At the zenith the Interface portal was a tiny, growing flower of electric blue. The Spline ship was already within the thousand-mile region of exotic space, the squeezed vacuum that surrounded the wormhole mouth.
Jasoft Parz settled, birdlike, to the deck in the new artificial gravity of the Spline drive; he took a seat and watched Michael closely, his green eyes sharp, fascinated.
Shira got out of her chair and walked unsteadily across the deck. Her eyes were huge, bruised, the shape of her skull showing through her thin flesh. "You must not do this," she said.
Michael began, "My dear—"
Harry cut in, "Michael, we’re in the middle of a storm of messages. I’m surprised the hull of the dome hasn’t burned off under comm-laser fire… I think you’ll have to deal with this. All the ships within a thousand miles are aware we’re moving, and a dozen different authorities want to know what the hell we’re doing."
"Can any of them stop us before we reach the Interface?"
Harry considered. "Probably not. The Spline, even disabled as it is, is so damn big it would have to be blown out of the sky to be stopped. And there’s no armor in range heavy enough to do that."
"Okay. Ignore them."
"And we’re getting messages from the earth-craft," Harry reported. "Also inquiring politely as to what we think we’re doing."
Shira’s hands twisted together. "You must listen to them, Michael."
"Answer me honestly, Shira. Can the Friends do anything to stop us?"
Her mouth worked and her eyes seemed heavy, as if she could barely restrain hysterical tears; and Michael felt an absurd, irrational urge to comfort her. "No," she said at last, quietly. "Not physically, no. But—"
"Then ignore them too." Michael thought it over. "In fact, Harry, I want you to disable the whole damn comms panel… Any equipment the Spline is carrying too. Permanently; I want you to trash it. Can you do that?"
Again a short hesitation. "Sure, Michael," Harry said uncertainly. "But — are you sure that’s such a good idea?"
"Where we’re going we’re not going to need it," Michael said. "It’s just a damn distraction. In—" He studied the zenith. "What, forty minutes?"
"Thirty-eight," Harry said gloomily.
" — we’re going to enter the Interface. And we’re going to close it. And there’s nothing more anybody can say that will make a piece of difference to that."
"I’m not going to argue," Harry urged, "but — Michael — what about Miriam?"
"Miriam’s a distraction," Michael said firmly. "Come on, Harry; do it. I need your support."
There was a silence of a few seconds. Then: "Done," Harry said. "We’re all alone, Michael."
"You are a fool," Shira told Michael coldly.
Michael sighed and tried to regain a comfortable posture in his couch. "It’s not the first time I’ve been called that."
"Might be the last, though," Parz said dryly.
"You think you are solving the problem, with one bold, audacious stroke," Shira said, her water-blue eyes fixed on Michael’s face. "You think you are fearless, in the face of unknown dangers — an encounter with the future, even with death. But you are not fearless. You are afraid. You fear even words. You fear the words of your contemporaries — how many lectures have I endured on how important it was that we should allow you into our confidence… that we should share the immense problems with which we grappled? And now you — as arrogant as you are foolish — turn your back even on your own kind. You fear the words of the Friends themselves — even of me — you fear the logic, the truth in our convictions."
Michael massaged the bridge of his nose, wishing he didn’t feel so damned tired. "Quite a speech," he said.
She drew her back straight. "And you fear yourself. For fear of your own weakness of resolve, you dare not even consider the possibility of consulting the one closest to you, Miriam, who is less than a light-second away. You would rather, as you put it, ‘trash’ your comms equipment than—"
"Enough," Michael snapped.
She drew back a little at the sharpness of his tone, but she held her ground; pale eyes glittered from her fleshless face.
