Everybody turned to see, evidently shocked.
Having made its statement – and Salma could see no speaker grille, could not see how it spoke – the floating sphere, Terminus, just waited. Floating at a little over head height, with no visible support against the planet’s gravity, though that seemed a minor miracle by comparison.
What did seem extraordinary was that Salma felt no fear of this thing. Or awe. And neither, as far as she could tell, did the others.
‘This feels right,’ she blurted out. ‘That we should meet this – thing. As if I knew we would see this, before we even arrived here. I mean, us – Feathers and the four of us.’
‘Yes. This seems right,’ Doria echoed. ‘It feels right.’ She seemed to have to tear her gaze away from the floating sphere, from Terminus, to the others. ‘Right, again. Like when the group of us got selected as the landing party. That felt right too. Do you feel the same? I mean, the four of us with these damn pendants …’ She touched her chest, and Salma wondered if she was feeling the pendant at her neck, under her pressure suit, that handsome disc of lunar obsidian.
Meriel glanced around, apparently shocked. ‘Yes, the pendants … For me and Salma, gifts from her mother – tokens of Earth.’
Vasta nodded. ‘And I always carry that heavy black pendant with me … A pearl, in fact. It’s an heirloom. Seemed right to have it.’ She looked at Feathers. ‘Now I see these are all stones are deep black, like Feathers’ own eyes.’
Salma was baffled. ‘But we only met so recently. How could we all have these pendants already, like tags from the future? … It makes no sense.’
Doria grunted. ‘A spooky kind of sense, maybe. But not the kind we’re used to, I don’t think. Not simple cause and effect. Like the quasar kicking off twenty-five thousand years before its light was supposed to reach Earth.’
Vasta said, ‘Yes, maybe it was like a – a forward memory. We were given the pendants because we’re wearing them now, together.’ She laughed, uneasily. ‘We were meant to be here, now. Because we are here, now. And it feels right, doesn’t it? And here we are talking about pendants, while – that – is watching us.’
She turned to the featureless sphere, which hovered, still, silent, seemingly infinitely patient.
Vasta snapped, ‘You. Terminus. You say that is the name we will give you. Or have given you. Cause and effect mixed up again … That is the only thing you have told us. Your name. Why that name?’
The voice in their heads sounded softly. The name, Terminus, has deep roots in your cultures …
Salma listened hard – concentrating more now that the initial shock of contact was past. To her the accent seemed a mix of the various brogues spoken aboard the Shadow, the few human voices to which she had been exposed all her life – aside from sporadic communications from the rest of the Solar System, and with strangers in the last few weeks since the arrival of the Cronus. Maybe the others had the same kind of subjective mix rattling in their heads – maybe that voice sounded subtly different to each of them. She ought to remember to ask …
She couldn’t even tell the gender. It might have been more a male human voice than female, but it was hard to determine.
She tried to focus on what was being said.
‘Deep roots in our cultures,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Well, that’s true.
‘Terminus was a god of the Romans. I know that much; I studied classics as part of my political education. I learned about the rise and fall of empires before ours … Also I wear a smart pressure suit, which is now reminding me that Terminus was a “liminal deity”. A god of the edges, a protector of boundaries.’ She glanced around, an uncertain smile behind her faceplate. ‘I’m gabbling. Gabbling because I’m nervous. Does it show?’
Doria shook her head. ‘You’re making sense – as much sense as there is to be had in this bizarre situation—’
Meriel held up her hand. ‘With respect – you’re all talking too much. Let the damn thing speak.’
Vasta nodded. ‘Quite right. Well, then – Terminus!’ She faced the hovering sphere. ‘Why that name? Why are you here? What do you want?’
I speak of change. I intend no threat. Change is inevitable but not necessarily a threat. I bring – hope. From across the boundary of your understanding, perhaps.
Vasta glared. ‘So how do you know about Terminus, the name, the god?’
You just told me about it.
Doria frowned, shook her head sharply, as if trying to clear it. ‘Wow. There you go again. Another closed causal loop. Like the pendants. It is because it is because it is because …’
Not quite. Your terminology is inexact. In fact, you have no exact terminology for these phenomena. I do not dwell in closed causal loops in any one universe. I inhabit many universes. I can cross many universes. Back and forth. I and my … cousins …
Salma was getting lost. We wear the pendants because we wear the pendants because we wear the pendants … But even so—
‘Many universes … What does that even mean?’ She glanced across at Feathers, who seemed to be listening intently. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You and me both, kid,’ said Doria, evidently trying to keep Salma’s spirits up. ‘This is well above the pay grade of a lunar rock jockey.’
