Malenfant said, “Today, there’s just us; in the future, somebody spreads across the Galaxy. Who else but us? Anyhow seventy-five megayears is more than you need to cover the Galaxy. You know, we should look farther out. Another few megayears for the biosphere to reach Andromeda, three million light-years away—”
Cornelius said, “The nearest large Galaxy cluster is the Virgo Cluster. Sixty million light-years out. It’s plausible the biosphere might have reached that far by now.”
“We have to look,” Malenfant said. “Send through more fireflies. Maybe we could establish a science station there, on the future Cruithne.”
“Christ, Malenfant,” Emma said. “It’s a one-way trip.”
“Yeah, but there are resources on Cruithne, just as there are
now. Enough to sustain a colony for centuries. We’d have no
shortage of volunteers. For half a buck I’d go myself. Maybe we
could contact the downstreamers directly.”
Malenfant and Cornelius talked on, excited, speculating.
But they are missing the point, Emma thought. Why are we
being shown this? What do the downstreamers wanft
There was a blur of movement in the corner of the softscreen image. It was out of focus, a flash of golden fabric.
“There’s the Sheena,” Emma snapped. “Cornelius, the camera. Fast.”
Cornelius, startled, complied. Again the agonizing wait as Cornelius’ command crept across space, through the portal, to this startling future.
The picture tipped up drunkenly, and Galaxy light smeared across the image. But they could see that the beach ball was rolling across the surface toward the portal.
Emma said, “She’s going to come back through.”
“You don’t understand,” Cornelius said tightly. “She won’t
come back anywhere. The portal isn’t two-way.”
“So if she steps through it, she will go—”
“Somewhere else.”
On the screen, the golden beach ball sailed into the interface — reddening, slowing, disappearing.
The firefly rolled forward, through soft Galaxy light, toward
the downstreamer gateway.
Maura Della:
Open journal. October 22,2011.
Can it be true? Can it possibly? Do we want it to be true?
People seem to think I have a more privileged access to Malenfant and his projects than is the reality. I can’t tell whether those now-famous downstream images are a hoax, or a misinterpretation, or if they are real. I can’t tell if they represent the only future available to us, or one of a range of possibilities.
I don’t even know whether it has been to Malenfant’s help or hindrance to release the images. When you’re trying to build credibility in Congress it generally does not help to have most of the media and every respectable scientist on the planet calling you a wacko.
But I do know that the effect of the images on the world, real or false, has been astounding.
It has all been cumulative, of course: the hysteria over the Carter predictions; the strange, eerie, shameful fear we share over the Blue children; and now this downstream light show. And all of it wrapped up with Reid Malenfant’s outrageous personality and gigantic projects.
We shouldn’t dismiss the more extreme reactions we’re seeing. Violence, suicide, and the rest are regrettable of course, and there are a number of “leaders,” even some here on the Hill, who need, I would say, to keep a clearer head.
But how are we supposed to react? As a species we’ve never before had a proper debate about the structure of the future. And now we’re all online, all our voices joined, and everybody is having a say.
None of us knows what the hell we’re talking about, of course. But I think it’s healthy. The debate has to start somewhere.
Maybe it’s all part of our growing up as a race. Maybe every technical civilization has crises to survive: the invention of weaponry that can destroy its planet, the acquisition of the capability to trash its environment. And now here is a philosophical crisis: we must come to terms with the prospect of our own long-
term destiny or demise.
Just as each of us as individuals must at last confront death.
Emma Stoney:
Another flash of blue light. And—
And nothingness.
The darkness before Emma was even more profound than the intergalactic night. And there was no sign of the Sheena.
“Shit,” Malenfant said.
“Everything’s working,” Cornelius said evenly. “We’re actually retrieving an image. And I’m picking up other telemetry. That is what the firefly is seeing.”
Emma said tightly, “Then where’s the Sheena?”
“Have it pan,” Malenfant said.
“I’ll try. But I don’t think we can communicate with the firefly any more. It’s passed through the portal again, remember, so it must have crossed a second Einstein-Rosen bridge. There’s no longer a line of sight connecting us. The communication is one-way now, through the Feynman radio—”
“Then what do we do?”
Cornelius shrugged. “We wait. The firefly has onboard autonomy. It’s programmed to investigate its own situation, to return what data it can.”
A blur, a wash of light, passed over the corner of the screen before the image stabilized.
Now Emma saw a battered plain, slightly tipped up, receding to a tight, sharp horizon. The craters and ridges were low and eroded, with shadows streaming away from the viewpoint.
“The light’s too poor to return any color,” Cornelius said.
“What’s the light source?”
“Floods on the firefly. Look at the way the shadows are pointing away from us. But the use of those floods is going to exhaust the batteries fast. I don’t know why it’s so dark…”
“Cruithne looks older,” Emma said. The firefly was panning its camera across an empty landscape; the shadows streamed away. “Those craters are eroded flat, like saucers.”
Malenfant said, “Micrometeorite impacts?”
“It’s possible,” Cornelius said. “But the micrometeorite sand-
blasting must be slow. I assume we’re still out in intergalactic
space. Matter’s pretty thin out here.”
“How slow?”
Cornelius sighed. “I’d say we’re farther into the future by several orders of magnitude compared to the last stop.”
Emma asked Malenfant, “What’s an order of magnitude to a physicist?”
Malenfant grimaced. “A power often.”
Emma tried to take that in. Ten times seventy-five million. Or
a hundred, a thousand times…
The viewpoint was shifting. The landscape started to rock, drop away, return. Slowly more features — ancient, eroded craters — loomed up over the horizon.
Cornelius said, “The firefly is moving. Good.”
“The Sheena,” Emma said.
The beach ball was sitting on Cruithne’s surface once more, complex highlights picked out by the firefly’s light. Within, a shadow was visible, swimming back and forth.
“How extraordinary,” Cornelius said. “To see a living thing across such immense spans of time.”
“She looks healthy,” Emma said. “She’s moving freely; she looks alert.”
“Maybe not much longer,” Malenfant growled. “That damn water ball will freeze.”
“Do you think she understands any of what she is seeing?”
“I doubt it,” Cornelius murmured.