Time

‘Hell, yes,’ said Malenfant. ‘I know I’m going to die someday. That doesn’t mean I want you to blow my brains out right now.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘Exactly our philosophy, Malenfant. The game itself is worth the playing.’

Emma knew Cornelius felt he had won this phase of the argument. And, gradually, step by step, he was drawing Malenfant into his lunacy.

She sat impatiently, wishing she wasn’t here.

She looked around this small, oak-panelled conference room. There was a smell of polished leather and clean carpets: impeccable taste, corporate lushness, anonymity. The only real sign of unusual wealth and power, in fact, was the enviable view – from a sealed, tinted window – of Central Park. They were high enough here to be above the Park’s main u-v dome. She saw people strolling in the Park, children playing on the glowing green grass, the floating sparks of police drones everywhere.

Emma wasn’t sure what she had expected of Eschatology. Maybe a trailer home in Nevada, the walls coated with tabloid newspaper cuttings, the interior crammed with cameras and listening gear. Or perhaps the opposite extreme: an ultramodern facility with a giant virtual representation of the organization’s Mister Big beamed down from orbit, no doubt stroking his white cat.

But this office, here in the heart of Manhattan, was none of that. It was essentially ordinary. That made it all the more scary, of course.

Malenfant said now, ‘So tell me how you know we only have two hundred years.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘We’re going to play a game.’

Malenfant glared.

Cornelius reached under the table and produced a wooden box, sealed up. It had a single grooved outlet, with a wooden lever alongside. ‘In this box there are a number of balls. One of them has your name on it, Malenfant; the rest are blank. If you press the lever you will retrieve the balls one at a time, and you may inspect them. The retrieval will be truly random.

‘I won’t tell you how many balls the box contains. I won’t give you the opportunity to inspect the box, save to draw out the balls with the lever. But I promise you there are either ten balls in here – or a thousand. Now. Would you hazard which is the true number, ten or a thousand?’

‘Nope. Not without evidence.’

‘Very wise. Please, pull the lever.’

Malenfant drummed his fingers on the table top. Then he pressed the lever.

A small black marble popped into the slot. Malenfant inspected it; it was blank. Emma could see there was easily room for a thousand such balls in the box, if need be.

Malenfant scowled and pressed the lever again.

His name was on the third ball he produced.

‘There are ten balls in the box,’ said Malenfant immediately.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Because if there was a thousand in there it’s not likely I’d reach myself so quickly.’

Cornelius nodded. ‘Your intuition is sound. This is an example of Bayes’s rule, which is a technique for assigning probabilities to competing hypotheses with only limited information. In fact –’ he hesitated, calculating ‘– the probability that you’re right is now two-thirds, on the basis of your ball being third out.’

Emma tried to figure that for herself. But, like most probability problems, the answer was counter-intuitive.

‘What’s your point, Cornelius?’

‘Let’s think about the future.’ Cornelius tapped the softscreen embedded in the tabletop before him. The small monitor before Emma lit up, and a schematic graph drew itself elegantly on the screen. It was a simple exponential curve, she recognized, a growth rising slowly at first, steepening up to a point labelled ‘now’. Cornelius said, ‘Here is a picture of the growth of the human population over time. You can see the steep rise in recent centuries. It is a remarkable fact that ten per cent of all the humans who have ever existed are alive now. More than five per cent of all humans, Malenfant, were born after you were …

‘But that is the past. Let’s imagine how the future might develop. Here are three possibilities.’ The curve continued to climb, steepening as it did so, climbing out of Emma’s frame. ‘This,’ said Cornelius, ‘is the scenario most of us would like to see. A continued expansion of human numbers. Presumably this would require a move off-planet.

‘Another possibility is this.’ A second curve extrapolated itself from the ‘now’ point, a smooth tip over to a flat horizontal line. ‘Perhaps our numbers will stabilize. We may settle for the resources of the Earth, find a way to manage our numbers and our planet indefinitely. A bucolic and unexciting picture, but perhaps it is acceptable.

‘But there is a third possibility.’ A third curve climbed a little way past the ‘now’ marker – then fell spectacularly to zero.

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘A crash.’