And Meriel reached out with one gloved hand to take Salma’s. ‘It’s difficult for all of us.’
Vasta said wearily, ‘Imagine trying to explain it to politicians. Which is what I’ll have to do some day …
‘Many universes. Look. Here’s an analogy. Imagine a flat sheet – a blanket, a huge piece of paper. Going on for ever. That would be infinite, wouldn’t it?’
‘Yes …’ Salma conceded cautiously.
‘OK. And now imagine a whole lot more such sheets, but piled on top of the first one. Even though each one is infinite, there can be many of them. Many infinities. Just – stacked sideways, so they don’t get in each other’s way …’ Vasta stared at Terminus even as she spoke about this.
‘Nice metaphor,’ said Doria. ‘Even I can get it. That’s how you get to be a presidential science adviser, I guess.’
‘I guess,’ Vasta said heavily, still watching Terminus. ‘So, Salma, if you had all those sheets stacked up, and if you were some kind of worm that could crawl along inside one of the sheets – and then you chewed your way through to go up or down, where the sheets touched, you could cross from one universe to another. Why, there may be some regions of another universe that could be closer, in terms of accessibility, than regions of our own.
‘Actually I think you could say that the idea of a multiverse is at the heart of our best theories of reality. We think that there is a sort of higher-dimensional substrate, a high-energy quantum foam, straddling all of reality. A foam which can spawn an infinite number of different universes – universes like our own. Or different. Like pages in an unending book. Or, bubbles in an infinite froth.
‘Our universe was just one more bubble in that froth, which expanded into the big, fat, old, complicated, expanding universe we all grew up in. Just one more bubble.
‘We even have some evidence for this. That our origin is a multiverse, I mean. There’s a big cold spot in the constellation of Eridanus, as seen from Earth, a spot as wide as five full moons in the sky – eight times the usual temperature variation. That’s one hell of an anomaly, isn’t it? And our best theory is that our universe jostled against another in some higher-dimensional crowd as they grew—’
‘Like rowdy teenagers,’ Doria said. ‘Always knocking lumps off each other.’
Terminus spoke now. You have seen other evidence now. Evidence of the existence of the multiverse. You have seen evidence of contacts between universes …
Meriel frowned. ‘The multiverse? Contacts? Like Nine, which we thought was a black hole …?’
Vasta said, ‘At the fringe of our physics, there are ideas like this. I boned up on it all during the long Cronus flight – and picked some brains.’ She smiled at Salma. ‘You might like to know your mentor Stephen Hawking, he of the black hole radiation, developed ideas on these lines. He imagined an – ecology – of universes, several emerging from one, perhaps continually complexifying. And not just complexifying in its contents, its structure, but in the intricacy of its physical laws. Which could, possibly, retrospectively adjust the Big Bang the universe emerged from, so that those laws, in a sense, made themselves … Something like that. And then there were theories that some black holes could survive the death of one universe, to survive through another Big Bang – thus providing travel portals, perhaps …’ She glared at Terminus. ‘I think all this makes sense, in terms of our own fringe physics. But it’s going to take generations of real physicists, not bluffers like me, to untangle it all.’
Terminus said, You have been confronted with the existence of the creature you call Feathers.
‘Yes,’ Meriel said. ‘Yes! Which was some kind of proof of all that. So we were on the right track, weren’t we? We talked about this, Salma. Your little friend … Remember how we speculated about how unlikely it was that two planets could produce humanoid-shaped species, as similar as, well, you and Feathers? How our universe isn’t big enough, or old enough, to have done that with any reasonable probability? So she had to have come from someplace else. Some universe elsewhere. Bigger, or older, than ours – or both maybe.’
Vasta said, ‘And now, standing here, you don’t need an exercise in probabilistic mathematics to get the idea. Look around you. This planet, too old for our universe, remember?’ She gestured at the sky. ‘And that galaxy core up there – that’s too young, right? There hasn’t been a feature like that in our universe since it was half a billion years old. Compared to thirteen billion years today.’
You are correct. This place is artificial. It has been assembled as an intersection of three time zones: your own epoch, the very early days of your cosmos—
‘This active galaxy core,’ Vasta said.
And its very late days.
‘Yes, yes. This ancient, dead planet, brought from the far future.’ She glared at Terminus. ‘I don’t know whether all this gaudy display is meant to uplift us, or crush us into some kind of submission.’
Neither, said Terminus calmly. I have come here, I show you this, to save you.
Vasta glared at it. ‘To save us from what?’
From the inevitable extinction of your own universe, and all life within it.