Ultima (47 page)

“I knew it,” the ColU breathed. “I found this, even on Per Ardua—the first world beyond the solar system reached by humans. The coincidences of timing. Photosynthesis appeared on Per Ardua two billion years before humans showed up, just as on Earth. And the first complex creatures appeared on both worlds with quite precise coincidences of timing: five hundred and forty-two million years before humanity on Earth, the same on Per Ardua. I
measured
this. I knew it! I remember speaking of this to your mother and father, Beth Eden Jones. Not that they understood the implications, not then. Well—nor did I. Not then.”

“The coincidences were real,” Earthshine said. “I have no detail on how this was done, what kind of agency they used to trigger a complexity explosion on Earth, say. I imagine farmers striding across the stars . . . But these events are indeed evidence of a deep, Galaxy-wide bioengineering on multiple worlds, by communities of Dreamers who were becoming more knowledgeable, more communicative—and more willing to intervene in the destiny of life.

“And as they grew in power and understanding, and as they learned more of the universe around them, so they developed a new urgency. Because—”

“Because they became aware of the imminence of the End Time,” Stef whispered.

“Yes. Even the Dreamers, who, huddled in the deep rock, might survive even the supernova detonation of a parent sun, could not survive that.

“And so they laid their plans.”

•   •   •

They might be a short-lived colony, but they were a busy colony.

They all had projects of one kind or another—well, Stef thought, there were so few of them, there were always plenty of chores to do, ranging from stitching ripped clothing or fixing a leaking boot to supervising the synthesis of some new component by the clattering fabricators.

Mealtimes were the only occasions when they all gathered together, breakfast, lunch, supper. That included Earthshine, for they always sat around his spidery framework. The ColU too. Titus had mandated that from the beginning, once they had got over the loss of Ari and Inguill. They were too small a group to be able to afford to break up into cliques or factions. Stef supposed this was another relic of Titus's field experience, presumably dating from when he had had to lead small isolated parties, scouts maybe, on long expeditions. She applauded his leadership.

It was unfortunate, though, that he always used language like “lancing boils” or “spilling the pus” to describe the process of talking out their problems. Especially when she was trying to force down the freeze-dried potato or fabricated slop that passed for food here.

And she tried not to let her dissatisfaction with the food distract her from listening to Earthshine's long, complex account.

•   •   •

“So. After the complexity waves. That was when they started to build the Hatches,” Stef prompted.

“That was when,” Earthshine agreed. “I don't know where, how, when the technology emerged. But a Hatch link is essentially a communications technology optimized to fit within the limits of the universe in which we find ourselves.”

“Limits? What limits?”

“To begin with, lightspeed. That seems to be a fundamental physical barrier—just as Einstein predicted all those years ago. And the other—”

“The end of the universe,” the ColU said.

“A wall across the future. And very close in time, to such long-lived beings. There was never a sense that the minded worlds, or that any of the Dreamers—or any of
us
—could survive that final limit. But they felt the urgency to talk, to communicate—to share as much as they could, to make the most of the time available.

“But here were these vast minds, dependent for their communication on the slow trajectories of crude starships, or on the still slower drift of rocks from star to star. It is as if Einstein and Newton, two tremendous intellects, both under sentence of imminent death, were able to communicate only by means of Morse code tapped out on a cell wall . . . They had to do better.”

“And the Hatches were the way,” Stef said.

“Yes. The Hatches are something like wormholes, flaws in space-time connecting one event to another. As you know, Stef, theoretically, wormholes can even link different universes—different cosmoses drifting in the great hulk of the multiverse. Any transition would be limited by lightspeed—”

“But with a Hatch, one can step from Mercury to Per Ardua, say, four light-years apart, in no more than four years.”

“Exactly. It is the best one can do. But to build such engines, rips and twists in space-time, requires huge amounts of energy, as you can imagine. Where is such energy to come from?”

