Timelike Infinity

They walked through a grove of light globes. The globes, hovering in the air perhaps ten feet from the soil, gave out sunlike heat and warmth, and Berg paused for a few moments, feeling on her face and in her newly aging bones the warmth of a star she had abandoned a subjective century before. In the yellow-white light of the globe the flesh-pink glow of Jupiter was banished, and the grass looked normal, wiry and green; Berg ran a slippered toe through it. 'So you camouflaged your ship.'

'The Qax do not interfere with areas they perceive as human cultural shrines.'

'Hurrah for the Qax,' said Berg sourly. 'Perhaps they’re not such bad fellows after all.'

Shira raised the ridges from which her eyebrows had been shaved. 'We believe that this is not altruism but calculation on the part of the Qax. In any event the policy is there — and it is a policy that may be manipulated to our gain.'

Berg smiled, her mind full of a sudden, absurd image of rebels in grimy jumpsuits burrowing like moles under cathedrals, Pyramids, the concrete tombs of ancient fission reactors. 'So you built your ship under the stones.'

'Yes. More precisely, we readied an area of land for the flight.'

'Where did you get the resources for this?'

'The Friends of Wigner have adherents System-wide,' Shira said. 'Remember that by the time of the first encounter with the Qax, humans had become a starfaring species, able to command the resources of multiple systems. The Qax control us — almost completely. But in the small gap left by that ‘almost’ there is room for great undertakings… projects to match, perhaps, the greatest works of your own time.'

'I wouldn’t bet on that,' Berg said with grim confidence.

They walked on, toward the heart of the craft. 'So,' said Berg, 'you got your ship ready. How did you get it off the planet and into space?'

'A stolen Squeem hyperdrive device,' said Shira. 'It cast a lenticular field around the craft, initially isolating it — and a surrounding layer of air — from the planet. Then the drive was used to hurl the craft into space, to bring it to the vicinity of your Cauchy. Then — after rendezvous with your ship — the drive was used to carry the craft through the Interface.'

'The Squeem. That’s the race humans came up against earlier, right? Before the Qax.'

'And who, in their defeat, afforded us much of the basic technology we needed to get out of the Solar System.'

'How will we defeat them?'

Shira grinned. 'Read your history books.'

'So,' Berg said, 'is the Squeem drive operating now?'

'Minimally. It serves as a radiation screen.'

'And to keep the air stuck to the ship, right?'

'No, the craft’s gravity does that.'

Berg nodded; maybe here was a chance to get a little more meaningful information. 'Artificial gravity? Things have come a long way since my day.'

But Shira only frowned.

They approached the dwellings and workplaces of the Friends. The buildings, simple cubes and cones built on a human scale, were scattered around the heart of this landscape ship like toys, surrounding the old stones at the center of the disk. The building material was uniformly dove-gray and — when Berg ran her fingertips over the wall of a teepee as she passed — smooth to the limit of sensation. But it was human-warm, without the cold of metal. This was 'Xeelee construction material,' one of the many technological miracles that had apparently seeped down to mankind — and their foes, like the Squeem and the Qax — from the mysterious Xeelee, lords of creation.

Friends moved among the buildings, patiently going about their business. One small group had collected around one of the data capture devices they called 'slates,' and were arguing over what looked like a schematic of the earth-craft.

They nodded to Shira, and to Berg with glances of curiosity.

Berg had counted about thirty Friends of Wigner aboard the craft, roughly split between male and female. They appeared to be aged between twenty-five and thirty, and all seemed fit and intelligent. Obviously this crew had been selected by the wider Friends organization for their fitness for the mission. All followed the shaved-skull fashion of Shira — some, Berg had noticed with bemusement, had even removed their eyelashes. But they were surprisingly easy to distinguish from each other; the shape of the human skull was, she was learning, as varied — and could be as appealing to the eye — as the features of the face.

'You’ve done well to get so far,' Berg said.

'More than well,' said Shira coolly. 'Our craft has successfully traversed the portal, without significant damage or injury. Our supplies — and our recycling gear — should suffice to sustain us in this orbit around Jupiter for many years. Long enough for our purposes.' She smiled. 'Yes, we have done well.'

'Yeah.' Berg sourly studied the busy knots of Friends. 'You know, it might help me a lot to understand you if you told me what the hell your Project is all about.'

Shira studied her sadly. 'That would not be appropriate.'

Berg took a stance before her, hands on hips, and set her face into what she knew would be a commanding scowl. 'Don’t hide behind platitudes, Shira. Damn it all to hell, it was my ship — my Interface — that you used to get as far as you have. And it’s the lives of my crew, lost on the wrong side of the wormhole, that have paid for the success you so complacently report. So you owe me a bit more than that patronizing crap.'

Shira’s pretty, paper-fine face creased with what looked like real concern. 'I’m sorry, Miriam. I’m not meaning to patronize you. But I — we — genuinely believe that it wouldn’t be right to tell you.'

'Why? At least tell me that much.'

'I can’t. If you understood the Project, then you would also see why you can’t be told any more.'

Berg laughed in her face. 'Are you kidding me? Is that supposed to satisfy me?'

