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.”
“A very human impulse,” said Mane.
Emma shrugged. “But why should they care what we think?”
Nemoto said, “Perhaps they were our descendants…”
Mane said nothing, her eyes wide as she peered at the crimson image, and Emma wondered what strange news from the future was pouring into her head.
And now the Galaxy image whirled again, evolving, changing, dimming. Emma hugged the baby hominid and closed her eyes.
Manekatopokanemahedo:
This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.
It began in the afterglow of the Big Bang, that brief age when stars still burned.
Humans arose on an Earth. Emma, perhaps it was your Earth. Soon they were alone, and for ever after.
Humans spread over their world. They spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through copying and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life: crude replicators, of carbon or silicon or metal, churning meaninglessly in the dark.
Nowhere did they find mind — save what they brought with them or created — no other against which human advancement could be tested.
They were forever alone.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages. It is impossible to understand what minds of that age were like, minds of time’s far downstream. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They needed nothing. They had nothing in common with their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as even the finest chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle…
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that something was wrong. It wasn’t supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe’s resources, the final down-streamers — lonely, dogged, all but insane — reached to the deepest past…
Emma Stoney:
Nemoto was muttering, perhaps to Emma or Manekato, or perhaps to herself, as she impatiently swept lianas and thorn tangles out other path. “Evolution has turned out to be a lot more complicated than we ever imagined, of course. Well, everything is more complicated now, in this manifold of realities. Even though Darwin’s basic intuition was surely right…” And so on.
Carrying the sleeping Nutcracker infant, Emma walked through the forest. Ahead she could see the broad back of Manekato.
Emma let Nemoto talk.
“…Even before this Red Moon showed up in our skies we had developed major elaborations to the basic Darwinian model. Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ is no simple tree, it turns out, no simple hierarchy of ancestral species. It is a tangle—”
“Like this damn jungle,” Emma said, trying to turn the monologue into a conversation. “Lianas and vines cutting across everywhere. If it was just the trees it would be easy.”
“A criss-cross transfer of genetic information, this way and that. And now we have this Red Moon wandering between alternate Earths, the Wheels returning to different Africas over and over, scooping up species here and depositing them there, making an altogether untidy mess of the descent of mankind — and of other species; no wonder this world is full of what Malenfant called ‘living fossils’. Surely without the Red Moon we would never have evolved, we Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo erectus was a successful species, lasting millions of years, covering the Earth. We did not need to become so smart…”
It had been some days since their jaunt into the tunnel in the Moon. Nemoto had spent the time with Manekato and other Daemons, struggling to interpret the experience. For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the ageing Galaxy had started to blizzard over her — even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it.
But she remembered the last glimpse of all.
…It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.
But even now there was something rather than nothing.
The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth…
That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn’t have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She had come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.
Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. This was reality, of life and breath and senses.
Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind
