Stephen Baxter - Time

She looked out her window, and there was the Moon in the daylit sky. Beneath her the planet turned; sun and Moon and stars continued to wheel through the sky. She felt lifted out of herself, transcending her small concerns, as if she were a mouse running around some grand, incomprehensible clockwork.

There was a knock on the door.

Maura dispatched the NASA report to the incinerator, and let in the cops once more.

Emma Stoney:

Emma fell into gray light.

Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It’s starting —

For a moment — a brief, painful moment — she thought she was with Malenfant. Where? Cruithne?

But she had never been to Cruithne, never left Earth before this jaunt to the Moon to inspect Never-Never Land on Maura’s behalf. And Malenfant, of course, was long dead, killed when the troopers stormed Cruithne.

And the Blue children of the Moon were all around her, clutching her hands and clothes, lifting her.

She started to remember. The German blue helmet, his assault on her. The escape into the children’s electric-blue spacetime anomaly wall.

She looked around for whoever it was who had called out, but she couldn’t see him.

They lowered her carefully — onto what? some kind of smooth floor — and then the children started to move away, spreading out.

She was lying on a plain: featureless, perfectly flat. The air was hot, humid, a little stale. Too hot, in fact, making her restless, irritable.

There was nothing before her: no electric-blue wall, no far side to this unreality bubble, which should have been just a couple of yards away. She reached out a hand, half expecting it to disappear through some invisible reality interface. But it didn’t.

She pushed herself upright. The pain was, briefly, as blackly unendurable as before, and she lay where she was, longing for unconsciousness. But it didn’t come. And the pain, somehow, started to recede, like a tide imperceptibly turning.

The children were scattering over the plain. The grayness and lack of contrast washed out the colors of the children’s skin and clothes and made them look ill. They seemed to be receding from her, remarkably quickly, perspective diminishing them to tiny running figures. Maybe this place was bigger than it looked.

The sky was an elusive grayness, blank and featureless. There was no sense of distance — no sign of stars, of sun or Earth or orbiting spacecraft, no clouds. The light was shadowless, sourceless.

As they moved farther away from her the children seemed to gray out completely, fading to black, as if there were something wrong with the light. There was nothing beyond the children, no fences or buildings, all the way to the horizon. Except there was no horizon. The floor simply merged into the remote grayness of the sky. It was like being inside a huge glass bulb.

Maybe this whole damn thing is some kind of near-death experience, she thought. An illusion.

But it didn’t feel like it. And her restless brain kept analyzing, observing.

There were little piles of gear: bright primary-color plastic toys, what looked like heaps of bedding or clothes, food packets, and water bottles. There was one more substantial structure, a shacklike assemblage of wires and cables and bits of metal: a Tinkerbell cage, a quark-nugget trap. But there was no order, no logic to the layout. Stuff just seemed to have been dumped where it was last used. If it weren’t for the sheer size of the place, it would be a pigpen.

But then she was looking at this place through adult eyes. It was just a kids’ playroom, writ large.

Somebody spoke. The words were muffled.

She turned. There was Anna, standing solemnly, her hands at her sides, regarding her. The girl seemed grayed out, like the other children.

Emma tried to shout. “I can’t hear you!” There was a dull dead-ness to the sound, like an anechoic booth.

Anna began to run toward her. She seemed to approach remarkably quickly, growing in perspective with every lunar-hop stride, the colors washing back into her clothes and her. In a few seconds she was at Emma’s side.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just asked if you wanted a drink.” She held out a clear plastic carton containing a gloopy orange liquid.

Emma’s throat was, now that she thought about it, rapidly growing dry in this sticky heat. “Thanks.” She took the drink, pulled off a foil tab, and sucked the liquid out of the carton. It was a fruit juice mix, sticky and heavily sweet.

“How do you feel?” Anna asked.

She looked down at her shattered leg. The pain had diminished so steeply the limb no longer seemed to be a part of her, as if she were studying some broken piece of machinery. “Not better, exactly,” she said. “But—”

“The pain can’t reach you,” Anna said gravely. “But it is still there. You should be careful.” She was studying Emma. “Do you know who you are?”

Emma frowned. “I’m Emma Stoney.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Strange questions, like a doctor’s. Go with the flow, Emma. “I’m with the UN. I report to Maura Della. I’ve been working with the Blues, with you, since Malenfant pushed me away in the Mojave to go fly his spaceship, and Bootstrap was broken up, and Malenfant died in space.” She had been fixing things, righting some of the wrongs Malenfant had left behind. Everything, of course, defined by her relationship to Malenfant, even though the man had been dead five years. “Maura sent me here.”

You married a spaceman, Maura had said to Emma. Now s your chance to do the Buck Rogers stuff yourself. If not for you I’d go myself. But I ‘m too old to fly. . .

And so she had come to the Moon. And now this.

Anna folded her thin legs with an enviable ease and sat cross-legged with her. “That’s right,” she said solemnly.

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

Emma stroked the floor. The surface was smooth, seamless, warm, and it gave a little, like rubber. Like the floor of a playpen, or maybe an insane asylum, she thought sourly. She eyed Anna. “This place is strange,” she said. “Distances are funny. It was like I was watching you through a fish-eye lens.”

Anna frowned. “What’s a fish-eye lens?”

“Never mind.”

“Of course distances are funny,” Anna said. “Everything here is folded up.” She waved a hand at the blank plain, the neon-tube sky. “How else could we fit all of this into that little bubble you saw?”

“Are we still on the Moon?”

“Oh, yes. Or rather we are still connected to the Moon. Actually the geometry here is hyperbolic. An infinite volume contained within a finite circumference.” Anna reached up, her fingers flexing toward the horizon. “The walls are infinitely far away, and six feet away, at the same time. Minutes pass in here, while two centuries pass on the outside.” She was watching Emma sympathetically.

Well, it didn’t matter whether Emma understood or not. It was just that this place, it seemed, was to be the end of the road, for the children and for herself. Whatever happened from now on, there was no going back: back to the world she had grown up in, with its comfortable furniture of sky and clouds and leather armchairs and other adults and, for Christ’s sake, coffee. One last cup of coffee, instead of this sickly orange syrup — she felt she would give her soul for that. Better yet, one last tequila sunrise.

Two centuries, Anna had said.

Anna’s eyes were empty, watchful. She knows the significance, Emma thought. It’s real; it’s happening; that’s why we’re here.

I’ve been fast-forwarded in time, to Carter Day.

Fear clutched her heart.

Now the children were coming back. Some of them carried toys — dolls, even a toy gun. One boy came pedaling on a small plastic bicycle, adapted for the Moon with fat mesh wheels.