Timescape

CHAPTER FORTY FIVE

JOHN RENFREW WORKED THROUGH THE NIGHT. HE had the temporary power supply going and he was damned if he’d stop while the fuel held out. If he stopped he could not be sure of getting it started again. Better to go on and see what would happen. Then he could have no regrets.

He grimaced. See what would happen? Or had happened? Or could happen? Human language did not fit the physics. There was no tense of the verb to be that reflected the looping sense of time. No way to turn the language on the pivot of physics, to apply a torque that would make the paradoxes dissolve into an ordered cycle, endlessly turning.

He had let the technicians go. They were needed at home. Outside, on the Coton footpath, no bicycles, no movement. Families were home, tending the ill, or else had fled to the countryside. He felt a twinge of the dysentery that had come in the night. A brush with the gnawing £tuff from the clouds, he guessed. He had been drinking from a store of bottled fruit drinks he’d found in the cafeteria, and eating packaged foods. For two days he’d been here, alone, not pausing to go home for a change of clothes. The world as he had lived in it was closing down, that much was clear from the windows of the lab. Since early morning a plume of oily smoke had furled upward in the distance; obviously no one was trying to put it out.

He tuned the apparatus gingerly. Tap tap. Tap tap. The tachyon noise level remained constant. He had been transmitting the new message about the neurojacket process for days now, mixing it with the RA and DEC monotony Peterson had phoned new biological sentences in from his London office. The man had sounded strained and hurried. The content of the message, as nearly as Renfrew could understand it, explained why. If the California group was right, this thing could spread through the cloud-seed mechanism with blinding speed.

Renfrew tapped patiently on his Morse key, hoping he had the focusing right. It was so bloody difficult to know if you had the rig aimed. A slight error in targeting the beam put it at the wrong x, and thus at the wrong t. He had got through once, that they’d learned from Peterson’s bank vault. But how could he check now, if the pulsing coils were a microsecond slow, or the fringing fields throwing the beam a degree to the left? He had only his sandy-eyed calibrations to trust. He was adrift here, in a world where t was time and tea was brine and x for space, x for the unknown floated in the air before him, a passing pattern.

He shook himself. The lab stool pinched his buttocks. He had less fat there, now; must have lost weight. Have to put on some extra ballast, yes.

Tap tap tap. Out went the Morse cadences. Tap tap.

Maybe the weight loss explained why the room rippled and stretched as he watched. Christ, he was tired. A wan anger welled up in him. He had been taptaptapping out biological stuff and coordinates and the lot, all impersonal and—he was sure of it now—in the end, all useless. Bloody boring, it was. He reached over and took up the identifying passage he had been transmitting regularly, and began sending it again. But this time he added a few comments of his own, about how this whole thing got started, and Markham’s ideas, and Peterson the stiff-faced bastard, and the lot, all the way up to Markham’s crash. It felt good to get it all down, pushing the words out in Morse as he thought of them. He told it in ordinary sentences, not the clipped telegraph style they’d adopted for compressing the biological information. It was a relief to tell it, really. The whole sodding thing was pointless, the beam was pouring down some unsuspected cosmic rathole, anyway, so why not enjoy the last shot? Tap tap. Here’s my life story, mate, written on the head of a pin. Tap tap. Into the void. Tap tap.

But after a while the momentum left him and he stopped. His shoulders sagged.

The scope screen rippled and the tachyon noise level rose. Renfrew peered at it. Tap tap. On impulse he flipped off the transmitting switch. The past be damned for a moment. He watched the scramble of curves arc and intersect, dancing. For brief snatches of time the noise resolved into these snakings across the screen. Signals, clearly. Someone else was transmitting.

Regular jolts of wave forms, evenly spaced. Renfrew copied them.

and a blur of noise again, swallowing all.

English. Somebody sending in English. From the year 2349? Perhaps. Or maybe with tachyons in the 234.9 kilovolt range. Or maybe it was a fluke, a sport.

Renfrew slurped cold coffee. He had made a thermos days ago and forgotten it. He hoped the water was okay. The coffee hadn’t the dog’s fur flavor he remembered; more like scorched earth. He shrugged and drank it without thinking further.

He felt his brow. Sweat. A fever. A strange, distant mutter came to him. Voices? He went to look, surprised at his weakness, at the lurking ache in his ankles and thighs. Should get more exercise, he thought automatically, and then laughed. Scuffling noises. Had they heard him? He lurched down a corridor. But there was no one about. Only the sound of the wind. That, and the gritty scraping of his own shoes on the bare concrete.

