The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 21

By now the universe was getting pretty old, and Wan-To was very nearly the age of the universe. There was a redeeming feature to that, though, because the older Wan-To got, the longer it took for him to become older still.

That wasn't because of the relativistic effect of time dilation. It had nothing to do with the velocity of his motion. It was only a matter of energy supply. Wan-To was living on a starvation diet, and it had made him very slow.

When Wan-To was young or middle-aged—or even quite elderly, say when he had reached the age of a few hundred billion years—he aged quickly because he did everything quickly. Wan-To was a plasma person. It was the flashing pace of nuclear fusion that drove his metabolism; changes of state happened at the speed of the creation and destruction of virtual particles, winking in and out of existence as vacuum fluctuations.

That was how it had been, once.

It wasn't that way anymore. Wan-To was almost blind now. He could not spare the energy for all those external eyes—but it didn't much matter, because what was there to see in this sparse, dark, cold universe? He did keep a tiny "ear" open for the sounds of possible communication—though even "possible," he knew, was stretching it. Who was there to communicate?

Wan-To's physical condition in itself was awful. (How awful just to have a "physical" condition at all!) He was trapped. He was embedded in a nearly solid mass, like a man buried in sand up to his neck. It wasn't impossible for him to move. It was only very difficult, and painful, and agonizingly slow.

He could have left. He could have cut himself loose from this corpse of a star to seek another. But there weren't any others better than the one he was in.

The wonderful quick, bright phase of his existence was so far in the past that Wan-To hardly remembered it. (His memory, too, was a function of how much energy he had to spare for it. A lot of memory was, so to speak, shut down—"on standby," one might say, to hoard what powers he had available.) The kind of energies to support that sort of life had disappeared. There wasn't any nuclear fusion anymore, not anywhere in the universe as far as Wan-To could see or imagine. Every fusible element had long since fused, every fissionable one had fissed.

And so the stars had gone out.

All of them. Every last one. Stars were history; and history, now, had run for so many endless eons that even Wan-To no longer kept count of the time. But time passed anyway, and now the universe had lived for more than ten thousand million million million million million million years.

That was a number without much meaning even to Wan-To. A human would have written it as the number 1 followed by forty zeroes—10,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. He wouldn't have understood it, either, but he could have juggled numbers around to give an idea of what it meant. He might, for instance, have said that if the entire age of the universe at the time when the human race first started thinking seriously about it—everything from the Big Bang to, say, the twentieth century on Earth—had been only one second, then on the same scale its present age was coming right up on something like fifty thousand billion billion years …

And, of course, that number wouldn't have meant much, either, except that anyone could see it was a very, very long time.

If Wan-To had been of a philosophical bent, he might have said to himself something consoling, like, At least I've had a good run for my money. Or, You only live once—but if you do it right, once is enough.

Wan-To was not that philosophical. He was not at all willing to go gladly into that long, dark night. He would have resisted it with all his force … if he had known a way to do it … and if he had had enough force to be worth talking about to resist it with.

Time was when Wan-To had hurled stars about in all the vigor of his mighty youth—had even made stars, out of clouds of dust—had even made himself a new galaxy or two, when all the ones in sight were beginning to dim toward extinction. He remembered that much, at least, because it gave him pleasure to mull over in his mind the wonderful, primordial, galaxy-sized clouds that he had caused to collapse and to begin to spin and to twinkle with billions of stars coming to life. Nothing in the universe was more powerful than Wan-To had been then, creator and destroyer of galaxies!

That had been a brave time!

But that time was long gone. In ten-to-the-fortieth-power years, most things are long gone.

What had happened in that long, long stretch of years?

The answer to that is simple.

Everything had happened.

The last of the galaxies had formed and evaporated and died. The last of the new stars had formed eternities before, as the last huge gas cloud shuddered into motion as a compressibility wave jolted it and caused it to crash together to form a new star. There couldn't be any new stars anymore. There might still be a vagrant wisp of dust here and there, but gravitational attraction wasn't strong enough to make it coalesce. That wasn't because anything had happened to gravity itself. It was just a matter of the law of inverse squares—after all, the universe was still expanding. It could not make more matter of energy, but it kept right on making more space. As the universe expanded, it cooled—there was more and more of it every second, and so the remnant heat was diluted more and more. And so everything was farther and farther away from everything else, so far that the distances were quite meaningless.

The last of the big, bright stars had long since gone supernova; the last of the Sol types had gone supergiant and turned into a white dwarf; all of those profligate wastrels of energy had long since burned themselves out. The red dwarfs had a somewhat longer run for their money. They were the smallest and longest-lived of those furnaces of nuclear fusion that were called stars, but then they had gone, too. The last of them had long before burned itself to a lump of iron, warmed by the only energy source that was left, the terminally slow decay of the protons themselves.

Proton decay! It hurt Wan-To's pride to have to live by so feeble an energy source as proton decay.

The only good thing about it was that it lasted a long time. When a proton decays, two up quarks and one down quark turn into a positron (which goes off and annihilates the first electron it comes across) and a quark-antiquark pair (which is to say a meson). The meson doesn't matter to anyone after that. The positron-electron annihilation produces heat—a little heat.

And all this happened very slowly. If the average life span of a proton was—well, let's not play the big number game anymore; let's just say it's a kazillion years—that didn't mean every proton in the universe would expire on the tick of that moment. That was average. Mathematics showed that the "half-life" of the proton should then be about seven-tenths of a kazillion.

By then Wan-To would be in even more straitened circumstances, with half the protons gone. In another such period half the remainder would be gone, and then half of that remainder.

The time was in sight, Wan-To saw with gloom, when there would just not be enough whole protons in any one cadaver of a star to keep him warm.

The word "warm" is an exaggeration. No human would have thought one of those hard, dead lumps very warm; the highest temperature proton decay could attain for it was less than a dozen degrees above absolute zero.

And that was when, after everything had happened, everything stopped happening, because there wasn't enough energy anywhere to drive events.

A few degrees above absolute zero wasn't what Wan-To considered warm, either, but it was all there was left for him. The solid matter he had once despised—the iron corpse that was all that was left of his last star—was the only home he could find.

It had not been easy for Wan-To to adapt to such a horrid environment. It had only been possible at all by resigning himself to the loss of most of his functions, and the slowing down of all there were left. Now the milliseconds of Wan-To's life dragged for thousands of years.

That was quite fast enough, in one way, for there wasn't much left for Wan-To to do—except to contemplate the fact that his future had no future except eternity. He wasn't even good at contemplating anymore, for his mind was fuzzy from deprivation. (Fuzzier even than that of the person who was almost as old as he was, Viktor Sorricaine.) That was just as well, because in his moments of clarity Wan-To realized that nothing was ever going to get better for him. All that would happen would be that the clinker he lived in would slowly, slowly cool even further, until there was no energy at all left to keep him alive.

And the horrible part of that was that it would go on for ever … or close enough … for so long that even his present age would seem only a moment, before the last proton expired and he was finally dead.

Nothing but a miracle could change his hopeless certain destiny.

Wan-To didn't believe in miracles.

A miracle had to come from somewhere, and Wan-To could see no place in the doddering, dying universe where a miracle might still be born. Of course, he had long since forgotten the dozen stars he had hurled out of that ancient galaxy at so vast a speed that time, for that little system, had almost stopped.