“I never understood. Not until now.”

Nevertheless you were a catalyst.

Malenfant found he was bleakly exhilarated. “Life is no accident,” he said. “No second-order effect, no marginal creation. We — small, insignificant creatures scurrying over our fragile planet, lost in the Galaxy — we were, after all, the center of the universe.” It was, in its extraordinary way, an affirmation of all he had ever believed. “Hah,” he barked. “Copernicus, blow it out your ass!”

Malenfant? I think I’m scared.

Malenfant pulled the boy to him, wrapped his arms around this complex creature, the ten-year-old boy, the superbeing stranded here from a vanished future.

“Will they remember us? The children. In the new universes.”

Oh, yes, Michael said, and he smiled. He waved a hand at the bubble. This couldn ‘t have happened without mind. Without intelligence. Who knows? They might be able to reconstruct what we were like, how we lived our lives.

“I hope they forgive us,” Malenfant whispered.

Sheena 47:

It was the hour.

Sheena 47 prowled through the heart of the lens-ship. On every hierarchical level mind-shoals formed, merged, fragmented, combining restlessly, shimmers of group consciousness that pulsed through the trillion-strong cephalopod community as sunlight glimmers on water. The great shoals had abandoned their song-dreams of Earth, of the deep past, and sang instead of the huge, deep future that lay ahead.

The diamond machines — transformed asteroid hulks — had worked without fault. Now the starbow arced around the lens-ship, complete and beautiful: the universe relativity-compressed to a rainbow that shone on the rippling water.

The helium-3 store, laboriously mined from the great cloud ocean of Jupiter, was all but exhausted. Sheena 47 paid a final farewell to the brave communities who had colonized those pink seas and delivered the fuel for the exodus. Those cousins had stayed behind and would soon be overwhelmed by the anomaly, but they had gone to nonexistence proudly.

Now was the time. Excitement crossed the great cephalopod communities in waves, and they crowded to the huge lenticular walls to see.

And, just as they were designed to, the magnetic arms of the ramscoop opened, like the arms of a giant cephalopod itself. The intangible limbs sparkled as thin matter was hauled into its maw, to be compressed and collapsed and burned.

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: Court me. Court me. See my weapons! I am strong and fierce. Stay away! Stay away! She is mine!…

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.

Malenfant. There s something Ididn ‘t tell you.

“What?”

We might survive. We might get caught in one of the false-vacuum black holes. We are here, but not here, Malenfant. The information that comprises us might be preserved during —

“Where would we be? One of the new universes?”

I don’t know.

“What would it be like?”

Different.

“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.

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 New Scientist of 1 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source.

* 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 Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (AddisonWesley, 1996).

* The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996).

* 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 (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647,1986.

* Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685,1997.

* 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,” Physical Review A vol. 30, p. 272,1984.

* 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, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447,1979.

* 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 Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997).

* The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508,1983.

The rest is fiction.

Stephen Baxter

Great Missenden

February 1999