“Not to an astrophysicist,” Stef said with a smile. “That is, a philosopher who knows the stars, Titus. In my Culture we were pretty sure that the universe was a bit less than fourteen billion years old. So why should the universe last longer than a few billion more? You see? Not trillions or hundreds of trillions of years, or beyond the age of proton decay… In my Culture we used to call this the Doomsday Argument. Why should the future be so dissimilar to the past? Shouldn’t we expect to find ourselves somewhere in the middle of its life span, not in its first few instants?”
Mardina was touching her belly again, as if trying to shield her baby from all this. “Three point five billion years. You’re saying the universe will die, three point five billion years after the year I was born. If I understand these numbers at all—that’s still an immense stretch of time.”
“Of course,” Stef said. “But here’s the catch, Mardina. We have been brought to the end of that stretch. That’s what we’ve determined—what the ColU has established definitively from his study of the sky.”
“It isn’t just the aging of the stars, the position of the galaxies,” the ColU said. “That would be enough for a rough estimate. There are also distortions in the background glow of the sky, the fading relic of the Big Bang explosion. Distortions caused by events from the future.”
Titus tapped the pot with a fingernail. “Because of the proximity of this wall of yours.”
“Which is a tremendously energetic horizon that sends back signals, back through time. Signals that show up as distortions in the background radiation. That is why I am able to be so precise. This, the age in which we find ourselves, is the End Time—”
“I don’t want to hear it.” Mardina stood, suddenly, pulling away from Beth, the weight of her blankets almost making her stumble into the fire. “I don’t want to hear any more.” She clamped her hands over her ears, and stomped out.
Beth half rose. “She needs her boots, her cloak, if she’s going out there—”
“No.” Chu was already on his feet, and grabbing his own boots. “Let me. It is our problem.”
Beth nodded to the rest. “Let him go. It will be harder for them, to be so young, to have to face this. We must let them find their way.”
Beth longed to go after her daughter, but she made herself sit still. “You’re a wise man, Titus Valerius.”
He smiled, looking tired. “No. Just an old one, and a survivor. So, Collius. Here we are in the far future, as I understand it. How long until we encounter this—edge?”
The ColU said simply, “A year. No more.”
Titus nodded. “And what then? What will happen?”
Stef said, “A wall of light.”
Titus heaved a huge sigh. “Very well. From the ethereal to the practical. Shall we consider our route for tomorrow? And then we all need sleep, if Morpheus grants it tonight.”
68
The antistellar was the place where all the gravity-train tunnel mouths converged.
At the final destination, as the rest of the party went through the by-now practiced routine of grappling their sled-cart out of the frictionless tube, Stef walked forward, away from the tunnel. The ice under her booted feet was concrete-hard but ridged, crumpled, wind-scoured—evidently old—and was not slick, maybe it was too cold for that; the footing was good. Once, back in her original timeline, she’d skimmed in space over the polar caps of Mars, which were very old accretions of water ice, the deepest layers perhaps a couple of million years old. The ice under her feet now might be a thousand times older than that. She really had been brought to an antique time, an old universe.
And the dark-side cold itself—she seemed to remember that too, from her first experience here. This point furthest from the warmth of the star was the center of a hemisphere of endless night, of ice and dark. Yet there was a limit to the cold, even here; some warmth at least washed around the world from the day side. It was evidently a survivable cold. Still, her breath steamed, and the frigid air plucked at her lungs and nose and eyes.
As she walked she could clearly see, by the light of an Andromeda reduced to a bloated sunset sitting on the horizon, more tunnels, dark gashes in the ground: a network of tunnels lacing this chill hemisphere of the planet, and all converging here, at the antistellar, at this point of geographic symmetry.
And at the precise antistellar point itself, the place all the tunnels seemed to be pointing to—something was there, a kind of flattened dome from which came a glow of pale light, with structures dimly visible within.
Earthshine: it had to be him.
Stef walked back to her companions. By now they had the cart set up on its runners, ready for the final haul over the ice to the dome. The ColU was in its pack on Chu’s back. Mardina, more visibly pregnant every day despite her layers of cold-weather clothing, stood at Chu’s side, their gloved hands locked together, breath wreathed around their faces.
Titus grunted, pointing to the dome. “So our long journey is over—and there is the obvious destination. We should be ready to defend ourselves.”
The ColU said now, “You may be right, legionary. But consider this. Earthshine needs no such shelter as that dome, whereas you do need shelter. Perhaps the dome itself should be seen as a gesture of welcome.”
Titus nodded cautiously. “I see your reasoning. But consider this, in turn. If we would be welcome, so would Ari and Inguill have been, if they got this far. We should be prepared for whatever they are up to in there. Also, if Earthshine, or his image, could walk around on this ice butt-naked—”
Beth laughed. “Titus, he could fly through the air if he wanted to.”
“Then why isn’t he here now? I’m quite sure he’s as aware of us as we are of him. Why not come out and see us?” Titus glanced around at the group. “It’s clear that there’s much about this situation that we don’t yet understand. We go to the dome. It’s the obvious destination. The only destination. But we go in with our hands open in gestures of peace and friendship, and our weapons sheathed at our backs. Agreed?”
Stef shook her head. “You’re a terrible cynic, Titus Valerius. And I’d like to see you in a knife fight; you’re like an overweight panda in that cold weather gear… But you and your instincts have kept us all alive this long. Agreed.”
They formed into a loose party, with Titus, Chu, Clodia and Beth hauling the cart toward the dome, and Mardina walking with Stef at the rear. Titus and Chu were in the front rank, and Stef could see their pugio daggers tucked in the back of their belts, glittering in Andromeda light.
Mardina linked her arm through Stef’s, and they walked cautiously together. Stef peered up. “That sky isn’t what it was when I came this way before, with your grandfather Yuri, in that other timeline. It’s been so long, the stars have swum around the sky, or aged and changed, the constellations have all melted away. I thought I would still be able to see her, though, up at the zenith. Brilliant she was, and as we walked to the antistellar we saw her steadily rise in the sky unlike any star.”
“‘Her’? Who are you talking about, Stef?”
“A creature called Angelia. A creation of my father.”
“Another artificial person, then. Like the ColU, like Earthshine.”
“Yes. Actually she was also a kind of ship. She and her lost sisters… I got to know her. I don’t suppose she could have survived this long. Why, in a billion years or two her very substance would have sublimed away, probably.”