He went back and stared at the scope. His throat burned. He tried to think calmly and cleanly about what Markham had said so long ago. The micro-universes were not like black holes, not in the sense that inside them all matter was compressed into infinite densities. Instead, their average density was a reasonable number, though higher than ours. They had formed in the early moments of the universe and been forever isolated, living out microlives inside a folded geometry. Wickham’s new field equations showed they were out there, between the clusters of galaxies. An x and t we cannot see, he thought, apart from me and thee. Now there was a literary flourish for you, worthy of the last edition of the Times. The very last edition.

Abruptly he sat, feeling dizzy. An ache behind his eyes, spreading. Matter was swallowed into the net of space-time, of differential geometries. G times n. A tachyon could wing out of the knots, a free phoenix, its flight ordained by the squiggles and jots of Markham and Wickham. Renfrew shivered as the cold seeped into him.

Another set of bursts. He scribbled them on a pad. The scratching pen cut the silence.

and then the sea of noise again, the waves lost.

This all meant something to someone, but who? Where? When? Another:

Wrong language? A code from across the galaxy, from across the universe? This apparatus opened up communication with everywhere, everywhen, instantly. Talk to the stars. Talk to the compressed beings inside a dot of space. A telegram from Andromeda would take less time than one from London. Tachyons sleeted through the laboratory, through Renfrew, bringing word. It was within their grasp, if only they had time…

He shook his head. All form and structure was eroded by the overlapping of many voices, a chorus. Everyone was talking at once and no one could hear.

The roughing pumps coughed. Tachyons of size 10^-13 centimeters were flashing across whole universes, across 10²⁸ centimeters of cooling matter, in less time than Renfrew’s eye took to absorb a photon of the pale laboratory light. All distances and times were wound in upon each other, singularities sucking up the stuff of creation. Event horizons rippled and worlds coiled into worlds. There were voices in this room, voices clamoring, touching—

Renfrew stood up and suddenly clutched at a scope mount for support. Christ, the fever. It clawed at him, ran glowing smoke fingers through his mind.

ATTEMPT CONTACT FROM 2349. All thought of reaching the past was gone now, he realized, blinking. The room veered, then righted itself. With Markham gone and the Wickham woman missing for days, there was no longer even any hope of understanding what had happened. Causality’s leaden hand would win out. The soothing human world of flowing time would go on, a Sphinx yielding none of her secrets. An infinite series of grandfathers would live out their lives safe from Renfrew.

ATTEMPT CONTACT, the scope sputtered again.

But unless he knew where and when they were, there was no hope of answering.

Hello, 2349. Hello out there. This is 1998, an x and t in your memory. Hello. ATTEMPT CONTACT.

Renfrew smiled with flinty irony Whispers came flitting, embedding soft words of tomorrow in the indium. Someone was there. Someone brought hope.

The room was cold. Renfrew huddled by his instruments, perspiring, peering at the bursts of waves. He was like a South Sea islander, watching the airplanes draw their stately lines across the sky, unable to shout up to them. I am here. Hello, 2349. Hello.

He was trying a modification of the signal correlator when the lights winked out. Utter blackness rushed in. The distant generator rattled and chugged into silence.

It took a long time to feel his way out and into the light. It was a bleak, gray noon, but he did not notice; it was enough to be outside.

He could hear no sound from Cambridge at all. The breeze carried a sour tang. No birds. No aircraft.

He walked south, towards Grantchester. He looked back once at the low square profile of the Cav and in the diffused light he raised a hand to it. He thought of the nested universes, onion skin within onion skin. Leaning back, head swimming, he peered at the clouds, once so benign a sight. Above that cloak was the galaxy, a great swarm of colored lights, turning with majestic slowness in the great night. Then he looked down at the bumpy, worn footpath and felt a great weight lift from him. For so long now he had been transfixed by the past. It had deadened him to this real world around him. He knew, now, without knowing quite how he knew, that it was forever lost. Rather than feeling despair, he was elated, free.

Marjorie lay up ahead, no doubt frightened to be alone. He remembered her preserves on the uncompromising straight shelving, and smiled. They could eat those for some time. Have some easy meals together, as they did in the days before the children. They would soon have to go to the countryside and get Johnny and Nicky, of course.

Puffing slightly, his head clearing, he walked along the deserted path. There was really quite a lot ahead to do, when you thought about it.