Stephen Baxter: Last and First Contacts

The last cultures pooled resources and eventually identities, so that, within the cosmological horizon of the sun, in the end there was only a single consciousness, a single point of awareness, hoarding a meagre store of memory.

And still the universe congealed. Elstead’s final cosmological discovery was that there could be no relief from the relentless expansion. The proton decay reduced all matter to a cloud of photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos – and at last the cosmic expansion would draw apart even these remnants. In the end, each particle would be alone within its own cosmological horizon. And at that point, when no complexity of any kind was possible, consciousness would cease at last.

Think of it! There you lie, the last solar mind, trapped in spacetime like a human immersed in thickening ice. Dimly you remember what you once were, how you cupped stars in your hands. Now you can barely move. And the constant expansion of the universe bit by bit shreds your memories, your very identity, a process that can only end in utter oblivion. You have nothing left but resentment and bitterness, and envy for those who went before you.

And yet there is, just occasionally, a moment of relief.

In Earth’s oceans, life teemed close to the surface, where green plankton grew thick on sunlight, a minuscule forest that underpinned food chains. But as one fish ate another, scraps or droppings would fall into the deeper dark beneath. Here swam strange fish of the deep, with huge mouths and enlarged eyes and viper-like teeth. There were whole pallid ecologies down here, surviving on the half-digested morsels that rained down from the shell of sunlit richness above.

So it was in the ocean of time. In the bright, energy-rich ages of the past, time travel had been invented and reinvented many times. And wary travellers would venture into the far future, beyond the death of the suns …

You are trapped in the cold and the dark. But, just occasionally, a morsel from the bright warm past falls down the ages to you, bringing with it a freight of mass and energy and, above all, complexity. Just for a while, you can live again – or at least, allow yourself the luxury of completing a thought.

Elstead’s Bathyscaphe, this unwary time machine, is like a fresh strawberry in the mouth of a starving man. You bite. And yet the taste is bitter …

The Bathysphere rolled and shuddered. The walls lit up with red alert signals. Junge and Elstead were shouting at each other. It was far worse than the gravity-wave wash of the galactic collision.

But it wasn’t the condition of the ship that concerned me, but the state of my own head.

I could feel it in me, another awareness, like a hand rummaging inside my skull. It fed on my memories, my personality, my life – it tried to consume all I had. And at the same time I sensed it , a huge intelligence towering over me, a roomy mind like an abandoned museum, and as desolate. I sensed envy. I sensed pity. I sensed regret . I wept, for myself, and for it.

And then it backed away. But my head was still cut open, my mind cold and exposed to the air.

I saw Junge’s fist slam down on his panic button. Then I blacked out.

We sat in blankets under an intense Mojave sun. After the Cristal Industries medics had pulled us from the half-wrecked Bathyscaphe they wanted to move us into a blockhouse hospital, but none of us would leave the light, the warmth of the young sky. The medics and techs fussed around us, but it was as if only the three of us sat there, still alone in the universe.

Except we hadn’t been alone.

All through the eight-day ascent back to the present we had been trying to piece together what had happened, trying to assemble our fragmentary impressions into a coherent whole. We were still arguing.

‘It could have destroyed us,’ Elstead said. ‘The time shark. But it didn’t. Why not?’

‘Because it pitied us,’ I said. ‘That’s all. It consumes time machines. But ours was early – as primitive as a hot-air balloon, perhaps – maybe even the first of all to get so far. It saw something in us it has lost in itself. Potential. Hope, even. It couldn’t destroy us, any more than a bitter old man could kill a newborn baby.’

‘That’s quite something,’ Elstead murmured. ‘To be the first.’

‘But it is us ,’ Junge said. ‘It is the confluence of all the minds in two galaxies – or a fragment of that confluence anyhow.’

‘Not us,’ I said flatly. ‘Couldn’t you feel it? There was nothing of the human in it, nothing left of us.’

We had been arguing about this all the way home. For all he had goaded me about it, Elstead just hadn’t wanted to believe humanity had had an end. ‘Maybe that’s so, maybe not.’ He was as beat-looking as any of us. But, under his blanket, he rubbed his hands. ‘What we have to do now is make sure it doesn’t turn out like that.’

Junge and I peered at him. I asked, ‘What are you talking about?’

‘We brought back a hell of a lot of data. Maybe we can figure out what went wrong for humanity. And then make sure it doesn’t happen.’

I said, ‘But even if you achieve that – what about the ultimate end? When the expansion scatters the last particles, all complexity is lost—’

‘Does it have to turn out that way?’ And he began to talk of other theories of physics. The dark energy field could have decreased in strength, just enough to slow the expansion. Or an even more eerie force called quintessence could stop the expansion when the last fundamental particles were still in contact with each other – and life, and consciousness, could continue, though at a terribly slow rate. ‘But the story wouldn’t end,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t end.’

‘Elstead—’ After all we had been through I wanted to be gentle. ‘The universe isn’t like that. Cosmology doesn’t accord with that model. We saw it for ourselves.’

He wasn’t daunted. ‘Then we have to find a way to fix it so it does accord. Or else ship out to another universe more to our liking. We’ve plenty of time to figure out the details. It’s always been my belief that however the future works out, Big Crunch or Rip or endless expansion, there has to be a way to preserve information through the terminal catastrophe – there has to be a way for life to survive. Anyhow, that’s my plan.’ He looked at us, his eyes huge in his gaunt face. ‘Are you with me?’

All this was two years ago.

I didn’t go back to England. I can no longer bear the dark and the cold – or the ocean. I took a house on a mountain-top in Colorado, a place bathed in light where I could hardly be further from the sea. I’m close enough to the summit that I can walk around it, and, every morning, I do.

I wrote up our story. I earned my euros.

I’ve found a partner. We’re planning kids. That way I can postpone the death of the universe, just a little, I guess. I’ve kept in touch with Walter Junge; I hope his kids will get on with ours.

I’ve started attending Mass again. I don’t quite know what I’m feeling when I listen to the ancient lessons. But Elstead was surely right that the monumental existence of deep time, and the erasure of all things, is the ultimate challenge to any faith. I suspect that in a few million years we’ll be smart enough it figure it out, and I’m content to wait.

As everybody knows, St John Elstead built a new vessel – Spacetime Bathyscaphe II – bigger and more capable than the first, and stocked it with people of a like mind to himself. I turned down the invitation to join him, but I did send him my crucifix pendant.

Elstead descended once more into the abyss of time, to challenge the destiny he found so unsatisfactory. He has yet to return.