion lightyears or more from its nearest neighbor. The holes were detectable only by their declining halos of radiation, and even that was doomed. Finally nothing was visible; Norton knew their paths only by inference. A trillion lightyears out, and still the torus expanded, for there was nothing to stop it. Would it ever end?
Then something happened. In the far, far, far distance he perceived a detonation. It was another Big Bang, the explosion of a monstrous black hole. A new universe was forming!
He realized that this Bang had occurred directly in the path of one of the local universe's far-flung holes. They had collided and overheated and burst apart. New energy and matter were generating in the region of this flux, as they had done so before.
He also realized that, just as some holes were pinhead size, so were some universe size. They were scattered through space (though space did not really exist in the absence of matter or energy—a quibble), rendered ever larger by the accumulation of stray radiation and dust and the debris from other worn-out universes, perhaps billions of such toruses. On occasion, a swiftly traveling galactic hole would collide with such a universe hole, like a neutron plowing into the nucleus of a uranium atom, and the impact would shatter both holes and cause the most massive possible explosion, augmented by the stress of space itself. In this manner were new universes born, his own included.
He continued to work it out as he watched the distant universe expand. Obviously not all galaxies became neutrons, and not all neutrons would strike larger holes headon with sufficient force to shatter them. Most would be captured in orbit about
the larger holes and eventually swallowed peacefully. Thus the masses of larger holes would steadily increase as their number diminished. Perhaps there was a critical mass, beyond which a hole became unstable, ready to be detonated. Thus the detonation of new universes would be a regular thing, occurring every trillion years or less, each expiring in a grand flash of a few tens of billions of years before its black-hole ashes were absorbed by still-accumulating universes. Perhaps new universes were flowering continuously, scattered over such a wide region that no entity could perceive more than one at a time, not even Chronos. Surely his own universe had developed in that fashion, not remarkable at all, just a single brief spark in eternity.
All it took was a little matter and antimatter—that was why the secondary explosions occurred around a new universe, because of the dexter and sinister curls of matter formation—and time. Time.
And he was Chronos, the Incarnation of Time. The one entity permitted to grasp the true nature of reality.
Norton shook his head. "Satan, compared to this truth, your lies are of no consequence!"
It was time to return to his own tiny portion of his particular spark. He brought out the Hourglass and focused on its flowing sand. He was still traveling forward, and the sand was still blue—but as he looked at that lie, the color changed to red and he saw truly at last. He had penetrated Satan's illusion and knew that he would never again be vulnerable to it.
He willed the sand blue again, this time to true blue, and the progress of time reversed. The distant universe began to contract. He wondered idly whether it had sapient creatures within it, living, loving, warring, and dreaming, performing minor exploits of science and magic, and whether any part of his long-gone physical body was incorporated into it, on the off chance that his own Milky Way Galaxy happened to be the neutron hole that had triggered this new effort. Perhaps a quark or two of him was there! "Good luck, you who follow us!" he cried.
Then that universe contracted back to its origin, and the hole from his own universe was ejected from it. It—and he—was on its way home.
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