Time

“Cornelius.” Malenfant found himself shouting, though the light storm was utterly silent. “Can you hear me?”

“Tell me what you see.”

Malenfant tried to describe the pulsating sky. As he did so the clatter of white-red-white pulses slowed, briefly, and the pumping of the sky became almost languid, each cycle lasting maybe three or four seconds. But then, without warning, the cycling accelerated again, and the dying skies blurred into a wash of fierce light.

“Cosmologies,” Cornelius whispered. “Phoenix universes, each one rebounding into another, which expands and collapses in turn. Each one destroyed so that the next one, its single progeny, can be born. And the laws of physics get shaken around every time we come out of a unified-force singularity.”

“A what?”

“A Big Bang. Or the singularity at the heart of a black hole. The two ways a universe can give birth to another… Black holes are the key, Malenfant. A universe that cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. A universe that can make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters: baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities at the center of black holes. Like a miniature Big Crunch at the center of every hole. And that’s where cosmic evolution really takes off… We’re privileged, Malenfant.”

Malenfant shouted, “Privileged? Are you kidding?”

“We’re watching the evolution of universes. Or rather, you are. A spectacle beyond comparison.”

The pulsing cosmic collapses accelerated once more; the waves of light that washed down from the sky came so fast, one after the other, that it was as if they were caught inside some giant strobe machine. The three of them hung here, framed by the patient blue ring, their battered dust-stained suits bathed in the light of creation and extinction.

Could it be true? Universes, born and dying in a time shorter than it took him to draw a breath, as if he were some immense, patient god?

He turned to Emma.

She was still starfished, silent. He tapped her suit’s chest-control panel, but that only told him about the condition of her suit — laboring, damaged, complaining about the loss of fluids from the ruptured leg. He couldn’t see her face, as he did not dare lift her gold visor; it glared in the light of dying cosmoses.

Cornelius was curling into a ball. Maybe he was descending into some kind of shock. It wouldn’t be so surprising, after all.

And how come your head is still working, Malenfant? If Cornelius wants to curl up and hide, why don’t you?

Maybe, he thought, it was because he was too dumb to understand. Maybe if he did understand, like Cornelius, the knowledge would crush him.

Being dumb was sometimes an evolutionary advantage.

“Cornelius. How are you feeling?”

“I’m heating up. These universes aren’t long-lived enough to allow our suits to dump their excess heat.”

Malenfant forced a laugh. “I bet that’s one situation that isn’t covered by the manufacturer’s warranty.”

Cornelius, folded over into a fetal ball, whispered: “Let me tell you my plan. …”

The intensity of the light storm increased. Malenfant closed his eyes and huddled over Emma, trying to protect her a few seconds longer.

The suit alarm sounded.

And shut itself off.

And the light storm died.

Malenfant grunted. He opened his eyes and looked around.

The sky was cooling in a soundless explosion of light, dimming as if exhausted from yellow to orange to red to a dull emberlike glow that was soon so faint he had trouble distinguishing it with his creation-dazzled eyes.

He felt a huge relief, as if he had stepped out of a rainstorm.

Cornelius whispered fretfully, “Not every universe will make stars, Malenfant. There may not even be atomic structure here. In our universe the various atomic forces are balanced so precisely you can have more than a hundred different types of stable nuclei. Hence, the richness of the matter in our world. But it didn’t have to be like that. Everything is contingent, Malenfant. Even the structure of matter…”

The sky had become uniformly dark now, and the light, as far as he could see the only light in the whole of this universe, was the cold blue glow of the patient, unmarked portal.

Malenfant hugged Emma to him. Her face was peaceful, as if she were immersed in a deep, untroubled sleep. But she looked cold. He thought he could see a frost forming on the inside of her faceplate.

He sensed the growing universe around him, its huge, mean-inglessly expanding emptiness. And, it seemed, in all of this baby universe the only clump of matter and energy and light was here, the only eyes to see this his own. If he closed his eyes — if he died, here and now — would this cosmos even continue to exist?

A hell of a thought. Therefore, don’t think it.

“It’s damn cold,” he said.

“You’re never satisfied, are you, Malenfant?” Cornelius, still hunched over, was fiddling with the controls on his chest, tapping at them.

