Stephen Baxter - Time

He turned away from the wheels, the blue mist, and pulled himself back to the portal.

So they passed on, on down the corridor of universes.

… Until they came, at last, to a sky full of stars.

Malenfant let himself drift away from the portal. “At least I think they are stars.”

The sky was uniformly speckled with points of light, all around them, above and below. No glowing clouds, no black hole roses. It might have been a starry night on Earth.

But there was something wrong. “They look old,” Malenfant said. It was true: a handful of the stars were as bright as orange, one even seemed to be sparking fitfully yellow, but the rest were a dim red. When he donned the night-vision goggles, he made out many more starlike points, a field of them stretching beyond the visible. But they were dim and red.

“We’ve been expecting stars,” Emma said.

“We have?”

“Sure. Think about it. If the key to breeding universes is black holes, you need to come up with the best way there is of making black holes. Which is stars.”

“What about those giant black holes we saw in the rose universes?”

“But they looked like they had ripped up half of creation. Stars have got to be more efficient than that. How many black holes were there in our universe?”

“A billion billion. Round numbers,” Malenfant said.

“We’re going to see more universes full of stars now. Universes that are star factories, and so black hole factories.”

He gathered up the tethers.

More universes, many and strange. Most of them now contained stars of some kind, but they were generally dim, scattered, unimpressive if not dying or dead. And nowhere did they see anything to match the splendor and complexity of their home Galaxy, and nowhere did they see any evidence of life and organization.

Malenfant grunted. “I feel like I’m trapped in God’s art gallery.”

Emma laughed weakly. “Malenfant, how can you be bored? You’re being transported between universes. Not only that, you only have a few hours to live. What do you want, dancing girls? And what difference does it make? We’re surely going to die soon anyhow, in some chunk of emptiness or other. I don’t think you’re destined to die in your own bed, Malenfant.”

“I don’t own a bed. But I’d rather die in my own fucking universe.”

“Even a million light-years from home?”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

“You do take things personally, don’t you, Malenfant? As if all of this, the manifold of universes, is picking onyou.”

He fixed their tethers and faced the portal, its blank central expanse open, empty, somehow reassuring, a way onward. “Hell, yes,” he said. “What other enemy is there?”

So, holding on to each other, they moved on to another reality, then another.

More skies. More stars, mostly small and unspectacular.

At last they came to a place with a Galaxy. But it was small and knotlike, populated by stars that looked dull, uniform, and aging; it seemed to have none of the reeflike complexity of their own Galaxy.

They passed on.

Universe after universe, all but identical to Malenfant’s eye: small and uninspiring stars, untidy galaxies, skies littered with the corpses of red, dying stars.

“I wonder why the stars are all so small,” he said. “And why there are so few. And why they all got so old so quickly.”

“Because there’s no giant Galaxy to make new ones,” Emma said. “We saw it, Malenfant. The reef Galaxy. All those feedback loops. A way to make stars, and keep on making them, over and over.”

Maybe she was right. If the key goal was to make lots of black holes — and if black holes were best made in giant stars — then you wanted machines to make lots of giant stars, and reef galaxies were the best way they had yet seen.

But evidently it wasn’t so easy to make reef galaxies — or rather, to evolve them. Malenfant looked around another dull, uninteresting sky. He wondered what was missing, if there was some simple, key ingredient. Carbon, perhaps, or some other element essential to the great star-spawning gas clouds.

Malenfant paused again when they came to a new, different universe. But this time some of the galaxies were broken up, their outlying stars scattered and their central masses collapsing into what Malenfant was coming to recognize as the signatures of black holes. And there were patches of glowing gas marring the sky, as if some of the nearer stars had exploded.

Beyond the stars the sky was glowing. It was like one of the early phoenix universes he had seen, born only to die within seconds or hours or days or years. But it wasn’t a uniform glow, he saw.

There seemed to be hot spots, one directly above his head and one below his feet, like poles in the sky. And there was a cold band around the equator of the sky, a plane running through his midriff. There were two points on the equator, in fact — once again on opposite sides of the sky — that seemed to be significantly cooler than the average.

He described the sky to Emma. “It’s a collapsing universe. But the collapse doesn’t seem to be symmetrical. It’s coming in over our heads, flattening out at the sides.”

“Is that possible?”

“Maybe this universe is oscillating,” he said. “Like a soap bubble, before it bursts. Not collapsing evenly. Going from a sphere to a stretched-out ellipse shape to a flattened disc shape…

“You know, Cornelius said it might be possible to survive a Big Crunch in a universe like that. You have to take control of the universe. And then you manipulate it, mass and energy and gravity fields, to control the oscillations. If you milk them just right you can extract enough energy to live forever.”

“That sounds like Cornelius,” she said dryly. “Malenfant, does it look like life-forms are manipulating the universe here?”

“No.”

So they went on.

Emma slept again. Trying not to wake her, he drifted on to the next universe, and the next.

Until — without warning, after another routine transition — he landed on Cruithne.

At least, for a few seconds he thought it was Cruithne.

He and Emma were floating above a gray, dusty surface, dropping through ghostly microgravity. The portal was embedded in the plain, jutting out of it upright, just as it had before. There was a hiss of static in his headset.

His feet settled to the surface. There was the gentlest of crunches, transmitted through his suit fabric, as his boots crushed the regolith of this place. The dust seemed soft, easily compressed.

Standing straight, he grinned fiercely. The touch of gravity was feather-light, but even so it was pleasing to feel solid ground under his feet.

He laid Emma down carefully. The soft, loose dust billowed up around her, falling back slowly in the feather-soft gravity.

Of course, it wasn’t Cruithne.

He’d seen more exciting skies. There was a single star, small, spitting light. Its color was elusive, a blue-green. That was all: There was nothing else to be seen, anywhere in the sky.

He stepped forward. The surface was covered in smooth, flowing dust, like a folded-over sand dune. There were low hills, even what might have been the faded-out remnants of very ancient, very large craters, palimpsests. The dust wasn’t the charcoal black of Cruithne, but a bluish silver-gray. Malenfant dug his gloved hand into the dust. It was very fine, like talc, with none of the little knotty clumps he remembered from Cruithne itself. He scraped out a small pit He thought he could detect a subtle flow as the dust poured gently back into his hole, filling it in and smoothing it over.

He straightened up, slapped the dust off his hands, and bent over to brush it off his legs. Except that there was no dust there; it seemed to have fallen away from his suit fabric. In fact he could see, where Cruithne II dust was peeling away, lingering traces of coal-dark Cruithne I, still stuck there after so long, after all the exotic cosmoses he had seen.