Michael said, "To hell with any of that. It’s academic, Shira. The rules have changed; the outside universe might as well not exist as far as what happens to this ship from now on; we’ve established that. There’s only the four of us now — you, me, Parz, and Harry—"
" — and several hundred drones," Harry put in uncertainly. "Who I’m having a certain amount of difficulty controlling—"
Michael ignored him. "Just the four of us, Shira, in this bubble of air and warmth. And the only way this ship is going to get turned aside is if you — you — convince me, and the others, that your Project is worth the incalculable risk it entails." He studied her, trying to gauge her reaction. "Well? you have thirty-eight minutes."
"Thirty-six," Harry said.
Shira closed her eyes and drew in a deep, shuddering breath. "All right," she said. She crossed the deck to her chair, her gait stiff and ungainly, and sat down.
Michael, watching her, felt himself come alive with anticipation, rejuvenated by the prospect of having his questions answered at last.
Shira talked to them of Eugene Wigner, and of the von Neumann catastrophe.
Like the alive-dead condition of Schrödinger’s cat, events remained in a state of unreality until observed by a conscious entity. But each act of observation merely added another layer of potentiality to the core events, itself unrealized until observed in turn.
The chains of quantum functions, in Wigner’s view, extended to infinity in an unending chain, an infinite regress.
"Thus, the paradox of Wigner’s friend," Shira said.
Michael shook his head impatiently. "But this is pure philosophical debate," he said. "Wigner himself believed that the regress was not infinite… that the chain of wave functions terminates as soon as a conscious mind makes an observation."
"That is one view," Shira said quietly. "But there are others…"
Shira described the participatory universe.
Life — intelligent life — was, under this hypothesis, essential for the very existence of the universe. Imagine a myriad box-cat-friend-Wigner chains of quantum functions, all extending through time, without end. "Constantly," Shira said, "life — consciousness — is calling the universe into existence by the very act of observing it."
Consciousness was like an immense, self-directed eye, a recursive design developed by the universe to invoke its own being.
And if this was true, the goal of consciousness, of life, said Shira, must be to gather and organize data — all data, everywhere — to observe and actualize all events. For without actualization there could be no reality.
Arising from a million chance beginnings, like the stirring of the chemical soup of Earth’s ancient seas, life had spread — was continuing to spread — and to observe, to gather and record data using every resource available.
"We live in an era somewhere near the start of the contact between species, on an interstellar scale," Shira said. "There is war, death, destruction. Genocide. But one can, from a godlike perspective, regard it all as interfacing — as a sharing, a pooling, of information.
"Ultimately, surely, the squabbling species of our day will resolve their childish differences — differences of special prejudice, of narrow interests, of inadequate perception and move together, perhaps under the leadership of the Xeelee, toward the ultimate goal of life: the gathering and recording of all data, the observation and invocation of the universe itself."
More and more resources would be devoted to this goal — not just in extent, as life spread from its myriad points of origin, but in depth and scope. At last all the energy sources available for exploitation, from the gravitational potential of galactic superclusters down to the zero-point energy inherent in space itself, would be suborned to the great project of consciousness.
Shira described the future of the universe.
In a few billion years — a blink of cosmic time — Earth’s Sun would leave the main sequence of stars, its outer layers ballooning, swallowing the remains of the planets. Humanity would move on, of course, abandoning the old in favor of the new. More stars would form, to replace those that had failed and died… but the formation rate of new stars was already declining exponentially, with a half-life of a few billion years.
After about a thousand billion years, no more stars would form. The darkened galaxies would continue to turn, but chance collisions and close encounters would take their cumulative toll. Planets would "evaporate" from their parent suns, and stars would evaporate from their galaxies. Those stars remaining in the time-ravaged star systems would lose energy, steadily, by gravitational radiation, and coalesce at last into immense, galactic-scale black holes.
And those holes themselves would coalesce, into holes on the scales of galactic clusters and superclusters; from all across the universe the timelines would converge, merging at last into the great singularities.
But life would prevail, said Shira, continuing to exploit with ever-increasing efficiency the universe’s residual sources of energy. Such as the dim shining of the star-corpses, kept at a few degrees above absolute zero by the slow decay of protons.
And there would still be work to be done.
