Time

gathered and used to record information, thoughts, life. And when their structure failed, the last black hole must have evaporated.” He looked misty. “Of course they must have tried. Fought to the last. It must have been magnificent.”

Emma studied Malenfant. “You’re disappointed. But we’ve seen so much time. So much room for life—”

“But,” Malenfant said, “I hoped for eternity.”

Cornelius sighed. “The universe will presumably expand forever, on to infinity. But we know of no physical processes that will occur beyond this point.”

Emma said, “And all life, of any form, is extinct. Right?”

“Yes.”

“In that case,” Emma said softly, “who is Sheena talking to?”

Sheena was blurred with distance now, her habitat a golden planet only dimly visible in the light of the robot’s failing lamps. Maybe Emma’s imagination was projecting something on her, like the face of the man in the Moon.

But still—

“I’m sure I can see her signing,” she said.

“My God,” Malenfant said. “You’re right.”

Emma frowned. “There must be someone here. Because the portal’s here. And it called to us — right? — through a relay of portals, upstream through the zoom factors, to the present. Maybe it called to Sheena, and brought her here.”

“She’s right,” Cornelius said, wondering. “Of course she’s right. There has to be an entity here, a community, manipulating the neutrino bath and sending signals to the past.”

“So where are they getting the energy from, to compute, to think?”

Cornelius looked uncomfortable; obsessively he worked his softscreen, scrolling through lists of references. “It’s very speculative. But it’s possible you could sustain computation without expending energy. We have theoretical models…

“What actually uses up energy during computation is discarding information. If you add two numbers, for instance, clearing out the original numbers from your memory store eats up energy. But if your computation is logically reversible — if you never discard information — you can drive down your processing costs to arbitrarily small values.”

“There has to be a catch,” Malenfant said. “Or somebody would have patented it.”

Cornelius nodded. “We don’t know any way of interacting with the outside universe without incurring a loss. No way of inputting or outputting data. If you want to remain lossless, you have to seal yourself off, in a kind of substrate. But then, nothing significant is going to change, ever again. So what is the use of perception?”

“Then what’s left?”

“Memory. Reflection. There is no fresh data. But there may be no end to the richness of understanding.”

Malenfant said, “If these ultimate downstreamers are locked into the substrate, how can Sheena talk to them?”

“Sheena is a refugee from the deepest past,” Cornelius said. “Perhaps they feel she is worth the expenditure of some of their carefully hoarded energy. They must be vast,” he said dreamily. “The last remnant particles orbit light-years apart. A single mind might span the size of a Galaxy, vast and slow as an empire. But nothing can hurt them now. They are beyond gravity’s reach, at last immune to the Heat Death.”

Emma said, “And these are our ultimate children? These wispy ghosts? The manipulation of structures spanning the universe, the endless contest of ingenuity versus entropy — was

it all for this?”

“That’s the deal,” Cornelius said harshly. “What else is there?”

“Purpose,” Emma said simply. “We’re losing her.”

Sheena was drifting out of the picture.

Cornelius tapped his console. “The firefly is nearly out of attitude-control gas.”

Every few minutes the beach ball drifted through the frame of the softscreen as the firefly’s helpless roll carried it around. The image was dim, blurred, at the extreme range of the failing camera. Emma took to standing close to the softscreen frame, staring at the squid’s image, trying to read any last signs.

It’s like a wake, she thought.

“We have to consider our next step,” Cornelius murmured.

Malenfant frowned. “What next step?”

“Look at the image. Look at it. We’ve found an artifact, a non-terrestrial artifact, on that asteroid. Exactly where the down-streamers pointed us. And they used it to teach us about the future: the trillions upon trillions of years that await us, if we can only find a way around the Carter catastrophe, which must be possible. My God, think of it. We caught the barest glimpse today, a flyby of the future. What if we established monitoring stations in each of those downstream islands? Think of what we’d achieve, what we’d see.

“We have to retrieve that artifact. If we can’t get it off the asteroid, we have to study it in situ. Malenfant, we have to send people to Cruithne. And we must show this to Michael.”

A look of unaccountable fear crossed Malenfant’s face.

In the softscreen Sheena was a blurred patch of light, shadows moving across her sides. Sheena signed once more — Emma struggled to see — and then the screen turned a neutral gray.

“It’s over,” Cornelius said. “The firefly’s dead. And so is Sheena.”

“No,” Emma said. “No, I don’t think so.”

Somehow, she knew, the Sheena understood what was happening to her. For the last thing Sheena had said, the last thing Emma could recognize before the image failed, was a question.

