The Time Ships

These are the sun’s true companions, Nebogipfel said. Its siblings, if you like: the stars which shared the sun’s nursery-cloud. Once, they formed a cluster as bright and as close as the Pleiades… but gravity will not hold them together, and before the birth of life on earth they will drift apart.

One of the young stars, directly over my head, flared. It expanded, soon becoming large enough to show a disc, but growing more red, and fainter… until at last it expired, and the glow of that part of the cloud died.

Now another star, almost diametrically opposed in position to the first, went through the same cycle: the flare, followed by the expansion into a brilliant crimson disc, and then extinction.

All of this magnificent drama, you must imagine, was played out against a background of utter silence.

We are witnessing the birth of stars, I said, but in reverse.

Yes. The embryonic stars light up their birthing gas cloud such nebulae are a beautiful sight but after the stellar ignition, the lighter gases are made to flee the heat, leaving only heavier rubble —

A rubble which condenses into worlds, I said.

Yes.

And now — so soon! — it was the turn of the sun. There was that uncertain flaring of yellow-white light, a glare that glinted from the Time Ships’ Plattnerite prows — and the rapid swelling into an immense globe, which briefly swamped the armada of Time Ships in a cloud of crimson light… and then, at last, that final dispersal into the general void.

The Ships hung in the sudden darkness. The last of the sun’s companions flared, ballooned out, and died; and we were left in a cloud of cold, inert hydrogen, which reflected our glow of Plattnerite green.

Only the remote stars marked the sky, and I saw how they too shimmered and flared, fading in their turn. Soon the skies grew darker, and I surmised that fewer and fewer stars yet existed.

Then, suddenly, a new breed of stars flared across the sky. There was a whole host, it seemed: dozens of them were close enough to show a disc, and the light of these new stars was, I was sure, bright enough to read a newspaper by — not that I was in a position to try such an experiment!

Confound it, Nebogipfel, what an astonishing sight! Astronomy should have been a little different under a sky like this — eh?

This is the very first generation of stars. These are the only lights, anywhere in the new cosmos… Each of these stars amass a hundred thousand times as much as our sun, but they burn their fuel prodigiously — their life-spans are counted in mere millions of years.

And indeed, even as he spoke, I saw that the stars were expanding, reddening, and dispersing, like great, overheated balloons.

Soon it was done; and the sky was left dark again — dark, save only for the green glow of the Time Ships, which forged, steady and determined, into the past.

[3] The Boundary of Space and Time

A new, uniform glow began to permeate space around me. I wondered if some earlier generation of stars was shining in this primeval age — a generation undreamed of by Nebogipfel and the Constructors with whom he communed. But I soon saw that the glow did not come from an array of point sources, like stars; rather, it was a light which appeared to shine, all about me, as if from the structure of space itself — although here and there the glow was mottled, as, I surmised, dense clumps of embryonic star-matter shone more brightly. This light was the deepest crimson at first — it reminded me of a sunset breaking through clouds — but it brightened, and escalated through the familiar spectrum colors, through orange, yellow, blue, towards violet.

I saw that the fleet of Time Ships had gathered more closely together; they were rafts of green wire, silhouetted against the dazzling emptiness, and clustering as if for comfort. Tentacles — ropes of Plattnerite — snaked out across the glowing void between the Ships, and were connected, their terminations assimilated into the Ships’ complex structures. Soon, the whole armada about me was connected by a sort of web of cilia filament.

Even at this early stage, Nebogipfel told me, the universe has structure. The nascent galaxies are present as pools of cold gas, gathered in gravitational wells… But the structure is imploding, contracting, as we travel back towards the Boundary.

It is like an explosion in reverse, then, I suggested to Nebogipfel. Cosmic shrapnel, collapsing to site of detonation. At last, all the matter in the universe will merge in a single point — at some arbitrary center of things — and it will be as if a great Sun has been born, in the midst of infinite and empty space.

No. It’s rather more subtle than that…

He reminded me of the bending-about of the axes of Space and Time — the distortion which lay behind the principle of time travel. That twisting of axes is going on now, all around us, he said. As we travel back through time, it is not that matter and energy are converging through a fixed volume, like a gathering of flies at the center of an empty room… Rather, space itself is folding up — compressing — crumpling, like a deflated balloon, or like a piece of paper, crushed in the hand.

