She was aware that Parz’s green eyes were fixed on her. That he was almost radiating sympathy.
Her legs tucked under her, Miriam stared at the slate on her lap, at the delicate image of the portal it contained, as if willing herself to travel into the slate, shrinking down until she, too, could follow Michael Poole through the spacetime wormhole. If she concentrated really hard she could shut out all the rest of it — this strange, rather chilling man from the future beside her, the distant activities of the Friends — even the damned thin air and irregular gravity of the devastated earth-craft.
The moment stretched. The portal glimmered like a diamond in her slate.
Then, with shocking suddenness, blue-white light flared silently inside the portal, gushing from every one of the tetrahedral frame’s facets. It was as if a tiny sun had gone nova inside the frame. The light of the wormhole’s collapse glared from the slates carried by Parz, the Friends, as far as she could see; it was as if everyone held a candle before them, and the light generated by that failing spacetime flaw illuminated all their young, smooth faces.
The light died. When she looked again at her slate the portal was gone; broken fragments of the exotic-matter frame, sparking, tumbled away from a patch of space that had become ordinary, finite once more.
She threw the slate facedown on the grass.
Jasoft Parz laid his slate more gently on the ground. 'It is over,' he said. 'Michael Poole has succeeded in sealing the wormhole; there can be no doubt.'
Berg shoved her fingers, hard, into the battered earth, welcoming the pain of bent-back nails. 'Those damn struts of exotic matter will have to be cleared. Hazard to navigation.'
He said, 'It is over, you know. You’ll have to find ways of letting it go.'
'Letting what go?'
'The past.' He sighed. 'And, in my case, the future.'
She lifted her head, studied the huge, brooding bulk of Jupiter. 'The future is still yours… your own future. There is plenty for you to explore here. And the Friends, of course.'
He smiled. 'Such as?'
'AS treatment for a start. And, for the first time in your lives, some modern — sorry, ancient — health checks.'
Jasoft smiled, quietly sad. 'But we are aliens on our native planet. Stranded so far from our own time—'
She shrugged. 'There are plenty of you, including the Friends. And they’re young, basically fit. You could found a colony; there’s plenty of room. Or head for the stars.' She smiled, remembering the strange voyage of the
'Yes. Well, Miriam, such projects might attract these young people, if not me…'
She looked at him now. 'what do you mean? What about you, Jasoft?'
He smiled and spread his long, age-withered fingers. 'Oh, I think my story is over now. I’ve seen, done, learned more than I ever dreamed. Or deserved to.'
Her eyes narrowed. 'You’re going to refuse further AS treatment? Look, if you feel some guilt about the function you performed in the Qax Occupation era, nobody in this age is going to—'
'It’s not that,' he said gently. 'I’m not talking about some complicated form of suicide, my dear. And I don’t suffer greatly from guilt, despite the moral ambivalence of what I’ve done with my life. I certainly believe I left my era for the last time aboard that damn Spline warship having done more good than harm… It’s just that I think I’ve seen enough. I know all I could wish to know, you see. I know that although the Project of these rebels — the Friends of Wigner — has failed, Earth will ultimately be liberated from the fist of the Qax. I don’t need to learn anything more. I certainly don’t feel I need to see any more of it laboriously unfold. Do you understand that?'
Berg smiled. 'I think so. Though I must chide you for thinking small. The Friends of Wigner have projects that extend to the end of time.'
'Yes. And as for their future, I suspect they are already engaged on designs of their own.'
She nodded. 'You’ve told me what Shira said. Take the long way home, by surviving through the centuries until the era of your birth returns… and then what? Start the whole damn business over again?'
'Perhaps. Though I hear they’ve done a little more thinking since I spoke to Shira. You mention a sublight star trip. I think that would appeal to the Friends, if only because it would let them exploit relativistic time-dilation effects—'
' — and get home that much quicker; in a century instead of fifteen.' She smiled. 'Well, it’s a way to waste your life, I suppose.'
'And you, Miriam? You’ve been a century away yourself; this must be almost as great a dislocation for you as it is for me. What will you do?'