“The kernels,” Stef said immediately. “Which are also like wormholes, through which energy pours. That was basically a
lure
—right? The cheese that baited the trap, into which we clever tool-making apes thrust our greedy paws. And all the time the true purpose was to get us to build those damn Hatches.”

“True, although
you
never got that far, did you? You saw that kernels were associated with Hatch emplacements, of course. But, Stef, you never understood how the presence of kernels facilitates the setting up of a Hatch in the first place. You never even discovered the process by trial and error, as did the Romans, the Incas.

“Stef, there is actually only one kind of technology here.
Kernels are Hatches
; a Hatch is a specialized form of kernel. The Hatches emerge when a kernel field is perturbed by an energetic event—I imagine it is almost an organic process, a self-selection, as a single tree will emerge from a grove of saplings.”

“Maybe. But what about the energy? For all the decades I spent studying those beasts, we never came close to understanding where that energy came from.”

“True,” said Earthshine. “And
I
was never allowed access to kernels and Hatches to study them for myself. I had to rely on your work, at secondhand. How much time was wasted!”

“We guessed stellar cores, supernovas, gamma ray bursters, quasars—”

“Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Remember, Stef, both kernels and Hatches are forms of wormholes. As we have experienced ourselves, a wormhole can link events separated by space
and by time
. We walked through a Hatch from the Mars of Inguill's Inca era, the human age, to—this, a world light-years distant and well over three billion years separated in time.”

“Yes,” said Stef. “But these wormholes aren't as they were predicted by our own science, by relativity.
They
were rips in space and time held open by impossible kinds of antigravity . . . You could have traveled faster that light through Einstein's wormholes. And you could have dragged such a wormhole around with a sublight ship to make a functioning time machine. But this is different. Kernel/Hatch wormholes are sublight. But they can link different universes. And so you could connect the present of one universe to the past or the future of another . . .” The pieces of the puzzle moved around inside her head. “That's it. If you're right about the nature of the multiverse, then all the universes in our local ensemble share the same future, if you look ahead far enough . . .”

“They all must face the End Time,” the ColU said.

Earthshine said, “And
that
, Stef, is the answer to where a kernel's energy comes from. Not from some quasar, from some point distant in space. It comes from a point distant
in time
—”

“The future.” Stef saw it now. “The End Time itself.”

“Yes. You have it. The End Time will be a hugely energetic event. The Dreamers
have tapped into that very energy
, using the kernels, in order to build their Hatch network. Now, we multicellular toy-creatures are allowed to play with the technologies, to build our kernel-driven starships and to wage our wars, but—”

“But it's all secondary to the true purpose,” Stef said, “which is for the Dreamer worlds to be linked to each other. You know, my father saw this, right at the beginning. He sensed that whoever was giving us kernels—he never lived to learn about Hatches—had some agenda of their own.”

“He was right. Humans, however,” Earthshine said softly, “could never resist such deadly toys. Even if they were powered by the energies of Ragnarok itself.

“So the Hatch network spread. So the worlds were linked, as never before; so they learned and grew.

“But that's not the end of the story. For even this was not enough. The time left, mere billions of years, seemed horribly short to such minds as the Dreamers. And so, having intervened several times before in the destiny of life in the Galaxy, now they intervened again. Seeking to find a way to have us serve their needs even more completely . . .”

•   •   •

As the final months passed, Titus Valerius led many expeditions back to the nearside of Per Ardua. Given the gravity-tunnel network, the terminator was only days away; they always needed supplies, so why not travel back?

Titus didn't retrace the journey that they had made to get here every time. He and his companions took the chance to explore the rest of the branching gravity-train system that fanned out across the dark face of Per Ardua, and to study different regions of the terminator and the edge of the star-facing side. This amounted to a kind of inspection of the tunnel system itself, of course, and Titus did report a few breakages, even collapses, times they had had to come back the way they'd traveled and find another way. The tunnel system was tremendously ancient and wonderfully robust—Stef joked in the silence of her head that it had kept working almost to the end of the universe itself—but nothing was perfect, it seemed.

