“I will do what I can.” Pierce bowed deeply to the delegates, who numbered no less than a round dozen deans and even a vice-chancellor or two: he studiously avoided making eye contact with his father-in-law, who stood at the back. “If you are absolutely sure of the merits of your case, I can consult the Library, then testify publicly, insofar as I am authorized to do so. Would that be acceptable?”
The vice-chancellor of the Old College of Leng – an institution with a history of over six thousand years at this point – bowed in return, his face stiff with gratitude. “We are certain of our case, and consequently willing to abide by the word of the Library of the Guardians of Time. Please permit me to express my gratitude once more—”
After half an hour of formalities, the delegation finally departed. Xiri reemerged from her seclusion to direct the servants and robots in setting the receiving room of their mansion aright; the boys also emerged, showing no sign of understanding what had just happened. “Xiri, I need to go to the Final Library,” Pierce told her, taking her hands in his and watching for signs of understanding.
“Why, that’s wonderful, is it not? My lord? Pierce?” She stared into his eyes. “Why are you worried?”
Pierce swallowed bitter saliva. “The Library is not a place, Xiri, it’s a time. It contains the sum total of all recorded human knowledge, after the end of humanity. I’m near to graduation, I’m allowed to go there to use it, but it’s not, it’s not safe. Sometimes people who go to the Library disappear and don’t come back. And sometimes they come back changed. It’s not just a passive archive.”
Xiri nodded, but looked skeptical. “But what kind of danger can it pose, given the question you’re going to put to it? You’re just asking for confirmation that we’ve been honoring our sources. That’s not like asking for the place and time of your own death, is it?”
“I hope you’re right, but I don’t know for sure.” Pierce paused. “That’s the problem.” He raised her hands to his lips and kissed the backs of her fingers. If it must be done, best do it fast. “I’ll go and find out. I’ll be back soon…”
He stepped back a pace and activated his phone. “Agent-trainee Pierce, requesting a Library slot.”
There was a brief pause while the relays stored his message, awaited a transmission slot, then fired them through the timegate to Control. Then he felt the telltale buzzing in the vicinity of his left kidney that warned of an incoming wormhole. It opened around him, spinning out and engulfing him in scant milliseconds, almost too fast to see: then he was no longer standing in the hall of his own mansion but on a dark plain of artificial limestone, facing a doorway set into the edge of a vast geodesic dome made from some translucent materiaclass="underline" the Final Library.
A Brief Alternate History of the Solar System: Part Three
SLIDE 11.
One hundred billion years will pass.
Earth orbits a mere twenty million kilometers from its necrosun in this epoch, and the fires of the accretion disk are banked. Continents jostle and shudder, rising and falling, as the lights strobe around their edges (and occasionally in low equatorial orbit, whenever the Stasis permits a high-energy civilization to arise).
By the end of the first billion years of the voyage, the night skies are dark and starless. The naked eye can still – barely, if it knows where to look – see the Chaos galaxy formed by the collision of M-31 and the Milky Way; but it is a graveyard, its rocky planets mostly supernova-sterilized iceballs ripped from their parent stars by one close encounter too many. Unicellular life (once common in the Milky Way, at least) has taken a knock; multicellular life (much rarer) has received a mortal body blow. Only the Stasis’s lifeboat remains.
Luna still floats in Terrestrial orbit – it is a useful tool to stir Earth’s liquid core. Prone to a rocky sclerosis, the Earth’s heart is a major problem for the Stasis. They can’t let it harden, lest the subduction cycle and the deep carbon cycle on which the biosphere depends grind to a halt. But there are ways to stir it up again. They can afford to wait half a billion years for the Earth to cool, then reseed the reborn planet with archaea and algae. After the first fraught experiment in reterraforming, the Stasis find it sufficient to reboot the mantle and outer core once every ten billion years or so.
The universe changes around them, slowly but surely.
At the end of a hundred billion years, uranium no longer exists in useful quantities in the Earth’s crust. Even uranium 238 decays eventually, and twenty one half-lives is more than enough to render it an exotic memory, like the bright and early dawn of the universe. Other isotopes will follow suit, leaving only the most stable behind.
(The Stasis have sufficient for their needs, and might even manufacture more – were it necessary – using the necrostar’s ergosphere as a forge. But the Stasis don’t particularly want their clients to possess the raw materials for nuclear weapons. Better by far to leave those tools by the wayside.)
The sky is dark. The epoch of star formation has drawn to a close in the galaxies the Earth has left. No bright new stellar nurseries glitter in the void. All the bright, fast-burning suns have exploded and faded. All the smaller main-sequence stars have bloated into dyspeptic ruddy giants, then exhausted their fuel and collapsed. Nothing bright remains save a scattering of dim red and white dwarf stars.
Smaller bodies – planets, moons, and comets – are slowly abandoning their galaxies, shed from stars as their orbits become chaotic, then ejecting at high speed from the galaxy itself in the wake of near encounters with neighboring stars. Like gas molecules in the upper atmosphere of a planet warmed by a star, the lightest leave first. But the process is inexorable. The average number of planets per star is falling slowly.
(About those gas molecules: the Stasis have, after some deliberation, taken remedial action. Water vapor is split by ultraviolet light in the upper atmosphere, and the Earth can ill afford to lose its hydrogen. A soletta now orbits between Earth and the necrosun, filtering out the short-wavelength radiation, and when they periodically remelt the planet to churn the magma, they are at pains to season their new-made hell with a thousand cometary hydrogen carriers. But eventually more extreme measures will be necessary.)
The sky is quiet and deathly cold. The universe is expanding, and the wavelength of the cosmic microwave background radiation has stretched. The temperature of space itself is now only thousandths of a degree above absolute zero. The ripples in the background are no longer detectable, and the distant quasars have reddened into invisibility. Galactic clusters that were once at the far edge of detection are now beyond the cosmic event horizon, and though Earth has only traveled two hundred million light-years from the Local Group, the gulf behind it is nearly a billion light-years wide. This is no longer a suitable epoch for Science Empires, for the dynamic universe they were called upon to study is slipping out of sight.
SLIDE 12.
A trillion years will pass.
The universe beyond the necrosun’s reach is black. Far behind it, the final stars of the Local Group have burned out. White dwarfs have cooled to the temperature of liquid water; red dwarfs have guttered into chilly darkness. Occasionally stellar remnants collide, then the void is illuminated by flashes of lightning, titanic blasts of radiation as the supernovae and gamma-ray bursters flare.
But the explosions are becoming rare. Now it isn’t just planets that are migrating away from the chilly corpses of the galaxies. Stellar remnants are ejected into the void as the galaxies themselves fall apart with age.
Space is empty and cold, barely above absolute zero. The necrostar’s course has passed through what was once the Bootes Void, but there is no end to the emptiness in sight: there are voids in all directions now. The Stasis and their clients have abandoned the practice of astronomy. They maintain a simple radar watch in the direction of travel, sending out a gigawatt ping every year against the tiny risk of a rogue asteroid, but they haven’t encountered an extrasolar body larger than a grain of sand for billions of years.