Time

You will.

What the hell are you doing, Malenfant? If you reject this you’re throwing away immortality. A thousand years of life, recognizable human life, followed by… what? Transcendence?

But, if I lose myself, I’ll lose Emma. And that, surely, would be the final disrespect.

You always were decisive, Malenfant. If there was ever a time to make a choice it’s now.

Malenfant closed his eyes. “Let’s do it,” he said.

You’re sure?

“Hell, no. Let’s do it anyhow.”

The boy pulled him toward the door.

Malenfant’s heart was thumping. “You mean now?”

Will your decision be different later?

Malenfant took a deep sigh. “Do I need to dress?”

Malenfant went to the bathroom. He washed his face, had a leak, a dump. He had time to be impressed by the faithfulness of the mysterious processes that had restored him here, that had even, presumably, reconstructed the contents of his stomach after his last meal.

He looked at himself in the mirror, studied a face that he had known all his life. The last time for everything, even for the simple things. Here, in his body, in this place, he was still himself. But what was he about to become? He’d built up his courage to blow himself to bits once today already, and his reward had been this, this Alice in Wonderland bullshit. Could he go through with it again?

Of course, if he chickened out, it would have to be in front of Michael and the weird entities who were watching through him.

Malenfant grinned fiercely. To hell with it. He checked his teeth for bits of peanut, then went back to the room.

Michael was wearing his kid-sized pressure suit now, and he had laid out Malenfant’s suit on the bed, beside the unused shirt and slacks. The components of the suit — skinsuit and outer garment and thermal garment and gloves and helmet and boots — looked unearthly, out of place in this mundane environment. And yet, Malenfant thought, the suit was actually the most normal thing about the whole damn room.

“Are we going to need suits?”

If we go like this. If you ‘d rather —

“Hell, no.” Malenfant suited up quickly.

Michael came to him with a pen he’d taken from the desk. You have some notes to write.

“What notes? Oh. Okay.” Malenfant sighed, and bent stiffly in his suit. “What if I make a mistake?… Never mind.”

He wrote out the notes hastily and stuck them where he thought they ought to be. And if he got it wrong, let some other bastard sort it out.

He put on his gloves and helmet, and he walked to the door with Michael. When they got there he closed up his own suit and sealed Michael’s, and ran quick diagnostic checks on the kid’s systems.

They turned and faced the door. Michael reached up and, clumsily, pulled it open.

The corridor was gone. A blue-ring portal floated there, framing darkness.

“Is this going to hurt?”

No more than usual.

“Great. Michael… I saw the future. But what was it like?”

Michael paused. Huge. Primal. Beyond control. New minds emerged in great pulses.

“Like Africa,” Malenfant said. “We always thought the future would be like America. Clean and empty and waiting to be shaped. I always thought that way. But our past was Africa. Dark and deep. And that’s how the future was.”

Yes, Michael said.

Malenfant braced himself and faced the portal. “Visors down,” he said.

Michael lowered his gold visor, hiding his face. Malenfant saw the portal’s blue ring reflected in his visor. Then Michael held up his hand, like a son reaching for his father. Malenfant took the hand. The child’s fingers were buried in his own begrimed glove.

They stepped forward. There was a blue flash, an instant of agonizing pain—

— and Malenfant was floating in space. The instant transition to zero gravity was a shock, like falling off a cliff, and he had to swallow a few times to keep his peanuts down.

He was surrounded by patient stars: above, below, all around him, childhood constellations augmented by the rich, still lights of deep space. There was a single splinter of brilliance below him. The sun? It was a point source that cast strong, sharp shadows over their suits.

He was still holding Michael’s hand.

Are you okay? Michael asked. His Seattle whine was a radio crackle. If you become uncomfortable —

“I’ll be okay. What are we looking at, Michael? The sun?”

Yes. We’re out of the plane of the ecliptic. That is, somewhere above the sun s north pole. We’re about five astronomical units out. Five times Earth’s orbit, about as far as Jupiter is from the sun. Forty-three minutes at light speed. What do you want to see?

“Earth.”