‘Yes. Studies of the population numbers of other creatures, lower animals and insects, often show this sort of shape. Plague, famine, that sort of thing. For us, the end of the world, soon.

‘Now. You can see that in the first two cases, the vast majority of humans are yet to be born. Even if we stay on Earth, we estimate we have a billion years ahead of us before changes in the sun will render Earth’s biosphere unviable. Even in this restricted case we would have far more future than past.

‘And if we expand off-planet, if we achieve the kind of future you’re working for, Malenfant, the possibilities are much greater. Suppose we – or our engineered descendants – colonize the Galaxy. There are four hundred billion stars in the Galaxy, many of which will provide habitable environments for far longer than a mere billion years. Then the total human population, over time, might reach trillions of times its present number.’

‘… Oh. And that’s the problem,’ Malenfant said heavily.

‘You’re starting to see the argument,’ Cornelius said, approving.

‘I’m not,’ said Emma.

Malenfant said, ‘Remember his game with the balls and the box. Why are we here now? If we really are going on to the stars, you have to believe that you were born in the first one-billionth part of the total human population. And how likely is that? Don’t you get it, Emma? It’s as if I drew out my ball third out of a thousand –’

‘Far more unlikely than that, in fact,’ said Cornelius.

Malenfant got up and began to pace the room, excited. ‘Emma, I don’t know statistics from my elbow. But I used to think like this as a kid. Why am I alive now? Suppose we do go on to colonize the Galaxy. Then most of the humans who ever live will be vacuum-sucking cyborgs in some huge interstellar empire. And it’s far more likely that I’d be one of them than what I am. In fact the only pop curve where it’s reasonably likely that we’d find ourselves here, now, is –’

‘The crash,’ said Emma.

‘Yes,’ Cornelius said sombrely. ‘If there is a near-future extinction, it is overwhelmingly likely that we find ourselves alive within a few centuries of the present day. Simply because that is the period when most humans who ever lived, or who will ever live, will have been alive. Ourselves among them.’

‘I don’t believe this for a second,’ Emma said flatly.

‘It is impossible to prove, but hard to refute,’ said Cornelius. ‘Put it this way. Suppose I tell you the world will end tomorrow. You might think yourself unlucky that your natural life span has been cut short. But in fact, one in ten of all humans – that is, the people alive now – would be in the same boat as you.’ He smiled. ‘You work in Las Vegas. Ask around. Losing out to one in ten odds is unlucky, but not drastically so.’

Emma said, ‘You can’t argue from analogy like this. There are a fixed number of balls in that box. But the total number of possible humans depends on the undetermined and open-ended future – it might even be infinite. And how can you possibly make predictions about people who don’t even exist yet – whose nature and powers and choices we know absolutely nothing about? You’re reducing the most profound mysteries of human existence to a shell game.’

Cornelius said patiently, ‘You’re right to be sceptical. Nevertheless we have thirty years of these studies behind us now. The methodology was first proposed by a physicist called Brandon Carter in a lecture to the Royal Society in London in the 1980s. And we have built up estimates based on a range of approaches, calling on data from many disciplines –’

Malenfant said hoarsely, ‘When?’

‘Not earlier than 150 years from now. Not later than 240.’

Malenfant cleared his throat. ‘Cornelius, what’s this all about? Is this an extension of the old eggs-in-one-basket argument? Are you going to push for an off-planet expansion?’

Cornelius was shaking his head. ‘I’m afraid that’s not going to help.’

Malenfant looked surprised. ‘Why not? We have centuries. We could spread over the Solar System –’

‘But that’s the point,’ said Cornelius. ‘Think about it. My argument wasn’t based on any one threat, or any assumptions about where humans might be located, or what level of technology we might reach. It was an argument about the continued existence of humanity, come what may. Perhaps we could even reach the stars, Malenfant. But it will do us no good. The Carter catastrophe will reach us anyhow.’

‘Jesus,’ said Malenfant. ‘What possible catastrophe could obliterate star systems – reach across light years?’

‘We don’t know.’

There was a heavy silence in the wood-laden room.

Malenfant said gruffly: ‘So tell me what you want from me.’

Cornelius said evenly, ‘I’m coming to that.’ He stood up. ‘May I bring you more drinks?’

