Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

The — murder — of her boat by the Friends had been a price worth paying, of course, for getting her single, brief message off to Poole. He would do something; he would be coming… Somehow, in formulating her desperate scheme, she had never doubted that he would still be alive, after all these years. But still she felt a twinge of conscience and remorse as she surveyed the wreckage of the boat; after all this was the destruction of her last link with the Cauchy — with the fifty men, women, and children with whom she had spent a century crossing light-years and millennia — and who were now stranded on the far side of the wormhole in the future they had sought so desperately to attain, that dark, dehumanized future of the Qax Occupation.

How paradoxical, she thought, to have returned through the wormhole to her own time, and yet to feel such nostalgia for the future.

She lay on her back in the grass and peered up at the salmon-pink clouds that marbled the monstrous face of Jupiter. Tilting her head a little she could still make out the Interface portal — the wormhole end that had been left in Jovian orbit when the Cauchy departed for the stars, and through which this absurd earth-craft of the Friends of Wigner had come plummeting through time. The portal, sliding slowly away from the earth-craft on its neighboring orbit, was a thumbnail sketch rendered in cerulean blue against the cheek of Jupiter. It looked peaceful — pretty, ornamental. The faces of the tetrahedron, the junctions of the wormhole itself, were misty, puzzled-looking washes of blue-gold light, a little like windows.

It was hard to envisage the horrors that lay only subjective hours away on the other side of that spacetime flaw.

She shivered and wrapped her arms around her body. After she’d landed on the earth-craft the Friends had given her one of their flimsy, one-piece jumpsuits; she was sure it was quite adequate for this fake climate, but, damn it, she just didn’t feel warm in it. But she suspected she’d feel just as shivery in the warmest clothing; it wasn’t cold that was her problem, she suspected, but craving to return to the safe metal womb that the Cauchy had become. During her century of flight, whenever she had envisaged the end of her journey she had anticipated a pleasurable tremor on stepping out of a boat for the first time and drinking in the fresh blue air of Earth… even an Earth of the distant future. Well, she hadn’t got anywhere near Earth; and surely to God anybody would be spooked by a situation like this. To be stranded on a clod of soil a quarter mile wide — with no enclosing bubble or force shell as far as she could tell — a clod that had been wrenched from the Earth and hurled back through time and into orbit around Jupiter -

She decided that a healthy dose of fear at such a moment was quite the rational response.

She heard footsteps, rustling softly through the grass.

"Miriam Berg."

Berg raised herself on her elbows. "Shira. I’ve been waiting for you."

The girl from the future sounded disappointed. "I trusted you, Miriam. I gave you the freedom of our craft. Why did you send this message?"

Berg squinted up at Shira. The Friend was tall — about Berg’s height, a little under six feet — but there the similarity ended. Berg had chosen to be AS-frozen at physical age around forty-five — a time when she had felt most at home in herself. Her body was wiry, tough, and comfortable; and she liked to think that the wrinkles scattered around her mouth and brown eyes made her look experienced, humorous, fully human. And her cropped hair, grizzled with gray, was nothing to be ashamed of. Shira, by contrast, was aged about twenty-five. Real age, once and for all, thanks to the Qax’s confiscation of the AS technology. The girl’s features were delicate, her build thin to the point of scrawny. Berg couldn’t get used to Shira’s clean-shaven scalp and found it hard not to stare at the clean lines of her skull. The girl’s skin was sallow, her dark-rimmed eyes blue, huge, and apparently lashless; her face, the prominent teeth and cheekbones, was oddly skeletal — but not unpretty. Shira was much as Berg imagined Earthbound city-dwellers of a few centuries before Berg’s own time must have looked: basically unhealthy, surviving in a world too harsh for humans.

Berg would have sworn that she had even spotted fillings, yellowed teeth embedded in Shira’s jaw. Was it possible that dental caries had returned to plague mankind again, after all these centuries?

What a brutal testament to the achievements of the Qax Occupation forces, Berg reflected bitterly. Shira was like a creature from Berg’s past, not her future. And now that Berg was deprived of the medical facilities of the Cauchy — not to mention AS technology — no doubt soon she, too, would become afflicted by the ills that had once been banished. My God, she thought, I will start to age again.

She sighed. She was close to her own time, after all; maybe — unlikely as it seemed — she could get back home. If Poole made it through…

"Shira," she said heavily. "I didn’t want to make you unhappy. I hate myself for making you unhappy. All right? But when I learned that you had no intention of communicating with the humans of this era — of my era — of telling them about the Qax… then of course I had to oppose you."

Shira was unperturbed; she swiveled her small, pretty face to the wreck of the boat. "You understand we had to destroy your craft."

"No, I don’t understand that you had to do that. But it’s what I expected you to do. I don’t care. I achieved my purpose; I got my message off despite all of you." She smiled. "I’m kind of pleased with myself for improvising a radio. I was never a hands-on technician, you know—"

"You were a physicist," Shira broke in. "It’s in the history books."

Berg shivered, feeling out of time. "I am a physicist," she said. She got stiffly to her feet and wiped blades of grass from her backside. "Can we walk?" she asked. "This place is depressing me."

Berg, casting about for a direction, decided to set off for the lip of the earth-craft; Shira calmly fell into step beside her, bare feet sinking softly into the grass.

Soon they were leaving behind whatever gave this disk of soil its gravity; the ground seemed to tilt up before them, so that it was as if they were climbing out of a shallow bowl, and the air started to feel thin. About thirty feet short of the edge they were forced to stop; the air was almost painfully shallow in Berg’s lungs, and even felt a little colder.

At the edge of the world tufts of grass dangled over emptiness, stained purple by the light of Jupiter.

"I think we have a basic problem of perception here, Shira," Berg said, panting lightly. "You ask why I betrayed your trust. I don’t understand how the hell a question like that has got any sort of relevance. Given the situation, what did you expect me to do?"

The girl was silent.

"Look at it from my point of view," Berg went on. "Fifteen hundred years after my departure in the Cauchy I was approaching the Solar System again…"

As the years of the journey had worn away the fifty aboard Cauchy had grown somberly aware that the worlds they had left behind were aging far more rapidly than they were; the crew were separated from their homes by growing intervals of space and time.

They were becoming stranded in the future.

…But they carried the wormhole portal. And, they knew, through the wormhole only a few hours flight separated them from the era of their birth. It was a comfort to imagine the worlds they had left behind on the far side of the spacetime bridge, still attached to the Cauchy as if by some umbilical of stretched spacetime, and living their lives through at the same rate as the Cauchy crew, patiently waiting for the starship to complete its circuit to the future.