Time

The trooper squirmed, trying to get hold of Cornelius. But Cornelius, laboring, had managed to reach down between the backpack and the trooper’s suit. He yanked loose a hose. Vapor vented into space, immediately freezing into crystals.

The trooper’s motions became scrambled, panicky. Legs kicked helplessly, and gloved hands scrabbled at the helmet as if striving to pull it off.

It took only a minute for the trooper’s struggles to diminish, a few last kicks, desperate scrabbles at helmet, chest panel, backpack.

And then, stillness.

Even before that, Cornelius was still too.

There was blood inside Cornelius’ helmet. It had stuck to the visor and was drying there. Droplets of it seemed to be orbiting inside the helmet itself. Malenfant couldn’t see Cornelius’ face, and he was grateful for that.

I’m going to miss you, he thought. Cornelius, the man who understood the future, even other universes. I wonder if you understand the place you have gone to now.

The trooper turned out to be a woman. There was some kind of liquid over the interior of her depressurized helmet, and Malenfant didn’t look too closely. He did find a name tag sewn to the fabric of her suit: TYBEE J.

He couldn’t find the gun.

With loose loops of tether he tied together the bodies of Cornelius and the trooper.

I ought to say something, he thought.

Who for? For the corpses? They weren’t around to hear any more, and Emma was unconscious. Then who? Did this universe have its own blind, stupid God, a God whose grasp of the possibilities of creation had reached only as far as this dull, expanding box?

Not for God. For himself, of course.

He said, “This is a universe that has never known life. But now it knows pain, and fear, and death. You couldn’t get much farther from home. And I guess it’s right that you should stay here, together. That’s all.”

Then, bracing himself against the portal, he shoved them gently. There was only the blue glow of the portal, which diminished quickly, and they were soon fading from sight.

He wondered how long the bodies would last here. Would they have time to rot, mummify, their substance evaporate? Would the different physical laws of this universe penetrate them, making their very atomic nuclei decay? Or would they be caught up, destroyed at last, in the Big Crunch that Cornelius had promised would destroy this universe, as it had the others?

The bodies drifted away slowly, tumbling slightly, the two of them reaching the limit of the tether and then coming back together, colliding softly once more, as if their conflict had continued, in this attenuated form, beyond death itself. As, perhaps, it would; their ghosts, trapped in a universe that wasn’t their own, had only each other to haunt.

It doesn’t matter, Malenfant. Time to move on.

The trooper’s MMU backpack, evidently built to mil spec, was considerably more advanced than Bootstrap hardware.

There was a power source — lightweight batteries — that would long outlast Malenfant’s own, a significant supply of compressed air, a simple water recycler, and food pods that looked as if they were meant to plug into slots in the trooper’s helmet. And there was a med pack, simple field-medicine stuff. The MMU even contained a lightweight emergency shelter, a fabric zip-up bubble.

Suddenly life was extended — not indefinitely, but through a few more hours at least. He was startled how much that meant to him.

Malenfant pulled himself and Emma into the shelter and assembled it around them. It was just big enough for him to stretch out at full length. The fabric, self-heating, was a thin translucent orange, but a small interior light made the walls seem solid. Malenfant felt enormously relieved when he had shut out the purposeless expansion outside, as if this flimsy fabric emergency tent could shelter him from the universes that flapped and collapsed beyond its walls.

When the pressure was right, the temperature acceptable, he cracked his own helmet and sniffed the air. It was metallic, but fine.

He pulled off his gloves. He turned to Emma, opened up her helmet, lifted it off carefully, and let it drift away. Emma’s burned-red cheek was cold to his touch, but he could feel a pulse, see breath mist softly around her mouth.

He took time to kiss her, softly. Then he used his own helmet nipple to give her a drink of orange juice.

He tried to treat Emma’s wounded leg. He didn’t like the look of what he saw below the improvised tether tourniquet. The blood and flesh, exposed to vacuum, was frozen, the undamaged skin glassy. But at least she hadn’t bled to death, he thought, and she didn’t seem to be in any pain. He cleaned up the wound as best he could.

“Malenfant?”

The sound, completely unexpected, made him gasp, turn.

She was awake, and looking at him.

Maura Della:

Life on the Hill had gotten a lot harder, even without the protestors. And the chanting of the protestors, cult groups, and other disaffected citizens in the streets outside, always an irritant, had become a constant distraction. There were times — even here, behind the layers of toughened glass — when she could hear the cries of pain, the smash of glass, the smoky crackle of small-arms fire, the slap and crash of grenade launchers.

Maura believed there was something deep and troubling going on in the collective American psyche right now. She’d always worked on the belief that Americans liked to imagine themselves elevated from the general human fray, if only a little. Americans had the most robust political system, the best technology, the strongest economy, the finest national character and spirit. Of course it was mostly myth, but it wasn’t a bad myth as national fever dreams went, and Maura knew that Americans’ faith in themselves had, historically, tended to turn them into a positive force in the world.

