ASIM_issue_54 (27 page)

His impromptu (and apparently, rather unconventional) entrance produced a speechless, startled shock. However, after a few moments of utter stillness, this shock soon evolved into a wary curiosity (another characteristic of the species, he recalled upon observing it).

Then: how to communicate? He remembered, vaguely, those earlier encounters, and now he searched his memory for their speech.

His first attempt to close the distance between them was awkward and ineffective.

Surprisingly, the Captain came to his rescue with a machine, an improbable device of electrons and organic membranes, which was dusted off and within a few moments had transformed his elegant language into a broken, alien chatter.

The man introduced himself as the Captain of the vessel, who was drifting to repair one of his engines. Then he smiled at Hesp and said, “Welcome on board!”

The greeting was unexpected, warming.

The Captain was alone, in command of a crew of machines that were shaped in his image.

Hesp wondered at the likeness of the machines, and how they both duplicated and transcended the strengths and weaknesses of the Captain himself. He was impressed. “All these devices that you use. Your race held on to the light for longer than any other that I know of.”

“We kept the carbon cycle ticking over as long as we could,” the Captain admitted, “by cannibalising other stars, but eventually … well, it’s just too cool now, even for that. I’m almost out of fuel myself, and once that’s gone there won’t be any more.”

The eerie, dull red light of the withering star by which the craft drifted, rocking gently in the wake of its perturbations, cast his face in an apocalyptic light.

Hesp watched it, and his eyes smouldered with a wistful longing.

They sat and talked for a while, as if they had known each other for years. Which shortly became very true.

“But how have
you
come to be drifting out here, all alone?” The Captain asked, tapping ash from a pipe through which fumed the product of an ordinary oxidation process.

Fascinated by this example of the Captain’s quaint lingering cultural affectations, Hesp smiled.

* * *

His world—how to describe his world … Beauty, truth, rain. A rain of light from two hot suns, and a sky that gushed thick clear glistening steams from the top of crisp reticulate mountains. His race was not a populous one, for they rarely reproduced—they saw little need for it.

They were, to all extents and purposes, immortal.

“You know,” the Captain offered, “we once thought the universe was also immortal, that there was such a thing as forever. Perhaps that’s true, but I’m not sure if infinite darkness counts as a future, if there is nothing sentient to experience it.”

“I find it interesting that you speak of the universe as if it were an entity, in such a way that implies a beginning.”

“It’s a habit my people once had.”

“You had an aversion to infinity?”

“More of a conceptual barrier, I’d say.”

“But
you
have crossed this.”

“Had to. Wouldn’t have got past lunch, otherwise.” The Captain picked at his fingernails. “This doesn’t mean to say that I had a preference for any one descriptive model of the universe over any other in the old days—but for what it’s worth, what I like to believe, as whimsy, is anything which makes me feel better. The seeker of scientific truth in me is aware there is a difference.”

“The seeker of scientific truth should be.”

“It
was
a very long experiment, after all.”

Hesp returned his gaze to the transparent arching hull of the craft, and the distant red twilight that embraced him.

“Ours was also long, but more biological in nature. It turned out we were not immortal, not really. There are none of us left now. No one but me.”

“Then there’s no chance—?”

“None.”

Hesp knew it beyond a doubt. He had watched them all die, in the end.

“Oh,” said the Captain, with sympathy and a glimmer of understanding. “I take it you did not part on the best of terms.”

“You could say that.”

* * *

He couldn’t recall the trial. A hundred thousand years of exile, and what he had missed most of the life from which he had been excluded had been the shimmering wet kiss of rain upon his upturned face.

Though, while he was away, he came to see things differently.

The rain, while beautiful, was only the weeping of a single world among the tears of millions upon hundreds of millions of worlds. Each and every one of these was distinct. And beyond
these
there was an otherness, stretching on and up and out, across other scales, other dimensions, an infinity unbound. Astounded, he saw with terrifying clarity the chaos of forever, and how he and all else must fade away to nothing within it. His entire universe was a cinder spat out of someone’s fireplace, left to cool in a huge arc through another atmosphere, the sky of a fractal world which was itself a cinder, or an asteroid, or a grain of sand.

