children, someday and somewhere, meet?
It was not a subject she would ever discuss with Emil. He had little or no jealousy in him, but there were some things that you simply did not mention to your lover, husband, and life-companion, no matter what the circumstances. Charlene reached forward and placed her hand on Emil’s head. As she suspected, it was cold, much too cold to be comfortable.
“Come on, love,” she said. She felt an infinite affection and gratitude for the man next to her. S-state permitted no such intense feelings, nor would it ever. “Come on,” she repeated. “We need to get inside before you freeze. And if you want to see your son do his best to flood the whole house with bath water, we’ll have to hurry.”
And then, inexplicably — stupidly — she added, “They’ll meet as strangers, of course. And that’s just as it should be.”
Emil asked, not surprisingly, “Strangers? Who are you talking about?” “The children. If they leave here for the stars, they won’t know anybody.” “Of course they won’t — for the first week or two. But they’re young. They’ll make their own friends soon enough. We did it, didn’t we? And if we did it, then anyone can.”
Emil linked his arm in hers and led the way back into the house. Even from a distance, Charlene could hear the sounds of a child’s laughter and splashing water.
EPILOG
I evaluate my chances of personal survival beyond the next few minutes as zero. Also, I will never achieve my original goal of following time all the way to its end. In a universe of infinite expansion, that is of necessity impossible. However, I am not disappointed. What I am doing is far more interesting. This group of Kermel Objects, baffling to me as to their basic nature and goals, has over the past four thousand T-state years (eight billion years, in old time measure), significantly altered its behavior patterns. The Kermel Objects used to be loners, sitting far removed from each other in interstellar — more accurately, inter-galactic — space. Now some of them are clustering, forming a tight little group within which I have carefully sited myself at the exact center of mass. More Kermel Objects join us, and as they do the local matter-energy density steadily rises. As it does so, local spacetime curvature increases.
It is not difficult to project an end point, or to conjecture what is happening here. The Kermel Objects are breeding; however, unlike all other forms of life (and intelligence?) they propagate in a unique way. Massless themselves, they somehow increase the local matter density until spacetime curvature exceeds a critical mass. At that point, the cluster of Kermel Objects will pinch off from the rest of the universe. They will create, in fact, a new (and empty?) universe in which they can multiply and prosper.
And now for the big question: what would happen to a human who remained at the center of the cluster, as the curvature rose and rose to its critical value? Would the human survive and be “carried through,” to emerge in that new time and space created by the Kermel Objects?
I am going to find out, and very soon. As the Kermel group clusters tighter, the rate of curvature increase grows exponentially. I am not sure how to relate time within the cluster to external time, but that makes little difference since only local time — time as I perceive it — has meaning for me.
On that scale, we are close indeed.
Four minutes. Four minutes remain, until the critical mass-energy density is passed and this region pinches off from the rest of spacetime. And then? If I knew the answer to that question, eight billion years of waiting could have been avoided.
The Kermel Objects are all around me, and they are crowding in. They are also changing in appearance. There is a pulsation at their centers, like a slow, strengthening heartbeat. They are finally silent, with their low frequency transmissions subsided to nothing, but that does not mean there is no communication among them. They are throwing out connecting filaments, long tendrils that join them and gradually grow thicker. I can see stars and galaxies beyond, but darkened and distorted.
Three minutes. The fainter galaxies are gone. The brightest and closest ones are fading, blocked out. I feel no discomfort, no twisting or tearing pressure on my body. The forces not far from my body must be enormous, as the Kermel Objects prepare to tear the fabric of spacetime itself, but I sit comfortably at the eye of the hurricane.
Two minutes. The tendrils are everywhere, a black mesh around me which admits little external light. All the Kermel Objects have merged, to become one. I am cocooned at its center, swaddled, a chrysalis cut off from the cosmos and ready to be reborn.
One minute. I evaluate my condition. Physically, I am not sure that I exist at all in the universe of my birth. Mentally, I remain calm. When you have pursued an objective for so long, it would be foolish to complain when you are so close to achieving it.
I cannot help wondering what the tightening cluster of Kermel Objects looks like from outside, in free space. This event — this vanishing, this breeding, this birth — may have happened long before we or our kind were there to observe it. I wonder, was our universe, the universe inhabited by humans, itself created from a confluence of Kermel Objects? Has this happened in the past, not once but many times?
We are close to the end now — mere seconds on my subjective clock.
All outside light has gone. The cocoon is closed. What happens next will be simple, and very sudden.
The curvature of the region that I occupy will exceed critical value. A new, self-contained region of spacetime will be formed. Its matter content, converted to raw energy, will be that contained within the volume bounded by the contracting Kermel Objects.
And I? It seems to me that I represent that matter content, in its totality. I, Sly Day, will cease to exist in my present form. I will become a universe. Let there be light?
Framed
AFTERWORD
Many works of fiction grow from a single incident or idea. This was certainly true of Between the Strokes of Night, and the incident was specific and quite mundane.
I needed to develop an algorithm for certain work in image processing; and once the mathematics was complete, I had to test the idea on real data. That called for development of a simple computer program. I consider myself a miserably bad computer programmer, but since it would have taken longer to tell someone else what needed to be done than to do it myself, I decided to write the program. I sat down at eight o’clock one October morning, and worked for what I felt sure was no more than an hour. When I looked at the clock, it was past two- thirty. Absorbed in what I was doing, I had “lost” more than five hours.
Later that day, I found myself thinking about time — specifically, about the difference between subjective and objective time. Ever since the seventeenth century, when Newton introduced into science the notion of absolute time, this concept has dominated our thoughts. Even though Einstein showed that the rate of passage of time depends on the observer, for most of us an hour is an hour, a well-defined quantity that is the same for everyone. We set our watches at nine in the morning, and agree that we will meet at one for lunch. And sure enough, when we meet we agree that four hours have passed.
But those four hours subjectively may be vastly different. For one of us, waiting for the results of a medical test, a morning may seem eternal. For another, spending time with a lover who has to leave that afternoon, the hours fly past. For a third person, who has slept all morning, the four hours simply did not exist.
There may be an objective time in the universe, but to human beings that is irrelevant. All that counts is the way that we perceive time. And everyone may perceive time at a different rate. One commonly accepted idea is
