Starburst

31

IN THE EVENING OF DAY 22,305, HOUR 17, MINUTE 22—1 CAN give you seconds to the millisecond, if you like, even to that least of all Dirac units, the length of time that it takes light to cross the radius of an electron. At that moment, I say, I watched Nephew Jeron set foot on his own planet. Watched? Watch. Will watch; you know the trouble us ghosts have with mortal temporal fancies. It is all one time, not causal, and it goes on forever. If I pick one moment to consider a "now," it is my own caprice to do so— as you might, strolling, stand on a particular flagstone next to your wading pool to survey your property, rather than the graveled driveway near the mint patch. One place is as much "your place" as any other. One moment is as much "my moment" as any of the myriad alternatives from the instant events began to their remote terminal full stop. Oh, yes! I have been there! But the farther I go from my physical "now" the harder it is, and so I have gone only once to The End, and will not again. Enough of that. I don't want to speak of things that terrify even a ghost. For even the end of events is not the end of time.

So what I seek is friendly, familiar events, the doings of my colleagues and our get. It was just the same when I was in college. I faced the cruel beauty of mathematics and was glad to turn from it to the letter from home, Joan's new baby, Arnie's transfer to California, the leak in the porch roof, and how well the little vegetable garden was doing this year. And so it gives me pleasure that Jeron has found himself a world, and that the Jeron-Molomy cross is doing so well, and that Eve Barstow has her heart's desire.

Jeron surprised us all in Puget, would not stay, would not go home; he had a better idea, he said, and he was right. He went back to Aleph only long enough to build new ships and recruit a new community, and now he has a world of his own. If I had had eyes I would have wept with pleasure when he brought the fleet of golden globes to the third planet of Epsilon Eridani. Rich genes to cross! He had a dozen former Pugets with him, and a couple of the President's old White House guards, to add to the stock from Aleph—including fifteen of his children in body and about a hundred more in stored buds from the cabbage patch. They will make some handsome strains. Molomy was not there; she stayed on Earth with Eve. And that's going well enough, for Eve is fat and frail and happy with her Toby and their lives. She persuaded Puget to make treaties with New York and London and all the other great glamor places of the Grand Tour, and now she drinks tea at the Ritz and eats onion soup on the Champs Elysees whenever she wishes to, and the old mother planet is gradually limping toward ease. Ann? Ann is encrusted inside her own planet. She makes it rumble now and then, throwing up a mountain range or opening a sea. I visited her once, in her crystal catacomb at the core, but she responded to me not at all, and anyway magma is not to my taste. Shef and Flo have built forty navigable habitats and sent some of them flying off to Arcturus and Procyon, with Jeromolo Bill and some of his children and grandchildren to fly them, solving tensor equations in their heads. And I . . .

Oh, I'm all right. More or less.

I'm alone, of course. Now and then I would call up a Knefhausen or a former love to imitate a companion, but it was like making faces in a mirror. I wait and hope. Hope for someone as cowardly as myself, who dares not break through the surface tension to see what is on the other side; but all the other larvae seem willing to turn to dragonflies.

So I roam. Looking for the starburst. Slipping through gas clouds and watching the organic molecules form. Plumbing the hearts of suns. Waiting. As long as events occur I will have something to do, but after events stop . . . oh, after events stop! When the last stars of spongy iron dissolve as their protons melt away and there is only a universal soup of decaying photons—

Oh, then I will have no choice but to spread my wings and enter the place I fear; and then, perhaps, I will rediscover purpose. And the coming of the knowledge of that purpose, yes, that is it: that is what I fear.