Timelike Infinity

Chapter 8

Parz, alone, curled tightly, floated in Spline entoptic fluid.

"Jasoft Parz. Jasoft. You should wake now." Parz uncurled abruptly, the dense entoptic liquid and his skintight environment suit making the movements of his limbs heavy. He blinked to clear sleep from his eyes. A single light globe floated with him, casting a shadowless light on the rough, bloodred walls of the three-yard-wide chamber that contained him; the heavy fluid, disturbed by his movements, cast graceful, waved shadows on the walls.

For a second he was disoriented, unable to remember where he was, why he was here; he thrashed, helpless as a trapped fish, clumsily swimming toward the nearest wall. Tubes trailed after him like transparent umbilicals, linking him to a heavy metal box fixed to one wall. "Parz. Are you awake? It is time." The voice of the Qax — of the new Governor of Earth, the bleak, murderous Qax from the future — sounded again, but it had an oddly calming effect on Parz as he clung to thick folds in the fleshy wall of the chamber; his fragmented attention clustered around the words, and something of his composure returned.

He whispered, finding his throat closed and dry. "Yes, I’m awake."

"I will open the eyelid."

"No, please." Jasoft, with a bizarre sense of modesty, felt reluctant to have the curtains of this makeshift sleeping chamber drawn aside before he was fully ready. He pushed away from the wall and operated controls embedded in the right wrist of his suit. "Give me a minute."

The Qax did not reply; Parz envisaged its impatience.

Parz’s skinsuit, a transparent overlay over thin cotton garments, had been designed for long-duration wear. Now Parz felt the material whisper over his skin; his pores were cleansed, his beard, toenails, and fingernails trimmed back. The inside of his faceplate extruded a nipple that pressed into his lips, and an ice-cool liquid flavored like fresh apple juice coursed into his mouth. When he was done he opened his mouth and let ultrasonics work at his teeth.

He emptied his bladder and watched the waste filter back along the pipes to the wall unit for recycling.

His breakfast and toilet over, Parz spent a few minutes bending and stretching, trying to work all of his major muscle groups. He worked particularly on his back and shoulders; after eight hours in a fetal position his upper spine — still heavy with age, despite the AS treatments — creaked with a papery stiffness. When he was done he was breathing a little deeper and he felt the tingle of fresh blood reaching his flesh. Ruefully he realized that this was as good as he was going to feel all day. These suits were good at what they did, but living in one was no substitute for a decent cabin: for waking up to a shower with fresh water, and a breakfast of something you could actually bite into, damn it.

Well, that hadn’t been an option. Nor had his attendance on this whole damn mission of the Qax’s, of course.

"Parz," the Qax rasped. "You’ve had five minutes."

Parz nodded. "I’m sorry," he said. "I needed time to wake up properly."

The Qax seemed to think that over. "Parz, the next few subjective hours could be the most significant in the history of both our species. You are privileged to act as the only human of your era to witness these events. And you took time to cleanse yourself after your sleep?"

"I’m human," Parz snapped. "Even when the world is coming to an end I have to put my trousers on one leg at a time."

The Qax considered that. "And your metaphorical trousers are now on?"

"Open the damn eyelid."

The walls of the Spline’s huge eyeball trembled, sending small shock waves through the heavy entoptic fluid; the waves brushed against Jasoft’s skin like light fingers. Muscles hauled at sheets of heavy flesh, and the eyelid lifted like a curtain. Through the rubbery grayness of the Spline’s cornea salmon-pink light swept into the eyeball like a false dawn, dwarfing the yellow glow of Jasoft’s light globe, and causing his slender, suspended form to cast a blurred shadow on the purple-veined retina behind him. Jasoft swam easily to the inside face of the pupil; feeling oddly tender about the Spline’s sensations he laid his suited hands carefully on the warm, pliant substance of the lens.