Black hole evaporation would continue, with the eventual shrinking and disappearance of event horizons even on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies; and naked singularities would emerge into the spreading sweep of spacetime.
Perhaps the universe could not exist beyond the formation of a naked singularity. Perhaps the formation of such a flaw would cause the cessation of time and space, the ending of being.
"And perhaps," Shira said, "life’s purpose, in the later stages of the evolution of the universe, is to manipulate event horizons in order to prevent the formation of naked singularities."
"Ah." Parz smiled. "Another elegant idea. So our descendants might be entrained to work as Cosmic Censors."
"Or as Cosmic Saviors," Michael said dryly.
Harry asked, sounding awed, "How do you manipulate event horizons?"
"No doubt there are lots of ways," Michael said. "But even now we can imagine some fairly crude methods. Such as forcing black holes to merge before they get a chance to evaporate."
"The Wigner paradox is inescapable," Shira said. The chains of unresolved quantum states would build on and on, growing like flowers, extending into the future, until the observations of the cosmos-spanning minds to come rested on aeon-thick layers of history, studded with the fossils of ancient events. "At last," Shira said, her voice steady and oddly flat, "life will cover the universe, still observing, still building the regressing chains of quantum functions. Life will manipulate the dynamical evolution of the cosmos as a whole. One can anticipate the pooled resources of life exploiting even the last energy resource, the sheer energy of the expansion of spacetime itself…
"Consciousness must exist as long as the cosmos itself — for without observation there can be no actualization, no existence — and further, consciousness must become coextensive with the cosmos, in order that all events may be observed."
Parz laughed softly, wondering. "What a vision. Girl, how old are you? You sound a thousand years old."
But, Shira went on, the chains of quantum functions would finally merge, culminate in a final state: at the last boundary to the universe, at timelike infinity.
"And at timelike infinity resides the Ultimate Observer," Shira said quietly. "And the last Observation will be made—"
"Yes," Parz said, "and so collapsing all the chains of quantum functions, right back through time — through the wreckage of the galaxies, down to the present and on into history, past Wigner, his friend, the cat and its box — what a charming notion this is—"
"Retrospectively, the history of the universe will be actualized," Shira said. "But it cannot be realized until the final Observation." For the first time since resuming her seat she turned to Michael. "Do you understand the implications of this, Michael Poole?"
He frowned. "These ideas are staggering, of course. But you’ve gone one step further. Haven’t you, Shira? There’s still another hypothesis you’ve made."
"I… Yes." She bowed her head in an odd, almost prayerful attitude of respect. "It is impossible for us to believe that the Ultimate Observer will simply be a passive eye. A camera, for all of history."
"No," Michael said. "I think you believe that the Ultimate Observer will be able to influence the actualization. Don’t you? You believe that the Observer will have the power to study all the nearly infinite potential histories of the universe, stored in the regressing chains of quantum functions. And that the Observer will select, actualize a history that is — what?"
"Which is simply the most aesthetically pleasing, perhaps," Parz said in his dry, aged way.
"Which maximizes the potential of being," Shira said. "Or so we believe. Which makes the cosmos through all of time into a shining place, a garden free of waste, pain, and death." She lifted her head abruptly; the light from the data panel before her struck shadows in her face, and Michael was moved by the contrast between the skeletal gauntness of the girl’s intense face and the beauty — the power, the wistfulness — of her concepts.
Harry said, his voice heavy with wonder. "A god at the end of time. Is it possible?"
Michael found he wanted to reach the girl, and he tried to put tenderness into his voice. "I understand you now, I think," he said. "You believe that none of this — our situation here, the Qax Occupation of Earth, the Qax time invasion — is real. It’s all transitory, in a sense; we are simply forced to endure the motion of our consciousness along one of the chains of quantum functions that you believe will be collapsed, discarded, by your Ultimate Observer, in favor of—"
"Heaven," Harry said.
