“She’s going back to the portal,” Malenfant said. “She’s going on.”
Something shrank, deep inside Emma. Not again, she thought.
“Perhaps it’s a kind of morbid curiosity,” Cornelius said dryly. “To keep on going forward, on and on, to the end of things.”
“No,” Emma said. “You saw her. She’s not morbid.”
“Then what?”
“It’s as if she’s looking for something. But what? The more I see of this future universe, the more it seems—”
“Pointless?” asked Malenfant.
She was surprised at that, from him. “Yes, exactly.”
His face wore a complex expression. He’s taking it hard, she thought, this cold, logical working-out of his dreams. Malenfant campaigns for an expansive future for humankind: survival, essentially, into the far downstream. Well, here it is, Malenfant: everything you dreamed of.
And it is appalling, terrifying: proof that if we are to survive we must sacrifice our humanity.
Cornelius shrugged. “Pointless? What a trivial response. We are the first, the only intelligence in the universe. We have no objective, save endurance: nothing to do but survive, as long as we can.
“And in fact this era may be the peak, when we learn to tap these giant energy sources, the greatest in the universe, sources so great they outshine our fusion-driven stars as if they were candles.”
“The manhood of the race,” Emma said dryly.
“Perhaps. And—”
“And are they like us?” Emma asked.
“What does it matter? Your thinking is so small. Modern humans could never handle such projects as this. We can’t imagine how it is to be such a creature, to think in such a way.
“Perhaps there is no real comparison between them and us, no contact possible. But it does not matter. They are magnificent.”
She was repelled. She thought: You’re wrong. There had to be something more to strive for than that, more than simple survival in a running-down universe.
But then, she had no children. So these black-hole miners, however remote, however powerful, were not her descendants; she was cut off, a bubble of life lost in the far upstream.
The firefly worked its painful way across the time-smoothed landscape toward the portal.
Damien Krimsky:
…Anyhow that’s why I went AWOL for so long, Mr. Hench. I hope you can understand that.
I support Bootstrap. I’m a big fan of Reid Malenfant and everything he’s trying to do. The time I spent working with you on those BDBs in the Mojave desert was probably the most meaningful of my life.
It’s just that when all that Carter stuff came out of the media, well, maybe I went a little crazy. If the world’s going to end anyhow, what’s the point of paying taxes?
That was why I, umm, disappeared.
Anyhow I saw what Malenfant broadcast, the galaxies and the black holes and all. And now I feel different. Who wouldn’t? Now I know my children have a chance to grow old and happy, and their children too, on and on until we’ve conquered the stars.
Life is worth living again.
I know there are those who say it doesn’t matter. That if the fu ture is going to be so wonderful anyhow we don’t need to do anything now. But I feel a sense of duty. It’s the same way I felt when I saw my own kid in my wife’s arms for the first time. At that moment I knew how I would spend the rest of my life.
So I’m coming back to the Mojave. I have clearances from the rehab and detox clinics, as well as from the parole board. I hope you’ll welcome me back.
Your friend,
Damien Krimsky
“Moondancer”:
People have been arguing for months about whether this Carter stuff can be correct. And now they’re arguing about whether the far-future visions are hoaxes.
Of course they can’t both be true.
And it’s amazing that you have stock market crashes and suicide cults and wackos who think they need to rip up the cities because the end of the world is coming, and another bunch of nuts doing exactly the same thing because the end of the world isn ‘t coming.
Of course the far future visions are all genuine.
This is our fate. And it’s fantastic! Wonderful! Don’t you think so?
Have you even thought where you’d like to travel if you had a time machine, and could go anywhere, past or future? Maybe you would go hunt T Rex, or listen to Jesus preach, or sail with Columbus. What do you think? I know what I’d do. I’d ride off to join the black-hole miners in the Incredible Year A.D. Four Hundred Billion. Man, will those guys party.
What? How come I know the future stuff is real? Because I’ve seen it myself. Also, as you probably know, there were secret codes in the L.A. Times write-up comprehensible only by other Travelers, confirming the veracity of the pictures.
I have a Cap — careful with it! — and when I wear it, it projects my sense of selfastrally…
Emma Stoney:
This time the golden beach ball was visible as soon as the firefly emerged from the blue flash of transition. The beach ball was standing on a smooth, featureless plain, square in the middle of the softscreen. An arc of the portal was visible beside the beach ball, a bright blue stripe.
The sky was dark. The black hole rose had disappeared. The only light falling on the beach ball seemed to be the glow of the firefly’s dimming floods. The belt of horizon Emma could see looked like a perfect circular span, unmarked by ridges or craters.
The squid swam through her bubble of water, lethargic.
Emma watched the Cruithne landscape slide past the firefly’s panning camera lens. Its smoothness was unnerving, unnatural. She felt no awe, no wonder, only a vague irritation.
“That damn asteroid has taken a beating,” Malenfant said. “Look at that mother. Smooth as a baby’s butt—”
“You don’t understand,” Cornelius said testily. “I — or rather my electronic friends — think there’s more than simple erosion here. The gravimeters on the firefly are telling me the morphology of Cruithne has changed. I mean, the asteroid’s shape has changed. Out here in the dark, it has flowed into a sphere.”
Malenfant said, “A sphere? How the hell?”
“I thj.nk this is liquefaction. If that’s so, it means that proton decay lifetimes must exceed ten to power sixty-four years — and that means—”
“Whoa, whoa.” Malenfant held up his hands. “Liquefaction? You’re saying the asteroid flowed like a liquid? How? Did it heat up, melt?”
“No. What is there to heat it up?”
“What, then?”
“Malenfant, over enough time, the most solid matter will behave like a very viscous liquid. All solid objects flow. It is a manifestation of quantum mechanical tunneling that—”
Malenfant said, “I don’t believe it.”
“You’re seeing it,” Cornelius said tightly. “Malenfant, the far future is not the world you grew up in. Marginal processes can come to dominate, if they’re persistent, over long enough time scales.”
“How long?” Malenfant snapped.
Cornelius checked his softscreen. “A minimum of ten to power sixty-five years. Umm, that’s a hundred thousand trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion. Look. Start with a second. Zoom out; factor it up to get the life of the Earth. Zoom out again, to get a new period, so long Earth’s lifetime is like one second. Then nest it. Do it again. And again…”