Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

And, just as our History has shriveled to a single, searing point, so the Multiplicity of Histories has converged. The Boundary itself is melting away — can you understand it? — lost in the infinite possibilities of the collapsed Multiplicity…

And then there was a single, very brilliant, pulse of light: of Plattnerite green.

The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about — stretched and battered — as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.

Nebogipfel?…

His voice was joyful — exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors…

The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the gray-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unraveling of Space and Time.

I was traveling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the center of the sun.

The Time Ships no longer accompanied me — perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation — and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me — like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp’s burst — were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.

Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?

… Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?

I am here.

What is happening? Are we traveling through time again?

No, he said. Still he had that note of exultation — of triumph — in his disembodied voice.

Then what? What is happening to us?

Do you not see? Could you not understand? We passed beyond the Nucleation. We reached the Boundary. And —

Yes?

Think of the Multiplicity as a surface, he said. The totality of the Multiplicity is smooth, closed, featureless — a globe. And Histories are like lines of longitude, drawn between the poles of the sphere…

And, in the Time Ships, we reached one pole.

Yes. That point where all the longitude lines converge. And, in that precise instant of infinite possibility, the Constructors fired their Nonlinearity Engines…

The Constructors have traveled across the Histories, he said. They — and we — have followed paths of Imaginary Time, paths scrawled sideways across the surface of the Multiplicity globe, until we have reached this new History…

Now the cloud of Constructors — there were millions of them, I thought — drifted apart, like fragments of a child’s firework. It was as if they were trying to fill up the infant vacuum with the light and awareness we had brought from a different cosmos. And as the new universe unraveled, the afterglow of Creation faded to an immense darkness.

It was the end-result — the logical conclusion — of my own dabbling with the properties of light, and the distortion of the frames of Space and Time that went with it. All of this, I realized, even the collapsing of the universe and this great progression across Histories — all of it had come about, growing inevitably, from my experiments, from my first, dear machine of brass and quartz…

It had led to this: the passage of Mind between universes.

But where have we come to? What is this History? Is it like ours?

No, Nebogipfel said. No, it is not like ours.

Will we be able to live here?

I do not know… it was not chosen for us. Remember that the Constructors have sought, he said, a universe — out of all the in finite sheaf of possibilities that is the Multiplicity — a universe which is optimal for them.

Yes. But what can “optimal “mean for a Constructor? I conjured up vague images of Heaven — of peace, security, beauty, light — but I knew these imaginings were hopelessly anthropomorphic.

Now I saw a new light emerging, from the darkness all around us. At first I thought it was the returned glow of that fireball at the beginning of time — but it was too gentle, too insistent, for that; it was more like star-light…

The Constructors are not men, the Morlock said. But they are the Heirs of Humanity. And the audacity of what they have accomplished is astonishing.

Nebogipfel said, Among all the myriad possibilities, the Constructors have sought out that universe — the single one — which is Infinite in extent, and Eternal in age: where that Boundary at the Beginning of Time has been pushed into the infinite past.

We have traveled beyond the Nucleation, to the Boundary of Time and Space themselves. And ape-fingers have reached out to the Singularity that lies there — and pushed it back!

Star-light, now, was erupting from beneath the darkness, all around me; the stars were igniting everywhere; and soon the sky blazed, as bright everywhere as the surface of the sun.

An infinite universe!

You might look out, through the smoky clouds of London, at the stars which mark out the sky’s cathedral roof; it is all so immense, so unchanging, that it is easy to suppose that the cosmos is an unending thing, and that it has endured forever.

…But it cannot be so. And one only need ask a common sense question — why is the night sky dark? — to see why.

If you had an infinite universe, with stars and galaxies spread out through an endless void, then whichever direction in the sky you looked, your eye must meet a ray of light coming from the surface of a star. The night sky would glow everywhere as brightly as the sun…

The Constructors had challenged the darkness of the sky itself.

My impressions had an adamantine hardness: there was no blurring softness, no atmosphere, nothing but that infinite brilliancy set with myriad acute points and specks of light. Here and there I thought I could make out patterns and distinguishing features — constellations of brighter stars against the general background — but the whole effect was so dazzling that I could never find a given pattern twice.

My companion sparks of Plattnerite light — the Constructors, with Nebogipfel among them — receded from me, above and below, like green-glowing fragments of a dream. I was left isolated. I felt no fear, no discomfort. The buffeting I had experienced at the moment of Nonlinearity had faded, leaving me without a sense of place, time or duration…

But then — after an interval I could not measure — I perceived I was no longer alone.

The form before me coalesced against the star-light, as if a magic-lantern slide had been held up before me. It began as a mere shadow against that universal glare — at first I was not sure if there was anything there at all, save for the projections of my own desperate imagination — but at last it gained a sort of solidity.

It was a ball, apparently of flesh, dangling in space, as unsupported as I was. I judged it to be eight or ten feet from me (wherever, and whatever, I was) and perhaps four feet across. Tentacles dangled from its underside. I heard a soft, babbling sound. There was a fleshy beak, no sign of nostrils, and two huge eyelids which now wrinkled up like curtains, to reveal eyes — human eyes! — that fixed on me.