Will I dream?

Maura Della:

Open journal. October 22,2011.

I’ve never forgotten the first time I flew the length of Africa. The huge empty deserts, the mindless blankets of green life, the scattered humans clinging to coasts and river valleys.

I’m a city girl. I used to think the human world was the whole world. That African experience knocked a hole in my confidence of the power of humans, of us, to change things, to build, to survive. The truth is that humans have barely made an impression on Earth — and Earth itself is a mote in a hostile universe. This shaped my thinking. If humanity’s hold on Earth is precarious, then, damn it, we have to work to make it less so.

It’s only a generation since we’ve been able to see the whole Earth. And now, it seems, we can see the whole future, and what we must do to survive. And I hope we can cope.

I admit, though, I found the whole thing depressing.

It is of course the logical conclusion of my own ambition, which is that, on the whole, the human race should seek not to destroy itself — in fact, that it is our destiny to take over from the blind forces of inanimate matter and guide the future of the cosmos.

It’s just it never occurred to me before that, in the end, all there will be out there to conquer is rabble, the cooling rains of the universe.

I’m sixty-one years old. I’m not in the habit of thinking about death. I suppose I always had a vague plan to fight it: to use all my resources, every technique and trick I could find and pay for, to live as long as possible.

But is it worth it? To cling to life until I’m drained of strength t and mind and hope? But isn’t that exactly what we saw in the far future, a senile species eking out the last of its energies, straggling against the dark?

It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.

Maybe some things are more important than life itself.

But what?

Emma Stoney:

Even as his representatives wrestled with the bureaucratic demons that threatened to overwhelm him — even as the world alternately wondered at or mocked his light-and-shadow images of the far future — Reid Malenfant sprung another surprise.

He went on TV and the Nets and announced a launch date for BDB-2, tentatively called O’Neill.

And as Malenfant’s nominal, fictional, technically-plausible-only launch date approached, events seemed to be coming to a head. On the one hand a groundswell of popular support built up for Malenfant, with his enterprise and defiance and sense of mystery. But on the other hand the forces opposing him strengthened and focused their attacks.

Look at it this way. If all this legal bullshit evaporates, and I’m ready to launch, I launch. If I ain ‘t ready to launch, I don’t launch. Simple as that. What am I wasting?

Come watch me fly.

He was wasting a few million bucks, actually, Emma thought, with every aborted launch attempt. But Malenfant knew that, and it wouldn’t stop him anyhow, so she kept it to herself.

And she had to admit it worked: raising the stakes again, whipping up public interest to a fever pitch. Nothing like a countdown to focus the mind.

Then, a couple of days before the “launch date” itself, Malenfant asked Emma to come out from Vegas. Things are hotting up, babe. I need you here…

She refused Malenfant’s offer of a flight out to the compound. She decided to drive; she needed time to rest and think. She turned on the SmartDrive, opaqued the windows, and tried to sleep.

It was only when the car woke her, some time before dawn on Malenfant’s “launch day,” that she began to be aware of the people.

At first there was just a handful of cars and vans parked off the road, little oases of light in the huge desert night. But soon there were more: truck-camper vans, and cars with tent-trailers, and converted buses, and Jeeps with houses built on the back, and Land Rovers, and Broncos with bunks. There were tents lit from inside, people moving slowly in the predawn grayness. There were people sleeping in the cars, or even in the open, on inflatable mattresses and blankets.

As she neared the Bootstrap site itself the density of people continued to increase, the little groups crowded more closely together. She saw a place where a blanket spread out under the tailgate of an ancient convertible was almost overlapping the groundsheet of a much more elaborate tent. In another, right next to an upscale mobile home, she saw an ancient Ford, its hood held in place by what looked like duct tape, with a child sleeping in the open trunk and dirty bare feet protruding from all the windows. And as dawn approached people were rising, stirring and scratching themselves, making breakfast, some climbing on top of their cars to see what was going on at the Bootstrap compound.

She spotted what looked like a military vehicle: a squat, fierce-looking Jeep of some kind, with black, rectangular, tinted windows. A man was standing up, poking his head out of a sunroof. He was beefy, fortyish, shaven-haired. He shifted, as if he was having trouble standing. He was watching the compound with big, professional-looking binoculars. She thought he looked familiar, but she couldn’t think where from.

When she looked again the Jeep had gone. It could only have driven off, away from the crowded road, into the desert.

Farther in she spied uniforms and banners. There were religious groups here, both pro and anti Malenfant. Some of them were holding services or prayer sessions. There were animal rights