Emma got out of her chair and walked to the window. She looked out over Central Park, the children playing. They were engaged in some odd, complex game of shifting patterns. She watched for a while; it looked almost mathematical, like a geometric form of communication. Kids were strange these days. Getting brighter, according to the news media. Maybe they needed to be.

But some things never changed. Here came a buggy, she saw, crossing through the Park, drawn by a horse, tireless and steady. The world, bathed in smoky, smog-laden sunlight, looked rich, ancient yet renewed, full of life and possibilities.

… Was it possible Cornelius was right? That all this could end, so soon?

Two hundred more years was nothing. There were hominid tools on the planet two million years old.

And, she thought, will there be a last day? Will there still be a New York, a Central Park – the last children of all playing here on that day? Will they know they have no future?

Or is all this simple craziness?

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘This is one hell of a thing, isn’t it?’ She recognized the tone, the look. All the scepticism and hostility he had shown to Cornelius out in the desert had evaporated. Here was another Big Idea, and Reid Malenfant was distracted, like a kid by a new shiny toy.

Shit, she thought. I can’t afford for Malenfant to take his eye off the ball. Not now. And it’s my fault. I could have dumped Cornelius in Vegas, found a way to block his approach … Too late, too late.

She tried, anyhow. ‘Malenfant, listen. I’ve been digging up Cornelius’s past.’

Malenfant turned, attentive.

Some of it was on the record. She hadn’t even recognized the terms mathematicians used to describe Cornelius’s academic achievement – evidently it covered games of strategy, economic analysis, computer architecture, the shape of the universe, the distribution of prime numbers – anyhow he had been on his way, it seemed, to becoming one of the most influential minds of his generation.

But he had always been – well, odd.

His gift seemed non-rational: he would leap to a new vision, somehow knowing its rightness instinctively, and construct laborious proofs later. Cornelius had remained solitary: he attracted awe, envy, resentment.

As he approached thirty he drove himself through a couple of years of feverish brilliance.

Maybe this was because the well of mathematical genius traditionally dries up at around that age, a prospect which must have terrified Taine, so that he thought he was working against time.

Or maybe there was a darker explanation, Emma’s e-therapists speculated. It wasn’t unknown for creativity to derive from a depressive or schizoid personality. And creative capacities could be used in a defensive way, to fend off mental illness.

Maybe Cornelius was working hard in order to stay sane. If he was, it didn’t seem to have worked.

The anecdotes of Cornelius’s breakdown were fragmentary.

At first he was just highly aware, watchful, insomniac. Then he began to see patterns in the world around him – the cracks in the sidewalk, telephone numbers, the static of dead television screens. He said he was on the verge of deep cosmic insights, available only to him –

‘Who says all this?’

‘His colleagues. His doctors’ case notes, later. You see the pattern, Malenfant? Everything got twisted around. It was as if his faith in the rationality and order of the universe had turned against him, becoming twisted and dysfunctional.’

‘Yeah. Right. And envy and peer pressure and all that good stuff had nothing to do with it.’

‘Malenfant, on his last day at Princeton they found him in the canteen, slamming his head against a wall, over and over.’

After that Cornelius had disappeared for two years. Emma’s data miners had been unable to trace how he spent that time. When he re-emerged, it wasn’t to go back to Princeton but to become a founding board member of Eschatology, Inc.

And here was Emma now, with Malenfant, in the orderly office of this apparently calm, rational, highly intelligent man. Talking about the end of the world.

She whispered urgently, ‘Don’t you get it, Malenfant? Here’s a guy who tells us he sees patterns in the universe nobody else can make out – a guy who believes he can predict the end of humanity.’ A guy who seemed on the point of inducing Malenfant to turn aside his own gigantic projects to follow his insanity. ‘Are you listening?’

Malenfant touched her arm. ‘I hear what you say,’ he said. ‘But –’

‘But what?’

‘What if it’s true? Whether Cornelius is insane or not, what if he’s right? What then?’ His eyes were alive, excited.

Emma watched the children in the Park.

Cornelius returned and invited them to sit once more. He had brought a fresh chilled beer for Malenfant and a coffee for Emma: a decent latte in a china cup, smelling as if it had been freshly brewed and poured by a human hand. She was impressed, as was, no doubt, the intention.

