Trailing off, the janitor on Mars let his sicklelike head drop to his chest. Then it reared up again, catching the light, and he said, “Everybody knew that the only honorable or even dignified course was planetary self-slaughter. Such in fact is the usual destiny of type-v worlds in this phase. Then bolder voices started to be heard. This had never been a thing about winning or losing. This had always been about the glorious autonomy of Martian will. As it turned out, Mars’s next battle plan involved kamikaze forces and was itself not easily distinguishable from suicide.
“We came up with a ruse du guerre. We faked auto-annihilation and moved our whole operation underground. It had to look good, though: we blew off our atmosphere and paralyzed our core, which also spelt goodbye to our magnetosphere. What you see out there—the red plains and valleys, the rocks and pocks on that carpet of iodized rubble: it’s just set-dressing. We went underground, and waited.
“We undertook an arms build-up in a series of five-million-year plans. Morale was high: ringingly idealistic. Just one shot. Just one shot: that was the chant we worked to. We were going to turn that wormhole into a gun barrel. And what was the bullet? We started working on a strictly illegal type of weaponry based on the void-creating yield of false vacuum. A bubble of nothingness expanding at the speed of light. The great voids, the great starless deserts that so puzzle you: they’re the sites of incautious false-vacuum deployment. Or false-vacuum accident. Hence also the numberless void universes that populate the Ultraverse. If we could detonate this weapon within the event horizon of the core black hole—well, we felt confident of creating quite an impression when the time came for our second rendezvous with Infinity. Such a deed would rearrange the entire Ultraverse. Conceivably to Martian advantage.
“False-vacuum harnessing, we knew, was in itself exquisitely perilous: the field would be appallingly vulnerable to runaway. It was at this time that I was constructed and emplaced, here, in a shell of pure ultrium (an element not to be found in your periodic table), awaiting activation and eventual tripwire. It was as well that I was. For I would remain here alone to ponder the appalling prepotence of the i-power. Forget Infinity and Core. Forget the Resonance and the Third Observer. This came from much higher up.
“The device was ready. All that remained to be done was the addition of the final digit of its algorithm. The planet held its breath. In this instant the war would begin. Preparations that had lasted half a trillennium would now bear fruit… The Martian Slave Rebellion, as I came to call it, was over in a trillionth of the time it takes the speed of light to cross a proton. That was how long it took for all life on this planet to be extinguished. You see, the i-power had imposed cosmic censorship on matter. Poised to form the forbidden configuration, matter was instructed to destroy itself. This was 570 million years ago. You’d just gone Cambrian. I settled down for the wait.
“But that’s enough about Mars. Let’s talk about Earth. Before we do that, though—how about our intermission? There are… facilities in the rear there. No soap, I’m afraid. Or towels. Or hot water. I suggest you fortify yourselves. After the break we’ll do tripwire. I’ll give you the bad news first. Then I’ll give you the bad news.”
Pop Jones came out of the rear door, flexed his face in the weak starshine, and skirted the south lawn in his brisk, busy waddle. Keys jounced in the sagging pockets of his black serge suit. It was important, he thought, to walk as quickly as you could… Pop felt deafened, depersonalized. How quiet the place was: no boys on the benches, smoking, grooming, grumbling, coughing, yawning, scratching, gaping. Pop passed through the doors of the Rectory and trotted up the stairs.
He wasn’t normally allowed in the Common Room. His public space was the Pantry, a blighted nooklet between the bathhouse and the bikeshed, where he could, if he wished, consume a mug of cocoa among wordless representatives of the catering and gardening staff. Pop Jones knocked on the oak and entered.
The room received him in sudden silence. All you could hear was a stray voice somewhere: the wallscreen TV with somebody saying, One way out of the faint-young-star paradox lies in radiative transfer calculations, suggesting that the presence of CO2 on early Mars which… Smells of brewery and ashtray, ginger tea, ginger biscuits, ginger hair, and the dead soldiers of many beer cans. And Mr. Davidge, flanked by Mr. Kidd and Mr. Caroline, turning and saying in his tight Welsh voice:
“What is it, Jones?”
“It’s about Timmy, sir. Timmy Jenkins.”
He felt the silence rise another notch. Mr. Davidge waited. Then he said, “What about him?”
“He’s in San, sir, as you know. And Fitzmaurice says they can’t turn the television off, sir. Without disconnecting the whole—”
“So what’s your solution, Jones?”
“The directive from the Department Head about the news, sir. I—”
“So what’s your solution, Jones?”
“Request permission to move him to the Conservatory, sir.”
Mr. Davidge glanced at Mr. Kidd and said, “That’s okay by you, isn’t it? Yes, Jones, I think we can leave Timmy to your tender mercies.”
Everyone was smiling with just their upper lips. For a moment Pop Jones felt with frightening certainty that he was in a room full of strangers. He dropped his head and turned.
Largely disused, the Conservatory led off the south end of the main building, a few meaningless twists and turns from Pop Jones’s own quarters. He wheeled Timmy in and established him there, warmly wrapped, on a settee. The child lent his limp cooperation. Pop thought back. Three days ago, when Timmy was found… That bright morning, the air had glittered with such possibility—possibility, coming up out of the lawn. In all the newspapers and on TV they were analyzing the Martian “key” to the aging process: so elegant, so easily grasped. And everyone was laughing and feeling faint… Pop put his hands on his rounded hips and said,
“Dear oh dear, who did this to you, Timmy? It was ‘Day,’ wasn’t it? Dear oh dear, Timmy.”
“Floor,” said Timmy.
And what becomes of the moral order? he thought, settling back between the jaws of his gray armchair. The screen said: 03.47, 03.46, 03.45.
2
“In the Ultraverse there is an infinite number of universes and an infinite number of planets, and in infinity everything recurs an infinite number of times. That’s a mathematical fact. But it hasn’t panned out in your case. Among the countless trillions of type-y worlds so far cataloged, none, I can confidently divulge, presents a picture of such agonizing retardation as Mother Earth. To be clear: type-y planets that have been around as long as you have are, without exception, type-x planets or better. Earth has other peculiarities. DNA, I have known you since before you were children. I am the witness of all your excruciations! I have watched you hopping along the savannah and hooting around your campfires. I have watched you daub shit on the walls of your caves. I have watched you stumble, grope, err, miscarry, flop, dither, blunder, goof off. I have watched you trying, straining, heaving. I feel… I sometimes feel that I, too, have become partly human, over these many, many years.”
The conference room was now but feebly illumined. You saw the milky outlines of the listeners and the fumes of their milky breath, shapes of heads, Incarnacion with Pickering’s hand on her lap, Lord Kenrick flexing his shoulders, Zendovich hunched forward with his chin on his palm, Miss World chewing gum and not blinking. On stage the robot moved among shadows, tracked by the glint of its face. It came forward, and sat. The janitor on Mars had changed clothes. That serge coat had been discarded: in its place, a rust-red smoking jacket of balding velvet. At first you thought it was a trick of the light, but no: there were two black rivets, like eyes, on the curved axe of the face.