Timelike Infinity

Chapter 6

The GUT ship Hermit Crab swept backside-first through a powered orbit around the swollen cheek of Jupiter.

Michael Poole sat in the Crab’s clear-walled lifedome with the Virtual of his father, Harry. The ship was rounding the dark side of the planet now, and the GUT drive, blazing a mile beneath the transparent floor of the cabin, illuminated vast areas of that ocean of swirling cloud. Violet light was cast upward through the cabin, and Poole noticed how his father’s young, blond head had been given suitably demonic shadows in response.

"We’re making quite an entrance," Harry said.

"I guess so. If you like fireworks."

Harry turned to his son, his blue eyes boyishly wide with wonder. "No, it’s more than that. You’re the physicist, son, and I’m just a government functionary; and you’ll understand it all better than I ever could. But maybe the wonder of it doesn’t hit you with the same impact as a layman like me. We’re harnessing forces lost to the universe since the first few seconds after the Big Bang—"

"Essentially. Except that you’re talking about the first few fractions of a second…"

"GUT" stood for Grand Unified Theory, the philosophical system that described the fundamental forces of nature as aspects of a single superforce. The heart of the Crab’s GUT drive was a fist-sized chunk of hydrogen locked into a superconducting bottle and bombarded to creation physics temperatures. At such temperatures only the unified superforce could act. When hydrogen was bled from the bottle the superforce went through "phase transitions," decomposing into the four familiar forces of nature — strong and weak nuclear, gravitational, and electromagnetic.

And just as steam releases heat when it goes through a phase transition by condensing to water, so at each transition of the superforce a pulse of energy was emitted.

Poole said to his father, "The Crab uses GUT phase energy to flash comet ice to plasma; the superheated plasma is expelled through a superconducting nozzle…"

Harry nodded, peering down the mile of superstructure to the residual lump of comet that had brought them in from the Oort Cloud. "Sure. But it was that same phase transition energy, liberated during the cooling period after the Big Bang, which drove the expansion of the universe itself.

"That’s what seems so awesome, when you stop and think about it, Michael. We’ve spent a year scooting around the Solar System — and now we’re making Jupiter himself cast a shadow — and we’re doing it by harnessing the energies of creation itself. Doesn’t it make you wonder?"

Poole rubbed the side of his nose. "Yes, Harry. Of course it does. But I don’t actually think that sort of attitude is going to help us all that much, in the next few days. I’d rather not feel awed by the workings of our own drive, right now. Remember we’re going to be dealing with humans from fifteen centuries into the future… for all I know, with artificial life-forms, or with aliens, even."

Harry leaned closer to Poole and grinned. "Not all of us AIs are such terrible things, Michael."

Poole narrowed his eyes. "Push your luck and I’ll pull your plug."

Harry grumbled, "Maybe these superpeople from the future will be advanced enough to recognize the rights of AIs. Such as the right to continuous consciousness, for instance. Anyway, I know it’s all talk with you."

"If you don’t get your fingers out of my head, then I’ll shut you down talk or not, you old fart."

An alarm chimed through the lifedome. The Crab, sailing barely a thousand miles over a sea of purple clouds, was near its closest approach to the planet; and now the battered old ship swept around the limb of Jupiter and emerged into the light of the distant sun. Sol, shrunken by distance, lifted through layers of clouds at Jupiter’s flat-infinite horizon; for a few seconds there was a dazzling impression of the depth of the Jovian atmosphere as clouds cast thousand-mile-long shadows over each other. The cabin was flooded with brilliance. For a second Harry’s Virtual image retained the purplish shadows cast from the cabin floor by the drive. Then the processor caught up and when Harry turned his face to the sun his profile was highlighted in yellow.

Then, like a second, angular dawn, the Interface portal hurtled over the horizon toward them. Michael could see the firefly sparks of ships circling the portal, waiting for any new intrusion from the future. The Crab’s trajectory took her to within a few dozen miles of the portal; Michael stared out at the dazzling sky-blue of the portal’s exotic tetrahedral frame, let his eyes linger over those cool lines and be drawn effortlessly to the geometrically perfect vertices. The faces were like semitransparent panes of silvered glass; he could make out the watercolor oceans of Jupiter through the faces, but the cloud images were overlaid with a patina of silver-gold and were distorted, swirled around in a fashion the eye could not quite track, like visions in a dream. And every few seconds a face would abruptly clear, just for a dazzling moment, and afford Michael a glimpse of another space, unfamiliar stars, like a hole cut into Jupiter.

The Crab swept on and away from the artifact; it dwindled rapidly behind them like an abandoned toy.

"My God," Harry breathed. "I didn’t know how beautiful it was. I thought I could see stars in those faces."

