Time

She pushed herself upright. The pain was, briefly, as blackly unendurable as before, and she lay where she was, longing for unconsciousness. But it didn’t come. And the pain, somehow, started to recede, like a tide imperceptibly turning.

The children were scattering over the plain. The grayness and lack of contrast washed out the colors of the children’s skin and clothes and made them look ill. They seemed to be receding from her, remarkably quickly, perspective diminishing them to tiny running figures. Maybe this place was bigger than it looked.

The sky was an elusive grayness, blank and featureless. There was no sense of distance — no sign of stars, of sun or Earth or orbiting spacecraft, no clouds. The light was shadowless, sourceless.

As they moved farther away from her the children seemed to gray out completely, fading to black, as if there were something wrong with the light. There was nothing beyond the children, no fences or buildings, all the way to the horizon. Except there was no horizon. The floor simply merged into the remote grayness of the sky. It was like being inside a huge glass bulb.

Maybe this whole damn thing is some kind of near-death experience, she thought. An illusion.

But it didn’t feel like it. And her restless brain kept analyzing, observing.

There were little piles of gear: bright primary-color plastic toys, what looked like heaps of bedding or clothes, food packets, and water bottles. There was one more substantial structure, a shacklike assemblage of wires and cables and bits of metal: a Tinkerbell cage, a quark-nugget trap. But there was no order, no logic to the layout. Stuff just seemed to have been dumped where it was last used. If it weren’t for the sheer size of the place, it would be a pigpen.

But then she was looking at this place through adult eyes. It was just a kids’ playroom, writ large.

Somebody spoke. The words were muffled.

She turned. There was Anna, standing solemnly, her hands at her sides, regarding her. The girl seemed grayed out, like the other children.

Emma tried to shout. “I can’t hear you!” There was a dull dead-ness to the sound, like an anechoic booth.

Anna began to run toward her. She seemed to approach remarkably quickly, growing in perspective with every lunar-hop stride, the colors washing back into her clothes and her. In a few seconds she was at Emma’s side.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just asked if you wanted a drink.” She held out a clear plastic carton containing a gloopy orange liquid.

Emma’s throat was, now that she thought about it, rapidly growing dry in this sticky heat. “Thanks.” She took the drink, pulled off a foil tab, and sucked the liquid out of the carton. It was a fruit juice mix, sticky and heavily sweet.

“How do you feel?” Anna asked.

She looked down at her shattered leg. The pain had diminished so steeply the limb no longer seemed to be a part of her, as if she were studying some broken piece of machinery. “Not better, exactly,” she said. “But—”

“The pain can’t reach you,” Anna said gravely. “But it is still there. You should be careful.” She was studying Emma. “Do you know who you are?”

Emma frowned. “I’m Emma Stoney.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Strange questions, like a doctor’s. Go with the flow, Emma. “I’m with the UN. I report to Maura Della. I’ve been working with the Blues, with you, since Malenfant pushed me away in the Mojave to go fly his spaceship, and Bootstrap was broken up, and Malenfant died in space.” She had been fixing things, righting some of the wrongs Malenfant had left behind. Everything, of course, defined by her relationship to Malenfant, even though the man had been dead five years. “Maura sent me here.”

You married a spaceman, Maura had said to Emma. Now s your chance to do the Buck Rogers stuff yourself. If not for you I’d go myself. But I ‘m too old to fly. . .

And so she had come to the Moon. And now this.

Anna folded her thin legs with an enviable ease and sat cross-legged with her. “That’s right,” she said solemnly.

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t matter now.”

Emma stroked the floor. The surface was smooth, seamless, warm, and it gave a little, like rubber. Like the floor of a playpen, or maybe an insane asylum, she thought sourly. She eyed Anna. “This place is strange,” she said. “Distances are funny. It was like I was watching you through a fish-eye lens.”

Anna frowned. “What’s a fish-eye lens?”

“Never mind.”

“Of course distances are funny,” Anna said. “Everything here is folded up.” She waved a hand at the blank plain, the neon-tube sky. “How else could we fit all of this into that little bubble you saw?”

“Are we still on the Moon?”

“Oh, yes. Or rather we are still connected to the Moon. Actually the geometry here is hyperbolic. An infinite volume contained within a finite circumference.” Anna reached up, her fingers flexing toward the horizon. “The walls are infinitely far away, and six feet away, at the same time. Minutes pass in here, while two centuries pass on the outside.” She was watching Emma sympathetically.

