Time

He frowned. “So what?”

“Don’t you get it, Malenfant? If universes with black holes have more babies, after a few generations there will be a lot more universes with black holes than without. Because they can multiply.”

“We’re talking about universes, Emma. What does it mean to say one type of universe outnumbers another?”

“Perhaps it’s all too simple for you to understand, Malenfant.”

“You mean too complex.”

“No. Too simple. Let’s go on.”

“Are you sure you’re ready?”

“What choice do I have?” And, feebly, she began to tug herself along the tether that joined them.

They passed on through the gallery of universes, barely noticing, comprehending little. Maybe Emma was right. Maybe they were working their way up a branching tree of universes — new baby cosmoses twigging off through every black hole. If that was so, how were the two of them being guided in their journey? By whom? Why?

Anyhow, on they went.

Even at the rate they traveled — a whole new universe, after all, every couple of minutes — the rate of cosmological evolution seemed damnably slow to Malenfant: a dim, undirected groping for complexity.

At first there were more red-sky universes. Most of them were adorned by black hole roses. Sometimes there was one all-consuming monster, sometimes an array of them studded

randomly around the sky.

Once they were so close to a hole center that its glare, seen through a dense mass of cloud, was dazzling, and Malenfant was sure he could see movement in the nearer clumps of gas, shadows thousands of light-years long turning like clock hands. Perhaps the portal itself was being dragged inward to the hole. He wondered what would happen then. Could even the portal survive falling into an immense black hole? Or did someone — some unimaginable agency of the downstreamers who built this chain — monitor the portals across the universes, repair them after cosmological accidents?

Then, fifty or a hundred cosmoses — they weren’t counting — from the first black hole rose, they came to something new. No infrared clouds, no black holes. But there was structure.

Malenfant pushed himself away from the portal. He drifted to the end of the tether, rebounding slightly. He shielded his eyes, trying to shut out the blue glow of the portal.

There were wheel shapes in the sky: rimless, but with regular spokes of the palest yellow light. It seemed to him there was a nesting here, structure on structure, the wheel shapes themselves gathered into greater, loosely defined discs, just as stars combined into galaxies, which gathered in turn in clusters and super-clusters.

His tether stretched beyond him, farther from the portal by six or seven yards. It just hung in space, coiled loosely. But there was a fine blue mist at its terminus.

Malenfant worked his way along the tether. The mist was made up of very small particles, fine almost to the limit of visibility. At first he thought they must be flaking away from the tether, somehow; but it looked as if they were just condensing out of the vacuum. The mist was everywhere—

Except right in front of him. There was a rough disc shape directly ahead of him, where no mist was forming. Puzzled, he lifted his arm out to his left. The empty disc shape extended that way. It was a diffuse shadow of himself.

“I think it’s something to do with the portal light. There’s no mist here, where I block it out. Maybe the light is—” He waved his hands. “ — condensing.”

“How is that possible, Malenfant?”

“Hell, I don’t know.” He reached along the tether, meaning to pull himself farther.

‘Wo, Malenfant. Look at the tether.”

He let his gaze follow the rope to its end, a few yards ahead.

The tether was disappearing. It looked as if it was being burned away by some invisible, high-intensity ray. Occasionally he saw a flash of green light.

He pulled the tether back. The burning-off stopped. He was able to touch the end of the rope. It had been cut clean through. But the blue mist was still sparkling into existence, right where it had been before.

“There’s a limit out there, Emma. A barrier.” He looked around, but there was only the strangely structured sky. “Maybe the portal is protecting us. Like a shield.”

“A shield, Malenfant? You always did watch too much seventies TV”

“Then you explain it,” he said testily.

“Why does everything have to have an explanation? This is a different universe. Maybe the stuff from our universe is changing when it goes out there, past the portal’s influence.”

“Changing how?”

“The mass of the tether is disappearing. So maybe it’s being converted into something else. Light, maybe. And the mist—”

“—is the light from the portal. Condensing. Turning into some kind of matter. So,” he said, “how can light and matter swap over? Cornelius would have known.”

“Yes. This is a strange place, isn’t it, Malenfant?”

“There’s nothing for us here.”

He turned away from the wheels, the blue mist, and pulled himself back to the portal.

So they passed on, on down the corridor of universes.

… Until they came, at last, to a sky full of stars.

Malenfant let himself drift away from the portal. “At least I think they are stars.”

The sky was uniformly speckled with points of light, all around them, above and below. No glowing clouds, no black hole roses. It might have been a starry night on Earth.

