Stephen Baxter - Time

“But how do you know what to send?”

“You were there. I know what to send because I remember what I received. And since we did receive the message, we came here, and we can send it. So it’s all perfectly consistent, Malenfant. Just—”

“Backward.”

“I would have said looped. And the universe has reconstructed itself, knitting itself together quantum transaction by quantum transaction, around this central causal loop.”

“So where did the message come from in the first place? The information in it, I mean. If you’re just copying what you received—”

Cornelius stopped tapping and sighed. “That’s a deeper question, Malenfant. At any point in spacetime, at any now, there are an infinite number of pasts that could have led to the present state, and an infinite number of possible futures that flow from it. This is called the solution space of the universal wave function. Somewhere out in that solution space some equivalent of me figured out and wrote down the message, and sent it back with a Feynman radio.”

“Even if I understood that,” Malenfant growled, “I wouldn’t like it. Information coming out of nothing.”

“Then don’t accept it. Maybe the message just appeared, spontaneously.”

“That’s impossible.”

“How do you know? We don’t have a conservation law for knowledge.” And he carried on with his patient tapping.

The cold, the endless chill of this meaningless, empty cosmos seemed to sink deeper into Malenfant’s bones. “We’re going to freeze to death if we stay here,” he said.

“Our suits aren’t made for extremes,” Cornelius whispered. “Not for extended periods of heat and cold, or for extremes of temperature. But this won’t last forever.”

“Another Crunch?”

“Yes. But it may not be for a while—”

And there was no time to say any more, for there was a howl of radio static, a burst of sodium light that washed over them.

Malenfant, grunting with shock, cradling Emma, tried to turn.

Something came erupting out of the portal: complex, spinning, dazzling light flaring. It was a human. Dressed in a heavy black spacesuit, face hidden behind a gold visor. Spinning about its waist — crazily, not under control.

The space-suited figure carried a gun, a snub-nosed pistol, raised toward Malenfant.

Malenfant struggled to turn, to shield Emma with his body, but his suit, the tether, impeded him.

The trooper was wearing a backpack much bulkier than Malenfant’s. It had small bronze nozzles and big wraparound arm units with what looked like joysticks. Maybe it was some kind of MMU, a manned maneuvering unit. Sodium light was flaring from lamps. The suit looked as if it had once been as black as coal, but now it was badly charred, the surface flaking off, so as the figure spun it gave off a shower of scorched flakes like a firework.

Malenfant called, “Wait. Can you hear me? You followed us all the way here, through a thousand universes. I can’t believe you want to kill us—”

Cornelius was moving. He had dragged at a tether and launched himself across space, directly at the trooper.

“Cornelius!”

The trooper, still spinning, swiveled and fired at Cornelius. Malenfant saw the gun spark — once, twice — in complete silence. Cornelius crumpled about his middle. But he was still moving, still floating through space, his limbs still working, reaching.

His belly hit the trooper’s legs. He clung on, groping at the trooper’s suit.

Meanwhile the trooper continued to fire; Malenfant saw at least one more shot slice through Cornelius’ legs. But now Cornelius, clambering behind the trooper, was out of reach. The momentum of their combined bodies turned their motion into a clumsy, uncoordinated, complex roll.

The trooper squirmed, trying to get hold of Cornelius. But Cornelius, laboring, had managed to reach down between the backpack and the trooper’s suit. He yanked loose a hose. Vapor vented into space, immediately freezing into crystals.

The trooper’s motions became scrambled, panicky. Legs kicked helplessly, and gloved hands scrabbled at the helmet as if striving to pull it off.

It took only a minute for the trooper’s struggles to diminish, a few last kicks, desperate scrabbles at helmet, chest panel, backpack.

And then, stillness.

Even before that, Cornelius was still too.

There was blood inside Cornelius’ helmet. It had stuck to the visor and was drying there. Droplets of it seemed to be orbiting inside the helmet itself. Malenfant couldn’t see Cornelius’ face, and he was grateful for that.

I’m going to miss you, he thought. Cornelius, the man who understood the future, even other universes. I wonder if you understand the place you have gone to now.

The trooper turned out to be a woman. There was some kind of liquid over the interior of her depressurized helmet, and Malenfant didn’t look too closely. He did find a name tag sewn to the fabric of her suit: TYBEE J.

He couldn’t find the gun.

With loose loops of tether he tied together the bodies of Cornelius and the trooper.

I ought to say something, he thought.

Who for? For the corpses? They weren’t around to hear any more, and Emma was unconscious. Then who? Did this universe have its own blind, stupid God, a God whose grasp of the possibilities of creation had reached only as far as this dull, expanding box?

Not for God. For himself, of course.

He said, “This is a universe that has never known life. But now it knows pain, and fear, and death. You couldn’t get much farther from home. And I guess it’s right that you should stay here, together. That’s all.”

Then, bracing himself against the portal, he shoved them gently. There was only the blue glow of the portal, which diminished quickly, and they were soon fading from sight.

He wondered how long the bodies would last here. Would they have time to rot, mummify, their substance evaporate? Would the different physical laws of this universe penetrate them, making their very atomic nuclei decay? Or would they be caught up, destroyed at last, in the Big Crunch that Cornelius had promised would destroy this universe, as it had the others?

The bodies drifted away slowly, tumbling slightly, the two of them reaching the limit of the tether and then coming back together, colliding softly once more, as if their conflict had continued, in this attenuated form, beyond death itself. As, perhaps, it would; their ghosts, trapped in a universe that wasn’t their own, had only each other to haunt.

It doesn’t matter, Malenfant. Time to move on.

The trooper’s MMU backpack, evidently built to mil spec, was considerably more advanced than Bootstrap hardware.

There was a power source — lightweight batteries — that would long outlast Malenfant’s own, a significant supply of compressed air, a simple water recycler, and food pods that looked as if they were meant to plug into slots in the trooper’s helmet. And there was a med pack, simple field-medicine stuff. The MMU even contained a lightweight emergency shelter, a fabric zip-up bubble.

Suddenly life was extended — not indefinitely, but through a few more hours at least. He was startled how much that meant to him.

Malenfant pulled himself and Emma into the shelter and assembled it around them. It was just big enough for him to stretch out at full length. The fabric, self-heating, was a thin translucent orange, but a small interior light made the walls seem solid. Malenfant felt enormously relieved when he had shut out the purposeless expansion outside, as if this flimsy fabric emergency tent could shelter him from the universes that flapped and collapsed beyond its walls.

When the pressure was right, the temperature acceptable, he cracked his own helmet and sniffed the air. It was metallic, but fine.