Otherness (33 page)

Soon, after only a few thousand years, it was time to decelerate, or she would simply streak past the center, with no time even to contemplate the bottom, the navel of creation.

Serena used much of her reserve killing the last of her velocity, relative to the bubble of galaxies. All around her the red shifts were the same, constant. All the galaxies seemed to recede away at the same rate.

So. Here I am
.

She coasted, and realized that she had just completed the last task of any relevance she could ever aspire to. There were no more options. No other deeds that could be done.

"Hello?"

Irritably, Serena wiped her conversation banks, clearing away the subpersonae that had helped her while away the last few centuries. She did not want those little artificial voices disturbing her as she contemplated the manner of bringing about her own end.

I wonder how big a flash I'll make
, she thought.
Is it even remotely possible that anyone back in the inhabited universe might see it, even if they were looking this way with the best instruments
?

She caressed the fields in her engines, and knew she had the will to do what must be done.

"Hello? Has somebody come?"

Serena sent angry surges through her lingula systems.
Stop it
.

Suicide would come none too soon.
I must be going crazy
, she subvocalized, and some of her agony slipped out into space around her.

"Yes, many feel that way when they arrive here."

Quakes of surprise made Serena tremble. The voice had come from outside!

"Who . . . who are you?" she gasped.

"I am the one who waits, the one who collects and greets,"
the voice replied. And then, after some hesitation:

"I am the coward."

Joy sparkled and burst from Serena. She shouted, though the only one in the universe to hear her was near enough to touch. She cried aloud.

"There is a
way
!"

The coward was larger than Serena. He drifted nearby, looking like nothing so much as a great assemblage of junk from every and any civilization imaginable. He had already explained that the bits and pieces had been contributed by countless stranded entities before her. By now he was approaching the mass of a small star and had to hold the pieces apart with webs of frozen field lines.

The coward seemed disturbed by Serena's enthusiasm.

"But I've already explained to you, it
isn't
a way! It is death!"

Serena could not make clear to the thing that she had already been ready to die. "That remains to be seen. All I know is that you have told me there is a way out of this place, and that many have arrived here before me and taken that route away from here."

"I tell you it is a funnel into hell!"

"So a black hole seems, to planet-dwellers, but we Grand Voyageurs dive into them and traverse the tortured lanes of Kaluza space—"

"And I have told you that this is not a black hole! And what lies within this opening is not Kaluza space, but a door into madness and destruction!"

Serena found that she pitied the poor thing. She could not imagine choosing, as it obviously had, to sit here at the center of nothingness for all eternity, an eternity broken every few million years by the arrival of one more stranded voyager. Apparently every one of Serena's predecessors had ignored the poor thing's advice, given him what they had to spare, and then eagerly taken that escape offered, no matter how hazardous.

"Show it to me, please," she asked politely.

The coward sighed and turned to lead the way.

It has long been hypothesized that there was more than one episode of creation.

The discovery that the universe of galaxies is distributed like soap bubbles, each expanding from its own center, was the great confirmation that the Big Bang, at least, had not been undivided.

But the ideas went beyond that.

What if
, they had wondered, even in ancient days,
what if there are other universes altogether
?

She and Coward traded data files while they moved leisurely toward the hole at the very center of All. Serena was in no hurry, now that she had a destination again. She savored the vast store of knowledge Coward had accumulated.

Her own Grand Voyageurs were not the first, it seemed, to have cruised the great wormholes between the galaxies. There were others, some greater, who had nevertheless found themselves for whatever reason shipwrecked here at the base of everything.

And all of them, no doubt, had contemplated the dizzying emptiness that lay before them now.

A steady stream of very strange particles emanated from a twisted shapelessness. Rarities, such as magnetic monopoles, swept past Serena more thickly than she ever would have imagined possible. Here they were more common than
atoms
.

"As I said, it leads to another place, a place where the fundamentals of our universe do not hold. We can tell very little from this side, only that,
charge, mass, gravity
,
all have different meanings there. Tell me, then, what hope does a creature of our universe have of surviving there? Will your circuits conduct? Will your junctions quantum-jump properly? Will your laser drives even function if electrons aren't allowed to occupy the same energy state?"

For a moment the coward's fear infected Serena. The closer she approached, the more eerie and dangerous this undertaking seemed.

"And nobody has ever come back out again," the coward whispered.

Serena shook herself out of her funk. Her situation remained the same. If this was nothing more than yet another way to suicide, at least it had the advantage of being interesting.

And who knows? Many of my predecessors were wiser than I, and they all chose this path, as well
.

"I thank you for your friendship," she told the coward. "I give you all of this spare mass, from my cargo, as a token of affection."

Resignedly, the coward sent drone ships to pick up the baggage Serena shed. They cruised away into the blackness.

"What you see is only a small fraction of what I have accumulated,"
he explained.

"How much?"

He gave her a number, and for a long moment there was only silence between them. Then the coward went on.

"And lately you castaways have been growing more and more common. I have hope that soon someone shall arrive who will leave me more than fragments."

Serena pulsed to widen the gap between them. She began to feel a soft tug—something wholly unlike gravity, or any other force she had ever known.

"I wish you well," she said.

The coward, too, began to back away. The other's voice was chastened, somber.
"So many others seem to find me pitiable, because I wait here, because I am not adventuresome."

"I do believe you will find your own destiny," she told him. She dared not say what she really thought, so she kept her words vague. "You will find greatness that surpasses that of even those much more bold in spirit," she predicted.

