Final Days

The current popular theory was that these slow-time chambers were stasis devices designed for long-term storage. Time-lapse cameras had been set up at the entrance, to try to estimate how long it would take Rodriguez to set his right foot down, turn around and walk back out of the chamber. The best estimates suggested anything up to a thousand years.

Sometimes Jeff woke from nightmares of Rodriguez still standing there, his face turned away, as the years turned into centuries. Sometimes he was Rodriguez, waking to find himself lost in the darkness of some future age, all alone on the wrong side of a wormhole gate that bored its way through time and space very nearly to the end of everything – a hundred trillion years into a future where most stars had turned to ashes, and the skies were filled with the corpses of galaxies.

They re-emerged from Vault One and followed the North Rampart until they reached Vault Four, half an hour after receiving Dan’s distress call.

Beyond the vaults lay nothing but the blasted, airless landscape of a world that had been dead for immeasurable eons. The planet on which the vaults stood orbited a black dwarf: the shrunken, frozen remnant of a once bright and burning star whose furious death had long since stripped away any vestiges of atmosphere.

Dan, who was an expert in such things, had once told Jeff the vaults themselves were tens of billions of years old, meaning they had stood for longer than the entire lifespan of the universe as it had been measured back in their own time. They were constructed, too, from a material that resisted all attempts at analysis. Despite a near- eternity of bombardment by micrometeorites and other debris drawn into the planet’s gravity well, the exterior of the vaults appeared as smooth and pristine as if their construction had just been finished.

Jeff glanced up at the towering slope of Vault Four, at the moment before they passed into its interior. He could hear Eliza talking to Dan and Lucy over the general comms circuit, trying to keep them calm, assuring them that help was almost at hand. He found himself wondering what they’d have to say once they discovered Eliza had been all for abandoning them.

Farad came abreast of him and tapped the side of his helmet: a request for a private link. At least Eliza had let him leave his cart of goodies back at Vault One, rather than wheel them all this distance.

‘I have come to believe,’ Farad told him, his eyes wide and fervent, ‘that God must have abandoned the universe long before this time-period.’

Jeff regarded him in silence, but with a sinking feeling.

‘Do you know what occurred to me when we heard about Stone and Vogel?’ Farad continued, an edge of desperation in his voice. ‘I could not help but wonder what, in the absence of God, happens to their souls.’

This wasn’t a conversation Jeff wanted to be having right now. His feet ached, and the interior of his suit stank from the long hours he’d spent inside it. Stress knotted his muscles into thick ropes of fatigue.

‘Their souls?’

‘This far beyond .

‘I know all this, Farad. They covered it in the orientations.’

‘Yes but, if God is no longer here, what happens if you die here?’ he demanded, his voice full of anguish. ‘Where do you go? There is only one conclusion.’

‘Farad—’

‘Hell is, by its very nature, the absence of God, is it not?’ the other man persisted.

Jeff stopped and put one hand on Farad’s shoulder, finally bringing him to a halt. Farad stared back at him, his nostrils faring.

‘Listen, you need to calm down a little, okay?’ Jeff told him. ‘You’re letting your imagination run away with you.’

Jeff glanced to one side. Eliza and Lou had moved ahead, apparently unaware that the pair had stopped. Up ahead lay a wide atrium, containing electric carts they could use for zipping about the ‘designated safe’ parts of the vaults.

Farad was a large, bluff man with a thick dark moustache, and he sometimes compared his attempts at picking apart the self-adjusting routines controlling the Vaults to a pygmy poking at electronic circuitry with a spear. He was intelligent and sharp, an excellent poker player – as some back at the Tau Ceti station had discovered to their cost – and also in possession of a keen sense of humour. But something about the black, unforgiving void that hung over the vaults, like a funeral shroud, could get to even the best of people.

It seemed to Jeff that the more intelligent people were, the harder it was for them to deal with witnessing a darkened universe far advanced in its long, slow senescence. Self-declared atheists began sporting prayer beads, while the moderately religious either discovered a new fervour for their faith or, more frequently, abandoned it altogether.

Farad refocused on him after a moment, and Jeff could see that his face was slick and damp behind the visor.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Farad after a moment. ‘Sometimes . . .’

‘I know,’ Jeff replied, with as much sympathy as he could muster. ‘But we’ll be home in a few days. Remember, we’ve got a plan.’

‘Yes.’ Farad nodded, his upper lip moist. ‘A plan. Of course.’

‘You just need to hold it together for a little while longer. Okay?’

‘Yes,’ Farad said again, and Jeff could sense he was a little calmer. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

<

Jeff gave him his best winning smile. ‘You already said that.’ He nodded, indicating somewhere further up the corridor. ‘I think we’d better catch up.’

Eliza had glanced back once, but chose to say nothing as the two of them caught up.