The huge lens turned the outside universe into a blurred confusion of pink, gunmetal-gray, and baby-blue; Jasoft kept his eyes steady, giving his eyes’ image-enhancing software time to work. After a few seconds deconvolution routines cut in with an almost audible click, transforming the blurred patches to objects of clarity and menace.

There was Jupiter, of course: cyclones larger than Earth tracked across its bruised, purple-pink countenance. Another ship glided past — a second Spline, its pore pits bristling with sensors and weaponry. The eyeball Parz inhabited rotated to follow the second ship, and swirls in the entoptic fluid buffeted Parz, causing him to bounce gently against the lens.

Now Parz’s Spline turned, driven by some interior flywheel of flesh, blood, and bone; the eye swept away from Jupiter and fixed on the baby-blue patch he’d seen earlier, now resolved into a tetrahedron of exotic matter. Sheets of elusive silver-gold stretched across the triangular faces of the Interface portal, sometimes reflecting shattered images of Jupiter, sometimes scattering elusive glimpses of other times, other starfields, of a younger Jupiter… of a defenseless past.

The portal grew steadily in Parz’s view. The Spline must already be inside the squeezed-vacuum exoticity zone that surrounded the mouth of the wormhole itself, and soon the portal was so close that Jasoft had to press his faceplate against the warm Spline lens to make out its vertices.

"It’s almost time," he whispered.

"Yes, Ambassador," the Qax growled. "Almost time."

The words that sounded in his headpiece were — as ever — a bland, synthesized human voice, the product of a translator box somewhere in the Spline. "Qax, I wish I knew what you were feeling."

The Qax paused for some seconds. Then, "Anticipation. Anticipation of satisfaction. My goal is close. Why do you ask this?"

Jasoft shrugged. "Why not? I’m interested in your reactions. Just as you must be interested in mine. Otherwise, why would you have brought me here?"

"I’ve explained that. I need a way into human perceptions."

"Rubbish," Parz said without anger. "Why do you bother to justify yourself in that way? Qax, you’re traveling back in time to destroy humanity — to eradicate forever the unlimited potential of a species. What do you care about human perception?"

"Jasoft Parz," the Qax said, its voice almost silky now, the relish audible, "you are the only human to return through time with this Qax expedition. Fifteen centuries ago humans were still largely cooped up in the dull star system of their birth. When we have destroyed the home planet — and scoured the neighboring worlds and spaces — you will be the only human left alive. And with the termination of your species’s world line, you will also be the last human. How will that feel?"

Parz felt his lifetime of compromise — of diplomacy — weigh down on him, a freight of age still heavy despite his AS rejuvenation. He tried, as he’d tried before, to comprehend the significance of the Qax’s monstrous act. Surely it was his duty, as the last human, to feel the pain of this crime, to suffer on behalf of his race.

But he couldn’t. It was beyond him. And, he thought, he had moved beyond hope.

He wondered how he’d feel, though, if he had children of his own.

He nodded, infinitely tired. "So. You’ve brought me here so you can watch me, as I watch my race die. I’ve not understood before; I guess I was hoping for — what? nobility? — from the murderer of my species. But it really is as petty as that. My reaction, the grief of one man, will dramatize for you the emotional significance of the event. It will heighten your pleasure. Won’t it?"

"Pleasure? I am not psychopathic, Jasoft Parz," the Qax said. "But the sweetness of my revenge will be great."

"Revenge for what?"

"For the destruction of my own world, of the home of the Qax, by the actions of a single human."

Parz had been told something of the story.

A few centuries after Parz’s era, there would be a human: Jim Bolder, an unremarkable man.

The Qax would try to employ Bolder, to exploit him for gain. But Bolder would deceive them — somehow trick them into turning starbreakers on their own sun.

The new Governor came from a future in which the comparatively lenient Occupation of Earth had led, inexorably, to the destruction of the Qax home world, to a diaspora in which dozens of the fragile Qax had perished. In this timeline the Qax were marginalized; humans, freed of the Occupation, grew far stronger.