"No, nothing so crude," Michael said. He tried to imagine it, to look beyond the words. "Harry, if she’s right, the ultimate state — the final mode of being of the cosmos — will consist of global and local optimization. Of the maximizing of potential, everywhere and at every moment, from the beginning of time." Shining, Shira had said. Yes, shining would surely be a good word for such an existence… Michael closed his eyes and tried to evoke such a mode; he imagined this shoddy reality burning away to reveal the pure, clear light of the underlying optimal state.
Tears prickled gently at his closed eyes. If one were vouchsafed a glimpse of such a state, he thought, then surely one would, on being dragged back to the mire of this unrealized chain of being, go insane.
If this was the basis of the faith of the Friends, then no wonder the Friends were so remote, so intense — so uncaring of their everyday lives, about the pain and death of others. History as it existed was nothing more than a shoddy prototype of the global optimization to come, when the Ultimate Observer discarded all inferior world lines.
And no wonder then, he thought, the Friends were so leached of humanity. Their mystical vision had removed all significance from their own lives — the only lives they could experience, whatever the truth of their philosophy — and it had rendered them deeply flawed, less than human. He opened his eyes and studied Shira. He saw again the patient intensity that resided inside this fragile girl — and he saw now how damaged she was by her philosophy.
She was not fully alive, and perhaps never could be; he pitied her, he realized.
"All right, Shira," he said tenderly. "Thank you for telling me so much."
Parz sighed, almost wistfully; his small, closed face showed a refined distress. "But she hasn’t yet told us all of it. Have you, girl?" With an edge in his voice, he went on, "I mean, if you truly believe such a wondrous vision — that the history we have lived through, the present and future we must endure, are merely prototypes for some vast, perfect version that will one day be imposed on us from the end of time — then what is the Project all about? Why do you need to do anything to change your condition in the here-and-now? Why not simply endure this pain, let it end, and wait for it all to be put right at the end of things?"
She shook her head. "In my time, humans are helplessly subjugated by the Qax. We were able to assemble the resources for our rebellion — but it was only the fortuitous arrival of your ship from the past that gave us the opportunity to do so.
"Such a rebellion could never happen again.
"Michael Poole, we believe the Qax Occupation will result, at last, in the decline of man. The Qax — inadvertently, perhaps — will destroy humanity. And thereby they will terminate all possible timelines in which humanity survives the Occupation era, joins the greater, maturing community of species that is to come, and adds to the wisdom of those mighty races at the end of time. The Qax will stop the transmission of any data about what humans were and might have been into the future. This is a crime on the largest of scales — and would be worth opposing even if we were not of the species affected…
"But we are. And we believe we have to thwart the Qax, to safeguard the future role of humanity."
Poole pulled his lip. "Jasoft, what do you make of this diagnosis?"
Parz spread his hands. "She may be right. The Qax of my era weren’t planning for our destruction before this disastrous sequence of events, ironically initiated by the Friends themselves — we’ve been too useful, economically. But perhaps in the end, we could not have survived an extended subjugation…
"And, looking ahead, we know that Shira’s prediction of the Qax’s enmity must come true, but in ways she could not anticipate. The human Jim Bolder will cause the destruction of the Qax home world, drive them to diaspora. After this, it seems, the elimination of humanity will become a racial goal for the Qax."
Poole nodded; he’d studied Shira’s reactions throughout this discourse, but her face was blank, unreacting, blandly pretty. She’s not listening, he realized. Perhaps she can’t.
"Very well," Parz said. "Then, Shira, tell us how turning Jupiter into a black hole will help you achieve your aims. Is the singularity to be some form of superweapon?"
"No," Shira said calmly. "Such is not our intention. Not directly."
"No," said Michael, staring at the girl. "You’re not weapons manufacturers, or warriors, are you? I think you see yourself as part of the great upward streaming of life, toward this marvelous cosmic future you’ve described. I think you want to preserve something. Information of some kind. And send it beyond the current perilous era into this distant, glorious future, when those wise Observers of the universe will pick up your message and understand its true meaning."
