Molly Fyde and the Blood of Billions

ache from keeping them furrowed in constant confusion.

“No, when I say we made the universe, I mean the one you are familiar with. We made the last several thousand of them—”

Byrne paused and frowned at the blank stare Cole must’ve been giving him. “I apologize,” he said. “I forget how limited your cosmological theories are. When I look at you, at any of you Humans, it’s like looking at a mirror. So few differences…” Byrne crossed his legs and seemed to settle back in his strange, metal throne. “Why don’t I start by explaining how the universe works, how it moves and operates. Let’s imagine for a moment that we’re on your home planet—”

“Gladly,” Cole interrupted.

Byrne smiled. “If you don’t get this lesson, my friend, the rest of the story will be lost. Now, imagine yourself on Earth, anywhere you like. Pretend you can walk across water and over any mountain. If you were to set off in a straight line in any direction, where would you end up?”

“On the other side,” Cole answered quickly, hoping to move the story along. “No—” With his index finger extended, he drew a circle in the air in front of him and focused on it through his goggles. “You’d end up where you started. Right?”

“Only if you stopped there.” Byrne had taken the tone of a teacher guiding along a favored student. He smiled at Cole, and for the first time, Cole realized Byrne didn’t have on goggles and didn’t seem to need them.

“You could keep going forever, if you liked,” Byrne said. “And that’s how the universe is shaped, only one dimension higher—”

“Well, you’re wrong about our cosmology, then. We’ve known this for a long time. If you travel in a straight line anywhere in the universe, you’ll end up where you started. It curves around on itself.”

“Oh, you’ve got the shape right,” Byrne agreed. “You’ve had that nailed for hundreds of years. However, your cosmologists don’t seem to appreciate the consequences, even though it’s completely obvious.”

“Consequences?” Cole asked.

“Everything in the universe is indeed traveling in a straight line. Which means—” He frowned, pursing his thin lips as if formulating a dumbed-down version for a child. “Imagine we’re sitting on the North Pole of your planet.”

Cole looked up at the snow flurries, at the large spire behind him. His imagination hardly needed to exert itself. “Done,” he said.

“Now picture the matter of the universe spreading out from here, all of it heading in every direction possible around your planet. Where is it going?”

“Back to where it started, just like when I go walking in a straight line.”

“Except you were traveling alone,” Byrne pointed out. Cole could almost imagine the armless man wagging his finger like Professor Phister used to. “Don’t forget,” Byrne said, “that there’s a lot of stuff in this example. If it’s all moving roughly the same speed—”

“The South Pole!” As soon as Cole uttered the answer, a lot more fell into place; he could almost hear his brain click audibly. The leading theory of their day, hundreds of years old and mostly unchanged, remained the Big Bang theory. Even with the problems of inflationary theory and dark energy, it was still the best they had, as messy and patchwork as it had become.

Cole thought about all that matter spreading out across the surface of a sphere, all heading away from the North Pole. He could see it traveling through the dips and rises, thinning out as it moved away. And then he could see it starting to come back together. All of it—all of everything—meeting in a big crunch at the South Pole. He considered the expanding universe and pictured for the very first time where it was expanding to!

“That’s why the expansion is speeding up,” Cole murmured. It was one of the mysteries of cosmology, the odd fact that expansion was accelerating when gravity should be slowing it down. Now he knew why. He turned to Byrne. “We’re halfway there, aren’t we? The matter is no longer flying away from itself, it’s now coming closer together! Gravity is working the other way, speeding it along.”

Byrne nodded. “Precisely how we like to put it. We are ‘past the universal equator.’ Well past, in fact.”

Cole forgot where he was, all the trouble he’d seen, all the matters relatively inconsequential. His brain went giddy with the possibilities, scrambling to assemble them into a coherent whole.

“That also explains hyperinflation,” he said. “It explains why things are going so quick in the beginning. All that matter just finished its downward swoop, so it would be absolutely flying as it came together!” He paused, finding a problem with the theory. “But why don’t we see it coming if we’re getting closer?” he asked. “Where’s all the other stuff?”

“All that stuff is over the horizon, to extend the metaphor.”

Cole pictured that. “But not because the light fails to bend, right? Is it because of the speed everything’s traveling?” Cole held up his finger, seeing it clearly. “It’s because of the direction it’s traveling through this fourth dimension.”

Byrne smiled broadly at Cole. “You are the one, aren’t you? I can see it, now. I never could in Mollie.”

Hearing her name elicited a shiver from Cole, snapping the descent into philosophy and cosmology. He remembered where he was, felt it like an icicle stabbing through his chest. He pictured Molly strapped to the gurney in Byrne’s ship, and the vision angered him, breaking the physics lesson. It helped him see another flaw in Byrne’s theory.

“That can’t be right,” he said. “The Big Bang didn’t happen in a place, it happened everywhere. It created space. Hell, the Big Bang happened just as much in my Portugal as it did in the Andromeda galaxy!”

Byrne laughed at this, bending at the waist and uncrossing his legs. It was a jolly laugh, very Human-like. When he settled down, he turned to Cole: “Son, we aren’t talking about hypotheticals, here. I’m not discussing theory. This is what we know, what we’ve known for a very long time. We’ve observed it.”

“That’s impossible,” Cole spat. “How can you observe something that destroys everything?”

“Oh, but it doesn’t. Very nearly but not quite. Not everything arrives at the same time, and some of it gets deflected. Besides, the South Pole of the universe, if you like to consider it that, is a very big place. As hot as it gets—and it gets hot enough to melt down nature’s laws—there are ways to get information through. Just as a particle can escape a black hole now and then, we can make sure data survives the Great Passing.”

Cole’s jaw dropped. “You’ve done this? This isn’t the first time we’ve been here?”

“Literally? You and I?” Byrne looked at the world zipping around them. “Of course it is.” He laughed. “There’s nothing mystical here, none of that repeating-our-actions nonsense. No, no, in fact, each universe is vastly different. That’s our job. That’s why I say this is our universe.”

Cole shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“What is life but information, my young friend? We are just—well you are just chemical programs and mindless routines. Ahh, you frown, and you are right to do so. Sentient things cannot grasp the accidental nature of their existence, and they are correct to feel this way. Tell me, do you know why Humans and the Bern look so similar?”

Cole looked at his hands and considered the question. “Convergent evolution?” he guessed. “The simplest solutions predominate?” But he knew that wasn’t right. Hadn’t Dani given him clues in the hallway of that Drenard prison?

“Nonsense. The odds are prohibitive. Look at the diversity of life on any one planet. An honest account of them is more bizarre than the differences between you and a filthy Bel Tra. No, my little Chosen One, the reason the Bern look alike all across the universe, the way they are able to rule all of creation with an iron and beneficent embrace, is simple: we set everything up in advance.”

Cole continued to stare at his palms; he peered at the lines in them. “You made us?”