Jeffrey Carver - Eternity's End

Palagren’s arms were stretched out, distended and transparent; all the riggers were turning transparent. All of their voices were dying away; but new sounds were rising…

*

An impossibly deep rumble… a thrum of incredible power… and, it seemed, sadness. Legroeder was hypnotized, unable to turn his attention, as the thrum filled with deeper and deeper harmonics. It was a choir of unimaginable size and proportion, a choir of space and time, and yet seemingly almost a living thing.

Was he hearing the shifting and creaking of the very fabric of spacetime itself? He was stunned, awed, terrified. For a moment, he wondered: was he even still alive? The quantum flaw could have wrenched them apart into constituent particles, puffing them out of existence in a cloud of neutrinos and gamma rays. Were these the dying thoughts of a haze of neutrinos, soon to dissipate like the morning dew?

They had lost Impris . Deutsch. Legroeder wanted to experience all that he could before he too vanished. Maybe it was pride. Or longing. Or grief. Or stubbornness. He focused all of his being on trying to perceive the sounds that welled around him. If only he could form a picture from them.

As if in response, coiling out of the darkness came distorted lines of force, turbulent traceries of fire, the body of the quantum splinter, surrounding them. Before them stretched a long, jagged avenue of fire and darkness, reaching out into the deeps of space… from infinity at one end to infinity at the other.

He stared at it and thought dumbly, it’s either the road to Heaven or the road to Hell…

*

He viewed its majesty through sound, an embryonic music of the spheres, heartbreakingly mournful. But this was not just the music of a handful of stars and star clouds. This was something very different, something far, far greater…

…wheeling majestically in space…

…enveloped by the sound of an expanding universe…

…very close to the instant of its origins… the sound of an infant spacetime continuum struggling to establish itself in the… place?… time?… where there had been no place, no time, nothing at all.

Through his astonishment, Legroeder knew… if he could reach out just a little further, he might hear the sound of the Genesis Moment itself. There was a sound coming at intervals: a great CLUNGGGG ringing through the choir of origins, like a vast bass string being struck with percussive force. He thought he knew what that was: fractures forming in the expanding continuum, splinters, flaws in space and time… fractures forming in the deep quantum structures of reality.

How he knew all this, he did not know. But he was aware of the perceptions of the Narseil overlapping his own, like layers of transparency. What they saw, he saw, in shimmering shadows.

And in his head, the implants were furiously recording.

*

Before him now was a broad ribbon of fire, reaching jaggedly, with streamers and fractal fingers, in both directions. It was not simply a blaze of light through a fracture, but something roiling with inner chaos and change, like a long window into the surface of a sun. It hurt the eye to behold; something about the perspective was all wrong. This was not Einsteinian space or even Chey-Kladdian… it was something different…

And then he knew what it was. This was the heart of the temporal discontinuities. This aspect of the flaw stretched through time rather than space, deep into the past at one end, and impossibly far into the future in the other. Stretching toward its birth… and its death.

The birth and death of the universe?

Legroeder was dumb with awe and terror, gazing down a rent in spacetime that stretched from one end of existence to the other. Would he next gaze into the face of God? Surely he would fall dead even if the flaw itself did not kill him…

But stirring in him now were other strange and wonderful and frightening emotions, emotions not human; and yet contained within them were human feelings—joy and determination and rage and reverence. It was the Narseil emotions; they were seeing this as he was—the terrible beauty and peril of the quantum flaw, the groans of birth and death, linked together in a single instant.

It was changing, though, sparkling at the edges, splinters of light streaming out into infinity… and at the same time, turning his thoughts inside out…

*

Visions of places he had been… present… past… future… Outpost Ivan… DeNoble… Maris and Jakus and Harriet… his mother carrying him as a small child, crying, in a shopping valley on New Tarkus… Tracy-Ace/Alfa standing with YZ/I, proposing a mission… in flight, speeding toward fabulous clouds of stars…

All these images gathered and then blew away like smoke, leaving him staggered by the vastness around him, the power of cosmic creation. What meaning could his existence have here, where elemental forces flowed like rivers? What possible influence could he have?

Insignificance.

The word flickered in his awareness like a sparkle of light at the boundaries of infinity. It danced, twinkling, along the great ribbon of light…

*

It was, Palagren knew, the most astounding thing he would ever see, the quantum flaw stretched out in multicolored glory: at one end the past, dwindling into the deepest infrared, and at the other end the future, vanishing into an ultraviolet diamond. The present loomed in a golden haze, within which possibilities danced like motes of dust against time and space.

Among the possibilities, Palagren saw a precious few that contained images of himself. He felt unutterably lonely as he glimpsed those. How could a single Narseil matter in the face of such cosmic history?

Something tattered was billowing around him; it was the rigger-net, coming undone. Electroquantum technology did not work well here; and yet something had been holding the net together. But if it wasn’t the fluxfield generators…

Palagren saw the net quiver, as though in response to his uncertainty. And then a fragment of the Wisdoms echoed in his thoughts:

“The Whole survives in unity with the One, and the One with the Whole. In all of the Rings, nothing can exist apart from the Circle except that which would break it… the Destroyer…”

The Destroyer…

The quantum flaw?

Or his own doubt?

Palagren drew a breath and stretched his arms wide, and turned his will toward holding the net together…

*

Who are these beings that you are mindful of them…

The question sparkled in Legroeder’s thoughts like a sunbeam through a window; it was a line from an ancient human text… but he hadn’t heard it from a human, had he? It had been Com’peer, the Narseil surgeon.

But hadn’t he heard it somewhere else, long ago? The memory was beginning to come:

What is man that you are mindful of him?

That was it: an earlier form. A poem, or a psalm. But what did it mean?

Skating across the sea of spacetime, his thoughts spun around, and the word “insignificance” twinkled back to face him. He laughed suddenly, and then cried. Who was he, what was he, to be here in the midst of this—surrounded by a shimmering net that was beginning to come apart like an old spiderweb?

The net… if they couldn’t hold it together, they would cease to exist.

What is man—?

He was man, human, individual—like his fellows, and yet one of a kind, unique. Did that matter, his uniqueness?

He gazed into the sea of eternity, churning with chaos and uncertainty, and thought perhaps it did matter, very much so, right now.

*

To Palagren, the waves of uncertainty brought hope. Hope for the integrity of his own being, and of the net itself. He thought of the old human story: Schrodinger’s cat in the box, its life or death decided by a single quantum event. And more than that, the life and death coexisting in one; it took the glance of an observer to force reality to crystallize.