The merged Multiplicity convulsed. I felt twisted about – stretched and battered – as if the great River of causality which bore me had grown turbulent and hostile.
Nebogipfel? …
His voice was joyful – exultant. It is the Constructors! The Constructors …
The buffeting faded. The green glow fell away, leaving me immersed again in the grey-white of that moment of Creation. Then a new, plain white light emerged, but that persisted for only a moment; and then I watched as energy and matter condensed like dew out of a new unravelling of Space and Time.
I was travelling forward in time once more, away from the Boundary. I had been pitched into a new History, unfolding out of the Nucleation. The universal glare remained brilliant, surely still many orders of magnitude brighter than the centre of the sun.
The Time Ships no longer accompanied me – perhaps their physical forms had been unable to survive that journey through the Nucleation – and the Plattnerite netting around me had gone. But I was not alone; all about me – like snowflakes caught in a flash-lamp’s burst – were speckles of Plattnerite-green light, which bobbed and drifted about each other. These were the elemental consciousness of the Constructors, I knew, and I wondered if Nebogipfel was among this disembodied host, and indeed if I, too, appeared to the rest as a dancing point.
Had my journey through time been reversed? Was I to swim up the streams of History, to my own era once more?
… Nebogipfel? Can you still hear me?
I am here.
What is happening? Are we travelling through time again?
No, he said. Still he had that note of exultation – of triumph – in his disembodied voice.
Then what? What is happening to us?
Do you not see? Could you not understand? We passed beyond the Nucleation. We reached the Boundary. And –
Yes?
Think of the Multiplicity as a surface, he said. The totality of the Multiplicity is smooth, closed, featureless – a globe. And Histories are like lines of longitude, drawn between the poles of the sphere …
And, in the Time Ships, we reached one pole.
Yes. That point where all the longitude lines converge. And, in that precise instant of infinite possibility, the Constructors fired their Nonlinearity Engines …
The Constructors have travelled across the Histories, he said. They – and we – have followed paths of Imaginary Time, paths scrawled sideways across the surface of the Multiplicity globe, until we have reached this new History …
Now the cloud of Constructors – there were millions of them, I thought – drifted apart, like fragments of a child’s firework. It was as if they were trying to fill up the infant vacuum with the light and awareness we had brought from a different cosmos. And as the new universe unravelled, the afterglow of Creation faded to an immense darkness.
It was the end-result – the logical conclusion – of my own dabbling with the properties of light, and the distortion of the frames of Space and Time that went with it. All of this, I realized, even the collapsing of the universe and this great progression across Histories – all of it had come about, growing inevitably, from my experiments, from my first, dear machine of brass and quartz …
It had led to this: the passage of mind between universes.
But where have we come to? What is this History? Is it like ours?
No, Nebogipfel said. No, it is not like ours.
Will we be able to live here?
I do not know … it was not chosen for us. Remember that the Constructors have sought, he said, a universe – out of all the infinite sheaf of possibilities that is the Multiplicity – a universe which is optimal for them.
Yes. But what can ‘optimal’ mean for a Constructor? I conjured up vague images of Heaven – of peace, security, beauty, light – but I knew these imaginings were hopelessly anthropomorphic.
Now I saw a new light emerging, from the darkness all around us. At first I thought it was the returned glow of that fireball at the beginning of time – but it was too gentle, too insistent, for that; it was more like star-light …
The Constructors are not men, the Morlock said. But they are the Heirs of Humanity. And the audacity of what they have accomplished is astonishing.
Nebogipfel said, Among all the myriad possibilities, the Constructors have sought out that universe – the single one – which is Infinite in extent, and Eternal in age: where that Boundary at the Beginning of Time has been pushed into the infinite past.
We have travelled beyond the Nucleation, to the Boundary of Time and Space themselves. And ape-fingers have reached out to the Singularity that lies there – and pushed it back!
Star-light, now, was erupting from beneath the darkness, all around me; the stars were igniting everywhere; and soon the sky blazed, as bright everywhere as the surface of the sun.