I’d known none of them in my past life, but I knew them now, and they knew me. They’d missed me for a long time, and now I had come home.
We ate the bread and cheese and fruit, and drank the wine, and talked about the great work on which we were all engaged. My part in it, they made sure I knew, was vital and heroic. Hauling matter about in the raw universe! How thrilling! How brave! But it was their part I was eager to hear about, and they told me. I understood all they told me, about the space–time gate, the problems and the progress made. The Malley equations were as easy as arithmetic, as familiar as recipes.
Yet, every so often, when I was talking to one, the others would say something to each other, and I would know it was above my head. I almost understood, but I had to accept that this high table had higher tables above it, tables where my delightful companions were familiar colleagues. There was no condescension in their manner. Some day I too would join them there.
But a thought, a sly strange query crept through my mind: was this place, to them, what my cramped quarters, my cigarettes and succubus, were to me?
The great sun made a sunset that stopped all speech, all thought. Its last green flash brought a collective sigh. Then with one accord all of us, gods and goddesses, leapt from the shelter onto the cool grass. We played like children and fucked like monkeys.
I fell asleep under the crowded stars, in the arms of one of the golden goddesses.
I woke in the robot.
The macro drew away from me, and it was as if something was being torn from my chest. I remembered just enough of what I’d known and felt to make the loss of that clarity and joy almost unbearable. I could remember my companions, but I couldn’t remember even their names. Our conversation, and the lucid equations, the very words we’d spoken and the formulae we’d thought were fading, the memory of a dream. The ache of separation, the agony of withdrawal, consumed my mind for a moment. Then came a rush of relief – I could go back in ten days!
Nothing else mattered.
When the first anguish of that parting had passed, I found that my whole attitude to, and understanding of, my work had changed. For the first time, I saw the structure which we were building as it really was. What had until now been a chaotic tangle of struts became visible as the scaffolding of a Visser–Price wormhole gateway, and the gantry of a ship. One part, over there, would stay; the other would leave with the ship. The Ring sprang into focus as the greatest particle-accelerator ever built, and Jupiter – my god, great Jove himself! – the ship’s fuel and reaction-mass.
I looked down, and saw the part of that work which I, at that moment, in that place, had the enormous privilege to do. Fine-tuning that interference modulator was what I had been born and re-born for. I set to work with the joy of a craftsman devoting his life to carving the door of a cathedral, certain of the credit it would bring him in a better life to come.
Nothing else mattered.
On my next visit to the macro my companions were the same people. They had changed since I’d last seen them, having lived another century of their still accelerating lives. More often than the first time, I didn’t understand their conversation. Their tact was subtle and kind, and all the more painful for that. But I came out of it, this time, shaken with anticipation rather than loss: the gate was soon to open.
Two days later, it happened. There was no ceremony about it. Only an alarm that warned the workforce away from the affected area. The macros had already flowed back from it, and now hung in a roughly circular pattern, spaced out among the girders. All work ceased as we jetted to the edges of the structure and clung there in wordless wonder.
In the core of the structure the girders began to move, folding into each other with increasing speed until a black circular space opened like a widening pupil. Two hundred metres across, four hundred, eight hundred, a mile: then at an arbitrary point on its rim, space cracked. In the twinkling of an eye, that one-dimensional flaw, the stretched point, became a circle cut loose from the universe.
The Visser–Price wormhole was held in place, like a film of soap in a ring, by the Malley non-exotic-matter structure around it. It couldn’t be held absolutely stilclass="underline" gravitational effects and sheer quantum uncertainty made the precise location of its edge undefinable to more than the nearest centimetre. This predictable imprecision created an unexpected, trivial but awesome effect: around the rim, the fractured light from the stars it occluded splintered into all the colours of the spectrum.
Now events progressed at the macros’ pace, not ours. The rainbow ring around the Malley Mile became two overlapping rings. The new circle separated, slowly at first. In the centre of that second circle, a section of the structure we’d built folded itself and unfolded into a dark parabolic blossom: the ship. I thought it, too, quivered with distorted space; I can’t be sure. The ship was linked to the second circle by a cone of cables, at whose apex it waited, poised.
Jupiter’s atmosphere boiled at dozens of points around its equator, sending tornadoes snaking up to the Ring around the planet. The Ring glowed, millions of accelerators around it whipping the stripped matter into a frantic circular race. After some minutes a white line blazed through our midst, from the Ring to the ship.
The ship, and the second circle, shot away. In seconds it was beyond my instruments’ reach. Now it seemed the white line extended to the first circle, and there it stopped. But only from our viewpoint: the jet of matter was passing instantaneously out of the other side of the wormhole, now further away with every passing second, and thence to the engines of the ship.
It was accelerating the probe, and with it the other side of the wormhole, to within a fraction of the speed of light. Both sides of the wormhole remained connected – there was literally no space between them, and no time. Our end of the wormhole existed in the ship’s time-frame, not in ours.
To an observer on the ship, relativistic time-dilation would shorten a journey of centuries to days – eventually, as its velocity crept closer and closer to the impassable eternity of the photon, millions of years to minutes, then trillions to seconds. In thirty or so ship-board years, it would reach the edge of the observable universe, and the heat-death or the Big Crunch.
And for all of those years, our side of the wormhole would be in the same place, and the same time, as the side that was with the ship. We had built a gateway to the stars – and to the future. In thirty years, if we wanted, we could walk to the end of time.
Meg, the succubus, was sitting on the sofa, pouting as I channel-hopped the television. I ignored her blatant impatience and wafts of aphrodisiac pheromones; she’s just a fucking machine, I told myself. Since the probe’s launch two days earlier the pace of work had slackened, and the television started to show news and entertainment. The news had an oddly stilted, house-journal quality: it was all solar weather-reports, interviews with rehabilitated crew-members – as we were now called – and accounts of what a great job we were doing. The entertainment was movies, game-shows, plays. Some of them were classics (somebody out here had a thing about Gillian Anderson) but most were unfamiliar to me. Their contemporary references gave no hint of the regression of civilisation I’d been shown in the orientation pack. It was exactly as if everything on Earth was what most people in my time would have expected the late twenty-first century world to be like: a bit crowded, a bit decadent; and that we, here, were picking it up after a few light-hours’ delay, in a space construction-site whose workers were for some obscure but accepted reason confined to individual space-tugs.