The Qax wanted to change all that.

Ironically, Parz had come to understand, the rebellion of the Friends of Wigner had nothing to do with the ultimate collapse of the Occupation, in this timeline. Whatever the rebels’ scheme was it was seen as irrelevant by the Qax — in fact, the sequence of time bridges initiated by the rebellion was actually an opportunity for the Qax to move back into time, far beyond Bolder, and to rectify their earlier leniency.

Parz, baffled and disturbed by the philosophy of it all, wondered if a multiplicity of variant worlds would be initiated by this series of trips into the past, of closed timelike curves. The original variant, the prime timeline, saw no impact on events from either the rebels’ activities or the Qax’s actions; the timeline would unfold with relentless logic to the Qax diaspora. The Qax, now, hoped to return through time to crush humanity before such events had a chance to occur; this second variant would see no diaspora and the emergence — presumably — of the Qax as the dominant species in the absence of mankind. The rebels, with their unknown project, must hope to initiate a third variant in which the Occupation would be crushed before the time of Jim Bolder — of whom, of course, the rebels could have no knowledge; to them the Occupation must have looked immense and eternal.

But even that wasn’t the end of it, Parz realized; for presumably the actions of the various groups of time travelers would interact to set off a fourth, fifth, or sixth variant…

But most human philosophers seemed to agree, now, that only one of these variants could be considered "real"; only one could be collapsed into actuality by the observation of conscious minds.

Parz pressed his face against the warm lens material; it yielded like thin rubber. The electric blue struts of the Interface portal had almost embraced the Spline now; the nearest face, which already blocked out the stars, the moons of Jupiter, was dark and empty, its blackness relieved only by a hint of autumn gold. Parz twisted his head about. He caught a glimpse of the second Spline he’d seen earlier; it hovered above and behind the Qax’s ship, following it toward the portal. "Some armada," he said. "Two ships?"

"Two are all that is required. The humans of fifteen centuries ago will have no means of defense against the weaponry of the Spline craft. The second craft will destroy the vessel of these rebels from your present — these Friends of Wigner — while my ship will besiege Earth."

Parz felt his throat tighten. "How?"

"Starbreaker beams."

Parz closed his eyes.

"Maybe your revenge won’t be so sweet," he said at random. "What about causality? Maybe I’ll pop out of existence as soon as my ancestors are destroyed. Maybe you will too. Have you thought about that? And then the destruction of your world by this human hero will never have happened… and you’ll have no reason, or means, to travel through time to assault the Earth." But then, he thought further, if the Qax did not travel back through time, surely humanity would survive to destroy the Qax world after all… "We’ll be caught in a causality loop, won’t we?"

"Jasoft Parz, causality does not operate in such a simplistic fashion. In such a circumstance the different outcomes may all exist simultaneously, like the probabilities expressed by a quantum function. But only one of those possibilities will be collapsed to actuality—"

"Are you sure?" Parz said grimly. "You’re talking about destroying a race… about altering history on a cosmic scale, Qax."

"Yes, we are sure. My intention is to close off all probabilities, all variants of reality in which humanity can survive. After the reduction of your system, you will be the only human left alive."

"And you and I will disappear into nonexistence," Parz said grimly.

"No," the Qax said. "But the timeline from which we emerged will no longer exist, as a potentiality. We will be stranded, out of time. But my job will be done."

Yes, Parz thought, what it’s saying is possible. The Qax was plotting not just the destruction of humankind but the destruction of all variant realities in which humanity might have survived. It was more than genocide, he saw; it was a murder of reality.

The Qax’s calculation somehow penetrated Parz’s dulled heart more deeply than anything else. How could a sentient being discuss such gruesome events — the destruction of species, of worlds, of timelines — in the language of cold logic, of science?

Damn it, Parz protested silently, we’re talking about the snuffing out of species — of the potential of countless billions of souls as yet unborn…

But, as always, he realized dully, the Qax were doing nothing that humans had not tried to perpetrate on sections of their own species in the past.

