Time

They may be about to kill you. Even so, don’t frighten the children. It surely isn’t their fault.

“Vacuum decay,” she said to Anna.

“Yes.”

“Will it be quick?”

Anna thought that over. “More than quick. The effects will spread at light speed, transforming everything to the true vacuum state.” She studied Emma. “Before you know it’s happening, it will be over.”

Emma took a deep breath. She didn’t understand a word; it was so abstract it wasn’t even frightening. Thank God I’m no smarter, she thought. “Okay. How far will it reach? Will it engulf Tycho? The Moon?”

Anna frowned. “You don’t understand.”

And the droplet exploded.

Emma flinched.

The cage held. Light flared, a baseball-sized lump, dazzling Emma, bathing the faces of the watching children, as if they were planets turned to this new sun.

Billie was cuddling closer, wrapping her arms around Emma’s waist. Emma put her hands on the child’s head and bent over her to shelter her. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay to be frightened.”

The light got brighter.

“Nearly, now,” Anna said softly.

“ Why, Anna? Revenge?”

Anna turned to her. “You don’t understand. You never will. I’m sorry. This isn’t destruction. This isn’t revenge. This is—”

“What?”

“It’s wonderful”

Emma felt heat on her face; a wind, hot air pulsing out of the cage, fleeing the heat of theTinkerbell.

Now more children came creeping closer to Emma. She reached out her arms and tried to embrace them all. Some of them were weeping. And maybe she was weeping too; it was hard to tell.

At last even Anna came to her, buried her face in Emma’s neck.

She thought of Malenfant: Malenfant on Cruithne, defying fate one last time. She might easily have been with him, up there, sharing whatever had become of him. Even at their worst times, the depths of the divorce, she had expected, in her heart, to die with him.

But it hadn’t turned out like that, for better or worse.

In the years after Mojave, after Malenfant, Emma had had relationships. She’d even inherited some children, from previous broken relationships. None of her own, though. Maybe this was as close as she had ever come.

But the children around her seemed remote, as if she touched them through a layer of glass. She felt incomplete. Maybe she was spread too thin over the possibilities of reality, she thought.

The light grew brighter, the heat fiercer. The wind was beginning to howl through the loose, shuddering framework of the cage.

The children whimpered and pushed closer to Emma.

There was a blue flare. Through the tangle of the Tinkerbell cage, Emma glimpsed an electric-blue ring, distorted, twisting away. And more of them, a great chain disappearing to infinity, a ribbed funnel of blue light. Sparks flared, shooting out of the blue tunnel, disappearing into the remote gray dome of sky.

They’re reaching into the past, Emma thought, wondering. Sending off the quark nuggets that reached the center in Nevada — even the one that initiated this event. Closed causal loops.

It was always about the children, she realized now. Not us, not Malenfant. All we did was help it along. But this has been their story all along. The children.

The light sculpture was gone, the burst of blue light vanishing like soap bubbles. Then there was only the fierce white glow of the Tinkerbell itself.

“It isn’t so much energy,” Anna was murmuring. “Not so much at all. But all of it concentrated on a single proton mass. You could have done this. You built particle accelerators, reached high energies. But you gave up. Besides, you were doing it wrong. You’d have needed an accelerator of galactic dimensions to get to the right energy levels—”

“We weren’t trying,” Emma said. “We didn’t know we were supposed to.”

Anna looked up, her eyes wet, her hair billowing around her face. “That’s the tragedy. That you never understood the purpose of your existence.”

Emma forced a smile. “Guess what? I still don’t.”

Anna laughed, and for a moment, a last moment, she was just a kid, a sixteen-year-old girl, half laughing, half crying, happy, terrified.

And then the Tinkerbell exploded.

It wasn ‘t instantaneous. That was the horror of it.

It washed over her, slicing her through, burning her out of her own skull. She could feel the modules of her brain, her mind, wiping clear, collapsing into the new vacuum beyond the light.

Until there was only the deep, old part of her brain left, the animal cowering in the dark.

Malenfant!

And the light broke through.

