Стивен Бакстер: Phase space

Kate Manzoni, with Reid Malenfant and Cornelius Taine, stood on Mike's porch. Inside the house, the baby was crying. Baby Michael - son of Mike - Malenfant's grandson.

And in the murky Houston sky, new Moons and Earths burst like silent fireworks, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.

It was just seven days since the failed echo from Alpha Centauri.

Malenfant said, 'So what are we looking at?'

'Phase space.' Cornelius seemed coldly excited. 'The phase space of a system is the set of all conceivable states of that system. We're glimpsing the wider phase space of the universe, Malenfant.'

Kate wondered how that remark helped.

No traffic moved on the street. Everybody had gone home, or anyhow found a place to hunker down, until -

Well, until what, Kate? As she had followed this gruesome step-by-step process from the beginning, she had studiously avoided thinking about its eventual outcome: when the wave of unreality, or whatever it was, came washing at last over Earth, over her. It was unimaginable - even more so than her own death. At least after her death she wouldn't know about it; would even that be true after this?

Now there were firebursts in the sky. Human fire.

'Nukes,' Malenfant said softly. 'We're fighting back, by God. Well, what else is there to do but try? God bless America.'

Saranne snapped, 'Come back in and close the damn door.'

The three of them filed meekly inside. Saranne, clutching her baby, stalked around the house's big living room, pulling curtains, as if that would shut it all out. But Kate didn't blame her; it was an understandable human impulse.

Malenfant threw a light switch. It didn't work.

Mike came in from the kitchen. 'No water, no power.' He shrugged. 'I guess that's it.' He moved around the room, setting candles on tables and the fire hearth; their glow was oddly comforting. The living room was littered with pails of water, cans of food. It was as if they were laying up for a snowstorm, Kate thought.

Malenfant said, 'What about the softscreens?'

Mike said, 'Last time I looked, all there was to see was a loop of the President's last message. The one about playing with your children, not letting them be afraid. Try again if you want.'

Nobody had the heart.

The light that flickered around the edges of the curtains seemed to be growing more gaudy.

'Kind of quiet,' Mike said. 'Without the traffic noise -'

The ground shuddered, like a quake, like a carpet being yanked from under them.

Saranne clutched her baby, laden with its useless immortality, and turned on Cornelius. 'All this from your damn fool stunt. Why couldn't you leave well enough alone? We were fine as we were, without all this. You had no right - no right…'

'Hush.' Malenfant moved quickly to her, and put an arm around her shuddering shoulders. 'It's okay, honey.' He drew her to the centre of the room and sat with her and the infant on the carpet. He beckoned to the others. 'We should hold onto each other.'

Mike seized on this eagerly. 'Yes. Maybe what you touch stays real - you think?'

They sat in a loose ring. Kate found herself between Malenfant and Saranne. Saranne's hand was moist, Malenfant's as dry as a bone: that astronaut training, she supposed.

'Seven days,' Malenfant said. 'Seven days to unmake the world. Kind of Biblical.'

'A pleasing symmetry,' Cornelius said. His voice cracked.

The candles blew out, all at once. The light beyond the curtains was growing brighter, shifting quickly, slithering like oil.

The baby stopped crying.

'Hold my hand, Malenfant,' Kate whispered.

'It's okay -'

'Just hold my hand.'

This time they have a couple of hours to spare before the bookstore signing, so Jays and Alice check into their hotel, and take a walk.

Hereford turns out to be a small, picturesque little town like so many crowded into England. It is incredible to Jays that they are only a hundred thirty miles west of London, and yet they've already all but come out of England into Wales. The centre is pretty, with a lot of historical curiosities, some of them incredibly old - 'Nell Gwynne was born here,' Alice points out, 'I thought she was a character from a novel' - but it is a little clogged with traffic.

The older houses are built of old red sandstone, Jays recognizes.

They walk along a river called the Wye. It is a steamy June afternoon - today, in fact, is the longest day of the year - with the sky a high, pale blue dome, and the reflection of the cathedral shines in the water. But the river is running low, and the willows are having trouble dipping to the water surface, and the grass sward is long and yellow, for England is suffering another of its baked-dry summers. The climate is changing here, with Mediterranean weather patterns working their way up from southern Europe. But, Jays remembers, England always looked pale brown or grey, not green, from orbit.

At around five, they walk into the cathedral. A choir of schoolboys is practising, and their thin, delicate voices float on the air. There are tourists here, but they move around quietly, looking up. Jays is conscious of the loud click of the toecaps of his boots on the flags.

Alice reads from a guide pamphlet. '"The cathedral is mainly

Norman." Some of it is nine hundred years old, Jays. "Of special interest are the carved stalls, the fourteenth-century Mappa Mundi in the south transept, the chapels, the tombs and the library, with its chained and rare books.'" She sniffs. 'I'm becoming acclimatized to all this great age, I think.'

Jays runs a hand over a huge slab of sandstone embedded in a pillar. Somebody has carved a graffito here - 'Dom. Gonsales' -but even this desecration is self-evidently ancient.

'Nice rock?' Alice asks dryly.

Jays grins as they walk on. 'Actually, yes. This is Devonian sandstone -'

'Don't tell me. When dinosaurs ruled the Earth.'

'Hell, no. Much older than that. This stuff is about four hundred million years old, Alice. We're on the coast of the Old Red Sandstone Continent. The rock here was laid down in lakes and deltas; most of southern England was covered by ocean. There were plants on land, but no animals yet…'

She nods as if listening, but she has found a small book stall, and is starting to browse.

Jays scratches the frosting of white that is all that is left of his hair. He is now seventy years old, fit and California-tanned. For twenty-five years, since his Apollo flight, his one and only spaceflight, he has been a bore about the Moon. And now his interest in geology is making him a bore about the Earth, too.

It is kind of heroic, he thinks, to be dull on two planets.

Alone, he wanders a little further. He tries to fix the church in his memory.

Most of the great English cathedrals stopped developing during the Reformation in the sixteenth century, when Henry VIII took his country away from the Church of Rome. Compared to the great churches in Catholic countries like Spain or Italy, swamped by centuries of ornamentation, English cathedrals have a certain austere class, he has decided.

He comes to a small, rather ugly side chapel. It isn't roped off, but there are no tourists here. The walls are much darker than the rest of the church, and that, together with the filtering of the light by a couple of niggardly slit-windows, adds to a sense of gloom and age.

Jays, on impulse, steps inside. There are a couple of pews before a small, nondescript altar, and a stand of unlit candles. There is dust on the pews. A paper sign, stuck to the wall with putty, tells