But there was something wrong. “They look old,” Malenfant said. It was true: a handful of the stars were as bright as orange, one even seemed to be sparking fitfully yellow, but the rest were a dim red. When he donned the night-vision goggles, he made out many more starlike points, a field of them stretching beyond the visible. But they were dim and red.

“We’ve been expecting stars,” Emma said.

“We have?”

“Sure. Think about it. If the key to breeding universes is black holes, you need to come up with the best way there is of making black holes. Which is stars.”

“What about those giant black holes we saw in the rose universes?”

“But they looked like they had ripped up half of creation. Stars have got to be more efficient than that. How many black holes were there in our universe?”

“A billion billion. Round numbers,” Malenfant said.

“We’re going to see more universes full of stars now. Universes that are star factories, and so black hole factories.”

He gathered up the tethers.

More universes, many and strange. Most of them now contained stars of some kind, but they were generally dim, scattered, unimpressive if not dying or dead. And nowhere did they see anything to match the splendor and complexity of their home Galaxy, and nowhere did they see any evidence of life and organization.

Malenfant grunted. “I feel like I’m trapped in God’s art gallery.”

Emma laughed weakly. “Malenfant, how can you be bored? You’re being transported between universes. Not only that, you only have a few hours to live. What do you want, dancing girls? And what difference does it make? We’re surely going to die soon anyhow, in some chunk of emptiness or other. I don’t think you’re destined to die in your own bed, Malenfant.”

“I don’t own a bed. But I’d rather die in my own fucking universe.”

“Even a million light-years from home?”

“Yeah. Wouldn’t you?”

“You do take things personally, don’t you, Malenfant? As if all of this, the manifold of universes, is picking onyou.”

He fixed their tethers and faced the portal, its blank central expanse open, empty, somehow reassuring, a way onward. “Hell, yes,” he said. “What other enemy is there?”

So, holding on to each other, they moved on to another reality, then another.

More skies. More stars, mostly small and unspectacular.

At last they came to a place with a Galaxy. But it was small and knotlike, populated by stars that looked dull, uniform, and aging; it seemed to have none of the reeflike complexity of their own Galaxy.

They passed on.

Universe after universe, all but identical to Malenfant’s eye: small and uninspiring stars, untidy galaxies, skies littered with the corpses of red, dying stars.

“I wonder why the stars are all so small,” he said. “And why there are so few. And why they all got so old so quickly.”

“Because there’s no giant Galaxy to make new ones,” Emma said. “We saw it, Malenfant. The reef Galaxy. All those feedback loops. A way to make stars, and keep on making them, over and over.”

Maybe she was right. If the key goal was to make lots of black holes — and if black holes were best made in giant stars — then you wanted machines to make lots of giant stars, and reef galaxies were the best way they had yet seen.

But evidently it wasn’t so easy to make reef galaxies — or rather, to evolve them. Malenfant looked around another dull, uninteresting sky. He wondered what was missing, if there was some simple, key ingredient. Carbon, perhaps, or some other element essential to the great star-spawning gas clouds.

Malenfant paused again when they came to a new, different universe. But this time some of the galaxies were broken up, their outlying stars scattered and their central masses collapsing into what Malenfant was coming to recognize as the signatures of black holes. And there were patches of glowing gas marring the sky, as if some of the nearer stars had exploded.

Beyond the stars the sky was glowing. It was like one of the early phoenix universes he had seen, born only to die within seconds or hours or days or years. But it wasn’t a uniform glow, he saw.

There seemed to be hot spots, one directly above his head and one below his feet, like poles in the sky. And there was a cold band around the equator of the sky, a plane running through his midriff. There were two points on the equator, in fact — once again on opposite sides of the sky — that seemed to be significantly cooler than the average.

He described the sky to Emma. “It’s a collapsing universe. But the collapse doesn’t seem to be symmetrical. It’s coming in over our heads, flattening out at the sides.”

“Is that possible?”

“Maybe this universe is oscillating,” he said. “Like a soap bubble, before it bursts. Not collapsing evenly. Going from a sphere to a stretched-out ellipse shape to a flattened disc shape…

“You know, Cornelius said it might be possible to survive a Big Crunch in a universe like that. You have to take control of the universe. And then you manipulate it, mass and energy and gravity fields, to control the oscillations. If you milk them just right you can extract enough energy to live forever.”

“That sounds like Cornelius,” she said dryly. “Malenfant, does it look like life-forms are manipulating the universe here?”

“No.”