‘It’s done,’ Poole said firmly. ‘No going back.’
Miriam had barely spoken to him since the cavern. She had said more words to me. Now she said, ‘I’ve been thinking. I won’t accept it, Michael. I don’t care about you and Harry and your damn vote. As soon as we get home I’m going to report what we found.’
‘You’ve no evidence—’
‘I’ll be taken seriously enough. And someday somebody will mount another expedition, and confirm the truth.’
‘All right.’ That was all he said. But I knew the matter was not over. He would not meet my mocking eyes.
I wasn’t surprised when, twelve hours later, as Miriam slept cradled in the net draped from the spider’s back, Poole took vials from her pack and pressed them into her flesh, one by a valve on her leg, another at the base of her spine.
I watched him. I’d seen this done before, more than once. ‘You’re going to edit her memories, aren’t you? Download her identity, edit it, load it back . . . All to keep her quiet. Planned this with Dad, did you?’
‘Shut up,’ he snarled, edgy, angry.
‘What will you make her believe – that she stayed up on the Crab with Harry the whole time, while you went exploring and found nothing? That would work, I guess.’
‘I’ve got nothing to say to you.’
But I had plenty to say to him. I am no saint myself, and Poole disgusted me as only a man without morality himself can be disgusted. ‘I think you love her. I even think she loves you. Yet you are prepared to mess with her head and her heart, even her personality, to serve your grandiose ambitions. Let me tell you something. The Poole she left behind in that pocket universe – the one she said goodbye to – he was a better man than you will ever be again. Because he was not tainted by the great crime you committed when you destroyed the cavern. And because he was not tainted by this.
‘And let me make some predictions. No matter what you achieve in the future, Michael Poole, this crime will always be at the root of you, gnawing away. And Miriam will never love you again. Even though you wipe out her memory of these events, there will always be something between you; she will sense the lie. She will leave you, and then you will leave her. One thing I know better than you is people, and what goes on in their hearts. You remember I said this.
‘And, Poole, maybe those whose work you have wrecked will some day force you to a reckoning.’
He was open, defenceless, and I was flaying him. He had no answer. He cradled the unconscious Miriam, even as his machines drained her memory.
We did not speak again until we emerged into the murky daylight of Titan.
Epilogue
It didn’t take the Virtual Poole long to check out the status of his fragile craft.
The power in the lifedome’s internal cells might last – what, a few hours? As far as he could tell there was no functional link between the dome and the rest of the Hermit Crab; none of his controls worked. Maybe that was beyond the scope of Miriam’s simulation. So he had no motive power.
He didn’t grouse about this, nor did he fear his future. Such as it was.
The universe beyond the lifedome was strange, alien. The toiling spiders down on the ice moon seemed like machines, not alive, not sentient. He tired of observing them. He turned on lights, green, blue. The lifedome was a little bubble of Earth, isolated.
Michael was alone, in this whole universe. He could feel it.
He got a meal together. The mundane chore, performed in a bright island of light around the lifedome’s small galley, was oddly cheering. Miriam’s simulation was good, here in his familiar personal space; he didn’t find any limits or glitches. Lovingly constructed, he thought.
He carried the food to his couch, lay back with the plate balancing on one hand, and dimmed the dome lights. He finished his food and set the plate carefully on the floor. He drank a glass of clean water.
Then he went to the freefall shower and washed in a spray of hot water. He tried to open up his senses, to relish every particle of sensation. There was a last time for everything, for even the most mundane experiences. He considered finding some music to play, a book to read. Somehow that might have seemed fitting.
The lights failed. Even the instrument slates winked out.
Well, so much for music. He made his way back to his couch. Though the sky was bright, illuminated by the nearest protosun, the air grew colder; he imagined the heat of the lifedome leaking out. What would get him first, the cold, or the failing air?
He wasn’t afraid. And he felt no regret that he had lost so much potential life, all those AS-extended years. Oddly, he felt renewed: young, for the first time in decades, the pressure of time no longer seeming to weigh on him.
He was sorry he would never know how his relationship with Miriam might have worked out. That could have been something. But he found, in the end, he was glad that he had lived long enough to see all he had.
He was beginning to shiver, the air sharp in his nostrils. He lay back in his couch and crossed his hands on his chest. He closed his eyes.
A shadow crossed his face.
He opened his eyes, looked up. There was a ship hanging over the lifedome.
Michael, dying, stared in wonder.
It was something like a sycamore seed wrought in jet black. Night-dark wings which must have spanned hundreds of kilometres loomed over the Crab, softly rippling.
The cold sank claws into his chest; the muscles of his throat abruptly spasmed, and dark clouds ringed his vision. Not now, he found himself pleading silently, his failing vision locked onto the ship, all his elegiac acceptance gone in a flash. Just a little longer. I have to know what this means. Please . . .
Poole’s consciousness was like a guttering candle flame. Now it was as if that flame was plucked from its wick. And the flame, with its tiny fear, its wonder, its helpless longing to survive, was spun out into a web of quantum functions, acausal and nonlocal.
The last heat fled from the craft; the air in the translucent dome began to frost over the comms panels, the couches, the galley, the abandoned body. And the ship and all it contained, no longer needed, broke up into a cloud of pixels.
A century and a half later, the future invaded the Solar System.
It had been humanity’s own fault; everyone recognised that. Under the leadership of Michael Poole, the ‘Interface project’ – a link to a future a millennium and a half ahead, created by towing a wormhole mouth across interstellar space behind Poole’s GUTship Cauchy – had been completed. Why had Poole’s wormhole time bridge been built? There were endless justifications: what power could a glimpse of the future afford? But the truth was that it had been built for little more than the sheer joy of it. Poole did it because he could.
Later, it would be difficult to recapture the mood of those times. The anthropic theories of cosmological evolution were somewhere near their paradigmatic peak. Some people believed humans were alone in the universe. Others even believed the universe had been designed, by some offstage agency, with the sole object of producing and supporting humans. Given time, humans would do anything, go anywhere, achieve whatever they liked.
But Poole’s Interface had been a bridge to the real future, not the dream. And what Jovik Emry had once called ‘the magnificence and the grandiose folly’ of Michael Poole had devastating consequences.