Authors: Adam Roberts
—
Your observations are entirely compromised by the thing they are observing! What you see as a huge, distant structure is actually a tiny mote of dust upon the lens of your telescope. Dark energy is your own unique contribution to the universe
.
Ange went through, got herself some food. She held it in front of her helmet for a while, and pondered how to get it in her mouth. She could certainly hold her breath long enough to get the helmet off, and the food in, but there was always a risk that she would fumble her grip, and have to scrabble around to get the helmet back on. Was it a risk worth taking? She would be dead soon, but had no desire to die sooner than absolutely necessary. On the other hand, she
was
hungry.
—
For a while I couldn’t believe it. I sought out another, and s/he didn’t believe it either. The distortion certainly
looked
like consciousness; but how could there
be
so much of that in one tiny place! And what would happen if we went there—would it destroy our own minds? We debated it for a long time. A third joined us. Finally we decided to come. Approaching, we encroached upon the limit of your telecommunications, and were able to see your self-imaging. It was a shock. So profligate with thought, so promiscuous with consciousness! In an individual body cells die and are born all the time, but they’re just cells, they’re nothing more. But
you!
You treat the vast significance of individual consciousness as the most common thing in the universe! You are breathtakingly cavalier with individual life—and and and yet, then again, why
wouldn’t
you be? New life is being born all the time on your world. Oh, insane profusion! It explains the uniquely
turbulent
nature of the concentration of this force; the raging furnace, consciousness being continually snuffed out, but continually replaced and more than replaced. It’s like looking into a solar maelstrom ... and yet you live in it, as calmly as a flower in the dirt!
—Hard to believe.
—
You said it!
It keeps powering up, growing and growing, this concentration of the most powerful force in the cosmos. We came, we three, in part to see if there was anything we could
do
about it.
—And is there?
—
It has destroyed my two companions.
—Oh, said Ange, surprised. I’m sorry.
—
We were giddy. We were intoxicated by the glory and seediness and splendour of it all. When they died I took my craft away, but my own consciousness has been ... poisoned, I suppose you might say ... as well. So I have come back. I might as well expire here as anywhere. Here at the heart of the cosmos.
The next question occurred to Ange only very belatedly: can you help me? I’ve suffered a series of malfunctions and don’t have enough air.
—
I know. I cannot help you. I’m sorry.
—Oh, said Ange. Then: ah well.
—
I have a question, though
.
—Shoot.
—
The shape of the cosmos is big bang, rapid expansion and then final contraction and crunch. The rise of your ... multiform species has overwhelmed that natural rhythm. So I suppose I want to ask: how can you not see it? But immersing myself in your communications and culture, I suppose I see the answer to that. The universe has renewed itself, systole and diastole, innumerable times; but your rise has interrupted that. Unless you do something it will all end in entropy. Can you bear the thought? Won’t you do something about that?
—You’re asking the wrong woman, said Ange, putting the food away in one of her suit pockets. I’ve got three days left, max.
—
It’s not a very well-formed question, I suppose,
said the alien, mournfully.
He, she, it—didn’t speak again.
***
Ange took the plunge, more out of boredom than hunger. Deep breath, pop up the helmet, morsel in mouth, helmet down again. Then she checked through the ship. She even managed to sleep—a nap, at any rate.
The next thing that happened was the arrival of a military sloop, the
Glory of Carthage
, burning its candle-end fierce in the night to decelerate after a high-g insertion. Ange was relieved and grateful to be rescued, of course; although they hadn’t come for her. The Cygnic craft had popped up on ten thousand sensor screens, and the
Glory of Carthage
had been the nearest. Of course they had rushed to that location: the Oort cloud was forbiddingly distant, but the space between Mars and Earth was thronged with craft of every kind.
They arrived too late: the Cygnic had gone, vanished, dead presumably, and he, she, its craft had vanished. So they took Ange on board and interviewed her and debriefed her and took her conversation with last Cygnic very seriously indeed. But that didn’t mean they were able to answer the alien’s last question. Still: centre of the cosmos, after all! That’s something, isn’t it? Poor old Copernicus, thought Ange, drifting to sleep finally. Wrong after all.
She was alive, despite everything. Her flight home began with a 3g acceleration burst (the sort of thing only the military could provide), followed by some fraternising with the physically attractive crew. The flush of near death and survival touched even Ange’s distant soul. And in her new eminence, the only homo sapiens sapiens to have talked directly with the Cygnics, she found herself the focus of a great deal of attention. In this, without a murmur, she indulged herself; and broke her years-long period of celibacy with the crewman who appealed the most to her. She was not too old. It wasn’t too late for her, she told herself, to return home and give birth to a new civilisation, entire.