"You could, Harry," Poole said softly. "It really is a gateway to another time, another place."

Harry leaned toward Michael. "I’m very proud of you."

Poole stiffened and pulled away.

Harry said, "Listen, what do you really think we’re going to find out here?"

"Aboard the craft from the future?" Poole shrugged. "Since they haven’t communicated with us apart from that single message from Miriam when they came through the Interface a year ago, it’s difficult even to extrapolate."

"Will humans still be recognizably human, do you think?"

Poole swiveled a glare at Harry. "And are we ‘recognizably human’? Look at us, Harry; I’m an AS immortal, and you’re a semisentient AI."

"Semisentient?"

"Superficially we look human enough, and we’d probably claim to be human, but I don’t know if a man of, say, a thousand years ago would recognize us as members of the same species as himself. And now we’re talking another fifteen centuries down the road…"

Harry wiggled his fingers in the air, pulling his face. "A third arm growing out of the center of the face. Disembodied heads, bouncing around on the deck like footballs. What do you think?"

Poole shrugged. "If gross modifications like that are efficient, or serve a purpose, then maybe so. But I don’t think any of that matters a damn, compared to what’s going on inside their heads. And what they’ve built."

"What about technology?"

"I guess I’d put singularity physics a long way up the list," Poole said. "The manipulation of spacetime curvature… We’ve already got a mastery of high-density, high-energy physics — that’s the heart of the GUT drive, and of the exotic matter that the Interface portals were built of. Exotic matter is mass/energy that is compressed to singularity densities, almost, so that the superforce emerges to bind it together — and then allowed to cool and expand so that the superforce breaks open in a controllable manner, to give us the negative-energy characteristics we want."

"And in fifteen more centuries—" Harry prompted.

"How far could we take this? I’d anticipate the manufacture of singularities themselves, on the scale of a few tons up to, maybe, asteroid masses."

"What for?"

Poole spread his hands wide. "Compact power sources. If you had a black hole in your kitchen you could just throw in the waste and see it compressed to invisibility in a fraction of a second, releasing floods of usable short-wavelength radiation. And how about artificial gravity? Bury a black hole at the center of, say, Luna, and you could raise the surface gravity as high as you like."

Harry nodded. "Of course you’d have to find some way of keeping the singularity from eating the Moon."

"Yeah. Then there’s gravity waves, to be generated by colliding black holes. You could build tractor beams, for instance." Poole settled back into his couch and closed his eyes. "Of course, if they’ve taken this far enough, maybe they will have found some use for naked singularities."

"And what’s a naked singularity?"

"…Maybe we’re going to find out."

Now they were entering a region of space filled with ships; hundreds of drive sparks flitted over the patient ocean of Jupiter. The ships were too distant to afford any detail, but Poole knew that there must be ships from the navies of the inhabited Jovian moons, science craft from the inner Solar System, and goddamned tourists and rubbernecks from just about everywhere. A subdued chatter in the background of the lifedome told him that signals were starting to come in from that motley armada — since the receipt of Berg’s message a year earlier, Poole knew, Jovian space had been the center of attention of most of the human race, and his own arrival here had been the most eagerly anticipated event since the emergence of the future ship itself.

He ignored the messages, letting Virtual copies of himself handle them; if there was anything devastating they’d let him know.

Peering into the crowded space ahead, and after his decades of isolation in the bleak outer lands of the Solar System, Poole felt a pang of absurd claustrophobia. He was driven on by curiosity as well as by a residual concern for Miriam Berg and her crew; but now that his year-long journey in from the Oort Cloud was complete he found he really, really didn’t want to be here, back among the fetid worlds of humankind.

Harry was studying him, his youthful brow creased. "Relax, son," he said. "It was never going to be easy."

"Oh, for Christ’s sake shut up," Poole snapped. Even as he spoke he was aware of an odd feeling of relief at having someone, or something, reasonably tangible outside his own head to react to. "I should put you in an electronic bottle labeled ‘Dad,’ and take you out when I feel the need of another patronizing fatherly homily."

Harry Poole grinned, unmoved. "Just doing my job," he murmured circumspectly.

Now the Crab, drive still blazing ahead of her, was approaching the densest knot of ships in the sky. The cloud of vessels, as if sensing the approach of the Crab, began to part.

Inside that firefly mist Michael could make out the lines of something huge: an artifact, a splash of green against the murky pink of Jupiter.

"That’s it," Poole said, finding his voice hoarse. "The ship from the future. Time to go to work…" He snapped a command into the air.

