Stephen Baxter: Time

The city of water and light, pursued by unreality, fled into the darkness of the far downstream.

Reid Malenfant:

The bubble of glowing, laser-speckle light was looming now, a wall that cut across the universe, plummeting toward them at light speed. It could have been a mile away or ten million. Malenfant could feel nothing: no heat, no cold, no tug of the anomaly’s monstrous gravity. Maybe he was already falling into its maw.

He wondered how long there was left. Then he put the thought aside. No more countdowns, Malenfant.

Malenfant. There s something Ididn ‘t tell you.

“What?”

We might survive. We might get caught in one of the false-vacuum black holes. We are here, but not here, Malenfant. The information that comprises us might be preserved during —

“Where would we be? One of the new universes?”

I don’t know.

“What would it be like?”

Different.

“I think I’d like that. Maybe this is just the beginning. Hold on, now…”

The unreal light grew blinding. He pressed Michael’s face to his own belly so the boy couldn’t see what was coming. Malenfant grinned fiercely.

I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts.

* The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 1 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source.

* The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (AddisonWesley, 1996).

* The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996).

* The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647,1986.

* Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685,1997.

* The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review A vol. 30, p. 272,1984.

* The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447,1979.

* The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997).

* The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508,1983.

The rest is fiction.

Stephen Baxter

Great Missenden

February 1999