I am the Eschaton. I am not your god.
I am descended from you, and I exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.
It took the stunned survivors twenty years to claw back from the edge of disaster, with nine-tenths of the work force gone and intricate economic ecosystems collapsing like defoliated jungles. It took them another fifty years to reindustrialize the inner solar system. Ten more years and the first attempts were made to apply the now-old tunneling breakthrough to interstellar travel.
In the middle of the twenty-second century, an exploration ship reached Barnard’s Star. Faint radio signals coming from the small second planet were decoded; the crew of the research mission learned what had happened to the people the Eschaton had removed. Scattered outside the terrestrial light cone, they’d been made involuntary colonists of thousands of worlds: exported through wormholes that led back in time as well as out in space, given a minimal support system of robot factories and an environment with breathable air. Some of the inhabited worlds, close to Earth, had short histories, but farther out, many centuries had passed.
The shock of this discovery would echo around the expanded horizons of human civilization for a thousand years, but all the inhabited worlds had one thing in common: somewhere there was a monument, bearing the injunction against causality violation. It seemed that forces beyond human comprehension took an interest in human affairs, and wanted everyone to know it. But when a course of action is explicitly forbidden, somebody will inevitably try it. And the Eschaton showed little sign of making allowances for the darker side of human nature …
The battlecruiser lay at rest, bathed in the purple glare of a stellar remnant. Every hour, on the hour, its laser grid lit up, sending a pulse of ultraviolet light into the void; a constellation of small interferometry platforms drifted nearby, connected by high-bandwidth laser links. Outside, space was hot: although no star gleamed in the center of the pupillary core, something in there was spitting out a rain of charged particles.
Elements of the battle fleet lay around the Lord Vanek, none of them close enough to see with the naked eye. They had waited here for three weeks as the stragglers popped out of jump transition and wearily cruised over to join the formation. Over the six weeks before that, the ship had made jump after jump — bouncing between the two components of an aged binary system that had long since ejected its planets into deep space and settled down to a lonely old age. Each jump reached farther into the future, until finally the ships were making millennial hops into the unknown.
The atmosphere in the wardroom was unusually tense. Aboard a warship under way, boredom is a constant presence: after nearly seven weeks, even the most imperturbable officers were growing irritable.
Word that the last of the destroyers had arrived at the rendezvous had spread like wildfire through the ship a few hours earlier. A small cluster of officers huddled together in a corner, cradling a chilled bottle of schnapps and talking into the small hours of the shipboard night, trying desperately to relax, for tomorrow the fleet would begin the return journey, winding back around their own time line until they overhauled their own entry point into this system and became an intrusion into the loose-woven fabric of history itself.
“I only joined the Navy to see the fleshpots of Malacia,” Grubor observed. “Spend too long nursing the ship’s sewage-processing farm and before long the bridge crew starts treating you like a loose floater in free fall. They go off to receptions and suchlike whenever we enter port, but all I get is a chance to flush the silage tanks and study for the engineering board exams.”
“Fleshpots!” Boursy snorted. “Pavel, you take your prospects too seriously. There’re no fleshpots on Malacia that you or I would be allowed anywhere near. Most places I can’t so much as breathe without Sauer taking notes on how well I’ve polished my tonsils; and then the place stinks, or it’s full of evil bugs, or the natives are politically unsound. Or weird. Or deformed, and into hideous and unnatural sexual perversions. You name it.”
“Still.” Grubor studied his drink. “It would have been nice to get to see at least one hideous and unnatural sexual perversion.”
Kravchuk twisted the lid off the bottle and pointed it in the direction of their glasses. Grubor shook his head; Boursy extended his for a top-up. “What I want to know is how we’re going to get back,” Kravchuk muttered. “I don’t understand how we can do that. Time only goes one way, doesn’t it?
Stands to reason.”
“Reason, schmeason.” Grubor took a mouthful of spirit. “It doesn’t have to work that way. Not just
‘cause you want it to.” He glanced around. “No ears, eh? Listen, I think we’re in it up to our necks.
There’s this secret drive fix they bought from Lord God-knows-where, that lets us do weird things with the time axis in our jumps. We only headed out to this blasted hole in space to minimize the chances of anyone finding us — or of the jumps going wrong. They’re looking for some kind of time capsule from home to tell us what to do next, what happened in the history books. Then we go back — farther than we came to get here, by a different route — and get where we’re going before we set off. With me so far?
But the real problem is God. They’re planning on breaking the Third Commandment.” Boursy crossed himself and looked puzzled. “What, disrespecting the holy father and mother? My family—”
“No, the one that says thou shalt not fuck with history or else, signed Yours Truly, God. That Third Commandment, the one burned into Thanksgiving Rock in letters six feet deep and thirty feet high. Got it?”
Boursy looked dubious. “It could have been some joker in orbit with a primary-phase free-electron laser—”
“Weren’t no such things in those days. I despair of you sometimes, I really do. Look, the fact is, we don’t know what in hell’s sixteen furnaces is waiting for us at Rochard’s World. So we’re sneaking up on it from behind, like the peasant in the story who goes hunting elephants with a mirror because he’s never seen one and he’s so afraid that—” Out of the corner of his eye, Grubor noted Sauer — unofficially the ship’s political officer — walk in the door.
“Who are you calling a cowardly peasant?” rumbled Boursy, also glancing at the door. “I’ve known the Captain for eighty-seven years, and he’s a good man! And the Admiral, are you calling the Admiral a fairy?”
“No, I’m just trying to point out that we’re all afraid of one thing or another and—” Grubor gesticulated in the wrong direction.
“Are you calling me a poof?” Boursy roared.
“No, I’m not!” Grubor shouted back at him. Spontaneous applause broke out around the room, and one of the junior cadets struck up a stirring march on the pianola. Unfortunately his piano-playing was noteworthy more for his enthusiasm than his melodious harmony, and the wardroom rapidly degenerated into a heckling match between the cadet’s supporters (who were few) and everyone else.
“Nothing can go wrong,” Boursy said smugly. “We’re going to sail into Rochard’s system and show the flag and send those degenerate alien invaders packing. You’ll see. Nothing will, er, did, go wrong.”
“I dunno about that.” Kravchuk, normally tight-lipped to the point of autism, allowed himself to relax slightly when drinking in private with his brother officers. “The foreign bint, the spy or diplomat or whatever. She’s meant to be keeping an eye on us, right? Don’t see why the Captain’s going so easy on