Guilty as charged. Had he been? Like everything else, the actuality of it no longer mattered. He did not immediately return when his term was up, for he had come to believe in endings and knew himself done with everything that represented his beginning.

They sought him out all the same, for they also had changed—or rather, they had found change forced upon them.

In all that time—that time of abundant light when the universe shone like a beacon and burned,
burned
so magnificently that every grain of dust glowed with slightly shorter wavelengths than they did when his time of waiting was over—during all that time, when their crisis finally came, they had come to realise that
he
was the only one equipped by nature and experience to save them. They brought him back, contrite with offers of forgiveness. When he rebuffed them, they begged; at the point of destruction, they had realised too late that seeking to bend other worlds to their will was in fact no sin of arrogance, it was in reality a lifeline, the natural progression of a dominant species. Without another world to turn to, they were chained to the ending of their own.

His two stars met in a final embrace of momentary brilliance. He watched the flash illuminate worlds and his past and eventually cool into a backlit emerald arc of dust that stretched beyond the edge of the galaxy before it thinned away.

He kicked at the ashes, so to speak, and didn’t think about it again until the galaxies themselves began to freeze and fall apart.

* * *

The Captain sat silently, listening and continuing to tap his pipe against the arm of one of his biometallic companions, who smiled indulgently, as it had been programmed to. There had been in the past many more of these automated assistants, but though engineered to be economical and to some extent self-sustaining, the Captain found he was no longer able to fill their veins with the helium fuel they required.

“I tried adapting most of them to use good old fashioned lead-acid batteries,” the Captain explained. “Plenty of higher order elements available now. Unfortunately it takes more energy to make them than I get back, and all of the self-replicating sentient engineered creatures which metabolised as I do turned out not to live very long.” He sighed. “So much for someone to take care of me into my old age.”

Soon, the Captain would also be alone.

* * *

Eventually, Hesp asked the Captain why he was also living out here at the edge of time.

The Captain hesitated before he answered, for the similarities of their circumstances had already begun to intrigue him. “I too had a … slight misunderstanding, as it were, with my own people.”

“I see.”

“You understand my race survived far longer than it ever expected to. The greatest handicap of my people, a resentment of change, was also perversely the reason for their success. As far as they could, they warped the universe to suit their needs.”

“And this did not suit you?”

“Oh, it suited me very well. But I wanted to go further … With my ship, my bioenhancements, and my unconventional methods of exploration and experimentation.”

“I must say, I am curious.”

The Captain smiled. “Compared to your unique abilities, my desire to slingshot one star inside of another to test an astrophysical theory—that one solar core can exist inside another—seems fairly insignificant.”

“Oh! I’ve seen that happen—an extremely rare event. So you actually set it up, and got it to work? I’m impressed!”

The Captain was deeply touched by the endorsement.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “the first star I tried it out on was my own—just a matter of logistics, you know. Cut its lifespan by a good four billion years, and took out a few inner planets at the same time. That didn’t go down at all well.”

They spent a great deal of time in reflections, experiencing the rich shared joy of different moods: happiness, sadness, anger and hope. As they did so, the light of a thousand dying galaxies blinked out as the universe carried them away, a million deep red metal suns setting over an unseen, immeasurable horizon.

Soon the phenomenal engine of the craft was ready for the Captain to resume his final experiment, to ride the wave of expanding space and perhaps—if he was very lucky—get ahead of it.

“The two most common elements in the universe were once said to be hydrogen and stupidity,” the Captain mused, clearing his throat of emotion, for instinctively he knew that his new friend would not be able to go with him to the end of forever. “You and I might be able to prove the continued existence of the latter, but now I can count on one hand the number of hydrogen atoms my sensors detect in every hundred cubic parsecs of space. An iron universe is too cold, and is hard to make jokes out of.”