"Parz, shortly we will be entering the throat of the wormhole. You must be prepared for causality stress."

"Causality stress?" Parz stared into the blank, gaping mouth of the wormhole portal; the hints of silver-gold were gone now, leaving only a receding darkness that covered the stars. "You know, Qax, you intend to destroy my home world. And yet all I feel now is a personal dread of entering that damn wormhole."

"You are a limited species, Jasoft Parz."

"Perhaps we are. Perhaps we’re better off that way."

The Spline trembled; to Jasoft, cushioned as he was by the entoptic matter, the mile-wide animal’s shudder was like a mild earth tremor.

"I’m frightened, Qax."

"Imagine my concern."

The Spline’s shuddering became continuous; Parz felt it as a high-frequency oscillation of the entoptic fluid — small waves beating against his flesh like insect wings — overlying a bass rumble that must come from resonances in the immense skeleton of the Spline itself. The ship was suffering.

"Qax. Talk to me."

"What about?"

"Anything," Parz muttered. "I don’t care. Anything to take my mind off this. Tell me the story of how a human destroyed your planet… Tell me about Jim Bolder."

"Will destroy it. Would have destroyed it."

"Whatever."

The Qax seemed to consider. "Perhaps. But what an odd question for you to ask, Jasoft Parz. I must consider what you have to gain by acquiring such information. Perhaps you have some vain scheme to use the data to rehabilitate yourself in the eyes of your people… from the race’s greatest traitor, to an unsung hero—"

Parz, surprised, frightened, looked inward. Traitor? A month ago he would have denied the charge.

But now the Qax had changed the rules.

Suddenly Parz had found himself transformed from a morally dubious collaborating diplomat into a witness to the destruction of his race…

The Spline shuddered again, more violently, and through the entoptic medium he seemed to hear a low groan, as if of pain, or terror.

Could the Qax be right? Was some element of his subconscious still scheming, looking for advantage, even now?

Did he, he asked himself with wonder, still entertain hope?

The Qax was silent.

Now the Spline shuddered so hard that Parz was thrown into a soft collision with the wall of the huge eyeball. It felt as if the Spline had jerked through a few hundred yards, as if hauling itself away from some source of pain.

Jasoft closed his eyes and, with a subvocalized command, ordered the software in his eyes to call up an external image of the Spline, transmitted from the companion ship.

His craft was entering the portal face, inching forward as delicately as any docking, the curves of its flanks almost brushing the powder-blue edges of the tetrahedral framework.

Parz was a hundred hours away from the past.

The Qax spoke abruptly, its decision evidently made. "The human was — will be — called Jim Bolder. A man of the Occupation era — from not far into your own future, Parz.

"Bolder was one of the last human pilots. Eventually the Qax interdiction on human operation of spacecraft will become complete, Jasoft Parz. Ships will be impounded on landing. The off-Earth human colonies will become self-sufficient. Or they will be closed, their inhabitants returned to Earth. Or they will die.

"Men such as Bolder will lose their vocation, Parz. Their reason to be. This made — will make — it possible to recruit Bolder for a special assignment."

The clean geometries of the Interface framework looked stark, inhuman, against the flesh of the Spline. At one point the Spline came within a few dozen yards of brushing the frame itself. Flesh toughened against the rigors of hyperspatial travel was boiling. As Parz watched, blisters the size of city blocks erupted in that pocked, metal-gray surface; the blisters burst like small volcanoes, emitting sprays of human-looking blood that froze instantly into showers of ice crystals, sparkling in the blue glow of the framework. Acres of the Spline convulsed, trying to pull the damaged area away from the exotic matter.

"What was Bolder’s assignment?" Parz asked.

"Parz, what do you know of galactic drift?"

Galaxies — and clusters and superclusters of galaxies, across half a billion light-years — were moving in great, coherent streams through space. It was as if the galaxies were moths, drawn toward some unseen light… Human astronomers had described such drift for centuries, but had never been able satisfactorily to explain it.

