Robert Sawyer - End of an Era

I winced. “Where did it happen?”

“In her house.” Dan sounded sad. “She’s never been the same since. Frankly, she doesn’t do much of anything anymore. Her job is mostly scheduling other people’s access to the cyclotron, instead of doing any original work of her own. They keep her on here, hoping that one day the old Ching-Mei will come back, but it’s been five years now.” He shook his head again. “It’s tragic. Who knows what she would have come up with if that hadn’t happened?”

I shook my head, too, trying to clear the mental picture of that defenseless woman being violated. “Who knows, indeed?” I said at last.

I went to TRIUMF again first thing the next morning. This time, strangely, Dr. Huang did invite me into her little office. There were awards and diplomas on the walls, but none with recent dates. Books and papers were piled everywhere. As soon as I’d entered, we realized there was a problem: the office only had one chair in it.

“I’m sorry, Dr. Thackeray. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a visitor here.” She disappeared out the door and returned a few minutes later wheeling a stenographer’s chair in front of her. “I hope this will do.”

I sat down and looked at her expectantly.

“I’m sorry about you and your wife,” she said abruptly.

“We’re still together.”

“Oh. I’m glad. You obviously love her immensely.”

“That I do.” There was silence for a time. “You’ve read the entire diary?”

“I have,” she said. “Twice.”

“And?”

“And,” she said slowly, “based on dozens of little details that you couldn’t have possibly known, I believe it is genuine. I believe it really does describe what my studies would have made possible.”

I sat up straight. “Then you could go back to your research! You could make stasis and then time travel possible. Hell, Ching-Mei, you could win your Nobel Prize!”

“No.” Her face had lost all color. “That’s over. Dead.”

I looked at her, still not comprehending. She seemed so delicate, so fragile. Finally, softly, I said, “Why?”

She looked away and I could see that she was rallying some inner strength. I waited as patiently as I could and, after a minute, she went on. “Physicists and paleontologists,” she said. “In a way, we’re both time travelers. We both hunt backward for the very beginnings.”

I nodded.

“As a physicist, I try to understand how the universe came into being. As a paleontologist, you’re interested in how life began.” She spread her arms. “But the fact is, both fields of endeavor come up short when you go right back. The origin of matter has never been satisfactorily explained. Oh, we talk vaguely about random quantum-mechanical fluctuations in a vacuum somehow spontaneously having given rise to the first matter, but we really don’t know.”

“Uh-huh.”

“And,” she continued, “you can read the fossil record back to almost the beginning of life, but as to how life actually arose, again, no one is really sure. We speak nebulously about self-replicating macromolecules supposedly arising spontaneously through some random series of events.”

“What are you talking about?” I said, baffled by where all this was going.

“I’m talking about time travel, Dr. Thackeray. I’m talking about why time travel is inevitable.”

She’d lost me completely. “Inevitable?”

“It had to come into existence. The future must be able, with hindsight, to rewrite the past.” She leaned forward slightly in her chair. “Someday we’ll be able to create life in the laboratory. But we will only be able to do it by reverse-engineering existing life. Something as complex as the universe, as complex as life, has to be reverse-engineered. It has to be built from a known model.”

“Not the first time, obviously.”

“Yes,” she said, “especially the first time. That’s the whole point. Without time travel, life is impossible.”

“You mean someone from the future went back into the past and created life?”

“Yes.”

“And he knew how to do it because he had the lifeforms from his time as models to study?”

“Yes.”

I shook my head. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“Yes, it does. For years, physicists have bandied about something called the strong anthropic principle. It says the universe must—must—be constructed in such a way so as to give rise to intelligent life. The purpose of the anthropic principle was to explain the existence of our unlikely universe, which has a number of remarkable coincidences about it, all of which were required for us to be possible.”

“For instance?”

Ching-Mei waved her hand. “Oh, just as one of a great many examples, if the strong nuclear force were even five percent weaker than it is in this universe, protons and neutrons couldn’t bind together and the stars wouldn’t shine. On the other hand, if the strong force were just a little more powerful than it is in this universe, then it could overcome the electrical repulsion between protons, allowing them to bind directly together. That would make the kind of slow hydrogen burning that stars do impossible; instead, hydrogen clouds would explode long before they could coalesce into stars.”

“I think I’m getting a headache.”

She smiled ever so slightly. “That goes with the territory.”

“You’re saying someone from the future went back in time four billion years and created the first life on Earth.”

“That’s right.”

“But I thought the Huang Effect could only go back—what did the diary say?—a hundred and four million years.”

“The Huang Effect was a first-generation time machine, created for a very specific purpose. It might not be the only or the best solution to the problem of time travel.”

“Hmm. Okay. But it’s not just the creation of life you’re talking about.”

“No.”

“You’re also saying that someone from the future—the very far future, I’d guess—went right back to the beginning, back some fifteen billion years, and created matter.”

“That’s right.”

“Created it, with exactly the properties needed to give rise to us, having learned how to do so by studying the matter from his or her own time.”

“Yes.”

I felt slightly dazed. “That’s mind-boggling. It’s like—like…”

“It’s like we’re our own God,” said Dr. Huang. “We created ourselves in our own image.”

“Then what about the Sternberger ?”

“You’ve read the diary. You know what that other version of you does in the end.”

“Yes, but—”

“Don’t you see?” she said. “The Sternberger mission was only one of many instances in which time travel was used to set things right. The flow of events requires periodic adjustment. That’s chaos theory for you: you can’t accurately predict the development of any complex system. Therefore, you can’t just create life and leave it to evolve on its own. Every once in a while you have to give it a push in the direction you want it to go.”

“So—so you’re saying that someone determined that the timeline had to be altered in order to give rise to us?”

“That’s right,” she said.

“But the time-traveling Brandy wrote that he could hunt dinosaurs, or do anything else, with impunity—that any changes he made wouldn’t matter.”

“I’m sure he believed that—he had to, of course, or he never would have done the things that needed doing. It was crucial that he believe that lie. But he was wrong. There was a mathematical string between the Sternberger in the past and the launch point in the present. The changes he made did indeed work their way up that string, altering the timeline as they did so, rewriting the last sixty-five million years of Earth’s history, making our world possible. By the time the string had been hauled all the way back to 2013, the conditions that had given rise to the Sternberger had been eliminated, and our version of the timeline existed instead.”