Stephen Baxter - Time

I don’t understand —

“Never mind.” Malenfant looked down at his hand, flexed it, turned it over: a monkey paw transmitted to the end of time, a perfect copy… No, if Michael was right, this really was his hand, as if he’d been teleported here. “I can live on here? Like this? How long for? No human of my era lived beyond a hundred and some years. So when I reach two hundred, three hundred…”

Your brain can store around a quadrillion bits. That corresponds to a thousand years of life. After that —

“I stop being me.”

You could be enhanced. There would be continuity. Growth.

“But I wouldn’t be me.”

You aren ‘t big enough to think the thoughts you would become capable of.

Malenfant hesitated. “Is that what happened to you?”

/ have lived a long time.

“Longer than a thousand years?”

Michael smiled.

“And so, you aren’t Michael any more.” Of course not. How could he be? “Don’t you regret that?”

Michael shrugged. My people, in Zambia, believed that we, on Earth, are the dead. Left behind by the true living, who have passed through their graves.

“And that’s what you believe?”

The boy I used to be was partial. Very damaged. He was a husk I gladly discarded. He studied Malenfant, and Malenfant thought there was a trace of accusation in his eyes, accusation over crimes long gone, buried in the glare of the Big Bang afterglow. Michael said, reasonably gently, A thousand years isn ‘t so bad, Malenfant.

“It’s more than I deserve.” He glared at the boy. “If you can do all this, bring Emma back.”

lean’t. I mean, they can’t. They don’t have the information.

“Emma passed through the portals. There must be records.”

But she would only be, umm, a simulation. The identity principle only works if the information is perfect. And because of the explosion as you went through —

Malenfant held his head in his hands. “Now,” he said, “now it hits me. If I’d known I could have saved her … Emma, I’m sorry. Somehow I managed to kill you twice over…”

You sound like you think it’s your fault.

“People around me tend to die, Michael. Cornelius. Emma. You, unless you count this as living on.”

The kid was nodding. / understand.

“You’re just a kid,” Malenfant snapped. “I don’t care how aug mented you are. You can’t understand. If I hadn’t screwed up her life, if I’d left her on Earth—”

Would you have wanted that?

“Yes. No. We wouldn’t have made love, floating between planets. She wouldn’t have followed me across universes. She wouldn’t have learned the truth, about the cancer, about us. I’d have lost … well, everything. My life would have remained meaningless, like your damn downstreamers. But she wouldn’t have died. All I had to do was push her away, in that scramble at Mojave…”

Then make it so, Michael murmured.

“What?”

Michael held his hand. Malenfant, the universe has many values. There is no one single path. Do you understand? The future can’t be determined. Nor can the past. Therefore we are free to choose. . .

Malenfant spoke slowly, carefully. “What you’re telling me is that I could change the past. I could spare Emma.” The thought electrified him. “But I’m no downstreamer.”

You are now, said the Michael thing.

“I pushed her away before, when I learned about the cancer, and it didn’t do a damn bit of good. And if I lost her, I’d lose everything. I was ready to die.”

But you would spare her, Malenfant. Give her years of life, maybe. Let go.

Michael was watching him, wide eyed, chewing nuts. There is something else, Michael said. The eschatos.

“The what?”

The end of things.

“The Carter catastrophe. My God…”

We could go back. Become part of it. If you wish.

“I don’t understand any of this, Michael.”

You will.

What the hell are you doing, Malenfant? If you reject this you’re throwing away immortality. A thousand years of life, recognizable human life, followed by … what? Transcendence?

But, if I lose myself, I’ll lose Emma. And that, surely, would be the final disrespect.

You always were decisive, Malenfant. If there was ever a time to make a choice it’s now.

Malenfant closed his eyes. “Let’s do it,” he said.

You’re sure?

“Hell, no. Let’s do it anyhow.”

The boy pulled him toward the door.

Malenfant’s heart was thumping. “You mean now?”

Will your decision be different later?

Malenfant took a deep sigh. “Do I need to dress?”

Malenfant went to the bathroom. He washed his face, had a leak, a dump. He had time to be impressed by the faithfulness of the mysterious processes that had restored him here, that had even, presumably, reconstructed the contents of his stomach after his last meal.

He looked at himself in the mirror, studied a face that he had known all his life. The last time for everything, even for the simple things. Here, in his body, in this place, he was still himself. But what was he about to become? He’d built up his courage to blow himself to bits once today already, and his reward had been this, this Alice in Wonderland bullshit. Could he go through with it again?

Of course, if he chickened out, it would have to be in front of Michael and the weird entities who were watching through him.

Malenfant grinned fiercely. To hell with it. He checked his teeth for bits of peanut, then went back to the room.

Michael was wearing his kid-sized pressure suit now, and he had laid out Malenfant’s suit on the bed, beside the unused shirt and slacks. The components of the suit — skinsuit and outer garment and thermal garment and gloves and helmet and boots — looked unearthly, out of place in this mundane environment. And yet, Malenfant thought, the suit was actually the most normal thing about the whole damn room.

“Are we going to need suits?”

If we go like this. If you ‘d rather —

“Hell, no.” Malenfant suited up quickly.

Michael came to him with a pen he’d taken from the desk. You have some notes to write.

“What notes? Oh. Okay.” Malenfant sighed, and bent stiffly in his suit. “What if I make a mistake? … Never mind.”

He wrote out the notes hastily and stuck them where he thought they ought to be. And if he got it wrong, let some other bastard sort it out.

He put on his gloves and helmet, and he walked to the door with Michael. When they got there he closed up his own suit and sealed Michael’s, and ran quick diagnostic checks on the kid’s systems.

They turned and faced the door. Michael reached up and, clumsily, pulled it open.

The corridor was gone. A blue-ring portal floated there, framing darkness.

“Is this going to hurt?”

No more than usual.

“Great. Michael… I saw the future. But what was it like?”

Michael paused. Huge. Primal. Beyond control. New minds emerged in great pulses.

“Like Africa,” Malenfant said. “We always thought the future would be like America. Clean and empty and waiting to be shaped. I always thought that way. But our past was Africa. Dark and deep. And that’s how the future was.”

Yes, Michael said.

Malenfant braced himself and faced the portal. “Visors down,” he said.

Michael lowered his gold visor, hiding his face. Malenfant saw the portal’s blue ring reflected in his visor. Then Michael held up his hand, like a son reaching for his father. Malenfant took the hand. The child’s fingers were buried in his own begrimed glove.