The Propagational Library (6): Alone

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In retrospect, he felt no surprise at all; it made perfect sense. But in the moment, the notion of “surprise” barely fit the experience. He wasn’t surprised. No, he was flat-out thunderstruck to learn that he — bodiless, free of gravity, barely aware of the passage of time let alone space — yet needed to sleep.

He didn’t learn this right away. At the outset, he was alert, too thoroughly engaged by two phenomena taking place in his neighborhood, so to speak:

First, of course, there was Kali. Or rather, there were Kali’s footprints. He somehow sensed these effects. He thought of it as “seeing” them, ridiculous he knew, impossible without physical eyes, but old habits of thought died hard. So The Earth had been shattered by Kali’s passing, but as he could (all right) see, it was not completely gone. It had been torn apart, burst into boulders and pebbles, crumbs and grains which continued a loose affiliation in space with one another: loose, and growing looser by the second. The whole thing formed something like a contrail in Kali’s wake, stretched thin, stretching thinner, at once dissipating and trailing behind her as she continued on her course to wherever. The Sun, more plastic than the rocky planet, seemed simply to have distended, like a giant fiery soap bubble, until it popped.

Whatever Kali might be, the layout of the solar system when she came in through the door had led to a miraculous outcome: she had wrecked only Earth and the Sun. Mercury had been swallowed up in the Sun’s bursting, and an unknown number of asteroids and miscellaneous chunks of space rock had been erased. But all the rest of the planets and moons — including Earth’s own — remained whole. Not entirely untouched, of course; like commuters standing on a train platform as an express train roars through, without stopping, their hair had been mussed, and they had been tugged forward and then bobbed back a moment later, oscillating to and fro.

Like the commuters, the planets had relied on a central gravitational force to keep them in place once the calamity passed. With the Sun gone, though, they seemed to have lost interest in one another’s future. As he watched, their orbits grew eccentric and elongated, and they began to wander off, apparently on missions of their own. The gas giants had enough gravity to pull their moons along with them. Mars lost a couple of moons. Venus, though, picked up an orphan as she drifted away: Earth’s former moon, which had been set spinning and wobbling, lost and disoriented, grabbed onto her skirts and headed out in the same direction.

The second phenomenon The Librarian noted was that he’d noted the first. He’d seen the remaining bits of Earth and the Sun scatter through space. He’d watched as the planets and moons and other large clots of matter had peeled away from their common center, bored with family, and took off on adventures of their own.

He’d watched all this. “Seeing” it or not, how had he observed something which probably took decades, perhaps even centuries, on his old time scale? And how had he managed to observe it in such compressed form that it seemed to take just a few minutes? He remembered that once (by now it must have been very long ago), he had seen a video clip filmed from directly over the center of a billiard table, across which had been arranged, apparently at random, a half-dozen brightly colored balls. The cue ball entered the frame from the bottom right corner, missing a couple of the colored ones, nicking the sides of a couple others, and slamming almost dead-center into the other two so that it — and they — went rocketing off at crazy angles, out of sight beyond the frame. The actual duration of the observed events, perhaps seconds, but the film had been slowed down so it took two or three minutes to see it all. This — watching this violent sundering of the solar system — this was like the reverse of the pool-table film. The viewing time hadn’t expanded; it had collapsed…

He was thinking about the pool table, and that led him to remember the last time he had played Eight Ball, and the taste of the beer he and Caro had been drinking that night, and the way she had burst out laughing at something Gabe had said… and somewhere in there, then, The Librarian fell asleep.

—-

He didn’t dream — not that time; not that he remembered anyhow. Nor did he laze hypnagogically for a while between sleep and wakefulness. He came instantly awake, with a start he supposed. (He also supposed, given his new timeframe, that his “instant” now may have taken considerably longer than his old instants.)

When he awoke, he felt a moment of panic at first. The lights were out. He must have overslept. The alarm had not gone off, where was the lamp switch—

Then he remembered where he was. He remembered how he’d gotten there, and what he was supposed to do.

But he’d been right about one thing in that moment of panic: the lights indeed were out. Wherever he was located in space at the moment, he could detect no light at all: not a single star or ultra-distant galaxy—

And then, poof, he emerged from the black cloud, the thick nebula in which he’d been drifting, and floated in a dense sea of stars. He still didn’t know where he was. But at least now he knew he was somewhere. He turned his attention behind him, to the black cloud. He was just thinking of a storm cloud, black and swirling, when something flickered to the right of center of his field of “vision.” What was that? He wanted a closer look. But he didn’t know how to move, did he? Could he move, at all? Could he, with no form, certainly nothing like a propulsion system or even, well, flippers — could he reverse his direction somehow in space, could he steer? Maybe if he…

He looked back in the direction of the little pinprick of light, intending to somehow lunge in its direction. But it was gone. The only thing he could see was the giant black thunderhead—

The light flickered on.