Parz was staring at him, baffled.
Michael said, "Jasoft, I think they are turning Jupiter into a vast — time capsule. They’re constructing a black hole; a black hole that will evaporate in — what? Ten to power forty years from now? Jupiter will be like a vast tomb, timed to open. A naked singularity will be exposed. These cosmic engineers, these tinkerers with the dynamical evolution of the universe, will come to investigate; to extinguish the peril exposed to the universe and its future/past."
"Ah." Jasoft smiled. "And when they do come, they will find a message. A message left for them by the Friends."
Harry laughed. "This conversation gets more and more bizarre. What will this message say? How do you strike up a conversation with godlike cosmic designers ten to power forty years in the future? ‘Hello. We were here, and had a hell of a lot of trouble. What about you?’ "
Michael smiled. "Oh, you might be a bit more imaginative than that. What if you stored the human genome in there, for instance? The future consciousnesses could reconstruct the best of the race from that. And with a bit of tinkering you could store the ‘message’ in the consciousness of the reconstructed humans. Imagine that, Harry; imagine emerging from some fake womb, with your head full of memories of this brief, glorious youth of the universe — and into a cosmos in which the formation, life and death of even the last, shriveled star is a memory, logarithmically distant…"
Shira smiled now. "There is no limit, given the technology," she said. "One could imagine converting an Earth-mass to data, lodging it within the event horizon. One would have available ten to power sixty-four bits — equivalent to the transcription of ten to power thirty-eight human personalities. Michael, one might imagine storing every human who ever lived, beyond the reach of the Qax and other predators."
"But how would you store the data? We know already that a black hole is a vast source of entropy; if an object of whatever complexity implodes into a hole, all bits of data about it are lost to the outside universe save its charge, mass, and spin—"
"Singularities themselves are complex objects," Shira said. "Unimaginably so. Our understanding of them has advanced enormously since your time. It may be possible to store data in the structure of the spacetime flaw itself—"
"But," Parz said, his round, weak face broken by a sly smile, "with respect, my dear, you still haven’t told us precisely what your message to these superbeings of the future would be. Even if you succeeded in transmitting it."
Michael settled back in his couch. "Why, that much is obvious," he said.
Shira watched him, utterly erect and tense. "Is it?"
"You’re trying to get a message to the Ultimate Observer." He heard Parz call out wordlessly, but he pressed on. "You want to influence the way the Observer selects the optimal lifeline of the cosmos; you want to ensure that data about humanity reaches the post-Qax future, and that the Observer selects world lines in favor of humanity." Michael smiled. "I’m right, aren’t I? I have to admire your capacity for thinking big, Shira."
Shira nodded, stiffly. "Our goal is a valid one, from a racial point of view."
He inclined his head in return. "Oh, certainly. None more valid. And once the final Observation takes place, the events we have endured will not have taken place, and the means you have employed are justified… because if the end is met, the means won’t even have occurred."
"It’s utterly outrageous," Parz said, green eyes sparkling. "But wonderful! I love it."
Shira, sitting silently in the uneven thrust of the damaged Spline, waited, her eyes still locked disconcertingly on Michael’s.
"Well, at least we know what’s going on now," Harry said brightly. "But now comes the difficult bit. Do we help them… or try to stop them?"
The basket of blue light at the zenith had grown to the size of a fist.
Shira shrugged, almost casually. "I have no more influence to exert on you. I can only rely on your wisdom."
"Right." Michael pursed his lips. "But you weren’t so keen on trusting to that wisdom earlier, were you?"
"We did not believe you would understand," she said simply. "We calculated it was more likely to yield success if we proceeded alone."
"Yes," said Parz coldly. "Perhaps you were wise to attempt such a course, my dear. I have learned that these people, from fifteen centuries before our shared era, are behind us in knowledge and some experiences, but are our peers — more than our peers — in wisdom. I suspect you knew what the reaction of these people would be to your schemes; you knew they would oppose you."
