Time

“The Sheena has gone,” Malenfant said immediately. “She must have gone back to the portal again.”

“Christ,” Emma said. “She’s trying to get home.”

“But she’s only succeeded in traveling farther downstream,” said Cornelius. The image lurched again as the firefly began to toil toward the portal once more. “And so, it seems, must we. The firefly doesn’t know what else to do.”

Emma found she was making a fist, so hard her nails were digging into her palm. “I don’t want to see any more.”

“I don’t think there’s a choice,” Malenfant said grimly.

The image of the portal expanded out of the camera’s field of view, and once more that deep black, blacker than galactic night, confronted Emma.

There was a flash of electric blue.

Another black sky, another Cruithne. The patient firefly crept forward, shining its own fading light over the crumpled surface of the asteroid, seeking the Sheena.

Emma would not have believed that the ground of Cruithne could look more aged than it had before. And yet it did, its craters and ridges and scarps all but invisible under a thick blanket of dust. As the firefly labored Emma could see how its pitons and cables kicked up great sprays of regolith.

The three of them watched in somber silence, oppressed by time’s weight.

“How long, Cornelius?” Malenfant asked, his voice hoarse.

Cornelius was studying his data. “I don’t know. The relic temperature is too low to read. And…”

And there was a dawn, on far-downstream Cruithne.

Emma gasped. The sight was as unexpected as it was beautiful: a point of yellow-white light, sunlike. The light rose in clumsy stages as the firefly labored toward it. Shadows of smooth eroded crater rims and ridges fled across the smooth landscape toward her, like bony fingers reaching. It was so bright it seemed to Emma she could feel its warmth, and she wondered if somehow this long journey through time had looped back on itself, returning her to the dawn of time, the birth of the Solar System itself.

But, she quickly realized, this was no sunrise.

A glaring point was surrounded by a tilted disc, glowing red, within which she could trace a tight spiral pattern. And there seemed to be lines of light tracing out from the poles of that central gleam, needle-thin. Farther out she saw discs and knots of dull red matter, much smaller than the big bright core object. The central light actually cast shadows through the crowded space around it, she saw, shadows that — if this was a galactic-scale object — must have been thousands of light-years long.

It was oddly beautiful, a sculpture of light and bloodred

smoke. But it was chilling, inhuman, even compared to the last

grisly galactic vision; there was nothing she could recognize

here, nothing that looked like a star.

“Our Galaxy?” Malenfant asked.

Cornelius studied his data. “Perhaps. If it is, it’s extremely shrunken. And I’m seeing objects away from the disc itself now: a scattering of low-energy infrared sources, all around the sky. Stellar remnants, I think.”

Malenfant said grimly, “What you said. Evaporated stars Right?”

“Yes.” Cornelius studied the screen. “At a guess, I’d say ninety

percent of the objects in the Galaxy have evaporated away, and

maybe ten percent are gathering in the core object.”

“The black hole. That’s what we’re seeing.”

“Yes. We’ve come a long way, Malenfant, and our strides are

increasing. These processes are slow….”

Emma barely listened.

The camera swung from the bright black-hole structure, to the folded asteroid dirt, to sweeping empty sky.

“No sign of Sheena,” she murmured. “Maybe the portals don’t always work consistently. Maybe she’s been sent on somewhere else, out of our reach—”

Malenfant briefly hugged her. “Emma, she’s been out of our reach since the first time she bounced through that portal. Whether we see her or not hardly matters.”

“But it feels like it does. Because we’re responsible for her being there.”

“Yes,” he said at length.

They fell silent, but they stayed close to each other. Emma welcomed Malenfant’s simple human warmth, the presence of his flesh, the soft wash of his breath on her face. It seemed to exclude the endless dark of the future.

Meanwhile Cornelius was staring up at the image, interrogating the smart systems, speculating, theorizing, obsessing.

“The light we see is coming from that central accretion disc, where matter is falling into the black hole and being absorbed. Intensely bright, of course; probably more energetic than the combined fusion energy of all the Galaxy’s stars in their heyday. The hole itself is probably a few light-months across. Those beams coming from the poles — perhaps they are plasma directed by the magnetic field of the disc, or maybe the hole itself. Like a miniature quasar.” He frowned. “But that’s wasteful. It’s hard to believe they don’t have a way to harness that radiant energy. Perhaps they’re signaling—”

“Wasteful?” Malenfant snapped. “What are you talking about, Cornelius? Wasteful to who?”

