Stephen Baxter - Time

She sighed. “I don’t think it makes a lot of difference, Malen-fant. All that matters is that this isn’t home. Do you think we’re getting any nearer?”

“I don’t even know what nearer means.” He checked his wristwatch. They had been traveling for hours through how many universes — dozens, a hundred?

“If not for the resources of this trooper’s backpack,” Emma said, “we’d be dead by now. Wouldn’t we, Malenfant?” Her voice was an insect whisper. “I wonder if Cornelius knew that, if he figured that we would need the backpack to survive.”

“To kill for a backpack—”

“Cornelius was the coldest, most calculating human being I ever knew. It was exactly the kind of thing he would do.” She closed her eyes. “I think I want to sleep now.”

He let her rest for an hour. Then they moved on.

They passed through more glowing-cloud universes. Sometimes the clouds would be sparser or denser, showing more or less structure. But they did not find galaxies or stars, nothing resembling the familiar structures of home.

Then they came to something new. They stopped, drifting in the unchanging blue light of the portal.

It was another red-sky universe. But this time it seemed as if the sparse clouds had been gathered up like cotton wool and wadded together into a single roseate mass that dominated half the sky. There was a single point of light at the center of it all, easily bright enough to be visible with the naked eye. Two splinters of light seemed to be protruding from the point, like lens flares, or poles from a toy globe. Malenfant thought he could trace structure in the cloud that surrounded the central point: a tight spiral knot at the center, glowing a brighter red than its surroundings, and farther out streamers and elongated bubbles, all of it swirling around the center. It was actually beautiful, in a cold, austere way, like a watercolor done in white, gray, red.

Beautiful, and familiar.

“My God,” said Malenfant. “It’s a black hole. A giant black hole. Remember what we saw—”

“Yes. But black holes are made by stars. How can it be here, if there are no stars?”

He shrugged. “Maybe the matter here didn’t form stars, but just imploded into… that. Do you think it’s a good sign?”

“I don’t know. I never was much of a tourist, Malenfant. Tell me what Cornelius told you about black holes. That universes can be born out of them. That what goes on in a black hole’s center is like a miniature Big Crunch…”

“Something like that.”

“Then,” she said laboriously, “this universe could have two daughters. One born out of the black hole, one from the final Crunch.”

He frowned. “So what?”

“Don’t you get it, Malenfant? If universes with black holes have more babies, after a few generations there will be a lot more universes with black holes than without. Because they can multiply.”

“We’re talking about universes, Emma. What does it mean to say one type of universe outnumbers another?”

“Perhaps it’s all too simple for you to understand, Malenfant.”

“You mean too complex.”

“No. Too simple. Let’s go on.”

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

“What choice do I have?” And, feebly, she began to tug herself along the tether that joined them.

They passed on through the gallery of universes, barely noticing, comprehending little. Maybe Emma was right. Maybe they were working their way up a branching tree of universes — new baby cosmoses twigging off through every black hole. If that was so, how were the two of them being guided in their journey? By whom? Why?

Anyhow, on they went.

Even at the rate they traveled — a whole new universe, after all, every couple of minutes — the rate of cosmological evolution seemed damnably slow to Malenfant: a dim, undirected groping for complexity.

At first there were more red-sky universes. Most of them were adorned by black hole roses. Sometimes there was one all-consuming monster, sometimes an array of them studded

randomly around the sky.

Once they were so close to a hole center that its glare, seen through a dense mass of cloud, was dazzling, and Malenfant was sure he could see movement in the nearer clumps of gas, shadows thousands of light-years long turning like clock hands. Perhaps the portal itself was being dragged inward to the hole. He wondered what would happen then. Could even the portal survive falling into an immense black hole? Or did someone — some unimaginable agency of the downstreamers who built this chain — monitor the portals across the universes, repair them after cosmological accidents?

Then, fifty or a hundred cosmoses — they weren’t counting — from the first black hole rose, they came to something new. No infrared clouds, no black holes. But there was structure.

Malenfant pushed himself away from the portal. He drifted to the end of the tether, rebounding slightly. He shielded his eyes, trying to shut out the blue glow of the portal.

There were wheel shapes in the sky: rimless, but with regular spokes of the palest yellow light. It seemed to him there was a nesting here, structure on structure, the wheel shapes themselves gathered into greater, loosely defined discs, just as stars combined into galaxies, which gathered in turn in clusters and super-clusters.

His tether stretched beyond him, farther from the portal by six or seven yards. It just hung in space, coiled loosely. But there was a fine blue mist at its terminus.

Malenfant worked his way along the tether. The mist was made up of very small particles, fine almost to the limit of visibility. At first he thought they must be flaking away from the tether, somehow; but it looked as if they were just condensing out of the vacuum. The mist was everywhere—

Except right in front of him. There was a rough disc shape directly ahead of him, where no mist was forming. Puzzled, he lifted his arm out to his left. The empty disc shape extended that way. It was a diffuse shadow of himself.

“I think it’s something to do with the portal light. There’s no mist here, where I block it out. Maybe the light is—” He waved his hands. “ — condensing.”

“How is that possible, Malenfant?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” He reached along the tether, meaning to pull himself farther.

‘Wo, Malenfant. Look at the tether.”

He let his gaze follow the rope to its end, a few yards ahead.

The tether was disappearing. It looked as if it was being burned away by some invisible, high-intensity ray. Occasionally he saw a flash of green light.

He pulled the tether back. The burning-off stopped. He was able to touch the end of the rope. It had been cut clean through. But the blue mist was still sparkling into existence, right where it had been before.

“There’s a limit out there, Emma. A barrier.” He looked around, but there was only the strangely structured sky. “Maybe the portal is protecting us. Like a shield.”

“A shield, Malenfant? You always did watch too much seventies TV”

“Then you explain it,” he said testily.

“Why does everything have to have an explanation? This is a different universe. Maybe the stuff from our universe is changing when it goes out there, past the portal’s influence.”

“Changing how?”

“The mass of the tether is disappearing. So maybe it’s being converted into something else. Light, maybe. And the mist—”

“—is the light from the portal. Condensing. Turning into some kind of matter. So,” he said, “how can light and matter swap over? Cornelius would have known.”

“Yes. This is a strange place, isn’t it, Malenfant?”

“There’s nothing for us here.”