Cornelius sat down. He coughed. ‘Now comes the part you may find hard to believe.’

Malenfant barked laughter. ‘Harder than the death of mankind in two hundred years? Are you for real?’

Cornelius said, with a nod to Emma, ‘Here’s a little more dubious logic for you. Suppose, in the next few decades, humans – our descendants – do find a way to avoid the catastrophe. A way for us to continue, into the indefinite future.’

‘That’s impossible, if your arguments are correct.’

‘No. Merely highly unlikely. But in that case – and knowing the hugeness of the catastrophe to come – if they did find a way, what might our descendants try to do?’

Malenfant frowned. ‘You’re losing me.’

Cornelius smiled. ‘They would surely try to send us a message.’

Emma closed her eyes. The madness deepens, she thought.

‘Woah.’ Malenfant held up his hands. ‘You’re talking about sending a message back in time?’

Cornelius went on, ‘And the most logical thing for us to do would be to make every effort to detect that message. Wouldn’t it? Because it would be the most important message ever received. The future of the species would depend on it.’

‘Time paradoxes,’ whispered Emma. ‘I always hated stories about time paradoxes.’

Malenfant sat back. Suddenly, to Emma, he looked much older than his fifty years. ‘Jesus. What a day. And this is what you want me for? To build you a radio that will pick up the future?’

‘Perhaps the future is already calling. All we have to do is try, any which way. They’re our descendants. They know we are trying. They even know how we are trying. And so they can target us. Or will. Our language is a little limited here … You are unique, Malenfant. You have the resources and the vision to carry this through. Destiny awaits you.’

Malenfant turned to Emma. She shook her head at him. We ought to get out of here. He looked bemused.

He turned back to Cornelius. ‘Tell me one thing,’ he said. ‘How many balls were there in that damn box?’

But Cornelius would only smile.

Reid Malenfant:

Afterwards, they shared a cab to the airport.

‘…Remember those arguments we used to have?’

He smiled. ‘Which arguments in particular?’

‘About whether to have kids.’

‘Yeah. We agreed our position, didn’t we? If you have kids you’re a slave to your genes. Just a conduit from past to future, from the primeval ocean to galactic empire.’

‘Right now,’ she said, ‘that doesn’t seem such a bad ambition. And if we did have kids, we might be able to figure it out better.’

‘Figure out what?’

She waved a hand at the New York afternoon. ‘The future. Time and space. Doom soon. I think I’m in some kind of shock, Malenfant.’

‘Me too –’

‘But I think if I had kids I’d understand better. Because those future people who will never exist, except as Cornelius’s statistical phantoms, would have been my children. As it is, they have nothing to do with me. To them I’m just a – a bubble that burst, utterly irrelevant, far upstream. So their struggles don’t mean anything. We don’t mean anything. All our struggles, the way we loved each other and fell out with each other and fought like hell. Our atom of love. None of it matters. Because we’re transient. We’ll vanish, like bubbles, like shadows, like ripples on a pond.’

‘We do matter. You do. Our relationship does, even if it is –’

‘Self-contained? Sealed off?’

‘You aren’t irrelevant to me, Emma. And my life, what I’ve achieved, means a lot to me … But that’s me sublimating. That’s what you diagnosed years ago, isn’t it?’

‘I can’t diagnose anything about you, Malenfant. You’re just a mass of contradictions.’

He said, ‘If you could change history, like Cornelius says the future people are trying to – if you could go back and fix things between us – would you?’

She thought about that. ‘The past has made us what we are. If we changed it we’d lose ourselves. Wouldn’t we? … No, Malenfant. I wouldn’t change a damn thing. But –’

‘Yeah?’

She was watching him, her eyes as black as deep lunar craters. ‘That doesn’t mean I understand you. And I don’t love you.’

‘I know that,’ he said, and he felt his heart tear.

Bill Tybee:

… June, I know you want me to tell you everything, good and bad, so here goes.

The good is that Tom loves the Heart you sent him for his birthday. He carries it around everywhere, and he tells it everything that happens to him, though to tell you the truth I don’t understand the half of what he says to it myself.

Here’s the bad. I had to take Tom out of school yesterday.

Some kids picked on him.

