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
