Stephen Baxter: Time

“This has been a good place to cycle,” Anna said dreamily. “Of course that’s why we built it this way.”

“You built a toy universe so you could ride your bikes?”

She grinned at Emma. “If you were ten years old and could build a universe, what would you do?”

Emma frowned. “It’s been a long time since I was ten.” And, she realized, at some point I forgot how it is to be a kid. How very sad.

As the children neared they loomed, unnaturally quickly, and the gray flatness washed out of them. Emma could smell them — their hot, moist little bodies, a playground smell, comforting here in this bright gray-white lightbulb unreality. Billie Tybee, seven years old, reached out a hand. Emma took it. The small hand was warm, perfect in hers.

Anna stood up.

“Is it time?”

Anna said, “Soon.”

Emma began to struggle to her feet. “Then let’s get it over.”

“Oh,” Anna said, “it isn’t waiting for us.”

Little Billie Tybee was still clutching her hand. Emma relaxed her grip, trying to release her, but the little girl held on. So Emma limped forward awkwardly, helped by the older children, leaning to hold hands with Billie.

Emma looked back the way they had come. She tried to remember the place where she had arrived here, the location of the invisible gateway back to her own familiar universe. Surely if there was any way out of here it would be from there. But the surface was as smooth and featureless as bare skin.

She sighed. Forget it, Emma. Where you came from isn’t important any more. Where you’re going to, however, is.

She found herself shaking.

Was not knowing, not understanding, making this experience so much harder to bear? But if she did know — if the kids were dragging her toward some folded-spacetime equivalent of an electric chair, if she knew every detail of how her life was going to end — would that be any easier?

The party resumed its slow hike across the featureless plain. Piles of kipple, clothes and toys and food packets, seemed to swim around them, the distances melting and merging in this folded place.

They were slowly nearing the one substantial structure on the plain, the shack of metal and wire she had noticed earlier. It was indeed a Tinkerbell trap: an electromagnetic cage made of junkyard garbage, capable of containing a chunk of quark matter. Like the prototypes, she could see how this cage had been made by the hands of children, a thing of lengths of wire and metal and bits of plastic clumsily twisted together.

But however crude its construction the cage evidently worked, for there was a Tinkerbell in there, a hovering point of light. It seemed to be following a complex path, darting back and forth, slowing as it reached maybe six inches from the center of the motion, then slipping back. Emma tried to pick out a periodicity in the motion. Perhaps there were many oscillations here, overlaying each other in three-dimensional space.

The children slowed, broke up as they reached the cage. Anna and the others lowered Emma carefully to the floor; though littered with scraps of wire, the floor was as featureless and unpleasantly warm here as where she had first emerged. Billie Tybee sat on the floor beside her now, cuddling up close.

One little boy walked around the back of the cage, and Emma heard a gentle splashing, glimpsed a thin stream of yellowish liquid.

Anna squatted on her haunches. She asked Emma, “Are you still okay?”

“So you built another Tinkerbell cage. More quark matter?”

“Oh, no. Not yet. That stuff isn’t quark matter. Can’t you tell? … I don’t suppose you can.”

“Then what?”

“It’s yolk,” Anna said. “Yolk, from an egg star.”

“A what?”

Billie sighed with all the seriousness a seven-year-old could muster. “She means,” she said, pronouncing the words carefully, “a neutron star.”

“But it’s like an egg,” Anna said. “The collapsed remains of a supernova. Solid outside and a lot of funny liquids churning around on the inside.”

“And that’s what this stuff is? This Tinkerbell? A droplet of neutron star matter?”

“Only a billion tons or so,” Anna said. “Originally material from the Moon.”

“Tell me what you want with it.”

“We don’t want it” Billie said seriously, and she wiped her nose on Emma’s sleeve.

Anna said, “What we want is what it will become. The degenerate matter is, umm, a fuse. In a moment a fragment of true quark matter will arrive.”

“From where?” Emma asked.

But Anna didn’t answer that. She said, “When the nucleus of quark matter enters the fuse, it will quickly develop an equilibrium strangeness content via weak interactions, and free neutrons will be absorbed as there is no Coulomb barrier—”

“Anna, my dear, I don’t understand a damn word.”

“The fuse will turn into quark matter very rapidly, all of it.”

Emma remembered a briefing Dan Ystebo had prepared for Maura. A neutron star flashing to quark matter. Half its mass being converted to energy in a few seconds. Explosions so vigorous they could be observed from another Galaxy.

“In fact,” the girl said with an element of pride, “the degenerate matter droplet has been shaped so that its collapse will be concentrated. At the very center of the droplet, in a space smaller than a proton, we will reach higher energy densities even than at the hearts of collapsing neutron stars. Higher energy densities than can form anywhere, naturally. Densities that need intelligence, design, to occur.”

“Jesus. Why, Anna? What are you trying to do? Blow up the Moon?”

“Oh, no,” Anna said, a little impatiently. “‘Not just that. The point is not the amount of energy that’s released here, but the precision of its application.”

“Which is why,” Emma said with growing dread, “you are calling this thing a fuse. You’re intending to use this to trigger something else. Something much bigger. Aren’t you?”

Anna smiled happily. “Now you’re starting to understand,” she said brightly.

Seven-year-old Billie turned her sweet, round face up to Emma. She said carefully, “Vacuum collapse. Are you afraid?”

Emma swallowed. “Yes. Yes, I am, Billie. But I don’t know what I’m afraid of.” Now Emma saw that the kid’s lower lip was wobbling. Emma bent, carefully, and leaned toward Billie. “Tell you what,” she said. “It’s okay to cry. But I’ll try not to if you try not to. What do you think?”

And then — suddenly, without warning or fanfare — it began.

Reid Malenfant:

Here was Malenfant, drifting in space.

He remembered how he had grabbed Emma, coaxed her, forced her onto the O ‘Neill to be with him. And he remembered how he had pushed her away, protected her with lies, left her on Earth.

He remembered how he had made love to her in the darkness and silence of space. And he remembered how he had started awake, weightless and disoriented, looking for her, and she had not been there, never had been there.

He remembered how she had come with him on his strange journey through the manifold of universes. And he remembered how he had journeyed alone: lost, frightened, incomplete.

He remembered how she had learned the truth about him at last. He remembered how she had died in his arms. He remembered how much he had missed her, longed to have her back, to tell her.

He remembered how he had wanted it all: his relationship with Emma, to spare her pain, his glorious future vision. And he’d finished with none of it.

The change was done, the timelines rewoven. But, by God, it had cost him.

Malenfant turned his head, refocused his eyes’ new zoom feature, and there was the Moon, swimming alongside the Earth as it always had. Beautiful doomed Earth.