Without thought, The Librarian flung himself in that direction. The light seemed unchanged. Steady, not flickering, but he didn’t seem to be getting any nearer — until he suddenly was, and the pinprick bloomed like a, like the bulb of a penlight in the dark, he remembered penlights, he’d had one when he— The little light he thought he was following went out again. Goddammit. But it was right there, wasn’t it?, pinned at that one spot against the opaqueness of the nebula, the black cumulus–

The light blinked on. A little brighter, perhaps, or perhaps even nearer now that he could see behind it the swirling ebony cloud — yes! definitely brighter!

Off to his right, in the middle distance, the two members of a binary-star system collided. The Librarian looked over in that direction, fascinated by the resulting burst of light and gamma-ray energy. He forgot about the little pinpoint of light, and pushed off instead in the direction of the brighter stellar spectacle over that way. He was moving at a pretty good clip by the time he reached it, blew through the intense energy field, and only then did it occur to him that he had in fact moved that way.

It worked.

He practiced it some more, over the course of perhaps the next hour (millenium?), until he had something which felt like control of his movement. Luckily the distances out here were vast. He didn’t have to and didn’t know if he would ever again be able to, haha, park a MagCar in its right-sized space. But he could with reasonable consistency and great lunges of consciousness hit the broad side of a star-sized barn.

On the other hand, he still didn’t know where he was — especially where he was relative to what used to be the solar system in which he’d once lived. For now he wasn’t too worried. He’d have time—

Time.

Oh, yes. He’d almost forgotten about time: after actually surviving Kali, time was his first mission.

—-

He would have “eternity,” they’d told him. But not quite eternity, either, because what we think of as eternity (so Eldon said) really ceases to exist once the universe itself ceases to exist.

“I thought the universe is expanding indefinitely.”

Eldon shook his head. “‘Indefinitely’ as fas as we’re concerned, sitting here. Maybe. But even if it keeps going and going and going forever, it’s still going to end.”

“Doesn’t forever mean indefinitely?”

“Yes and no. Heat death, right? The galaxies continue to fly away from one another. The stars and planets too, and eventually even the atoms ditto. Even if somehow magically the planets — the solar system — stays together, which it won’t, they’ll be dead rocks. No light, from the sun or more distant stars. And with no way, no energy source, to make any sort of artificial light or any of the other components of life. If it keeps going — forever, indefinitely, choose your word — it’ll all just wind down.”

Gabe frowned. “You said ‘maybe.'”

“Said and meant. Fact is, we just don’t know. Science keeps going back and forth on the question. Is there enough matter in the universe for the force of gravity to reverse the expansion? No? Suppose we count dark matter? Yes, that seems to, but no, wait, no it doesn’t after all, but wait, what about dark energy? So on and so on. It doesn’t — ha! — it doesn’t matter. Either the whole thing will collapse back into itself, or it’ll just run out of gas. Either way, there’s an end to what we think of when we think of as ‘eternity.'”

“So—”

“So assuming this goes the way we think it’ll go, you’ll have that eternity to do whatever we’re really sending you out there to do. But that eternity may not be enough. That’s why we’ve got you reading all this stuff about time. None of the rest of us will ever need to care about it anymore — or be able to act on it if we do care. But you? We think you’ve got a slim chance of pulling this off. But only if you put all your effort up front into getting more than one eternity.”

—-

So. Time.

The Librarian knew as much as he needed to at this point, he thought. He knew that he could displace himself in space, if not instantaneously then at least by heading in the proper direction.

But what did “instantaneously” mean, anyhow? It meant in no time at all. As the distance you needed to move increased, so did the amount of time you needed to traverse it. Maybe there was some relationship between space and time like the one between matter and energy, with tiny units of time scaling up (or down?) exponentially with given distances… Or maybe… but wait, time wasn’t the only thing related to distance: gravity was, too. So then could time and gravity be intertwined in some way…?

The Librarian ran back and forth over the possibilities and the physics and mathematics tens of thousands of times, sometimes forgetting what he’d already done to that point and having to back up and restart. He dropped off to sleep and reawakened more times than he bothered counting. But eventually — perhaps after a hundred thousand eons, give or take — the train of thought hooked up from beginning to end. The universe around him by then was unrecognizable; even though he took pains — tried to take pains — to bump himself spatially every now and then back the way he’d come, as the concepts and solutions in his consciousness kept multiplying and connecting, he kept forgetting, and losing his orientation. He didn’t think he recognized any of the places he was jumping to anymore; at the “moment” he could see a vast glowing red curtain of dust off to one side, a single white dwarf star with a single planet behind him, and apparent emptiness in all other directions. He took one more eon to retrace what he’d built in his mind; yes, he still thought it would work. He nodded off one more time, and awoke, refreshed and ready to give it a try. Ready. But where — or, more precisely, when?

He remembered the little flickering pinpoint of light he’d seen the first time he’d slept and awoken. Surrounded by stars on all sides but one, the big dense black cloud—

He lunged.

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[I found lots of interesting questions in working on this chapter. (And lots of interesting Web sites offering answers.) Hard to present it all as, y’know, a story. But interesting.]

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