scrubbers.
On the seventh day the ghosts of the last stars, mere infra-red traces, faded out one by one. The cosmic expansion, having long ago separated galaxies from each other, now plunged its hands deep into stellar neighbourhoods. There came a point when the remnant of the sun was left isolated within its cosmological horizon: the sun, alone in its own universe.
And as the day wore on, even the diamond sun began to break up.
Junge had a set of particle detectors mounted on the hull of the Bathyscaphe. He passed their signals through a speaker, and we heard soft pings from the cosmic dark.
‘Protons,’ Elstead breathed. ‘The decay of protons into their constituent quarks – on the very longest of terms, even solid matter is unstable. Another theory vindicated! They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for this.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘That all depends, Susie. On what we find tomorrow.’
None of us went to bed that night. We brought blankets from the cabins and sat in our couches, side by side, the only light in the universe shining on our faces. Nobody slept, I don’t think. Yet nobody had the nerve to suggest that we shut off the softscreens and exclude that terrible, unending night. I watched the clock. There wasn’t anything else to do.
At last, the eighth day began.
At the time we understood nothing of what happened to us. Later we reconstructed it as best we could.
We stayed together that night because we thought we were alone in the universe. We were wrong. Humans had never been alone.
From a hundred centres, life and mind spread across the face of the Galaxy. Gaudy empires sprawled; hideous wars were fought; glittering civilisations rose and fell. Yet what survived each fire was stronger than what had gone before.
Humanity, born early, did not survive to participate in this adventure. But the wreckage of Earth was discovered; humans were remembered.
Then came the collision with Andromeda, a ship of stars carrying its own freight of history and civilisation. The vast disruption inflicted deep wounds on two galactic cultures – wounds made worse by the wars of the dark days that followed.
Yet out of these conflicts came a new mixing. Minds rose up from the swarming stars like birds from a shaken tree, and then flocked into a culture stronger and more brilliant than those which had preceded it – but a more sober one.
In the long ages that followed, civilisation turned from conquest to consolidation, from acquisition to preservation. Vast libraries were constructed, and knowledge was guarded fiercely.
But the universe wound down.
As the galaxy evaporated, its unified culture disintegrated into fiefdoms. Worse, as the stars receded from each other, the universe shed its complexity, and it became impossible for the ancient catalogues to be maintained. Information was lost, whole histories deleted.
Nobody even noticed when the last traces of humanity were expunged.
The last cultures pooled resources and eventually identities, so that, within the cosmological horizon of the sun, in the end there was only a single consciousness, a single point of awareness, hoarding a meagre store of memory.
And still the universe congealed. Elstead’s final cosmological discovery was that there could be no relief from the relentless expansion. The proton decay reduced all matter to a cloud of photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos – and at last the cosmic expansion would draw apart even these remnants. In the end, each particle would be alone within its own cosmological horizon. And at that point, when no complexity of any kind was possible, consciousness would cease at last.
Think of it! There you lie, the last solar mind, trapped in spacetime like a human immersed in thickening ice. Dimly you remember what you once were, how you cupped stars in your hands. Now you can barely move. And the constant expansion of the universe bit by bit shreds your memories, your very identity, a process that
On the seventh day the ghosts of the last stars, mere infra-red traces, faded out one by one. The cosmic expansion, having long ago separated galaxies from each other, now plunged its hands deep into stellar neighbourhoods. There came a point when the remnant of the sun was left isolated within its cosmological horizon: the sun, alone in its own universe.
And as the day wore on, even the diamond sun began to break up.
Junge had a set of particle detectors mounted on the hull of the Bathyscaphe. He passed their signals through a speaker, and we heard soft pings from the cosmic dark.
‘Protons,’ Elstead breathed. ‘The decay of protons into their constituent quarks – on the very longest of terms, even solid matter is unstable. Another theory vindicated! They ought to give me the Nobel Prize for this.’
‘So what happens now?’
‘That all depends, Susie. On what we find tomorrow.’
None of us went to bed that night. We brought blankets from the cabins and sat in our couches, side by side, the only light in the universe shining on our faces. Nobody slept, I don’t think. Yet nobody had the nerve to suggest that we shut off the softscreens and exclude that terrible, unending night. I watched the clock. There wasn’t anything else to do.
At last, the eighth day began.
At the time we understood nothing of what happened to us. Later we reconstructed it as best we could.
We stayed together that night because we thought we were alone in the universe. We were wrong. Humans had never been alone.
From a hundred centres, life and mind spread across the face of the Galaxy. Gaudy empires sprawled; hideous wars were fought; glittering civilisations rose and fell. Yet what survived each fire was stronger than what had gone before.
Humanity, born early, did not survive to participate in this adventure. But the wreckage of Earth was discovered; humans were remembered.
Then came the collision with Andromeda, a ship of stars carrying its own freight of history and civilisation. The vast disruption inflicted deep wounds on two galactic cultures – wounds made worse by the wars of the dark days that followed.
Yet out of these conflicts came a new mixing. Minds rose up from the swarming stars like birds from a shaken tree, and then flocked into a culture stronger and more brilliant than those which had preceded it – but a more sober one.
In the long ages that followed, civilisation turned from conquest to consolidation, from acquisition to preservation. Vast libraries were constructed, and knowledge was guarded fiercely.
But the universe wound down.
As the galaxy evaporated, its unified culture disintegrated into fiefdoms. Worse, as the stars receded from each other, the universe shed its complexity, and it became impossible for the ancient catalogues to be maintained. Information was lost, whole histories deleted.
Nobody even noticed when the last traces of humanity were expunged.
The last cultures pooled resources and eventually identities, so that, within the cosmological horizon of the sun, in the end there was only a single consciousness, a single point of awareness, hoarding a meagre store of memory.
And still the universe congealed. Elstead’s final cosmological discovery was that there could be no relief from the relentless expansion. The proton decay reduced all matter to a cloud of photons, electrons, positrons and neutrinos – and at last the cosmic expansion would draw apart even these remnants. In the end, each particle would be alone within its own cosmological horizon. And at that point, when no complexity of any kind was possible, consciousness would cease at last.
Think of it! There you lie, the last solar mind, trapped in spacetime like a human immersed in thickening ice. Dimly you remember what you once were, how you cupped stars in your hands. Now you can barely move. And the constant expansion of the universe bit by bit shreds your memories, your very identity, a process that
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