“What the hell are you doing there, Cornelius?”

“Sending a message.”

“Via the portal. Like the firefly we sent through. Radio waves into neutrino pulses.”

“Yes.”

“You think somebody is going to be able to come help us?”

“I doubt it.”

“Then what?”

“Turn to band six.”

Malenfant changed the tuning of his suit radio, and there it was: a wash of static, broken up by Cornelius’ tapping. He was sending out a series of pulses, crudely controlled by the touchpad.

He remembered where he’d seen a signal like this before.

“3753, 1986. 3753, 1986. That’s what you’re sending, isn’t it, Cornelius? The message we picked up at Fermilab. You’re sending the Feynman radio message back to yourself.”

Malenfant could hear a smile in Cornelius’ voice. “I always wanted to try something like this.”

“And you’re not afraid of breaking causality? That, umm, the universe won’t explode or some damn thing to stop you?”

“A little late for that, Malenfant.”

“But how do you know what to send?”

“You were there. I know what to send because I remember what I received. And since we did receive the message, we came here, and we can send it. So it’s all perfectly consistent, Malenfant. Just—”

“Backward.”

“I would have said looped. And the universe has reconstructed itself, knitting itself together quantum transaction by quantum transaction, around this central causal loop.”

“So where did the message come from in the first place? The information in it, I mean. If you’re just copying what you received—”

Cornelius stopped tapping and sighed. “That’s a deeper question, Malenfant. At any point in spacetime, at any now, there are an infinite number of pasts that could have led to the present state, and an infinite number of possible futures that flow from it. This is called the solution space of the universal wave function. Somewhere out in that solution space some equivalent of me figured out and wrote down the message, and sent it back with a Feynman radio.”

“Even if I understood that,” Malenfant growled, “I wouldn’t like it. Information coming out of nothing.”

“Then don’t accept it. Maybe the message just appeared, spontaneously.”

“That’s impossible.”

“How do you know? We don’t have a conservation law for knowledge.” And he carried on with his patient tapping.

The cold, the endless chill of this meaningless, empty cosmos seemed to sink deeper into Malenfant’s bones. “We’re going to freeze to death if we stay here,” he said.

“Our suits aren’t made for extremes,” Cornelius whispered. “Not for extended periods of heat and cold, or for extremes of temperature. But this won’t last forever.”

“Another Crunch?”

“Yes. But it may not be for a while—”

And there was no time to say any more, for there was a howl of radio static, a burst of sodium light that washed over them.

Malenfant, grunting with shock, cradling Emma, tried to turn.

Something came erupting out of the portal: complex, spinning, dazzling light flaring. It was a human. Dressed in a heavy black spacesuit, face hidden behind a gold visor. Spinning about its waist — crazily, not under control.

The space-suited figure carried a gun, a snub-nosed pistol, raised toward Malenfant.

Malenfant struggled to turn, to shield Emma with his body, but his suit, the tether, impeded him.

The trooper was wearing a backpack much bulkier than Malenfant’s. It had small bronze nozzles and big wraparound arm units with what looked like joysticks. Maybe it was some kind of MMU, a manned maneuvering unit. Sodium light was flaring from lamps. The suit looked as if it had once been as black as coal, but now it was badly charred, the surface flaking off, so as the figure spun it gave off a shower of scorched flakes like a firework.

Malenfant called, “Wait. Can you hear me? You followed us all the way here, through a thousand universes. I can’t believe you want to kill us—”

Cornelius was moving. He had dragged at a tether and launched himself across space, directly at the trooper.

“Cornelius!”

The trooper, still spinning, swiveled and fired at Cornelius. Malenfant saw the gun spark — once, twice — in complete silence. Cornelius crumpled about his middle. But he was still moving, still floating through space, his limbs still working, reaching.

His belly hit the trooper’s legs. He clung on, groping at the trooper’s suit.

Meanwhile the trooper continued to fire; Malenfant saw at least one more shot slice through Cornelius’ legs. But now Cornelius, clambering behind the trooper, was out of reach. The momentum of their combined bodies turned their motion into a clumsy, uncoordinated, complex roll.