'No,' Shira said, grinning almost cheekily, and again, for a moment, Berg felt a tug of genuine empathy with this strange, secret person from the other side of time. 'But it really is all I can give you.'

Berg scraped her fingers across her wiry stubble of hair. 'What is it you’re afraid of? Do you think that it’s possible I’ll oppose you — try to obstruct the Project?'

Shira nodded seriously. 'If you gained only partial understanding, then that is possible. Yes.'

Berg frowned. 'I don’t think you’re talking about understanding — but about faith. Even if I knew what you were up to, I might oppose it if I didn’t share the same irrational faith in its success. Is that it?'

Shira did not reply to that; her gaze was clear and untroubled.

'Shira, maybe you genuinely need my help,' Berg said. 'I’d rather not rely on faith that my ship is going to fly, if I’ve a chance of getting into the drive and making sure it does.'

'It’s not as simple as that, Miriam,' Shira said. She smiled disarmingly. 'And I wish you’d stop pumping me.'

Berg touched the girl’s elbow. 'Shira, we’re on the same side,' she said urgently. 'Don’t you see that?' She gestured vaguely in the direction of the inner Solar System. 'You’ve got the resources of five planets — of Earth itself — to call on. Once people understand what you’re trying to avert — the nightmare of the Qax Occupation — you would be given all the help the worlds could muster. You’d have the strength of billions.'

'It wouldn’t work, Miriam,' Shira said. 'Remember, we have developed fifteen centuries beyond you. There is little your people could do to help.'

Berg stiffened, drawing away from the girl. 'We could pack a hell of a punch, Shira. What if the Qax follow us back in time, through the portal? Won’t you need help to stave them off?'

'We can defend ourselves,' Shira said calmly.

That sent a shiver through Berg, but she pressed on: 'Then imagine a hundred violently armed GUT ships crashing through that portal, and into the future. They could do a hell of a lot of damage—'

Shira shook her head. 'A single Spline warship could scythe them down in a moment.'

'Then let’s use the advantage of the centuries we’ve gained.' Berg slammed her fist into her palm. 'There’s not a Qax alive at this moment who even knows humans exist. We could go and roast them in their nest. If you gave us the secret of the Squeem hyperdrive, we could build a faster-than-light armada and—'

Shira laughed delicately. 'You’re so melodramatic, Miriam. So violent!' She made a wide cage of her hands. 'At this moment, the Qax already operate an interstellar trading empire spanning hundreds of star systems. The thought of an ill-equipped rabble of humans from fifteen centuries before my time having any hope of overcoming that might is risible, frankly. And besides — we are not hyperdrive engineers. We could not ‘pass on the secrets’ of the Squeem drive, as you put it.'

'Then let our engineers take it apart.'

'Any such attempt would result in the devastation of half a planet.'

Berg found herself bridling again. 'You’re still being patronizing,' she protested. 'Even insulting. We’re not complete dummies, you know; we are your ancestors, after all. Maybe you ought to have more respect.'

'My friend, your thinking is simplistic. We did not come here to attempt a simple military assault on the Qax. Even were it to succeed — which it could not — it would not be sufficient. Our purpose is at once much more subtle — and yet capable of achieving much, much more.'

'But you won’t tell me what it is? You won’t trust me. Me, your own great-to-the-nth grandmother—'

Shira smiled. 'I would be proud to share some fraction of your genetic heritage, Miriam.'

Side by side they walked on, still heading toward the center of the earth-craft. Soon they had cleared the belt of construction-material huts with their knots of busy people, and the hum of the Friends’ conversation faded behind them; when they reached the center of the craft it was as if they were entering a little island of silence.

And as the two women walked into the broken circles of stones, that seemed entirely appropriate to Berg.

There were no globe lights here; the stones, hulking and ancient, stood defiant in the smoky light of Jupiter. Berg stood beneath one of the still-intact Sarsen arches and touched the cold blue- gray surface of a standing stone; it wasn’t intimidating or cold, she thought, but friendly — more like stroking an elephant. 'You know,' she said, 'you could cause a hell of a stir just by landing this thing on Earth. Maybe on Salisbury Plain, a few miles from the original — which, of course, is standing there in the wind and the rain, in this time zone. If it was up to me I couldn’t resist it, Project or no Project.'

Shira grinned. 'The thought does have an appeal.'

'Yeah.' Berg walked toward the center of the circle, stepping over crumbled fragments of rock. She turned slowly around, surveying the truncated landscape, trying to see this place through the eyes of the people who built it four thousand years earlier. How would this place have looked at the solstice, standing on the bare back of Salisbury Plain, with no sign of civilization anywhere in the universe save a few scattered fires on the plain, soon dying in the dawn light?

…But now her horizon was hemmed in by the anonymous gray shoulders of the Friends’ construction-material huts; and she knew that even if she had the power to blow those huts away she would reveal only a few hundred yards of scratched turf, a ragged edge dangling over immensities. And when she tilted her head back she could see the arc of Jupiter’s limb, hanging like an immense wall across the universe.

The old stones were dwarfed by such grandeur. They seemed pathetic.

Absurdly she felt a lump rising to her throat. 'Damn it,' she said gruffly.