“The downstreamers, of course,” Cornelius said. “The down-streamers of this era. Can’t you see them?” Cornelius froze the camera’s shuddering image. “Can’t you see? Look at these smaller satellite holes. Look how uniform their size is, how regular the spacing.”

“You’re saying this arrangement of black holes is artificial,” Emma said.

“Why, of course it is. I suspect the downstreamers are using the smaller holes to control the flow of matter into the central hole. They must be regulating every aspect of this assemblage: the size of the satellite holes, the rate at which they approach the central core. I think the downstreamers are mining the Galaxy-core black hole of its energy.”

“Mining? How?”

He shrugged. “There are a whole slew of ways even we can dream up. If you coalesce two black holes, you get a single, larger hole — with an event horizon ringing like a bell — but you also get a monumental release of gravitational energy. Much of a spinning hole’s energy is stored in a great tornadolike swirl of space and time, dragged around by the hole’s immense inertia. You could tap this energy by enclosing the hole in a great mesh of superconducting cables. Then you could thread the tornado swirl with a magnetic field, to form a giant electrical power generator. Or you can just throw matter into the central hole, feeding off the radiation as it is crushed… No doubt there are better ways. They’ve had a long time to work it out.”

“How long?”

Cornelius tapped his softscreen. “A guess, based on the nature of that black hole? Ten to power twenty-four years: a trillion trillion years. Ten billion times as old as the last images we saw, the age of the star farmers.”

“Jesus,” Malenfant said. “A long time.”

Cornelius said testily, “Remember the zoom factors. We just zoomed out again. The universe must have expanded to, umm, some ten thousand trillion times its size in our day. Compared to the age of the Galaxy remnant we see here, the evolution of our universe was as brief, as insignificant, as the first three hours after the Big Bang is to us.”

“And yet there is still life.”

“The Sheena,” Malenfant said.

There was the golden beach ball, lurching over the surface, cables glimmering in the firefly’s floods. A cephalopod was clearly visible within, swimming back and forth, curious. The camera swept the Cruithne landscape as the firefly turned to follow the Sheena.

“She’s going back to the portal,” Malenfant said. “She’s going on.”

Something shrank, deep inside Emma. Not again, she thought.

“Perhaps it’s a kind of morbid curiosity,” Cornelius said dryly. “To keep on going forward, on and on, to the end of things.”

“No,” Emma said. “You saw her. She’s not morbid.”

“Then what?”

“It’s as if she’s looking for something. But what? The more I see of this future universe, the more it seems—”

“Pointless?” asked Malenfant.

She was surprised at that, from him. “Yes, exactly.”

His face wore a complex expression. He’s taking it hard, she thought, this cold, logical working-out of his dreams. Malenfant campaigns for an expansive future for humankind: survival, essentially, into the far downstream. Well, here it is, Malenfant: everything you dreamed of.

And it is appalling, terrifying: proof that if we are to survive we must sacrifice our humanity.

Cornelius shrugged. “Pointless? What a trivial response. We are the first, the only intelligence in the universe. We have no objective, save endurance: nothing to do but survive, as long as we can.

“And in fact this era may be the peak, when we learn to tap these giant energy sources, the greatest in the universe, sources so great they outshine our fusion-driven stars as if they were candles.”

“The manhood of the race,” Emma said dryly.

“Perhaps. And—”

“And are they like us?” Emma asked.

“What does it matter? Your thinking is so small. Modern humans could never handle such projects as this. We can’t imagine how it is to be such a creature, to think in such a way.

“Perhaps there is no real comparison between them and us, no contact possible. But it does not matter. They are magnificent.”

She was repelled. She thought: You’re wrong. There had to be something more to strive for than that, more than simple survival in a running-down universe.

But then, she had no children. So these black-hole miners, however remote, however powerful, were not her descendants; she was cut off, a bubble of life lost in the far upstream.

The firefly worked its painful way across the time-smoothed landscape toward the portal.

Damien Krimsky:

…Anyhow that’s why I went AWOL for so long, Mr. Hench. I hope you can understand that.

I support Bootstrap. I’m a big fan of Reid Malenfant and everything he’s trying to do. The time I spent working with you on those BDBs in the Mojave desert was probably the most meaningful of