Titus never forgot his primary purpose. Each time he returned, he would faithfully deliver a sled full of root vegetables and fruit, plus anything exotic he found, such as, once, a box of what looked and tasted like peaches.

But he also brought home specimens he thought might be of interest to the ColU or Earthshine. The ColU had specifically asked for samples of stems of any kind, the rod-like forms that had once been the fundamental unit of complex life on Per Ardua. And once Titus brought back a miniature stromatolite, a cylinder maybe a meter and a half tall, half a meter wide. He and Chu dragged this thing home strapped to the bed of the sled with ropes.

They had already given over part of the dome to a “Per Ardua garden,” where the ground-up rock floor had been laced with native soil, and the ColU was growing his stem samples and other native forms. Here they planted the stromatolite, bedding it deep in the worked ground. Not even the ColU had any experience of transplanting stromatolites before, and the little community spent some days fretting over the health of its new arrival before the stromatolite seemed to flourish, with its bronze-colored carapace acquiring a new sheen. It was another example of the integration of life, Stef supposed, of living beings from different stars working together: humans from Earth tending a stromatolite from Per Ardua.

And it was the lack of time in this doomed universe for integration, of biospheres and cultures and minds, that had driven the Dreamers to attempt their most radical rebuilding.

•   •   •

“Even humans had such fantasies,” Earthshine said. “Of cultures crossing the stars and coming together. Perhaps there would be conflict at first, but in the end there would be integration. A Galaxy united under a common civilization—imagine it.”

“I remember some of the scientists' dreams,” Stef said. “Perhaps if mind could encompass the universe, it could change its destiny. Save it from a Big Crunch, or a Big Rip. Make the universe
better
than nature intended.”

“Or at least,” the ColU said, “mind, by filling the universe, could
observe
it. And thereby make its existence worthwhile.”

“But there is no time for any of this,” Earthshine said now. “No time! Not in a universe with such a short life span, and constrained by lightspeed. Even a single Galaxy is too large, the Dreamers concluded, to be united in such a time. The Dreamers grew restless—though that's an odd word to apply to billion-year-old minds.
They wanted more time.
But there was no more to be had, not in the future.”

“Ah.” Stef nodded. “I think I see where this is going. To gain more time, they started to reach, not into the future—but
into the past
.”

“You have it. Remember, the Dreamers were becoming masters of wormhole technology; they had kernels and Hatches. By tapping the End Time event itself they had an effectively infinite energy supply. Now they began to reach out, not across time and space in this universe, but to other universes entirely. Universes with different histories.”

Stef laughed. “Of course. I see it now. Suppose you're dissatisfied that humans in my reality sheaf, the UN-China Culture, didn't even start to work with Hatches until the twenty-second century. You wish it had been earlier. Well, then, you simply pluck another copy of the universe from the tree of possible realities, one where we
did
get to the Hatches earlier.”

Mardina nodded. “I see—I think. Which happened to be a history in which Rome survived, as it did not in your history.”

“That's it,” Earthshine said. “So the destiny of the human race is altered fundamentally. Billions who might have lived were never born at all. Billions more rise up to take their place. And those billions strive to extend the Hatch network, long before it would have happened in the earlier reality—for that, you see, was the point.”

Titus frowned. “But if this is true, what of the other histories, other realities? Are they simply discarded, like—like early drafts of a note of command?”

“Not discarded,” said Earthshine. “They all continue to exist, out there, somewhere in the multiverse. And all, incidentally, will be terminated at the End Time; they are too closely related to be spared. But there is only ever one universe that is
primal
. As if it is more real than the rest. And before the Dreamers' meddling, the primal universe would have been the most logical, the most neat, the most self-consistent in terms of causality. Self-consistent as the others were not.