“And now, here on Per Ardua, we’re seeing the same thing over again. How long would it take? How much time has elapsed here since humans arrived? How far into the future have we been projected, ColU? More than millions of years, more than hundreds of millions…”
The ColU simulated a sigh. “I apologize for my reticence. You have asked these questions many times before. I can make only rough guesses based on the data I have so far, the evidence from the geology here, the biology—even from the evolution of the star itself. I will be able to make much more accurate estimates of the date when I see the dark-side sky, and I can gather astronomical data. But of course there is an upper bound.”
Stef frowned. “An upper bound? How can there be an upper bound on the future—what upper bound?”
“The End Time,” the ColU said simply.
That was when Mardina and Chu burst into the camp, scuffed and dusty and breathing hard.
Mardina said, “You keep saying you want to see the sky, ColU.”
“Yes—”
“Well, your luck is in. You can see it from the slope, not much of a climb from here. Chu, get him into his pack.”
“See what?” Stef demanded. “The stars?”
Mardina gave her only a quizzical look. “Sort of. See for yourself. Come on! And where’s my mother?”
The four of them, Stef, Chu, Mardina and Beth, stood on a hillside, looking out over the night lands of Per Ardua, over an ocean of dark. Only the faintest reflected glow from the summit above reached them here.
And above them, in a terminator sky marred for once only by scattered cloud…
Not stars, no, Stef saw. Not just stars. It was a band of light, an oval, an ellipse—no, surely it was a disc tipped away from her, all but edge on. The overall impression was of a reddish color, but bright white sparks were scattered over the pink, like shards of glass on a velvet cushion. There was a brighter blob at the center, and lanes of light sweeping around that core. As eyes adapted to the low light she saw finer detail, what looked like turbulent clouds in those outer lanes, and here and there a brighter spark, almost dazzling. And when she looked away from this tremendous celestial sculpture, she could see stars—ordinary stars, isolated sparks scattered thin, though many of them seemed reddish too. But the sky was dominated by the great ellipse.
And, oddly, the thing she noticed next was Mardina’s hand slipping into Chu’s, and squeezing tight.
Stef said sharply. “You know, ColU, you should have warned us about all this.”
“But I was never sure. I can never lead; I can only advise.”
“It’s a galaxy,” Beth said, a little wildly. “Even I know that much. Like our Galaxy, the Milky Way… But what the hell’s it doing up there? Is it our Galaxy?” She shook her head. “I grew up on Per Ardua, remember, on the day side. I never even saw the stars until I got to Mercury. Has Proxima been—I don’t know—flung out of the Galaxy somehow, so we see it from the outside?”
“Nothing like that,” the ColU said gently.
“That’s not our Galaxy at all,” Stef snapped. “That’s Andromeda, isn’t it? Bigger than ours, I think. The two galaxies were the biggest of the local group. Now, when I was a kid playing at astronomy with my father, on the rare nights we had clear skies in Seattle—”
And, in some realities, with her impossible sister Penny by her side.
“—we used to look for Andromeda. Fabulous in a telescope, but you could just see it even with the naked eye. A smudge of light. Now that, I would say,” and she started taking rough sightings of the width of the object with her thumb, “is, what, thirty times the apparent diameter of Earth’s sun?”
“More like forty,” the ColU said.
Mardina was staring at her. “So how did that thing get so big?”
“It didn’t. It got closer.” Stef closed her eyes, remembering her own basic astronomy classes from long ago. “In my time Andromeda was two and a half million light-years away. Right, ColU? But even then we could see it was approaching our Galaxy. The two star systems were heading for a collision, which—well, which would be spectacular. Now, as I recall, the best predictions for the timing of that collision were way off in the future. Four billion years or more?”
“More like four and a half,” the ColU said.
Stef squinted. “So if that beast, which is around two hundred thousand light-years across, is that apparent size in the sky, I could estimate its current distance—”
“Done,” the ColU said. “Colonel Kalinski, I now know we have traveled—or rather the Hatches have taken us—some three and a half billion years into the future. That is, after the epoch from which we set out.”
Beth, Mardina, Chu just stared at each other, and then into the slate hanging from Chu’s neck, as if the ColU’s mind resided there, as if behind a human eye.
But Stef understood immediately. “Yes, yes. So the collision is still a billion years away—”
“If it were to happen at all,” the ColU said enigmatically.
“I wonder what it must have done to cultures that emerged after our own, to have that hanging in the sky. Growing larger century by century. How many religions rose and fell in its light, awed and terrified?”
“We’ll never know, Stef Kalinski,” the ColU murmured.
“And, over three billion years—that’s presumably more than enough time for all the processes we’ve seen here on Per Ardua to have come about. For almost every trace of humanity to have eroded away. Even for species from two different star systems to find a way to evolve into one.”
Mardina looked around the strange sky. “I don’t understand. Three and a half billion years… It’s meaningless. Where is Terra? Where’s the sun?”
“I’m afraid I’m not sure,” the ColU said. “The sun and the Alpha Centauri system, the Centaur’s Hoof, were once near neighbors. But by now they will have wandered far from each other, as the Galaxy has turned on its axis. Earth, Terra, and the other planets will still orbit the sun. But Earth is probably lifeless; the sun, slowly heating, will have sterilized the inner planets—oh, as much as two or three billion years ago. But the aging sun has not yet entered its terminal cycle, the red giant phase when the sun will swell and swallow the inner worlds.”
Earth lifeless. Suddenly Stef shivered, despite the comparative warmth of her clothing. To be alone on this world was one thing. To be taken out of one reality stream and dumped in another was extraordinary. But to be stranded in a future so remote that Earth was dead, that presumably nothing like the humanity she had known could still survive…
“This is terrifying,” she murmured.
“Indeed, Colonel Kalinski,” the ColU said.
Chu was looking around the sky. “I rode on starships,” he said slowly. “I was held in slave pens. But when I passed windows, I glimpsed the skies of many worlds. And this is quite different. I mean, even aside from the approaching star storm, Andromeda. The stars seem more dim, more sparse.”
“That’s a good observation,” the ColU said. “Even in our time the great ages of star making were ending. Now there are fewer young stars, more aging ones.”
Chu asked, “And where are the other stars of the Centaur’s Hoof? They should be two brilliant lanterns in the sky.”