Vacuum Diagrams

Now: animals to populate the land and seas; to serve as food for the people? Human genetic material, the ship found, was a remarkably flexible substance; the adjustment of a mere few percent of the DNA strands gave astonishing scope for design.

This was another creative phase. The ship lingered over it, taking perhaps six months.

At last the various feedback cycles were established; the ecosystem, powered by sunlight, was established and self-sustaining.

The ship hovered over its creation, considering.

The world’s sun was artificial, a fusion reactor, a miniature star. It blazed down, hot and red, over its unlikely new satellite. The star would last mere millions of years, but the ship decided that should be enough time for the humans to work out what to do next for themselves.

The wings of the Xeelee ship curved one last time over the new world.

It was done. It was good.

Without ceremony the ship settled to the ground, threw open its ports, and deactivated.

Enval arose from sleep, aroused by the soft scent of grass. She rose stiffly, rubbed the sleep from her eyes, and made her way over sleeping bodies past the open port to the control table—

The open port?

This port had not opened for a year and a half… Now it led to a gentle ramp. The ramp lay in light, and it nestled against soft earth.

Trembling, Erwal walked down the ramp and into light which warmed her neck. She paused at the ramp’s edge, uncertain. Then, deliberately, she pressed her bare feet into the ground. The grass was cool and a little damp, as if dew-sprinkled — and it was a deep, dark brown. A breeze, strange on her skin after months of ship’s air, brought goosebumps to her bare arms.

She was standing on a grass-covered slope. The sun above was a pinkish red; beyond the sky, great billowing clouds were illuminated. The light brought out rich autumnal tones in the grass’s dominant brown. The ship was a slim black cylinder, its wings folded away; it rested on the grass, incongruous.

The slope fell away to a river which slid, gurgling, between tree-lined banks. The leaves of the trees were brown too, a pale russet color; but they flickered convincingly in the breeze. (What was that she saw in the branches of the trees? — The little creature, about a foot long, returned her gaze with startlingly human eyes, and scurried out of sight to the top of a tree.) She looked along the river. As far upstream as she could see there were no ice-floes. In the distance gray mountains shouldered above the plain; snow touched their peaks. And downstream of the river she made out a line of light, right on the horizon. A sea?

Something came flickering through the sky, out of the Sun: a bird, no larger than her fist, scooting over the grass at about head-height. She reached up towards it, impulsively; the bird swiveled its tiny (human!) head towards her, opened its mouth in fright, revealing rows of jewel-like teeth, and veered away, rustling into the distance.

Sura came climbing up from the river. She was singing quietly. When she saw Erwal she smiled, her nose and forehead pink. “Erwal, where are we?”

Erwal laughed. “Wherever it is, it seems… agreeable.”

Now more villagers came stumbling from the ship, open-mouthed; they seemed to expand as they sucked in the rich air. The children instantly ran off down the slope.

Erwal turned back to Sura. “What do you think we should do?”

The girl shrugged. “Get some teepees built, I suppose. Before the snows come.”

Erwal nodded. “But maybe the snows won’t be so bad here.”

“No. Maybe not.”

Arm in arm the two women walked down to the river.

C.A.D. 500,000,000

Time passed.

After a certain point measurement of time became meaningless. For Paul this point arrived when there was no hydrogen left to burn anywhere, and the last star flickered and died.

Already the Universe was a hundred times its age when the Xeelee left.

Somberly Paul watched the dimmed galaxies subside like the chests of old men.

At last there was little free baryonic matter outside the vast black holes which gathered in the cores of galaxies. Then, as the long night of the cosmos deepened, even protons collapsed, and the remaining star-corpses began to evaporate.

Paul wearied of puzzling over the huge, slow projects of the photino birds. He sought out what had once been a neutron star. The carbon-coated sphere floating between the huge black holes was so dense that proton decay was actually warming it, keeping it a few degrees above the near-absolute zero of its surroundings; Paul, as if seeking comfort, clustered his attention foci close to this shadow of baryonic glory.

After some time he became aware that he was not alone: the last of the Qax had come sliding through the interstices of space and now hovered with him over the frigid surface of the star.

Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.

The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.

Epilogue

Eve was receding from me. I saw her face, as if it was turned up towards me, and I was rising, away from her.

The walls, the apartment, had disappeared. There was only Eve’s face, and darkness.

“You must remember what you have seen, Jack. You must understand. You can see now why the Ghosts’ project must go ahead. Can’t you? Can’t you, Jack?”

I shouted at her: “Tell me who you are, damn you. Tell me how you know all this, the future. Tell me!”

But my voice was a whisper, an insect-rustle; and she didn’t reply.

Her face faded, as if a light had been turned off. And the Galaxy came out, crystallizing above me like a gaudy frost.

A Ghost hovered before me, concern sending ripples across its skin. “Jack Raoul. Can you hear me?”

I looked down. My hands were chrome, shimmering, returning complex highlights from the Galaxy’s glow. “Oh, Lethe. I’m back.”

“Jack Raoul? You have been unresponsive to stimuli for some time—”

I wanted to punch a hole in the Ambassador’s complacent hide, and then retreat into the safe warmth of my own metal stomach. “What have you done to me? What right have you — what right…”

Slowly, I became aware that all around me the Ghosts were rising, clustering around their skeletal ships, and sailing away from the deformed moon.

I tried to think beyond my own concerns. “Ambassador. What’s going on?”

“Jack Raoul, it seems you have, after all, achieved your purpose. You have come here to observe our experiment. Now, you are ready to witness its climax, its magnificent conclusion.” I heard pride in those thin translated tones, saw an insufferable arrogance about the Ambassador’s sleek shimmer.

I looked down at the moon. The intrasystem pods were active, working symmetrically around its battered surface, holding the moon in place.

And, down through the splayed-opened hearts of ancient craters, the quagma pods were descending towards the core.

With the Ambassador, I fell away from the Galaxy, descending beneath the moon.

The sky was empty of stars. The Galaxy was a mottled, glowing ceiling above us, and beneath my feet there was only the distant, etiolated smudge of remote galaxies.

I looked at it all with new eyes. Those shining stars were already infected by the photino birds. Even the most remote galaxy I saw would be affected by the final conflict, between the birds and the doomed Xeelee.

Behind the bright light of the Universe, I had glimpsed the skulllike dismalness of the end of time.