Timescape

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The crowd around the television murmured and stirred. The sensation of lightness and pressing heat had gone. Objects no longer swayed as though seen underwater, refracted. Gordon shouldered his way through the close-packed students. Speculations buzzed around him. He slid aside the glass door to the wooden deck and stepped through. Without thinking he vaulted over the railing and out onto the parking lot. He got his running gear out of the trunk of the Chevy. He changed in the nearby men’s room. In shorts and tennis shoes he looked as young as many of the students still flocking to the rec room in search of news. He felt an airy sense of liberation and a humming, random energy, almost pleasurable. He did not want to think just now.

He began to run on the flat, watery sand. A steady breeze came in, blowing strands of black hair across his eyes. He ran with his head down, watching his feet strike. When his heel hit the sand a pale circle leaped into being as the water rushed out, driven by the impact. The beach hardened under each step, upholding him, and dissolved back to a gray slate sameness behind him. A helicopter passed whump whump whump overhead.

He skirted the town and ran through crescent coves, heading south, until he reached Nautilus Street. Penny was grading papers. He told her the news. She wanted to turn on the radio, learn more, but he tugged her away. Reluctantly she went with him. They went to the beach and walked south. Neither spoke. Penny fidgeted, face cloudy. The sea breeze scuffed the tops from the whitecaps and furled a banner of foam from each. Gordon looked at them and thought about them coming across the Pacific, driven by tides and winds. They were shallow out in the ocean and moved fast. As they neared the land the sea bed reared up beneath them and they deepened and slowed. Coming in, a wave moved faster at the top than at the bottom and they toppled forward, the energy from out of Asia churning into turbulence.

Penny called to him. She was already charging into the shallows. He followed. It was the first time he had tried this but that did not matter. They swam out beyond the waves and waited for the next big one to come in. It moved with stately slowness. The dark blue line thickened and rose and Gordon looked at it and estimated where it would break. He pulled forward, stroking fast and kicking. Penny was ahead. He felt something picking him up and the water ahead fell away. A rushing sound, and he moved faster. He flung out his arms and leaned to the left. Spray hazed his eyes. He blinked. He cut down the face of the wave, cupped in a wall of water, curling and churning toward the shore.

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

1998

JOHN RENFREW WORKED THROUGH THE NIGHT. HE had the temporary power supply going and he was damned if he’d stop while the fuel held out. If he stopped he could not be sure of getting it started again. Better to go on and see what would happen. Then he could have no regrets.

He grimaced. See what would happen? Or had happened? Or could happen? Human language did not fit the physics. There was no tense of the verb to be that reflected the looping sense of time. No way to turn the language on the pivot of physics, to apply a torque that would make the paradoxes dissolve into an ordered cycle, endlessly turning.

He had let the technicians go. They were needed at home. Outside, on the Coton footpath, no bicycles, no movement. Families were home, tending the ill, or else had fled to the countryside. He felt a twinge of the dysentery that had come in the night. A brush with the gnawing ?tuff from the clouds, he guessed. He had been drinking from a store of bottled fruit drinks he’d found in the cafeteria, and eating packaged foods. For two days he’d been here, alone, not pausing to go home for a change of clothes. The world as he had lived in it was closing down, that much was clear from the windows of the lab. Since early morning a plume of oily smoke had furled upward in the distance; obviously no one was trying to put it out.

He tuned the apparatus gingerly. Tap tap. Tap tap. The tachyon noise level remained constant. He had been transmitting the new message about the neurojacket process for days now, mixing it with the RA and DEC monotony Peterson had phoned new biological sentences in from his London office. The man had sounded strained and hurried. The content of the message, as nearly as Renfrew could understand it, explained why. If the California group was right, this thing could spread through the cloud-seed mechanism with blinding speed.

Renfrew tapped patiently on his Morse key, hoping he had the focusing right. It was so bloody difficult to know if you had the rig aimed. A slight error in targeting the beam put it at the wrong x, and thus at the wrong t. He had got through once, that they’d learned from Peterson’s bank vault. But how could he check now, if the pulsing coils were a microsecond slow, or the fringing fields throwing the beam a degree to the left? He had only his sandy-eyed calibrations to trust. He was adrift here, in a world where t was time and tea was brine and x for space, x for the unknown floated in the air before him, a passing pattern.

He shook himself. The lab stool pinched his buttocks. He had less fat there, now; must have lost weight. Have to put on some extra ballast, yes.

Tap tap tap. Out went the Morse cadences. Tap tap.

Maybe the weight loss explained why the room rippled and stretched as he watched. Christ, he was tired. A wan anger welled up in him. He had been taptaptapping out biological stuff and coordinates and the lot, all impersonal and—he was sure of it now—in the end, all useless. Bloody boring, it was. He reached over and took up the identifying passage he had been transmitting regularly, and began sending it again. But this time he added a few comments of his own, about how this whole thing got started, and Markham’s ideas, and Peterson the stiff-faced bastard, and the lot, all the way up to Markham’s crash. It felt good to get it all down, pushing the words out in Morse as he thought of them. He told it in ordinary sentences, not the clipped telegraph style they’d adopted for compressing the biological information. It was a relief to tell it, really. The whole sodding thing was pointless, the beam was pouring down some unsuspected cosmic rathole, anyway, so why not enjoy the last shot? Tap tap. Here’s my life story, mate, written on the head of a pin. Tap tap. Into the void. Tap tap.

But after a while the momentum left him and he stopped. His shoulders sagged.

The scope screen rippled and the tachyon noise level rose. Renfrew peered at it. Tap tap. On impulse he flipped off the transmitting switch. The past be damned for a moment. He watched the scramble of curves arc and intersect, dancing. For brief snatches of time the noise resolved into these snakings across the screen. Signals, clearly. Someone else was transmitting.

Regular jolts of wave forms, evenly spaced. Renfrew copied them.

ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349 IN TAC

and a blur of noise again, swallowing all.

English. Somebody sending in English. From the year 2349? Perhaps. Or maybe with tachyons in the 234.9 kilovolt range. Or maybe it was a fluke, a sport.

Renfrew slurped cold coffee. He had made a thermos days ago and forgotten it. He hoped the water was okay. The coffee hadn’t the dog’s fur flavor he remembered; more like scorched earth. He shrugged and drank it without thinking further.

He felt his brow. Sweat. A fever. A strange, distant mutter came to him. Voices? He went to look, surprised at his weakness, at the lurking ache in his ankles and thighs. Should get more exercise, he thought automatically, and then laughed. Scuffling noises. Had they heard him? He lurched down a corridor. But there was no one about. Only the sound of the wind. That, and the gritty scraping of his own shoes on the bare concrete.

He went back and stared at the scope. His throat burned. He tried to think calmly and cleanly about what Markham had said so long ago. The micro-universes were not like black holes, not in the sense that inside them all