But there was a downside. Whenever things went bad, whenever the myth of superiority and competence was challenged, Americans would look outside, for somebody or something to blame for their troubles. And, whatever went wrong with the world, there was always an element who would blame the government.

Fair enough. But how the hell was she supposed to concentrate with all that going on?

But, of course, she had to.

Just as she had to ignore the other inconveniences of the post-Nevada world. Such as the fact that she wasn’t allowed to use e-mail, photocopiers, scanners, or even manual typewriters and carbon paper. All government business relating to Bootstrap and the Blue children was now conducted by handwritten note: one copy only, to be destroyed by the recipient after use.

Even her private diary was, strictly speaking, illegal now.

Depressed, she turned to the first fat report on her desk. It was set out in a clear, almost childish hand, presumably that of some baffled, sworn-to-silence secretary. She skimmed through a preface consisting of academic ass-covering bull:… able to offer no assurances as to the accuracy of this preliminary interpretation that has been produced, according to this group’s mandate, as a guide for further decision making and. . .

It was from the team of academics at Princeton who were trying to translate the messages the children had been sending to Earth. (She remembered Dan Ystebo’s apparently informed speculations on the subject, and she made a mental note to have one of the FBI plumbers dig out who was leaking this time.)

The sporadic signals were in the form of ultraviolet laser light targeted on an antiquated astronomy satellite in Earth orbit. Why they chose that means of transmission nobody knew, nor how they had gotten hold of or built a laser, nor why they felt impelled to transmit messages at all. Perhaps all that would come after the graybeard academic types at Princeton and elsewhere had figured out what the hell the kids were talking about here.

The message itself was text, encoded in a mixture of ASCII, English, other natural languages, and mathematics. But the natural-language stuff didn’t seem to bear much relation to the math, which itself was full of symbologies and referents whose meanings the academics were having to guess at.

The math appeared to be some kind of diatribe on fundamental physics.

Maura knew that for a century the theoreticians had been struggling to reconcile the two great pillars of physics: relativity, Einstein’s theory of gravity, and quantum mechanics, the theory of the submicroscopic world. The two theories were thought to be limited facets of a deeper understanding the academics called quantum gravity.

It is impossible to delimit a theory that does not yet exist, the report writers noted pompously. Nevertheless most theorists had expected to find the quantum paradigm more fundamental than the relativistic. The speculations of the children contradict this, however. . .

Maura skimmed on. Perhaps, the children seemed to be suggesting, fundamental particles — electrons and quarks and such — were actually spacetime defects, kinks in the fabric. For instance, a positive charge could be the mouth of a tiny wormhole threaded by an electric field, with a negative charge the other mouth, the flow of the field through the wormhole looking, from the outside, like a source and sink of charge. Einstein himself had speculated on these lines a century ago, but hadn’t been able to prove it or develop the theory to his satisfaction.

Anyhow, it seemed, Einstein hadn’t thought far enough. The children seemed to be saying that the key was to regard particles not just as loops or folds in space but as folds in time as well. Such a fold necessarily creates a closed timelike curve. . .

So every electron was a miniature time machine.

. . . This has clear implications for causality. The properties of a fundamental particle would be determined by measurements that can be made on it only in the future. That is, there is a boundary condition that is in principle unobservable in the present… Imagine a skipping rope, some dusty academic had dictated, struggling to make herself understood. If a handle is jiggled, the shape of the wave created depends not just on what is happening at the perturbed end but what happens at the other handle. . .

In this worldview it was this breach of causality that provided uncertainty, the famous multivalued fuzziness of the quantum world.

And so on, at baffling and tedious length.

She sat in her chair, struggling with the concepts.

So the world around her, the familiar solid world of atoms and people and trees and stars, even the components of her own aging body, was made up of nothing more than defects in space- time. There was nothing but space and time, knotted up and folded over on itself. If that’s so, she thought, maybe we shouldn’t be surprised at the eruption of all this acausal strangeness. It was there all along, just too low-level for us to see, too obscure for us to understand.

But was it possible?

Just accept it, Maura. The important thing, of course, is why the children are trying to communicate this to us.

… The children may be attempting to bridge the chasm in understanding between our patiently constructed but partial theories and their own apparently instinctive, or paradox- prescient, knowledge of the world’s structure. It may be they wish us to understand on a deeper level what has happened to us so far — or, possibly, what is to happen to us in the future. . .

A prediction, then.

Or a threat.

Maura shivered, despite the clammy warmth of her office.

Maura, skimming the transcript, found scraps of plain language interspersed with all this heavy stuff: We’re all right here. Please tell our parents we aren ‘t hot or cold or hungry but just right, and it s a lot of fun bouncing around on the Moon, like a big trampoline… You shouldn ‘t have done what you did when you dropped that big bomb on us and it just made us mad is all and