"What does this have to do with Bolder?"

"We suspected the drift had some connection with the Xeelee," the Qax said.

Parz snorted. "Come on. The Xeelee are powerful, but they’re not gods."

"We sent Bolder to find out," the Qax said mildly.

Parz frowned. "How? That’s impossible. Even in the fastest of our hyperdrive craft it would take centuries of subjective time—"

"We had access to a Xeelee ship."

Parz felt his jaw working. "But that’s impossible too."

"Such details are unimportant. It is sufficient that Bolder survived his journey to the center of the streaming."

"To the place where all the galaxies go."

"Yes," said the Qax. "Although, close enough to the center, Bolder found that the structure of all but the most compact ellipticals was shattered; galaxy fragments, stars and worlds, tumbled into the immense gravity well at the center of it all, their blue-shifted light tumbling ahead of them."

"And at the bottom of the well?"

The Qax paused.

To Parz, still studying the Spline from without, it was as if the portal framework were scorching the flesh of the hapless Spline. But it wasn’t heat, he knew, but sleeting high-frequency radiation and gravity tides raised by the superdense exotic matter that were damaging the Spline so.

Parz shuddered in sympathy with the suffering Spline.

The image winked out. Parz, reduced to sudden artificial blindness, realized with a shock that his ship must now be totally inside the wormhole. With a feeling of claustrophobia and panic he snapped out subvocal commands.

His vision cleared.

The eye chamber had been reduced to the darkness within which he had awoken; his faithful globe lamp, floating beside him, cast his own shadow on the fleshy interior of the eyelid.

So the Spline had shut its eyes. Well, he couldn’t entirely blame it.

The ship shuddered, buffeted; entoptic fluid sloshed within its spherical chamber. Parz half swam to the nearest wall and clung to a ropy nerve channel.

"Gravitational stress," the Qax murmured in his ear. "This wormhole is a throat in space and time, Parz: a region of stress, immensely high curvature. The throat is lined with exotic matter throughout its length; we are traversing a tube of vacuum that runs along the axis, away from the exotic matter. The minimum width of the throat is about a mile. Our velocity is three miles per second—"

"Not fast enough," Parz gasped.

Vibration traveled through Parz’s grasping fingers, up through his arms, and to his very core; it felt as if the Spline were being beaten by some immense fist. "Can the ship endure this?"

"So the simulations tell us," the Qax said complacently. "But the creature is scarcely comfortable."

"Right." Parz clung to his nerve rope, imagining centuries unraveling around the hurtling Spline. "Tell me what Bolder found," he said through chattering teeth. "At the bottom of the gravity well."

A Ring, the Qax said. A torus. Composed of some unknown, crystalline substance. A thousand light-years across. Rotating at a respectable fraction of the speed of light.

It was massive. It had caused a well in spacetime so deep that it was drawing in galaxies, including Earth’s Milky Way, from across hundreds of millions of light-years.

"I don’t believe it." Parz said, shaking in sympathy with the Spline.

"It is an artifact," the Qax said. "A Xeelee construct. Bolder watched the Xeelee build it."

Xeelee craft — cup-shaped freighters the size of moons, and fighters with night-dark discontinuity wings hundreds of miles wide — patrolled the huge construction site. With cherry-red starbreaker beams they smashed the infalling, blue-shifted galactic fragments; they plated layers over the growing Ring.

"We believe the Xeelee have already invested billions of years in this project," the Qax said. "But its growth is exponential. The more massive it becomes, the deeper the gravity well grows, and the faster matter falls toward the site, feeding the construction crews further."

"But why? What’s the point of it?"

"We speculate that the Xeelee are trying to construct a Kerr metric region," the Qax said.

"A what?"

The Kerr metric was a human description for a special solution of Einstein’s equations of general relativity. When spacetime was distorted by a sufficiently massive, rotating toroid, it could — open.