Reid Malenfant:

The brighter areas — the older terrain, the highlands of the near side and much of the far side — looked much as they had always done, tracing out the face of the Man in the Moon. But the seas of gray lunar dust, Imbrium and Procellarum and Tranquillity, seemed to be imploding. Even from here he could see cracks spreading in the lava seas, sections of crust cracking, tipping, sliding inward. The Moon was two thousand miles across; given that, the speed of the process he was watching — and the scale of it, hundred-mile slabs of lunar crust crumbling in seconds — was impressive.

The Moon had companions in this moment of convulsion, he saw: bright sparks that orbited slowly, like fireflies. Ships from Earth. He sensed they were helpless.

It’s beginning, Michael murmured in his Seattle-tinged middle-aged voice.

“What is?”

The Moon is being collapsed to a new form: quark matter. The weaker areas of the crust, the areas crushed by the ancient basin-forming impacts, are imploding first. Michael hesitated. Do you understand? The Moon will become, briefly, a single giant nu-cleon, an extended sac of quarks at nuclear density that—

“Who is doing this?”

The children, of course.

“Why, for Christ’s sake?”

It is the fulfillment of humankind. Of this cosmos…Ah.

Now the Moon’s ancient, cratered highlands were starting to crumble, too. Malenfant felt a stab of regret as the Moon’s bony geography collapsed into dust and light. Five billion years of stillness, Malenfant thought, ending in a few heartbeats. And we thought those Apollo footprints would last a million years.

Now a light started to shine out of the heart of the Moon, out of the eyes and mouth of the Man, as if something were burning there. He could actually see shafts of light cast through lunar dust, as if the Moon were a Halloween lantern hanging in a murky room.

And — with startling suddenness, in utter silence — the Moon imploded, shattered, burst into an expanding cloud of dust and rubble.

The orbiting ships were immediately overwhelmed. So, Malenfant thought, people are already dying.

The cloud began to disperse, spreading out along the Moon’s orbit. Maybe, given time, it would form a new ring around the Earth, Malenfant thought. And there would be spectacular meteor showers on the Earth, skies that would burn like a salute to the death of the Moon.

But now the dispersing debris revealed a point of dazzling white light, difficult to look into even with Malenfant’s mysteriously enhanced vision. The dying Moon had birthed a new star: a terrible, brilliant companion to the sun.

Just seconds now, Michael murmured, staring.

Malenfant glanced at the boy’s face. The quality of light had become strange, sharper. “Michael, what is that going to do to the Earth? The heat it’s putting out will surely play hell with the climate. And—”

You’re asking the wrong questions again, Malenfant. There will be no time for that. The quark nugget is only a tool.

“A tool to do what?”

To create a pulse of high-energy density.

Malenfant longed to understand. “How high?”

Would the numbers mean anything to you? The most energetic particles are cosmic rays: iron nuclei fleeing the explosions of stars, moving close to the speed of light. If an apple falls from a tree to the ground, the energy it gathers is shared over its billions of billions of atoms. The most energetic cosmic rays have comparable energy focused on a single nucleus. If two such nuclei were to impact head-on the energy released would be two orders of magnitude higher again. It is believed that no such event has happened in the history of the universe.

“And the children—”

Are seeking to create an event six orders of magnitude higher even than that. There are no natural processes that could produce such a thing. This is the first time there has been a mechanism — a mind, us — to deliver such gigantic energies. In this universe or any of those preceding it.

Malenfant frowned. “Are you saying this is our purpose? The purpose of man, of life, is to produce a single unnaturally huge energy pulse, this one thing? That’s all?”

The purpose is not the act. It is the consequence of the act.

The light in the Moon wreckage grew brighter. It flared, electric blue, and then white.

And the point burst, became an expanding bubble of light, pink-gray, ballooning into space. In a heartbeat it overwhelmed the debris cloud. Malenfant glimpsed its glare in the oceans of Earth, like a terrifying new sun born out of Earth’s lost companion.

But it took only a second for the bubble to grow monstrously large, fifty or sixty times the size of Earth, dwarfing the planet.

The wall of light swept across Earth, devouring it. And Earth was gone.

Malenfant grunted, the breath forced out of him. He felt as if he had been punched.