Stephen Baxter - The Time Ships

I recognized him, of course; he was one of the creatures which I had labeled Watchers — those enigmatic visions which had visited me during my trips through time.

The thing drifted closer to me. He held out his tentacles, and I saw those digits were articulated and gathered in two bunches, like distorted, elongated hands. The tentacles were not soft and boneless things, like a squid’s, but multiply jointed, and seemed to terminate in nails or hoofs — they were more like fingers, in fact.

Now it was as if he gathered me up. None of this could be real — I thought desperately — for I was no longer real — was I? I was a point of awareness; there was nothing of me to pick up, in this way…

And yet I felt cradled by him — oddly safe.

The Watcher was immense before me. His flesh was smooth, and covered with fine, downy hairs; his eyes were immense — sky-blue — with all the beautiful complexity of human eyes — and I could even smell him now; he had a soft animal musk about him, a scent of milk, perhaps. I was struck by how human he was. This may seem odd to you, but there — so close to the beast, and suspended in all that unstructured immensity — his common points with the human form were more striking than his grosser differences. I grew convinced that this was human: distorted by tremendous sweeps of evolutionary time, perhaps, but somehow akin to me.

Soon the Watcher released me, and I felt myself float away from him.

His eyes blinked; I heard the slow rustle of his eyelids. Then his huge gaze tracked around the searing, featureless sky, as if seeking something. With the softest of sighs, he drifted away from me. He turned as he did so, and his tentacles dangled after him.

For a moment a stab of panic flooded me — for I had no wish to be stranded again with my own company, here in the desolate perfection of Optimality — but in a moment I drifted after the Watcher. I went without volition, like an autumn leaf swept along by the passage of a carriage’s wheels.

I have mentioned those suggestions of constellations I had seen, shining against the background of light-drenched, infinite space. Presently it seemed to me that one group of stars, in the direction ahead of us, was scattering apart, like a flock of birds; while another, behind me (I was able to turn my point of view) was contracting.

Could it be so? I wondered. Could I be traveling with such enormous rapidity, that even the stars themselves moved across my field of view, like lamp-posts seen from a train?

Suddenly there came a flying multitude of particles of rock, glittering like dust-specks in a sunbeam; they swirled all about me, and vanished again in a twinkling, far behind. I saw nothing of planets, or other rocky objects, in my time in that Optimal History, save for that shoal of dust-motes; and I wondered if the great heat and intense radiation here would disrupt the coalescing of planets from the general debris.

Faster and faster the universe rushed by, a hail of whirling motes against the general brilliancy. Stars grew brighter, to shine out, explode from points into globes that hurtled at me, only to vanish in moments behind me.

We soared upwards, and hovered over the plane of a galaxy; it was a great Catherine-wheel of stars whose variegated colors shone, pale and attenuated, against the general whiteness of the background. But soon even this immense system was dwindling below me, now to a whirling, luminous disc, and at last to a minute patch of hazy light, lost amid millions of others.

And, throughout all this astonishing flight you must picture it — I had the vision of the dark, round shoulders of the Watcher, as he bobbed through that tide of light just ahead of me, quite unperturbed by the star-scapes through which we traveled.

I thought of the times I had witnessed this creature and his companions. There had been that faint hint of babbling during my first expeditions in time — and then my first clear view of a Watcher when, in the light of the dying sun of far futurity, I had watched that object struggling on the distant shoal — a thing like a football, glistening with the water. I had thought it, then, a denizen of that doomed world — but it had not been, any more than I. And, later, there had been those later visions — glimpsed through a glow of Plattnerite green — of the Watchers as they hovered about the machine, as I fled through time.

Throughout my brief, spectacular career as a Time Traveler, I saw now, I had been followed — studied — by the Watchers.

The Watchers must be able to follow at will the lines of Imaginary Time, crossing the infinite Histories of the Multiplicity with the ease of a steamship traversing an ocean’s currents; the Watchers had taken the crude, explosive Nonlinearity Engines developed by the Constructors and developed them to a fine pitch.

Now we journeyed into an immense void — a Hole in Space — which was walled off by threads and planes, sheets of light composed of galaxies and clouds of loose stars. Even here, millions of light years from the nearest of those star nebulae, the general wash of radiation persisted, and the sky all around me was alive with light. And beyond the rough walls of this cavity I could make out a larger structure: I could see that “my” void was but one of many in a greater field of star-systems. It was as if the universe was filled with a sort of foam, with bubbles blown into a froth of shining star-stuff.

Soon, I began to make out an odd sort of regularity about this foam. On one side, for instance, my void was marked off by a flat plane of galaxies. This plane, of matter gathered together so densely that it glowed significantly more brilliant than the general background, was so marked and clearly defined — so flat and extensive — that the thought popped into my fecund mind that it might not be a natural arrangement.

Now I looked about more carefully. Over here, I thought, I could see another plane — clean and well-defined — and there I made out a sort of lance of light, utterly rectilinear, which seemed to span space from side to side — and there again I saw a void, but in the shape of a cylinder, quite clearly delineated…

The Watcher was rolling about before me now, his tentacle-clumps bathed in star-light, and his eyes were wide and fixed on me.

Artificial. The word was inescapable — the conclusion so clear that I should have drawn it long before, I realized, had it not been for the monstrous scale of all this!

This Optimal History was engineered — and this artifice must be what the Watcher had brought me on this immense journey to understand.

I recalled old predictions that an infinite universe would be prone to disastrous gravitational collapse — it was another reason why our own cosmos could not, logically, be infinite. For, just as the earth and other planets had coalesced from knots in that turbulent cloud of debris around the infant sun, so there would be eddies in this greater cloud of galaxies which populated the Optimal History — eddies into which stars and galaxies should tumble, on an immense scale.

But the Watchers were evidently managing the evolution of their cosmos to avoid such catastrophes: I had learned how Space and Time are themselves dynamic, adjustable entities. The Watchers were manipulating the bending, collapsing, twisting and shearing of Space and Time themselves, in order to achieve their objective of a stable cosmos.

Of course there could be no end to this careful engineering, if this universe were to remain viable — and, I thought, if the universe was eternal, there could have been no beginning to it either. That reflection troubled me, briefly: for it was a paradox, a causal circle. Life would be required to exist, in order to engineer the conditions which were prerequisite to the existence of Life here…