"Like a wormhole?" Parz asked.

"Yes. But the Kerr metric interface would not connect two points in the same spacetime, Parz. It is a throat between spacetimes."

Parz struggled to understand that. "You’re saying that the artifact is a doorway — a way out of our universe?"

"Crudely, yes. The Xeelee are trying to build an exit from this cosmos."

"And to do it they’re prepared to wreck a region of space hundreds of millions of lightyears wide…"

Suddenly Parz was blind again. Hurriedly, panicking, he snapped subvocal commands; but this time his vision would not clear. The darkness in which he was immersed was deeper than the inside of his own eyelids… it was, he realized with a terrifying clarity, the darkness of nothingness, of emptiness. "Qax." His own voice was muffled; it was as if all his senses were failing together. "What’s happening to me?"

The Qax’s voice came to him, distant but clear. "This is causality stress, Parz. The severance of the causal lines, of the quantum wave functions in which you are embedded. Causality stress is causing sensory dysfunction—"

Jasoft felt his body sense softening, drifting away from him; he felt as if he were becoming disembodied, a mote of consciousness without anchor in the external universe.

The Qax continued to speak. Its words were like distant trumpet notes. "Jasoft Parz. This is as difficult for me, for any sentient being, as it is for you… even for the Spline. But it will pass. Do not let it undermine your sanity. Concentrate on what I am saying to you.

"Jim Bolder, in his stolen craft, evaded the Xeelee engineers. He returned to the Qax home system, where his journey had begun. Jasoft, the Qax are a trading nation. Bolder had returned with a treasure valuable beyond price: data on the greatest Xeelee artifact. It will not surprise you that the Qax decided to, ah, retain the data.

"But Bolder tricked us."

There was a glimmering around Parz now, a ghostly shimmer, a reflection of ripples, like moonlight on a sea.

"The details have never become clear. Bolder should have emerged from hyperspace into a region surrounded by Spline warships, all bearing gravity-wave starbreaker technology… He failed to do so. Bolder survived, escaped.

"Starbreakers were used. In the confusion and panic, they brushed the Qax sun. It was enough to cause the sun to become unstable — ultimately, to nova.

"The Qax were forced to flee. Dozens of individuals died in the exodus. Our power was lost, and the Occupation of Earth crumbled…"

Jasoft Parz, bewildered and disoriented as he was, could not help but exult at this.

A gray light, without form and structure, spread into existence around him… No, not around him, he realized; he was part of this light: it was as if this were the gray light that shone beneath reality, the light against which all phenomena are shadows. His panic subsided, to be replaced by a sense of calm power; he felt as if he were light-years wide and yet no wider than an atom, a million years old and yet fresher than a child’s first breath.

"Qax. What the hell is happening?"

"Causality stress, Parz. Perceptual dysfunction. Causality is not a simple phenomenon. When objects are once joined, they become part of a single quantum system… and they must remain joined forever thereafter, via superlight quantum effects. You should imagine you are walking across a beach, calling into existence a trail of footsteps as you go. The footsteps may fade with time as you pass on, but each of them remains bound to you by the threads of quantum functions."

"And when I pass out of my own region of spacetime?"

"The threads are cut. Causal bonds are broken and must be re-formed…"

"Dear God, Qax. Is this pain worth it, just to travel through time?"

"To achieve one’s goals: yes," the Qax said quietly.

"Finish the story," Jasoft Parz said.

"Finish it?"

"Why are the Xeelee building a way out of the universe? What are they seeking?"

"I suspect if we knew the answer to that," the Qax said, "we would know much of the secret truth of our universe. But we do not. The story must remain unfinished, Jasoft Parz.

"But consider this. What if the Xeelee are not seeking something beyond their Ring — but are fleeing something in this universe?

"What do Xeelee fear, do you suppose?"

Parz, buffeted, disoriented, could find no reply.

The Spline warship surged through time.