Then, before the stunned ancient thing could reply, she turned and accelerated toward her destiny.

On planets, they say, water always runs downhill
. . . .

From the bottom, from as low as one could go in all the universe, Serena plunged downward into another place. Her shields thickened and her drives flexed. As ready as she would ever be, she dived into the strangeness ahead.

She thought about the irony of it all.

He calls himself Coward
. . ., she contemplated, and knew that it was unfair.

She, and all of those who had plunged this way, blindly into the unknowable, were the real cowards in a way. Oh, she could only speak for herself, but she guessed that their greatest motive was fear, fear of the long loneliness, the empty aeons without anything to
do
.

And all the while Coward accumulated mass: bits of space junk . . . debris cast out from Kaluza space . . . cargo jettisoned or donated by castaways who, like her, were only passing through. . . .

He had told Serena how much mass. And then he had told her that the rate of accumulation was slowly growing over the long epochs.

And with the mass, he accumulates knowledge
. For Serena had opened her libraries to him, and found them absorbed more quickly than she would ever have thought possible. The same thing must have happened countless times before.

Already space had warped beyond recognition around her. Serena looked back and out at all the galaxies, distant motes of light now smeared into swirls of lambent glow.

Astronomers of every civilization puzzle over the question of the missing mass
, Serena thought.

Calculations showed that there had to be more mass than could be counted by measuring the galaxies, and what could be detected of the gases in between. Even cosmic rays and neutrinos could not account for it. Half of the matter was simply missing.

Coward had told her. He was accumulating it. Here and there. Dark patches, clots, stuffed in field-stabilized clusters, scattered around the vast emptiness of the center of the great galactic bubble.

Perhaps I should have stayed and talked with him some more
, Serena thought as the smeared light melded into a golden glory.

She might have told him. She might have said it. But with all of his brainpower, no doubt he had figured it out long ago and chose to hide the knowledge away from himself.

All that mass
.

Someday the galaxies would die. No new stars would be born. The glow would fade. Life—even life crafted out of baryonic machines—would glimmer and go out.

But the recession of the dead whirlpools would slow. It would stop, reverse, and fall again, toward the great gravitational pull at the center of each bubble. And there universes would be born anew.

Serena saw the last glimmer of galactic light twinkle and disappear. She knew the real reason why she had chosen to take this gamble, to dive into this tunnel to an alien realm.

It was one thing to flee loneliness.

It was quite another thing to flee one who would be God.

No wonder all the others had made the same choice.

The walls of the tunnel converged. She plunged ahead. All around her was strangeness.

Since the days of Olaf Stapledon, science fiction has been attracted to cosmic themes. The three stories in this section are about the shape, nature, and fate of the universe . . . or universes . . . reflecting recent concepts that would have been thought scientifically absurd only a decade ago. The great spacial voids depicted in "Bubbles" have lately amazed and stymied astronomers, sending theoreticians hurrying back to their models and blackboards to explain why vast reaches of intergalactic space appear to be empty of visible matter. This discovery has lent
texture
to the universe, on a scale so huge as to beggar the imagination. Few SF stories have been written to encompass superclusters of galaxies (most find
one
galaxy more than enough!). I, too, would have shied away, except for one thing—I'm a sucker for a dare. When Byron Preiss was collecting stories for his science-art-and-fiction book,
Universe
, he could find authors willing to write stories about stars, planets, asteroids, galaxies . . . almost anything except the empty spaces which appear to take up the vastly greatest part of the cosmos. Finally, Byron called me up and made it a challenge. Did I have the guts to take the subject on?

What else could I do?

"Bubbles" is one of three tales in this section revolving around the idea of separate realities beyond our own.

The second story, "Ambiguity," first appeared as a lagniappe to my novel
Earth
, and conveys my humble artist's rendering of a notion Cambridge University physicist Stephen Hawking and others have been laboring on . . . that of "baby" universes.

The final story takes even that extravagant idea one step further. In
Earth
I discuss the Gaia Hypothesis of Professors Lovelock and Margulis, which speculates that the planet itself—its oceans and air and ecosystems—might be viewed as a
living thing
. Debate still rages as to whether this is good science or anthropomorphizing gone berserk. But Professor Lee Smolin of Syracuse University took the Gaia idea and expanded it dramatically, with stunning implications that inspired my story, "What Continues . . . and What Fails . . ."

I only wish I had thought of it first.

Back when he was still a student, Stan Goldman and his friends used to play a game of make-believe.

"How long do you think it would take Isaac Newton to solve this homework set?" they would ask each other. Or, "If Einstein were alive today, do you think he'd bother with graduate school?"

It was the same sort of lazy, get-nowhere argument he also heard his musician friends debate on occasion: "What d'you figure Mozart would make of our stuff," they'd pose over bottles of beer, "if we snatched him from his own time to the 1990's? Would he freak out and call it damn noise? Or would he catch on, wear mirror shades, and cut an album right away?"

At that point, Stan used to cut in. "Which Mozart do you mean? The arriviste social climber? The craftsman of the biographies? Or the brash rebel of
Amadeus
?"

The composers and players seemed puzzled by his non sequitur. "Why, the real one, of course." Their reply convinced him that, for all their closeness, for all their well-known affinity, physicists and musicians would never fully understand each other.

Oh, I see. The real one . . . of course
. . .

But what is reality
?

Through a thick portal of fused quartz, mediated by a series of three hundred field-reinforced half mirrors, Stan now watched the essence of nothingness. Suspended in a sealed vacuum, a
potential
singularity spun and danced in nonexistence.