’Bye.
He weathered out the long, murky waning. His in-body indices had come back somewhat. They were erratic and the index he watched most carefully was down three more points. He sighed, momentarily glad Nikka was not here to worry about that, and then the weight of it all came in upon him. He lay in fever and bitter regrets, thinking thoughts that went down so deep, the lizards there had no eyes.
Something had blown him a long way down the Lane they had been in. This he discovered by climbing an unstable peak of teetering timestone and peering above a deck of olive-colored clouds. He recognized the territory where their farm had been and determined to walk back to it. This took longer than he thought it should with the broken arm and he hurried at the end. The farm seemed deserted at first. Inside the house he sat at the long dining room table and the room seemed filled with ghosts as substantial as Alexandria had been and that was when the thing moved into view.
He sat completely still. It was two-legged and two-armed and that was where the resemblance ended.
Human? No, he knew instantly.
Eerie, silent, radiating strangeness like a chill wave.
He noticed that his in-body electronics were working again. They helped a little with the splintered arm. The thing moved slightly. His in-bodies fluoresced in a disturbing response, sending dazzling fireworks across his retinas, and then he got it all in one long burst.
TWENTY-FIVE
Mortal Galaxies
He stood beneath a dull black sky framed by a jagged horizon.
Abruptly, he knew in a way he never had. In his weary bones he felt a worldview—kinesthetic, perceptions as momenta and geometry, not words. He fumbled to put the sensations into terms that he could get his mind around.
The sky. Black, then unfolding into streamers of feathery light.
How different, he thought, from the physics he had learned as a boy. In the Newtonian views of Boltzmann and Clausius, the universe extended forever but was always threatened by collapse. Nothing countered the drawing-in of gravity.
Given enough time, matter would seek its own kind, smacking into greater and greater stars. But the stars would die, guttering out as blunt thermodynamics commanded, always seeking maximum disorder. The Second Law of Thermodynamics ruled.
He folded his arms, tried to make sense of the buzzing images. So. Then.
That old, firm universe was doomed. In time, even hell would freeze over. Stars would burn into shadowy cinders. Planets, their atmospheres frozen out into waveless lakes of oxygen, would glide in meaningless orbits, warmed by no ruby star glow. The universal clock would run down to the last tick of time.
Only after he had left Earth, and had time to study subjects that he had neglected in school, did he see what the twentieth century—the oft-disparaged “TwenCen” of later slang—had done to that dark, earlier vision.
The universe was no static lattice of stars. It grew. The Big Bang was better termed the Enormous Emergence, space-time snapping into existence intact and whole, of a piece. With space-time came its warping by matter, each wedded to the other until time eternal.
For its first hundred billion years, the universe would brim with light. Gas and dust still folded into fresh suns. For an equal span the stars would linger. Beside reddening suns, planetary life warming itself by the waning fires of stellar death.
When a body meets a body, coming through the sky . . . he mused to himself. Stars inevitably collided, met, merged. All the wisdom and order of planets and suns finally compressed into the marriage of many stars, plunging down the pit of gravity to become black holes. For the final fate of nearly all matter was the dark pyre of collapse.
Now he felt, like a leaden soup in his gut, the implications of what he saw above him: a gaudy swirl of leaching light.
Galaxies were as mortal as stars. In the sluggish slide of time, the spirals that had once gleamed with fresh brilliance would deaden. Black holes would blot out whole spiral arms of dim red. The holes would gnaw through the galaxies themselves.
Life based on solid matter had no choice. To gain energy it had to merge black holes themselves. Only such fusions could yield fresh energy in a slumbering universe.
High civilizations came, mounted on the carcass of matter itself, the ever-spreading legions of black holes. Only by moving such masses, extracting power through magnetic forces and the slow gyre of dissipating orbits, could life rule the dwindling resources of the ever-enlarging universe.
Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt . . . He was startled to find that phrases learned by an irksome schoolboy in a cobwebbed past still leapt readily to mind. Old, and true.
About this vision of a swelling universe, its life force spent, hung a great melancholy.
For matter itself was doomed. Its basic building block, the proton, decayed. This took unimaginably long, but was inevitable, the executioner’s sword descending with languid grace.
But something survived. Not all matter dies, as did the proton. After the grand operas of mass and energy have played out their plots, the universal stage cleared to reveal . . . the very smallest.
The tiniest of particles—the electron and its antiparticle, the positron—lived on. No process of decay could find purchase on their infinitesimal scales, lever them apart. The electron danced with its antitwin in swarms: the lightest of all possible plasmas.
By the time these were the sole players, the stage had grown enormously. Each particle found its nearest neighbor to be a full light-year away. Communication took years . . . but in the slow thumping of the universal heart, that was nothing.
Could this actually happen? Perhaps, he thought, the best possible universe was one of constant challenge. One that made survival possible but not easy.
With an electric shock he felt the full force of it:
If life born to brute matter could find a way to incorporate itself into the electron-positron plasma, then it could last forever.
TWENTY-SIX
A Far One
The thing was still standing at the far end of the dining room table. Cold ivory light played upon it.
Nigel looked at it and felt a mixture of joys and sorrows he could not name. He panted shallowly, breath rasping as if he had run a long distance.
The thing reminded him of a funhouse mirror distortion of a woman. Bulging here, slimmed there, suggesting deep changes that left the mottled skin the same.
Intelligence glowed in large, unreadable violet eyes. It moved with easy grace, the awkward compromise curve of the human spine replaced by a complex double-spined split in the lumbar region. Broader hips held more weight. Four arms tapered to hands, every one with differently shaped fingers.
This was what humanity had become in the billions of years since his own time. And he understood that this was not some mere adaptation to the esty itself. It was how humanity had evolved to meet its destiny everywhere, amid the hundreds of billions of stars across the churn of the galactic disk itself.
