“Of course.” Nikka had on her See?—obvious! expression.
“So when we have to travel in a big loop to get home, that means we have to go into the future?” Nigel liked scientific ideas but he did not like having to think like a pretzel.
“There is a lot more future than past. The universe is only fifteen billion years old. The future’s almost infinite.”
Nikka seemed to think that finished off the idea. Nigel ventured, “Approximately infinite. Interesting concept. So there’s a much greater chance that any leg of our trip will go into the future?” and she rewarded him again with her daintily amused See?—obvious! smile.
Ito scowled in the last moments before Transit and asked warily, “How dangerous is this?”
She shrugged. She was no stranger to trauma and death and did not think much about it. “Not very, unless we hit a stutter.”
“What’s that me—” was all Ito had time for before the pulverizing wall of sound struck their capsule.
Pain stretches time.
The vibrations confirmed his fears. They seemed to go on for a sluggish, pounding eternity, though Nikka later told them offhandedly that it had been only forty-four seconds. Of agony.
SIXTEEN
Time Is a Horizon
Shaken, they popped open the capsule lock. They found themselves among their home and outbuildings, with the same slice of orchard as before—all resting atop a sliding mass of luminous timestone. To all sides a box canyon rose, shrouded in lemon-hot vapor.
They got out and breathed cold, thin air but kept their pressure skins on anyway. Nikka calculated from the capsule’s instruments and decided that they had squeezed through the momentarily pulsating wormhole, traversing an esty-displacement of several million kilometer-years.
“Could be millions of klicks away and at exactly the same time we left,” she said calmly, “or the same Lane, millions of years in the future.” Wormholes tunneled between eras not at all like elevators linking floors of a building, but that was how Nigel persisted on thinking of them.
The ground shook. The plate of their property shifted uneasily on the timestone beneath.
“There’s no way to tell which?” Benjamin asked apprehensively.
“The Causality Engine had chaos built into it,” Nikka answered, holding on to a capsule strut for support. “We can’t measure any better than this.”
Nigel watched the distant sky, where more lava-like walls fumed and roiled. “How long do we stay here?”
“That’s chaotic, too,” Nikka said. “But short. Looks to be maybe an hour or two. We’ll have some warning of when the next Transit is coming.”
Angelina laughed, which startled the others. “Until then we’re free to enjoy the scenery?” Despite their gathering unease, the family chuckled with her.
As if in answer, nearby cliffs oozed sulphurous light, complaining with slow groans. A sheet peeled off—crack!—and a sharp snap in the air knocked them flat. Here the esty was like skin, sloughing away layers so that more could grow. Compressed events evolved, brimmed, died.
Nigel knew from undergraduate days that mass curved space-time, but the inverse was still a surprise: compacted esty behaved like matter. Rendered as mass, events themselves were squeezed into slabs. Their endings brought forth explosive energies: literally, the end of history, for in these detonations data burst into phosphorescent energy, its true equivalent. The esty confirmed the final triumvirate of physics, one side of which Einstein had got right: mass was like energy was like information.
They went into their house, which had been fully provisioned by the Chairwoman’s minions, and tried to act as though this was a kind of homecoming. They were hungry and ate something like steaks of beef to celebrate but the coming Transit made their talk edgy. Nigel went outside. Ostensibly it was to smoke one of his cigars, carefully kept chilled in the kitchen but scorned if lit inside. He did not like delivering his family into the hands of Causality Engines or “intrinsic chaos” or any other collection of jawbreaker words that in the end meant the world’s casual indifference to human life and values. But he had no choice.
“It can’t be helped. You know that,” Nikka said. She had slipped beside him, her footsteps covered by the hollow crashing of timestone far up on the hazy curve of this spherical Lane.
“Should’ve let that body rot, moved away,” he said morosely.
“We wouldn’t be us, then.”
“Is that so bad? Change your dance steps, learn a new tune.”
“We’re doing what we’ve always wanted to do. Looking long, you used to call it.”
“Quite.” He sighed. “I always wanted to see over the far horizon. This—”
“Time is a horizon, too.”
SEVENTEEN
Transit; Wait
Stochastic.
Not a word he liked, too pedantic, when all it meant was chaos, disorder, the fitful randomness of life and esty. Their gravitationally transduced energy propelled their wedge of local esty through the worm in jolting, stochastic motions.
Transit; wait. Transit; wait.
They never knew precisely how long they would stay at any of the pauses along this worm-Vortex. They could watch the surroundings, but feared to venture out. They ate up their provisions this way as their frustration built.
No map of the esty was possible. Its contorted geometry roiled with fitful energies, a rubbery, sliding turmoil. Lanes were often long, snaky, bulging into spheres and lopsided bubbles without warning, stretching to expose fresh, wrenched topographies of timestone.
Sometimes their pause-points were in the same Lane, so they watched its speeded-up evolution. As timestone evolved by its own kinetics, topsoil tumbled and spilled in great alluvial fans. Beaten beneath hammering rains that accompanied the changes, the soil molded into new hills and valleys below the craggy peaks of freshly emerging timestone. Life was resilient, adapting. In bright canyons trees tunneled up from recent burials, and most plants could survive a temporary churning to emerge into the stone’s own waxing radiance again.
Nikka got grim-faced when Ito and Benjamin wanted to explore the nearby Lanes they intersected. “No.”
“Why not?”