“There is no opportunity for a rebirth,” Hesp sighed, “in such a universe.”

“Perhaps though … an endless oscillation, back and forward across a mirror boundary at intervals of roughly fifty or sixty billion of your years. Perhaps … Do you believe in ghosts?”

“Too many follow at my heels, how could I not?”

“I mean, if enough energy slips through, is stored in, or bounces back from, somewhere else within this infinite chain of scales and dimensions—if the quantum balance tips once again in our favour …”

The clanging echo of collisions sounded from the hull as the gentle motion of the ship, accelerating relative to the torrential expansion of space itself, nudged aside small pieces of rock, the dark, unseen debris of an almost frozen universe. Even these small movements would, in perhaps a few thousand million years, slow to an end. They both knew only too well that the cosmos was cooling on all scales, the energy consumed in the inexorable expansion, with nothing left over for the random, the unexpected.

“I’ve had little success with optimism,” Hesp remarked. “Does it work for you?”

“Besides a futile attempt to preserve my sanity? I’m not sure. Just something I do, I guess,” the Captain replied, with a slight shrug. “And now I must be off, in search of my horizon. I may see you in a few hundred million years or so. Please don’t wait up.”

Hesp surprised himself—he was reluctant to return to his own course and let the Captain go.

There was something missing. Why was their mental contact, their verbal communication (such as it was through the ancient but effective technology of the translator) not enough?

He asked the Captain if he could touch him.

The Captain considered this carefully. He had guessed, perhaps, the real nature of his friend, and how through actual physical contact they might annihilate each other and a large section of the space around them.

Then the Captain smiled. “You only live once,” he said, and he grinned, extending his hand. “Shake?”

Hesp blinked. “What?”

“Sorry. Old expression.”

Hesp formed an appendage. There followed a touch; a warmth of pressure and a faint tingling that was unique in the universe.

“Who
are
you?” the Captain asked, curious. “Have we met before?”

Hesp shrugged (as far as he could replicate the gesture of the Captain’s shoulders), but could give no answer. It was an almost infinite universe (at least, it was now). He couldn’t see why not.

“I really have to go now,” the Captain told him, and his voice was heavy with reluctance, with the inevitable. “I don’t think we’ll meet again.”

“No.”

“Inertia might bring me back, someday, if it’s still warm enough. Or what’s left of me. You’ll still be around, I guess.”

“I think so.”

“Ah well, I’m glad. Leave a light on for me, will you?”

* * *

The memory brought a smile to his face. That had been—when? Thousands of millions of the units Hesp had once measured by the rotational dance of his own two suns. The Captain had sent messages from time to time, but there had been nothing now for so long …

Silence on all wavelengths, as the universe itself gasped for breath.

The silence frightened him. He had never been bothered by it much before. Perhaps it was because he had seen himself too clearly in the cosmic mirror of the Captain’s face.

There must have been a crack somewhere, a hairline fracture in the brittle sheen of reality. Everything
should
have reflected perfectly, reflected back upon itself, safely contained in the hemisphere of the schizophrenic universal brain in which it belonged.

Hesp did not believe in quantum ghosts. Only in the real and the real, black and white, light and dark, and yet … here he was.

Before the absolute death of heat claimed him, before the death of all relevance, of information and the end of all consciousness and energy, while he could, he had to
do
something.

* * *

Leave a light on.

* * *

Even by his standards, the nebula had taken a long time to build. For materials, he had scoured millions upon millions of light years of space that were moving apart at almost relativistic speeds; it took him longer and longer to make it back each time and each time he returned the place he left was so much darker than it had been before. Eventually his masterpiece took shape; a giant superstructure of cold-forged iron, with the rare and precious hydrogen anchored about it. When he finally thought he had enough, the last wavelengths of light within the distant realm of perception were stretching beyond even his ability to sense them, deep red to black.