Stephen Baxter - Timelike Infinity

This warning sent a chill through Parz’s old bones. But his curiosity, drinking in knowledge after years of exclusion, impelled him to ask still more questions. "Governor, how could the Qax ever have got off the surface of their planet and into space? You’re surely not capable of handling large engineering projects."

"But we are nevertheless a technological race. Parz, my awareness is very different from yours. The scales are different: I have sentience right down to the molecular level; if I wish my cells can operate as independent factories, assembling high technology of a miniaturized, biochemical nature. We traded such items among ourselves for millions of years, unaware of the existence of the rest of the universe.

"Then we were ‘discovered’; an alien craft landed in our ocean, and tentative contact was established—"

"Who was it?"

The Governor ignored the question. "Our biochemical products had enormous market value, and we were able to build a trading empire — by proxy — spanning light-years. But we must still rely on clients for larger projects—"

"Clients like humans. Or like the Spline, who cart you around in their bellies."

"Few of us leave the home world. The risks are too great."

Parz settled back in his chair. "Governor, you’ve known me for a long time. You must know how I’ve been driven crazy, for all these years, by knowing so little about the Qax. But I’m damn sure you haven’t shown me all this as a long-service reward."

"You’re correct, Ambassador."

"Then tell me what you want of me."

The Governor replied smoothly. "Parz, I need your trust. I want to travel to the future. I want humans to build me a new time Interface. And I want you to direct the project."

It took Parz a few minutes to settle his churning thoughts. "Governor, I don’t understand."

"The revival of the ancient exotic matter technologies should not be difficult, given the progress of human science in the intervening millennium and a half. But the parameters will differ from the first project…"

Parz shook his head. He felt slow, stupid, and old. "How?"

Through the flitter’s tabletop the Qax transmitted an image to Parz’s slate: an appealing geometrical framework, icosahedral, its twenty sides rendered in blue and turning slowly. "The new Interface must be large enough to permit the passage of a Spline freighter," the Governor said. "Or some other craft sufficient to carry Qax."

A traveler through a wormhole interface suffered gravitational tidal stresses on entering the exotic-matter portal framework, and on passing through the wormhole itself. Parz had been shown, now, that a Qax was far more vulnerable to such stress than a human. "So the throat of the wormhole must be wider than the first," he mused. "And the portals must be built on a larger scale, so that the exotic-matter struts can be skirted—"

Parz touched the slate thoughtfully; the geometrical designs cleared.

The Qax hesitated. "Parz, I need your cooperation on this project." There seemed to be a note of honesty, of real supplication, in the Governor’s synthesized voice. "I have to know if this will cause you difficulty."

Parz frowned. "Why should it?"

"You are a collaborator," the Qax said harshly, and Parz flinched. "I know the ugliness that word carries, for humans. And now I am asking you to collaborate with me on a project whose success may cause great symbolic damage to humans. I am aware of how much the small success of the time-journeying rebels has meant to humans, who see us as oppressive conquerors—"

Parz smiled. "You are oppressive conquerors."

"Now, though, I am asking you to subvert this emblem of human defiance to the needs of the Qax. I regard this as an expression of great trust. Yet, perhaps, to you this is the vilest of insults."

Parz shook his head, and tried to answer honestly — as if the Qax were an externalization of his own conscience, and not a brooding conqueror who might crush him in an instant. "I have my views about the Qax Occupation, my own judgments on actions you have taken since," he said slowly. "But my views won’t make the Qax navies go away, or restore the technologies, capabilities, and sheer damn dignity that you have taken from us."

The Qax said nothing.

"I am a practical man. I was born with a talent for diplomacy. For mediation. By doing the job I do, I try to moderate the bleak fact of Qax rule into a livable arrangement for as many humans as possible."

"Your fellows might say that by working with us you are serving only to perpetuate that rule."

Parz spread his age-pocked hands, finding time to wonder that he was speaking so frankly with a Qax. "Governor, I’ve wrestled with questions like this for long hours. But, at the end of it, there’s always another problem to address. Something urgent, and practical, which I can actually do something about." He looked up at the ball of slowly seething liquid. "Does that make any sense?"

"Jasoft, I think we are of like mind, you and I. That is why I chose you to assist me in this enterprise. I fear that the precipitate actions of these rebels, these Friends of Wigner, represent the gravest peril — not just to the Qax, but perhaps to humanity as well."

Parz nodded. "That thought’s occurred to me too. Meddling with history isn’t exactly a proven science… and which of us would wish to trust the judgment of these desperate refugees?"

"Then you will help me?"

"Governor, why do you want to travel forward in time? How will that help you with your problem from the past?"

"Don’t you see what an opportunity this technology represents? By constructing a portal to the future I can consult with an era in which the problem has already been addressed and resolved. I need not make a decision on this momentous matter with any uncertainty about the outcome; I can consult the wisdom of those future Qax and refer to their guidance…"

Parz wondered vaguely if some sort of time paradox would be invoked by this unlikely scheme. But aloud he said, "I understand your intention, Governor. But — are you sure you want to do this? Would it not be better to make your own decisions, here and now?"

The Governor’s interpreted voice was smooth and untroubled, but Parz fancied he detected a note of desperation. "I cannot take that risk, Parz. Why, it’s entirely possible I will be able to consult myself… a self who knows what to do. Will you help me?"

The Qax is out of its depth, Parz realized. It genuinely doesn’t know how to cope with this issue; the whole of this elaborate new Interface project, which will absorb endless energy and resources, is all a smokescreen for the Governor’s basic lack of competence. He felt a stab of unexpected pride, of chauvinistic relish at this small human victory.

But then, fear returned through the triumph. He had been honest with the Governor… Could he really bring himself to trust the judgment of these Friends of Wigner, to whom accident had provided such power?

And, surely, this victory of procrastination would increase the likelihood that they’d all be left helpless in the face of the wave of unreality from the past.

But, Parz reflected, he had no choices to make.

"I’ll help you, Governor," he said. "Tell me what we have to do first."

With her message to Michael Poole dispatched and still crawling over the Solar System at mere lightspeed, Miriam Berg sat on coarse English grass, waiting for the Wigner girl Shira.

Berg had built a time machine and carried it to the stars. But the few days of her return through the wormhole to her own time had been the most dramatic of her life.

Before her the lifeboat from the Cauchy lay in a shallow, rust-brown crater of scorched soil. The boat was splayed open like some disemboweled animal, wisps of steam escaping its still-glowing interior; the neat parallel slices through its hull looked almost surgical in their precision, and she knew that the Friends had taken particular pleasure, in their own odd, undemonstrative way, of using their scalpellike cutting beams to turn drive units into puddles of slag.