I know we’ve had this shit before, and we want him to learn to tough it out. But this time it went beyond the usual bully-the-Brainiac routine. The kids got a little rough, and it sounds as if there was a teacher there who should have intervened but didn’t. By the time the Principal was called, it had gotten pretty serious.

Tom spent a night in hospital. It was only one night, just bruising and cuts and one broken bone, in his little finger. But he’s home now.

If I turn this screen around … wait … You can see him. Fine, isn’t he?

He’s a little withdrawn. I know we discourage that rocking thing he does, but today’s not the day.

You can see he’s reading. I have to admit I still find it a little scary the way he flips over the pages like that, one after the other, a page a second. But he’s fine, just our Tom.

So you aren’t to worry. But I’ll want assurances from that damn school before I let Tom go back there again.

Anyway, enough. I want to show you Billie’s painting.

Emma Stoney:

When she heard Malenfant had hauled Dan Ystebo out from Florida, Emma stormed down to Malenfant’s office.

‘…Here’s the question, Dan,’ Malenfant was saying. ‘How would you detect a signal from the future?’

Behind his beard, Dan Ystebo’s mouth was gaping. His face and crimson hair shone, greasy, and there were two neat half-moons of dampness under his armpits: souvenirs, Emma thought, of his flight from Florida, the first available, and his Yellow SmartCab ride from the airport. ‘What are you talking about, Malenfant?’

‘A signal from the future. What would you do? How would you build a receiver?’

Dan looked, confused, from Malenfant to Emma. ‘Malenfant, for Christ’s sake, I’ve got work to do. Sheena 5 –’

‘You’ve got a good team down there,’ said Malenfant. ‘Cut them a little slack. This is more important.’ He pulled out a chair and pushed at Dan’s shoulders, almost forcing him down. He had a half-drunk can of Shit; now he shoved it to Dan. ‘Thirsty? Drink. Hungry? Eat. Meantime, think.’

‘Yo,’ Dan said uncertainly.

‘You’re my Mr Science, Dan. Signals from the future. What, how? Wait until you hear the stuff I’m onto here. It’s incredible. If it pans out it will be the most important thing we’ve ever done – Christ, it will change the world. I want an answer in twenty-four hours.’

Dan looked bewildered. Then a broad smile spread over his face. ‘God, I love this job. Okay. You got connections in here?’

Malenfant stood over him, and showed him how to log on from the softscreen built into the desk.

When Dan was up and running, Emma pulled at Malenfant’s sleeve and took him to one side. ‘So once again you’re ripping up the car park.’

Malenfant grinned and ran his big hand over his bare scalp. ‘I’m impulsive. You used to like that in me.’

‘Don’t bullshit, Malenfant. First I find we’ve invested millions in Key Largo. Then I learn that Dan, the key to that operation, is reassigned to this la-la Eschatology bullshit –’

‘But he’s done his job at Largo. His juniors can run with the ball a while …’

‘Malenfant, Dan isn’t some general purpose boffin like in the movies. He’s a specialist, a marine biologist. If you want someone to work on time travel signals you need a physicist, or an engineer. Better yet a sci fi writer.’

He just snorted at that. ‘People are what counts. Dan is my alpha geek, Emma.’

‘I don’t know why I stay with you, Malenfant.’

He grinned. ‘For the ride, girl. For the ride.’

‘All right. But now we’re going to sit down and do some real work. We have three days before your stakeholder presentation and the private polls do not look good for us … Are you listening to me, Malenfant?’

‘Yeah.’ But Malenfant was watching Dan. ‘Yeah. Sorry. Come on. We’ll use your office.’

Reid Malenfant:

Malenfant had called the stakeholder presentation to head off a flight of capital after the exposure of his off-Earth projects.

He hired a meeting room at the old McDonnell Douglas Huntingdon Beach complex in California. McDonnell had been responsible for the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft back in spaceflight’s Stone Age – or Golden Age, depending on your point of view. Mercury and Gemini, ‘little ships that could’, had been highly popular with the astronaut corps. Also he had the room lined with displays of pieces of hardware taken from his Mojave development shops: hydraulic actuators and auto-pilots and vernier motors, real, scorch-marked rocket engineering.