Stephen Baxter: Origin

Mane laid gentle, patronizing hands on their scalps. “Analyse, analyse. Your minds are very busy. You must watch, listen.”

“Ooh.” It was the Nutcracker infant. She was crawling over the invisible floor, chortling at the light show.

Emma glanced down. The various Earths had vanished, to be replaced by a floor of swirling, curdled light.

It was a galaxy.

“Oh, my,” she muttered. “What now?”

The galaxy was a disc of stars, flatter than she might have expected, in proportion to its width no thicker than a few sheets of paper. She thought she could see strata in that disc, layers of structure, a central sheet of swarming blue stars and dust lanes sandwiched between dimmer, older stars. The core, bulging out of the plane of the disc like an egg yolk, was a compact mass of yellowish light; but it was not spherical, rather markedly elliptical. The spiral arms were fragmented. They were a delicate blue laced with ruby-red nebulae and the blue-white blaze of individual stars — a granularity of light and with dark lanes traced between the arms. She saw scattered flashes of light, blisters of gas. Perhaps those were supernova explosions, creating bubbles of hot plasma hundreds of light years across.

But the familiar disc — shining core, spiral arms — was actually embedded in a broader, spherical mass of dim red stars. The crimson fireflies were gathered in great clusters, each of which must contain millions of stars.

The five of them stood over this vast image — if it was an image — Daemon and Ham and humans and Nutcracker baby, squat, ungainly, primitive forms.

“So, a galaxy,” said Emma. “Our Galaxy?”

“I think so,” Nemoto said. “It matches radio maps I have seen.” She pointed, tracing patterns. “Look. That must be the Sagittarius Arm. The other big structure is called the Outer Arm.”

The two major arms, emerging from the elliptical core, defined the Galaxy, each of them wrapping right around the core before dispersing at the rim into a mist of shining stars and glowing nebulae and brooding black clouds. The other “arms” were really just scraps, Emma saw — the Galaxy’s spiral structure was a lot messier than she had expected — but still, she thought, the sun is in one of those scattered fragments.

The Galaxy image began to rotate, slowly.

Emma could see the stars swarming, following individual orbits around the Galaxy core, like a school of sparkling fish. And the spiral arms were evolving too, ridges of light sparking with young stars, churning their way through the disc of the Galaxy. But the arms were just waves of compression, she saw, like the bunching of traffic jams, with individual stars swimming through the regions of high density.

“A galactic day,” Nemoto breathed. “It takes two hundred million years to complete a turn.”

Oh, Malenfant, Emma thought again, you should be here to see this. Not me — not me.

Nemoto said, “But whose Galaxy is it?”

“That is a good question,” Mane said. “It is our Galaxy — that is, it belongs to all of us. The Galactic background is common to the reality threads bound by the Earth-Moon impact probability sheaf—”

“Woah,” Emma said. “Nemoto, can you translate?”

Nemoto frowned. “Think of the Galaxy, a second before the Earth-Moon impact. All those stars have nothing whatsoever to do with the Big Whack, and will not be affected by it. The Galaxy will turn, whether the Moon exists or not, whether humans evolve or not…”

Mane said, “Our Galaxy looks the same as yours. And it is unmodified.”

Emma snapped, “What does that mean?”

Nemoto said, “That there is no sign of life, Emma.”

“But we’re looking at a whole damn galaxy. From this perspective the sun is a dot of light. The place could be swarming with creatures like humans, and you wouldn’t see it.”

Nemoto shook her head. “The Fermi Paradox. In our universe, and Mane’s, there has been time for a thousand empires to sweep over the face of the Galaxy. Some of the signs of their passing ought to be very visible.”

“Like what?”

“Like they might tamper with the evolution of the stars. Or they might mine the black hole at the Galaxy’s core for its energy. Or they might wrap up the Galactic disc in a shell to trap all its radiant energy. Emma, there are many possibilities. It is very likely that we would see something even when we peer at a Galaxy from without like this.”

“But we don’t.”

“But we don’t. Humanity seems to be alone in our universe, Emma;

Earth is the only place where mind arose.” Nemoto confronted Mane. “And your universe is empty too. As was Hugh McCann’s. Perhaps that is true in all the universes in this reality sheaf.”

Emma murmured, “The Fermi Paradox.”

Nemoto seemed surprised she knew the name.

“Something is happening to the Galaxy,” Mane said.

They clustered close to watch.

The Galaxy was spinning fast now. All over the disc the stars were flaring, dying. Some of them, turning to red embers, began to drift away from the main body of the disc.

Emma picked up the Nutcracker infant and clutched her to her chest. “It is shrivelling,” she said.

“We are seeing vast swathes of time,” Nemoto said sombrely. “This is the future, Emma.”

“The future? How is that possible?”

Suddenly the stars died. All of them went out, it seemed, all at once.

The Galaxy seemed to implode, becoming much dimmer.

At first Emma could make out only a diffuse red wash of light. Perhaps there was a slightly brighter central patch, surrounded by a blood-coloured river, studded here and there by dim yellow sparkles. That great central complex was embedded in a diffuse cloud; she thought she could see ribbons, streamers in the cloud, as if material were being dragged into that pink maw at the centre.

Further out still, the core and its orbiting cloud seemed to be set in a ragged disc, a thing of tatters and streamers of gas. Emma could make out no structure in the disc, no trace of spiral arms, no lanes of light and darkness. But there were blisters, knots of greater or lesser density, like supernova blisters, and there was that chain of brighter light points studded at regular intervals around the disc. Filaments seemed to reach in from the brighter points towards the bloated central mass.

Emma said, “What happened to all the stars?”

“They died,” Nemoto said bluntly. “They grew old and died, and there wasn’t enough material left to make any more. And then, this.” Nemoto pointed. “The wreck of the Galaxy. Some of the dying stars have evaporated out of the Galaxy. The rest are collapsing into black holes — those blisters you see in the disc. That central mass is the giant black hole at the core.”

“When is this?”

Nemoto hesitated, thinking, and when she spoke again, she sounded awed. “Umm, perhaps a hundred thousand billion years into the future — compared to the universe’s present age five thousand times older.”

The numbers seemed monstrous to Emma. “So this is the end of life.”

“Oh, no,” Mane replied. She pointed to the clusters of brighter light around the rim of the galactic corpse. “These seem to be normal stars: small, uniform, but still glowing in the visible spectrum.”

“How is that possible?”

“Those stars can’t be natural,” Nemoto said. She turned to Emma, her eyes shining. “You see? Somebody must be gathering the remnant interstellar gases, forming artificial birthing clouds… Somebody is farming the Galaxy, even so far in the future. Isn’t it wonderful?”

“Wonderful? The wreck of the Galaxy?”

“Not that,” Nemoto said. “The existence of life. They still need stars and planets, and warmth and light. But their worlds must be huddled close to these small, old stars — probably gravitationally locked, keeping one face in the light, one in the dark… I think this is, umm, a biography,” Nemoto said. “This whole vast show. The story of a race. They are trying to tell us what became of them.”