I caught sight of Diane working her way up the slope, still struggling into her snowy white parka, one arm in, one arm out
I looked at Jason's face, grievously unhappy in the dim holiday light from below us. That frightened me, and despite what I was feeling I agreed to hear what he had to say.
* * * * *
He whispered something to Diane when she reached the gazebo. She looked at him wide-eyed and stood back from both of us. Then Jason began to talk, softly, methodically, almost soothingly, delivering a nightmare as if it were a bedtime story.
He had heard all this from E.D., of course.
E.D. had done well after the October Event. When the satellites failed, Lawton Industries had stepped forward with plans for an immediate, practical replacement technology: high-altitude aerostats, sophisticated balloons designed to hover indefinitely in the stratosphere. Five years later E.D.'s aerostats were carrying telecom payloads and repeaters, doing multipoint voice and data broadcasts, doing almost anything (apart from GPS and astronomy) a conventional satellite could have done. E.D.'s power and influence had grown apace. Lately he had formed an aerospace lobby group, the Perihelion Foundation, and he had consulted for the federal government on a number of less public projects—in this case, NASA's ARV (Automated Reentry Vehicle) program.
NASA had been refining its ARV probes for a couple of years now. The initial launches had been designed as investigations of the October shield. Could it be penetrated, and could useful data be retrieved from outside?
The first attempt was almost literally a shot in the dark, a simple ARV payload atop a refurbished Lockheed Martin Atlas 2AS, flung into the absolute darkness over Vandenberg Air Force Base. It had looked like a failure almost immediately. The satellite, which had been designed to spend a week in orbit, dropped into the Atlantic Ocean off Bermuda moments after its launch. As if, Jason said, it had hit the Event boundary and bounced back.
But it hadn't bounced. 'When they recovered it they downloaded a full week's worth of data.'
'How is that possible?'
'The question isn't what's possible but what happened. What happened was, the payload spent seven days in orbit and came back the same night it left. We know that's what happened because it happened with every launch they tried, and they tried it repeatedly.'
'What happened? What are you talking about, Jase? Time travel?'
'No… not exactly.'
'Not exactly?'
'Just let him tell it,' Diane said quietly.
There were all sorts of clues to what was really happening, Jason said. Ground-based observation seemed to suggest that the boosters actually accelerated into the barrier before they vanished, as if they had been drawn into it. But the recovered onboard data showed no such effect. The two sets of observations couldn't be reconciled. As seen from the ground, the satellites accelerated into the barrier and then dropped almost immediately back to Earth; the satellites themselves reported that they had progressed smoothly into their programmed orbits, remained there for the allotted span of time, and returned under their own power weeks or months later. (Like the Russian cosmonaut, I thought, whose story, never officially confirmed or denied, had become a sort of urban legend.) Assuming both sets of data were legitimate, there was only one explanation:
Time was passing differently outside the barrier.
Or, to turn the equation around, time on Earth was passing more slowly than in the universe at large.
'You understand what that means?' Jason demanded. 'Before, it looked like we were in some kind of electromagnetic cage that was regulating the energy that reaches the surface of the Earth. And that's true. But it's really only a side effect, a small part of a much bigger picture.'
'Side effect of what?'
'Of what they're calling a temporal gradient. You grasp the significance? For every second that passes on Earth, a whole lot more time passes outside the barrier.'
'That doesn't make sense,' I said immediately. 'What the hell kind of physics would that involve?'
'People with a lot more experience than me are struggling with that question. But the idea of a time gradient has a certain explanatory power. If there's a time differential between us and the universe, ambient radiation reaching the surface of the Earth at any given moment—sunlight, X rays, cosmic radiation—would be speeded up proportionally. And a year's sunshine condensed into ten seconds would be instantly lethal. So the electromagnetic barrier around the Earth isn't concealing us, it's protecting us. It's screening out all that concentrated—and, I guess, blue-shifted—radiation.'
'The fake sunlight,' Diane said, getting it.
'Right. They gave us fake sunlight because the real thing would be deadly. Just enough of it, and appropriately distributed, to mimic the seasons, to make it possible to raise crops and drive the weather. The tides, our trajectory around the sun—mass, momentum, gravitation—all these things are being manipulated, not just to slow us down but to keep us alive while they do it.'
'Managed' I said. 'It's not an act of nature, then. It's engineering.'
'I think we'd have to admit that,' Jason said, 'yes.'
'This is being done to us.'
'People are talking about a hypothetical controlling intelligence.'
'But what's the purpose, what's it supposed to achieve?'
'I don't know. No one knows.'
Diane stared at her brother across a gap of cold and motionless winter air. She hugged her parka and shivered. Not because of the temperature but because she had come to the fundamental question: 'How much time, Jason? How much time is passing out there?'
Out there beyond the blankness of the sky.
Jason hesitated, visibly reluctant to answer her.
'A lot of time,' he admitted.
'Just tell us,' she said faintly.
'Well. There are all kinds of measures. But the last launch, what they did was bounce a calibration signal off the surface of the moon. The moon gets farther away from the Earth every year, did you know that? By some minuscule but measurable amount. If you measure that distance you have a kind of rough calendar, more accurate the more time has passed. Add that to other signifiers, like the motion of nearby stars—'
'How much time, Jason?'
'It's been five years and a couple of months since the October Event. Outside the barrier, that translates into a little over five hundred million years.'
It was a breathtaking number.
I couldn't think of anything to say. Not a single word. I was rendered speechless. Thoughtless. At that moment there was no sound at all, nothing but the crisp emptiness of the night.
Then Diane, who had seen straight to the scary heart of the thing, said, 'And how long do we have left?'
'I don't know that either. It depends. We're protected, to some degree, by the barrier, but how effective is that protection? But there are some unavoidable facts. The sun is mortal, like every other star. It burns hydrogen and it expands and gets hotter as it ages. The Earth exists in a sort of habitable zone in the solar system, and that zone is moving steadily outward. Like I said, we're protected, we're okay for the time being no matter what. But eventually the Earth will be inside the heliosphere of the sun. Swallowed up by it. Past a certain point there's simply no going back.'
'How long, Jase?'
He gave her a pitying look. 'Forty, maybe fifty years,' he said. 'Give or take.'
4X109 A.D.
The pain was difficult to manage, even with the morphine Diane had purchased at ridiculous cost from a pharmacy in Padang. The fever was worse.
It wasn't continuous. It came in waves, clusters, bubbles of heat and noise bursting unexpectedly in my head. It made my body capricious, unpredictable. One night I groped for a nonexistent glass of water and smashed a