I followed his description — but it filled me with awe, and dread, for I could not see how life or Mind could survive such a crumpling!

The universal light grew in intensity, and it climbed the spectral scale to a glaring violet with startling speed. Clumps and eddies in that sea of hydrogen swirled about, like flames within a furnace; the Time Ships, connected by their ropes, were barely visible as gaunt silhouettes against that uneven glow. At last the sky was so bright I had only an impression of white-ness; it was like staring into the sun.

There was a soundless concussion — I felt as if I had heard a clash of cymbals — the light rushed in towards me, like some encroaching liquid — and I fell into a sort of white blindness. I was immersed in the most brilliant light, a light which seemed to suffuse my being. I could no longer make out those mottled clumps, and nor could I see the Time Ships — not even my own!

I called to Nebogipfel. I cannot see. The light —

His voice was small and calm, in that clamor of illumination.

We have reached the Epoch of Last Scattering… Space is now everywhere as hot as the surface of the sun, and filled with electrically charged matter. The universe is no longer transparent, as it will be in our day…

I could see why the Ships had been joined up by those ropes of Constructor stuff, for surely no signal could propagate through this glare. The dazzle grew more intense, until I was sure that it must have passed far beyond the range of visibility of normal human eyes — not that a man could have lasted for a moment in that glowing cosmic furnace!

It was as if I hung, alone, in all that immensity. If the Constructors were there, I had no sense of them. My feeling for the passage of time loosened and fell away; I could not tell if I was witnessing events on the scale of centuries or seconds, or if I was watching the evolution of stars or atoms. Before entering this last soup of light I had retained a residual sense of place — I had kept a feeling of up and down — of near and far… The world around me had been structured like a great room, within which I was suspended. But now, in this Epoch of Last Scattering, all of that fell away from me. I was a mote of awareness, bobbing about on the surface of that great River which was winding back to its source all about me, and I could only allow that ultimate stream to carry me where it would.

The soup of radiation became hotter — it was unbearably intense — and I saw that the matter of the universe, the matter which would one day compose the stars, planets and my own abandoned body, was but a thin trace of solidity, a contaminant in that seething maelstrom of light and stars. At last — I seemed to be able to see it — even the cores of atoms fizzed apart, under the pressure of that unbearable light. Space was filled with a soup of still more elemental particles, which combined and recombined in a sort of complex, microscopic melee, all about me.

We are close to the Boundary, Nebogipfel whispered. The beginning of time itself… and yet you must imagine that we are not alone: that our History — this young, glowing universe — is but one of an infinite number which has emerged from that Boundary; and that as we retreat all the members of that Multiplicity are converging towards this moment, this Boundary, like swooping birds…

But still the contraction of it all continued — still the temperature climbed, still the density of matter and energy grew; and now even those final fragments of radiation and matter were absorbed back into the shearing carcass of Space and Time, their energies stored in the stress of that great Twisting.

Until, in the end…

The last, sparkling particles fell away from me softly, and the glare of radiation heightened to a sort of invisibility.

Now, only a gray-white light filled my awareness: but that is a metaphor, for I knew that what I was experiencing now was not the light of Physics, but that glow hypothesized by Plato, the light which underlies all awareness — the light against which matter, events and minds are mere shadows.

We have reached the Nucleation, whispered Nebogipfel. Space and Time are so twisted over that they are indistinguishable. There is no Physics here… There is no Structure. One cannot point and say: that is there, such a distance away; and I am here. There is no Measurement — no Observation… It is all as One.

And, just as our History has shriveled to a single, searing point, so the Multiplicity of Histories has converged. The Boundary itself is melting away — can you understand it? — lost in the infinite possibilities of the collapsed Multiplicity…

And then there was a single, very brilliant, pulse of light: of Plattnerite green.

[4] The Nonlinearity Engines

The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about — stretched and battered — as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.

Nebogipfel?…

His voice was joyful — exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors…

The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the gray-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unraveling of Space and Time.

I was traveling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the center of the sun.

The Time Ships no longer accompanied me — perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation — and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me — like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp’s burst — were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.

Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?

… Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?

I am here.