It was working. The lens-ship was cut loose at last of the system that had birthed it. Now its ocean was the thin, rich inter stellar medium that drifted between the stars. The fuel was limitless, and the cephalopods could run forever…
Well, not forever, Sheena 47 knew. The great ship could approach but never exceed light speed; slowly, inexorably, the unreality tide must outrun the lens and wash over them all.
But, so stretched was time by their great speed, that hour was many, many generations away.
She felt a stab of regret for humanity: the flawed creatures who had given mind to the cephalopods, and who had now, it seemed, been consumed by the fire. But the cephalopods were young, hungry for time, and for them, the future was not done yet.
The ramscoop was working perfectly. The future was long and assured. The great hierarchies of mind collapsed as the cephalopods gave themselves over to a joyous riot of celebration, of talk and love and war and hunting:
The city of water and light, pursued by unreality, fled into the darkness of the far downstream.
Reid Malenfant:
The bubble of glowing, laser-speckle light was looming now, a wall that cut across the universe, plummeting toward them at light speed. It could have been a mile away or ten million. Malenfant could feel nothing: no heat, no cold, no tug of the anomaly’s monstrous gravity. Maybe he was already falling into its maw.
He wondered how long there was left. Then he put the thought aside. No more countdowns, Malenfant.
“What?”
“Where would we be? One of the new universes?”
“What would it be like?”
“I think I’d like that. Maybe this is just the beginning. Hold on, now…”
The unreal light grew blinding. He pressed Michael’s face to his own belly so the boy couldn’t see what was coming. Malenfant grinned fiercely.
AFTERWORD
I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts.
* The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is
* The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is
* The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in
* The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman
* Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in
* The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,”
* The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson,
* The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book
* The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?”
The rest is fiction.
Stephen Baxter
Great Missenden
February 1999