Then look. Michael pointed to a nondescript part of the sky.

Malenfant sighted along his arm and saw a star, a spark that might have been pale blue, a lesser light beside it.

And suddenly there was Earth, swimming before him, oceans and deserts and clouds and ice, just as it had always been. Sparks of light circled it, and drifted on its seas: ships, people, cities.

He felt a lump knot in his throat. “Oh, my,” he said.

We are two hundred years into the future, roughly. Our future.

“The Carter catastrophe date. So Cornelius’ prediction was right. He would have been pleased…”

Malenfant. There is little time. If you want to make your change, to reach back. It must be now.

He drifted in space, letting his suit starfish, thinking of Emma.

He whispered, “How do I do it?”

Just tell me what you want.

“Will I remember?”

Consciousness spans the manifold.

I don’t know if I have the strength, he thought.

“She’ll forget me. Won’t she, Michael?”

I’m just a kid, he said. How would I know?

Your call, Malenfant. Keep her, or give her back her life.

“Do it,” he whispered.

… And the universe pivoted around him, the lines of possibility swirling, knitting new patterns of truth and dream, and he clutched at the boy.

Emma Stoney:

Death has always fascinated me. Ever since the death of my father, I suppose. I was just a kid. The endless slow rituals of funerals and mourning, the morbid business of moving the bodies around, boxing them and dressing them. It was as if we humans were seeking some control of the horrible arbitrariness, a cushion against the blunt finality of it.

But that finality came, for me, when my father’s corpse was at last laid into the ground, and I realized it had stopped moving, forever. I remember I wanted to clamber into the grave and dig it up and somehow reanimate him a little longer. But even at age eight I knew that was impossible.

All of the ceremonial stuff focuses on the needs of the living. But at the heart of every funeral there is the central mystery: that a sentient, conscious being has ceased to exist. It is a brutal reality our culture simply refuses to face — the reality of death for the dying.

And the reality of my life is this, Maura: if I had gotten on that rocket ship with Malenfant, if I’d gone with him to the asteroid, I’d be dead now, as he is dead.

But I didn’t go. I miss him, Maura. Of course. Every minute of every day. I miss his laugh, the way he tasted of the high desert, even the way he pulled my life around. But he’s gone.

Anyhow, that’s why I’ll take the job. The Moon, you say?

Maura Della:

And for Maura — who had never been to the Moon, and now never would — the Moon hung in the Washington sky as it always had, the scar of the failed attack invisible to the naked eye. She kept a NASA feed running in her office, compiled from Hubble and lunar satellite cameras, images of the unmarked bubble artifact there on the Tycho surface.

After all, if things had been just a little different, Maura Della might have been up there when the shit hit the fan. She’d have been caught in the crossfire herself, rather than her envoy.

But as the incident on the Moon receded into the past, life went on. The panic subsides even as the data burns, she thought. Cruithne, even the Moon, are after all just lumps of rock a long way away.

Maura tried to concentrate on her work.

Here was a self-justifying report from the Lawrence Liver-more Laboratory on the exotic weapons technology they called FELs, free electron lasers, into which a goodly portion of the federal budget had been sunk, and which had been deployed, to spectacular failure, on the Moon. The basis of a PEL was a cyclotron, a closed ring that could be used to accelerate electrons. Although it was impossible for the electrons to exceed the speed of light there was no limit, it seemed, to the energy that could be piled into them. And that unlimited energy was the big advantage of PEL technology over conventional laser technology, like chemical. The report writers noted with jaunty technocrat-type confidence that a PEL should have been an ideal sword for fighting a war in a vacuum: in Earth orbit, or on the Moon.

But it had failed. The PEL had burned the lunar base and the Never-Never Land dome to the ground. But it hadn’t so much as scratched the droplet of twisted space, or whatever it was, that sheltered the children — and presumably continued to do so, even now, sitting like a drop of mercury amid the rubble of the Tycho battlefield.

All bullshit. The PEL was just another magic sword in a long line of such swords, technical solutions that were supposed to make the world better and safer and that, of course, always