Carrying the sleeping Nutcracker infant, Emma walked through the forest. Ahead she could see the broad back of Manekato.
Emma let Nemoto talk.
“…Even before this Red Moon showed up in our skies we had developed major elaborations to the basic Darwinian model. Darwin’s ‘tree of life’ is no simple tree, it turns out, no simple hierarchy of ancestral species. It is a tangle—”
“Like this damn jungle,” Emma said, trying to turn the monologue into a conversation. “Lianas and vines cutting across everywhere. If it was just the trees it would be easy.”
“A criss-cross transfer of genetic information, this way and that. And now we have this Red Moon wandering between alternate Earths, the Wheels returning to different Africas over and over, scooping up species here and depositing them there, making an altogether untidy mess of the descent of mankind — and of other species; no wonder this world is full of what Malenfant called ‘living fossils’. Surely without the Red Moon we would never have evolved, we Homo sapiens sapiens. Homo erectus was a successful species, lasting millions of years, covering the Earth. We did not need to become so smart…”
It had been some days since their jaunt into the tunnel in the Moon. Nemoto had spent the time with Manekato and other Daemons, struggling to interpret the experience. For her part, Emma had barely been able to function once those visions of the ageing Galaxy had started to blizzard over her — even though it had been, apparently, just a fraction of the information available in that deep chamber, for those minds capable of reading it.
But she remembered the last glimpse of all.
…It was dark. There were no dead stars, no rogue planets. Matter itself had long evaporated, burned up by proton decay, leaving nothing but a thin smoke of neutrinos drifting out at lightspeed.
But even now there was something rather than nothing.
The creatures of this age drifted like clouds, immense, slow, coded in immense wispy atoms. Free energy was dwindling to zero, time stretching to infinity. It took these cloud-beings longer to complete a single thought than it once took species to rise and fall on Earth…
That ultimate, dismal vision was slow to dispel, like three-in-the-morning fears of her own death. She knew she didn’t have the mental toughness to confront all this, special effects or not. Unlike Nemoto, perhaps.
Or perhaps not. To Nemoto, the whole thing seemed to have been more like a traumatic shock than an imparting of information. She had come out of the experience needing human company, in her reticent way, and needing to talk. But when she talked it was about Charles Darwin and the Red Moon, or even Malenfant and the politics of NASA, anything but the central issue of the Old Ones.
Emma concentrated on the leafy smell of the child, the crackle of dead leaves, the prickle of sunlight on her neck, even the itch of the ulcers on her legs. This was reality, of life and breath and senses.
Manekato had stopped, abruptly. Nemoto fell silent. They were in a small scrap of clearing, by the side of the lichen-covered corpse of a huge fallen tree. Manekato lifted herself up on her hind legs, sniffed the air and swivelled her ears, and belched with satisfaction. “Here,” she said. “The Nutcrackers will come.” With a massive thump she sat on the ground, and began exploring the bushes around her for berries.
Emma, gratefully, put down the infant Nutcracker and sat beside her. The leaves were slippery and damp; the morning was not long advanced. She considered giving the infant some more milk, but the child had already discovered Manekato’s fruit, and was clambering up the Daemon’s impassive back.
Nemoto sat beside Emma. Her posture was stiff, her arms wrapped around her chest, her right heel drumming on the ground. Emma laid one hand on Nemoto’s knee. Gradually the drumming stopped.
And, suddenly, Nemoto began to talk.
“They made the manifold.”
“Who did?”
“The Old Ones. They constructed a manifold of universes — an infinite number of universes. They made it all.” Nemoto shook her head. “Even framing the thought, conceiving of such ambition, is overwhelming. But they did it.”
Manekato was watching them, her large eyes thoughtful.
Emma said carefully, “How did they do this, Nemoto?”
“The branching of universes, deep into the hyperpast,” Manekato murmured.
Emma shook her head, irritated. “What does that mean?”
Nemoto said, “Universes are born. They die. We know two ways a universe can be born. The most primitive cosmos can give birth to another through a Big Crunch, the mirror-image of a Big Bang suffered by a collapsing universe at the end of its history. Or else a new universe can be budded from the singularity at the heart of a black hole. Black holes are the key, Emma, you see. A universe which cannot make black holes can have only one daughter, produced by a Crunch. But a universe which is complex enough to make black holes, like ours, can have many daughters, baby universes connected to the mother by spacetime umbilicals through the singularities.”
“And so when the Old Ones tinkered with the machinery—”
“We don’t know how they did it. But they changed the rules,” Nemoto said.
Emma said hesitantly, “So they found a way to create a lot more universes.”
Manekato said, “We believe the Old Ones created, not just a multiplicity of daughter universes, but an infinite number.” The bulky Daemon studied Emma’s face, seeking understanding.
“Infinity is significant, you see,” Nemoto said, too rapidly. “There is, umm, a qualitative difference between a mere large number, however large, and infinity. In the infinite manifold, in that infinite ensemble, all logically possible universes must exist. And therefore all logically possible destinies must unfold. Everything that is possible will happen, somewhere out there. They created a grand stage, you see, Emma: a stage for endless possibilities of life and mind.”
“Why did they do this?”
“Because they were lonely. The Old Ones were the first sentient species in their universe. They survived their crises of immaturity. And they went on, to walk on the planets, to touch the stars. But everywhere they went — though perhaps they found life — they found no sign of mind, save for themselves.”
“And then the stars went out.”
“And the stars went out. There are ways to survive the darkness, Emma. You can mine energy from the gravity wells of black holes, for instance… But as the universe expanded relentlessly, and the available energy dwindled, the iron logic of entropy held sway. Existence became harsh, straitened, in an energy starved universe that was like a prison. Some of the Old Ones looked back over their lonely destiny, which had turned into nothing but a long, desolating struggle to survive, and — well, some of them rebelled.”
The infant crawled over Manekato’s stolid head and down her chest, clutching great handfuls of hair. Then she curled up in the Daemon’s lap, defecated efficiently, and quickly fell asleep. Emma suppressed a pang of jealousy that it was not her lap.
“So they rebelled. How?”
Nemoto sighed. “It’s all to do with quantum mechanics, Emma.”
“I was afraid it might be.”
Manekato said, “Each quantum event emerges into reality as the result of a feedback loop between past and future. Handshakes across time. The story of the universe is like a tapestry, stitched together by uncountable trillions of such tiny handshakes. If you create an artificial timelike loop to some point in spacetime within the negative light cone of the present—”
“Woah. In English.”
Manekato looked puzzled.
Nemoto said, “If you were to go back in time and try to change the past, you would damage the universe, erasing a whole series of consequential events. Yes? So the universe starts over, from the first point where the forbidden loop would have begun to exist. As the effects of your change propagate through space and time, the universe knits itself into a new form, transaction by transaction, handshake by handshake. The wounded universe heals itself with a new set of handshakes, working forward in time, until it is complete and self-consistent once more.”