She shrugged, rubbing her hair. 'Maybe I’ll go with the Friends,' she murmured. 'Maybe I’ll take them to the stars and back, journey through fifteen centuries once more—'
' — and see if Michael Poole emerges into the Qax Occupation future, dashing valiantly from the imploding wormhole?' He smiled.
She looked up to the Jupiter-roofed zenith, trying to pick out the pieces of the shattered portal. 'It might make me feel better,' she said. 'But, Jasoft, I know I’ve lost Michael. Wherever he is now I could never reach him.'
They sat for a moment, watching images of shattered exotic matter tumble through the discarded slates. At length he said, 'Come. It is cold here, and the air is thin. Let us return to the
She dropped her head from the sky. 'Yeah. That’s a good idea, Jasoft.'
She stood, her legs stiff after so long curled beneath her. Almost tenderly Jasoft took her arm, and they walked together to the waiting boat.
Spacetime is friable.
Wormholes riddle the fabric of spacetime on all scales. At the Planck length and below, wormholes arising from quantum uncertainty effects blur the clean Einsteinian lines of spacetime. And some of the wormholes expand to the human scale, and beyond — sometimes spontaneously, and sometimes at the instigation of intelligence.
Spacetime is like a sheet of ice, permeated by flaws, by hairline cracks.
When Michael Poole’s hyperdrive was activated inside the human-built wormhole Interface, it was as if someone had smashed at that ice floe with a mallet. Cracks exploded from the point of impact, widened; they joined each other in a complex, spreading network, a tributary pattern that continually formed and reformed as spacetime healed and shattered anew.
The battered, scorched corpse of the Spline warship bearing the lifedome of the
It was like a small sun exploding amid the moons of Jupiter. Vast storms were evoked in the bulk of the gas giant’s atmosphere. A moon was destroyed. Humans were killed, blinded.
Cracks in shattering spacetime propagated at the speed of light.
There was already another macroscopic spacetime wormhole in the Jovian system: the channel set up to a future beyond the destruction of the Qax star, the channel through which Qax had traveled toward the past, intent on destroy ing humanity.
Under the impact of Poole’s hammer-blow arrival — as Poole had expected — this second spacetime flaw could not retain its stability.
The wormhole mouth itself expanded, exoticity ballooning across thousands of miles and engulfing the mass-energy of Michael Poole’s unlikely vessel. The icosahedral exotic-matter frame that threaded the wormhole mouth exploded, a mirror image of the destruction witnessed by Miriam Berg fifteen centuries earlier. Then the portal imploded at lightspeed; gravitational shock waves pulsed from the vanishing mouth like Xeelee starbreaker beams, scattering ships and moons like insects in a gale.
Through a transient network of wormholes that imploded after him in a storm of gravity waves and high-energy particles, Michael Poole hurtled helplessly into the future.
Chapter 16
Chains of events threaded the future.
A human called Jim Bolder flew a Xeelee nightfighter into the heart of the Qax home system, causing them to turn their starbreaker weapons on their own sun.
The Qax Occupation of Earth collapsed. Humans would never again be defeated, on a significant scale, by any of the junior species.
Humans spread across stars, their zone of influence expanding at many times lightspeed. A period known as the Assimilation followed; the wisdom and power of other species were absorbed, on an industrial scale.
Soon, only the Xeelee stood between humans and dominance.
The conflict that followed lasted a million years.
When it was resolved only a handful of humans, and human-derived beings, remained anywhere in the universe.
The projects of the Xeelee, the inexorable workings of natural processes, continued to change the universe.
Stars died. More stars formed, to replace those that had already failed… but as the primal mix of hydrogen and helium was polluted with stellar waste products the formation rate of new stars was declining exponentially.
And darker forces were at work. The stars aged… too rapidly.
The Xeelee completed their great projects, and fled the decaying cosmos.
Five million years after the first conflict between human and Qax, the wreckage of a Spline warship emerged, tumbling, from the mouth of a wormhole that blazed with gravitational radiation. The wormhole closed, sparkling.
The wreck — dark, almost bereft of energy — turned slowly in the stillness. It was empty of life.
Almost.
Quantum functions flooded over Michael Poole like blue-violent rain, restoring him to time. He gasped at the pain of rebirth.
Humans would call it the anti-Xeelee.