Shira looked at Michael uncertainly.
He said, somehow reluctant, unwilling to be cruel to this young, earnest girl, "He’s talking about hubris, Shira. Arrogance."
"We are attempting to avert the extinction of the species," Shira said, her voice fragile.
"Maybe. Shira, to my dying day I will honor the courage, the ingenuity of the Friends. To have constructed the earth-craft under the very eyes of the Qax; to have hurled yourselves unhesitatingly into an unknown past… Yes, you have courage and vision. But — what right do you have to tinker with the history of the universe? What gives you the wisdom to do that, Shira? — regardless of the validity of your motives. Listen, you scared us all to death when we thought you were just trying to create a naked singularity. That would have set off an unpredictable explosion of acausality. But in fact you’re trying to disrupt causality deliberately — and on the largest scale."
"You dare not oppose us," Shira said. Her face was a mask of anger, of almost childish resentment.
Michael closed his eyes. "I don’t think I dare allow you to go ahead. Look, Shira, maybe the whole logic of your argument is flawed. For a start the philosophical basis for the whole thing — that particular resolution of the Wigner paradox — is speculative, just one among many."
Parz nodded. "And where is the evidence of this onward advance of life that you’ve based your hopes on? The most advanced species we know are the Xeelee. But the Xeelee don’t fit the description, give no evidence of sharing the goals you’ve advanced. They show no signs of having the gathering and recording of data as their key racial motive. Indeed, their goal seems to be very different — the construction of their Kerr-metric gateway to another universe — and they seem prepared to destroy data, in the form of structures on an intergalactic scale, to do it. So how will this cosmic eye, this Ultimate Observer of yours, ever come about, if even the Xeelee don’t want to lead us toward its formation?"
Her nostrils flared. "You’re not going to help us. You’re going to try to stop us. Michael Poole, you are—"
Poole held his hands up. "Look, don’t bother insulting me again. I’m sure I’m a fool, but I’m a fool who doesn’t trust himself where a final solution to the history of the universe is concerned. I’d do anything to avert the imposition of such a ‘solution,’ I think."
"Perhaps the Project won’t, or can’t, succeed," Shira said. "But it remains humanity’s best and only hope of removing the Qax yoke."
"No," he said. He smiled, an immense sadness sweeping over him; he felt irrationally ashamed at his systematic demolition of this young person. "That’s the clinching argument, I’m afraid, Shira. The fact is, we don’t need your Project." He nodded to Parz. "Jasoft has told us. Humans will get out from under the oppression of the Qax. It won’t be easy — and it will cost the Qax almost everything — but it will be done, we know that now, and it will come from the simple, surprising actions of a single man. From the unpredictability of humanity." He studied her empty face, the surface of an incomplete personality, he realized now. "Ordinary humanity will beat the Qax in the end, Shira. But that’s beyond your imagining, isn’t it? We won’t need your grandiose schemes to sabotage history to win freedom."
"But—"
"And the only way that destiny can be subverted, as far as I can see," Michael pressed on, "is if we leave that portal open; if we allow the Qax themselves more chances to change history — in their favor. I’m sorry I had anything to do with building the damn thing, unleashing all this trouble in the first place. Now, all I want to do is to put that right—"
"You’ll be killed," Shira said, as if clutching at straws of argument.
He laughed. "Funnily enough, that doesn’t seem to matter so much anymore… But I don’t want to take you all with me, if I don’t have to. Harry, give me an option to get them off before we hit."
"Working," Harry said calmly. "Thirteen minutes to the portal, now."
Parz seemed to squirm, uncomfortable, in his chair. "I’m not certain I deserve such a reprieve," he said.
"Then think of it as an assignment," Michael said briskly. "I need you to get this girl off the ship. Do you think she’s going to go voluntarily?"
Parz briefly studied Shira, who still stood before Michael, clenching and unclenching her small fists. "Perhaps not," he said sadly.
"Twelve minutes," Harry said.