Well, it didn’t matter whether Emma understood or not. It was just that this place, it seemed, was to be the end of the road, for the children and for herself. Whatever happened from now on, there was no going back: back to the world she had grown up in, with its comfortable furniture of sky and clouds and leather armchairs and other adults and, for Christ’s sake, coffee. One last cup of coffee, instead of this sickly orange syrup — she felt she would give her soul for that. Better yet, one last tequila sunrise.

Two centuries, Anna had said.

Anna’s eyes were empty, watchful. She knows the significance, Emma thought. It’s real; it’s happening; that’s why we’re here.

I’ve been fast-forwarded in time, to Carter Day.

Fear clutched her heart.

Now the children were coming back. Some of them carried toys — dolls, even a toy gun. One boy came pedaling on a small plastic bicycle, adapted for the Moon with fat mesh wheels.

“This has been a good place to cycle,” Anna said dreamily. “Of course that’s why we built it this way.”

“You built a toy universe so you could ride your bikes?”

She grinned at Emma. “If you were ten years old and could build a universe, what would you do?”

Emma frowned. “It’s been a long time since I was ten.” And, she realized, at some point I forgot how it is to be a kid. How very sad.

As the children neared they loomed, unnaturally quickly, and the gray flatness washed out of them. Emma could smell them — their hot, moist little bodies, a playground smell, comforting here in this bright gray-white lightbulb unreality. Billie Tybee, seven years old, reached out a hand. Emma took it. The small hand was warm, perfect in hers.

Anna stood up.

“Is it time?”

Anna said, “Soon.”

Emma began to struggle to her feet. “Then let’s get it over.”

“Oh,” Anna said, “it isn’t waiting for us.”

Little Billie Tybee was still clutching her hand. Emma relaxed her grip, trying to release her, but the little girl held on. So Emma limped forward awkwardly, helped by the older children, leaning to hold hands with Billie.

Emma looked back the way they had come. She tried to remember the place where she had arrived here, the location of the invisible gateway back to her own familiar universe. Surely if there was any way out of here it would be from there. But the surface was as smooth and featureless as bare skin.

She sighed. Forget it, Emma. Where you came from isn’t important any more. Where you’re going to, however, is.

She found herself shaking.

Was not knowing, not understanding, making this experience so much harder to bear? But if she did know — if the kids were dragging her toward some folded-spacetime equivalent of an electric chair, if she knew every detail of how her life was going to end — would that be any easier?

The party resumed its slow hike across the featureless plain. Piles of kipple, clothes and toys and food packets, seemed to swim around them, the distances melting and merging in this folded place.

They were slowly nearing the one substantial structure on the plain, the shack of metal and wire she had noticed earlier. It was indeed a Tinkerbell trap: an electromagnetic cage made of junkyard garbage, capable of containing a chunk of quark matter. Like the prototypes, she could see how this cage had been made by the hands of children, a thing of lengths of wire and metal and bits of plastic clumsily twisted together.

But however crude its construction the cage evidently worked, for there was a Tinkerbell in there, a hovering point of light. It seemed to be following a complex path, darting back and forth, slowing as it reached maybe six inches from the center of the motion, then slipping back. Emma tried to pick out a periodicity in the motion. Perhaps there were many oscillations here, overlaying each other in three-dimensional space.

The children slowed, broke up as they reached the cage. Anna and the others lowered Emma carefully to the floor; though littered with scraps of wire, the floor was as featureless and unpleasantly warm here as where she had first emerged. Billie Tybee sat on the floor beside her now, cuddling up close.

One little boy walked around the back of the cage, and Emma heard a gentle splashing, glimpsed a thin stream of yellowish liquid.

Anna squatted on her haunches. She asked Emma, “Are you still okay?”

“So you built another Tinkerbell cage. More quark matter?”

“Oh, no. Not yet. That stuff isn’t quark matter. Can’t you tell?… I don’t suppose you can.”

“Then what?”

“It’s yolk,” Anna said. “Yolk, from an egg star.”

“A what?”

Billie sighed with all the seriousness a seven-year-old could muster. “She means,” she said, pronouncing the words carefully, “a neutron star.”

“But it’s like an egg,” Anna said. “The collapsed remains of a supernova. Solid outside and a lot of funny liquids churning around on the inside.”

“And that’s what this stuff is? This Tinkerbell? A droplet of neutron star matter?”

“Only a billion tons or so,” Anna said. “Originally material from the Moon.”

“Tell me what you want with it.”

“We don’t want it” Billie said seriously, and she wiped her nose on Emma’s sleeve.

Anna said, “What we want is what it will become. The degenerate matter is, umm, a fuse. In a moment a fragment of true quark matter will arrive.”

“From where?” Emma asked.