So they went on.
Emma slept again. Trying not to wake her, he drifted on to the next universe, and the next.
Until — without warning, after another routine transition — he landed on Cruithne.
At least, for a few seconds he thought it was Cruithne.
He and Emma were floating above a gray, dusty surface, dropping through ghostly microgravity. The portal was embedded in the plain, jutting out of it upright, just as it had before. There was a hiss of static in his headset.
His feet settled to the surface. There was the gentlest of crunches, transmitted through his suit fabric, as his boots crushed the regolith of this place. The dust seemed soft, easily compressed.
Standing straight, he grinned fiercely. The touch of gravity was feather-light, but even so it was pleasing to feel solid ground under his feet.
He laid Emma down carefully. The soft, loose dust billowed up around her, falling back slowly in the feather-soft gravity.
Of course, it wasn’t Cruithne.
He’d seen more exciting skies. There was a single star, small, spitting light. Its color was elusive, a blue-green. That was all: There was nothing else to be seen, anywhere in the sky.
He stepped forward. The surface was covered in smooth, flowing dust, like a folded-over sand dune. There were low hills, even what might have been the faded-out remnants of very ancient, very large craters, palimpsests. The dust wasn’t the charcoal black of Cruithne, but a bluish silver-gray. Malenfant dug his gloved hand into the dust. It was very fine, like talc, with none of the little knotty clumps he remembered from Cruithne itself. He scraped out a small pit He thought he could detect a subtle flow as the dust poured gently back into his hole, filling it in and smoothing it over.
He straightened up, slapped the dust off his hands, and bent over to brush it off his legs. Except that there was no dust there; it seemed to have fallen away from his suit fabric. In fact he could see, where Cruithne II dust was peeling away, lingering traces of coal-dark Cruithne I, still stuck there after so long, after all the exotic cosmoses he had seen.
Dust on Cruithne I stuck to suit fabric because it was electrostatically charged by the action of the sun. So how come this stuff didn’t act the same? No electrostatics? Maybe matter here wasn’t capable of holding a sizable electric charge . …
Why would that be, and what difference would it make?
He had, of course, absolutely no idea.
“This dust is soft, Malenfant. Like the finest feather bed you ever heard of. You remember the story about the princess and the pea?”
“I remember.”
“But I didn’t dream. I haven’t dreamed once since we went through the portal.” Her voice was a rustle. “Isn’t that strange? Maybe you have to be at home to dream. I think I finished my orange juice.”
“I’ll put up the habitat.”
“No
He rummaged in the trooper backpack’s medical kit and found an ampule of a morphine derivative. In the dim light of the green star he had to squint to read the instructions. Then he pressed it against a valve at Emma’s neck.
He watched her face. Her self-control was steely, as it always had been. But he thought he detected relief there.
“Now you made me a junkie,” she said.
“So sue me.” He bent and picked her up.
“I can hardly hear you. That static. Is there something wrong with the radio?”
“I don’t think so,” he said dryly. “The universe is broken, not the radio.”
Then, the mil spec backpack trailing behind him, he stepped a giant microgravity step through the portal.
As their consumables dwindled, Malenfant hurried through universes, dismissing billions of years of unique cosmic evolution with a glance, not bothering to try to figure out
Sometimes Malenfant found himself landing on a Cruithne, more or less like his own Cruithne, sometimes not. Sometimes the stars shone bright and white, but they seemed oddly uniform. Sometimes he found himself in a dying, darkling universe where the stars seemed already to have burned themselves out, a sky littered with diminishing points of orange and red.
Once there was a Galaxy over his head, a roof of light, star clusters scattered around it like attending angels. And when he lifted his sun visor, he could see its complex light reflecting from his own cheekbones and nose, the bony frame of his face.
… But it wasn’t right. Not quite.
There was the core, glowing bright, the broad disc, even a hint of spiral structure. But only a hint. There were none of the massive blue-white sparks he’d been able to see in the images their firefly had returned, none of the great supernova blisters, holes blasted into the big molecular clouds by the deaths of giant stars.
Not quite right.
Malenfant hurried on.
Meanwhile Emma grew weaker. She spent longer asleep, and her waking intervals grew shorter. It was as if she was hoarding her energy, hibernating like the black hole farmers of the far downstream. But parsimony hadn’t worked out for the down-streamers. And it wasn’t going to work for Emma.
It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered.
“Wait.”
He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor.
“Emma?”
She licked her lips.
No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?”
Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them — one of them a distinctive red — and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath…
“Holy shit,” he said.
She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.”
And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon.
It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit.
He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed.
It was a footprint.
He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain.
It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.
He looked down at Emma. But, as the sunlight played over her face, she had already closed her eyes. Gently he flipped down her gold visor. The light dazzled from it, evoking rich colors.
Maura Della:
The robot bus snaked across the folded floor of Tycho.
Maura gazed out, stunned, at gray-brown ground, black starless sky, a bright blue Earth, full and round like a blue marbled bowling ball. In the valleys, smooth rocky walls rose around her, hiding the Earth and the details of the land. As the shadows fell on the bus it cooled rapidly, and she heard its hull tick as it contracted, fans somewhere banging into life to keep the air warm for her. But there was light here, even at the bottom of the angular lunar chasms: not diffused by the air, for there was no air, but reflected from the rock walls at the top of the valleys.
The Plexiglas blister window was very clear, cleaned of Moon dust and demisted, and she felt as if she were outside the bus, suspended over the lunar ground. She saw dust, heavily indented by bus tracks that the bus was now following once more with religious precision. The dust was loose, fragile looking, flecked with tiny craters, with here and there the glint of glass. It was lunar soil: dead, processed by patient, airless erosion, passing beneath her feet like foam on a rocky sea. She longed to reach down, through the window, and run her fingers through that sharp-grained dirt.
But that was impossible.
When she had arrived at the dull, cramped, sour-smelling NASA base, dug into the regolith miles from the children’s encampment, she had been told that civilian types like herself weren’t expected to “EVA,” as they called it, to walk outside onto the surface of the Moon. Not once, not one footstep; she would pass over the Moon through an interconnected series of air-conditioned rooms and vehicles, as if the whole Moon were one giant airport terminal.
There were a dozen people in the bus.
Most of them were soldiers: hard-faced, bored men and women, their pressure suit helmets the pale blue of the United Nations. They carried heavy weaponry, rifles and handguns adapted for use either in the vacuum or in atmosphere, and Maura knew there were more weapons, heavier stuff, strapped to the bus’ hull. The sole purpose of this squad was to protect, or perhaps control, Maura. Nobody went to Never-Never Land unarmed or unescorted — not even someone as senior in this UN operation as, five years after Nevada, Maura had become.
Bill Tybee came to stand with her at the window. He was limping, and his silver med-alert lapel brooch glinted in the bus’ lights. He held a bulb of coffee in a polystyrene holder; she accepted it gratefully.
“Umm. Not too hot.”
“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing gets too hot here.”
The low pressure, she thought. An old NASA-type cliche, but true nonetheless.
“Never would have put you down as an astronaut, Ms. Della.”
“Call me Maura. You’re hardly Flash Gordon yourself.”
“Yeah. But what the heck.” Bill Tybee had been brought to the Moon, along with other parents, to work, in his inexpert way, on the interpretation of the Blues’ activities — and, of course, to be with his kids, as best he could. Anything that might work, help get a handle on the kids.
“Bill, why Tycho? Why did the children run