The crowded universe outside the lifedome was clouded by a sudden hail of pixels that danced like dust motes around the Crab, slowly congealing into planes, orbs, and strands around the lifedome. Harry squirmed in his seat, mouth open, as he watched the huge Virtual take shape around the ship. At last they were looking out through eyes that were each at least a hundred yards wide, with eyelids that swept like rainstorms over the glistening spheres. A nose like a vast engineering project, with nostrils like rocket nozzles, obscured the Crab’s GUT-drive module; and huge sculpted ears sailed alongside the lifedome.

A mouth, whale size, opened moistly.

"My God," Harry breathed. "It’s you, isn’t it? We’re looking out through your face."

"I couldn’t think of any other way to be sure we were identified properly. Don’t worry: the Virtual is all show; it’s not even as sentient as you are. It repeats a five-second phrase of greeting, over and again."

"So how will they hear what it has to say?"

"Harry, the Virtual is two miles high," Poole said, irritated. "Let them lip-read!"

Harry swiveled his head, surveying the nostrils, the cablelike hairs above the cabin, skin pores the size of small asteroids. "What a disgusting experience," he said at last.

"Shut up and watch the show."

Now there were ships all around the camouflaged Crab. Poole recognized Jovian Navy ships that bristled with weapon ports, science platforms open and vulnerable, even one or two inter-moon skitters that should surely never have been allowed so close. Many of the larger craft followed the same basic design as the Crab, with drive unit and living quarters separated by a stem; from this distance the ships looked like lit matchsticks, scattered through space.

"How do you think the men from the future will react to us?" Harry asked with sudden nervousness.

Poole, glancing across, saw Harry chewing a nail, a habit he remembered from a distant childhood. "Maybe they’ll shoot us out of the sky," he said maliciously. "What do you care? You’re tucked up in bed on Earth, well away from any danger."

Harry looked at him reproachfully. "Michael, let’s not go over that again. I’m a Virtual, but I have my identity, my sense of being."

"You think you do."

"Isn’t that the same thing?"

"Anyway, I doubt if we’re in any danger," Poole said. "The future people haven’t made any attempt to use weapons so far; why should they now?"

Harry nodded grudgingly. "True." After the future ship had settled into its orbit around Jupiter there had been several attempts by Jovian ships to approach the craft. The future humans hadn’t responded, or fired on the Navy ships; they’d simply run away, faster than they could be tracked.

"Maybe they haven’t any weapons," Harry said.

Poole pursed his lips. "That’s possible, I guess. They do have their superdrive. though."

"I know there’s speculation that could be some kind of hyperspace drive," Harry said.

"Maybe. But if that’s true we’ve no idea how it works. It’s not possible to extrapolate from existing technologies, the way I speculated about singularity technologies; a hyperdrive would represent a quantum leap."

"Maybe it’s not a human invention. Maybe it’s alien."

"Anyway, I don’t think we’re in any danger of being fired on; and if they want us to come in they’ll not run away."

"How reassuring," the Virtual murmured.

Now the last few layers of craft peeled away before them, the GUT-drive fire-sparkles sliding aside like scared insects.

The future craft was revealed, like a fragment of landscape emerging through a layer of cloud. The Crab’s drive died at last, and Poole’s Virtual, mouthing its idiot words of greeting, loomed over a disk of green Earth a quarter mile wide. To Poole it was like looking down from an aircraft. He could clearly make out the ring of ancient stones at its center, like gray-brown scars against the greenery. A belt of anonymous-looking dwellings encircled the stones, and beyond the belt grass grew as in some surrealist’s vision, all the way to the edge of the world; the green of it clashed in his eyes with the purple-pink of Jupiter, so that it was as if the craft were encircled by a scar of indeterminate color.

Close to the rim Poole made out a splash of metal, a scarred crater in the grass. Could that be a boat from the Cauchy?

Sparks of light, like entrapped stars, were sprinkled over this floating fragment of Earth. And here and there Poole could see tiny, insectlike forms crawling across the landscape. People? He imagined faces upturned in wonder to his own vast, smiling mouth.

Briskly he scanned the lifedome’s instrument displays, watching data on the lifeboat’s mass — about that of an asteroid — and its gravitational configuration, radiation characteristics chatter in.

"I’ve seen pictures and I’ve read about it," Harry said, "but I don’t think I really believed it until now."

"It looks more fragile than I expected," Poole murmured.

"Fragile?"

"Look at it. Why build a timeship under a clod of earth like that, with so little protection… unless, perhaps, you wanted to hide what you were doing."

"They can run, but they can’t fight," Harry said.

"Yeah. Maybe these aren’t the heroic, super-powered gods from the future we anticipated after all. Maybe these people are refugees."

Harry seemed to shiver. "Refugees from what?"

"Well, at least they haven’t fled from us yet. Come on; let’s get to the boat and see if they will let us land."