Time Quotes

“In the afterglow of the Big Bang, humans spread in waves across the universe, sprawling and brawling and breeding and dying and evolving. There were wars, there was love, there was life and death. Minds flowed together in great rivers of consciousness, or shattered in sparkling droplets. There was immortality to be had, of a sort, a continuity of identity through replication and confluence across billions upon billions of years.
Everywhere they found life.
Nowhere did they find mind—save what they brought with them or created—no other against which human advancement could be tested.
With time, the stars died like candles. But humans fed on bloated gravitational fat, and achieved a power undreamed of in earlier ages.
They learned of other universes from which theirs had evolved. Those earlier, simpler realities too were empty of mind, a branching tree of emptiness reaching deep into the hyperpast.
It is impossible to understand what minds of that age—the peak of humankind, a species hundreds of billions of times older than humankind—were like. They did not seek to acquire, not to breed, not even to learn. They had nothing in common with us, their ancestors of the afterglow.
Nothing but the will to survive. And even that was to be denied them by time.
The universe aged: indifferent, harsh, hostile, and ultimately lethal.
There was despair and loneliness.
There was an age of war, an obliteration of trillion-year memories, a bonfire of identity. There was an age of suicide, as the finest of humanity chose self-destruction against further purposeless time and struggle.
The great rivers of mind guttered and dried.
But some persisted: just a tributary, the stubborn, still unwilling to yield to the darkness, to accept the increasing confines of a universe growing inexorably old.
And, at last, they realized that this was wrong. It wasn't supposed to have been like this.
Burning the last of the universe's resources, the final down-streamers—dogged, all but insane—reached to the deepest past. And—oh.
Watch the Moon, Malenfant. Watch the Moon. It's starting—”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“It's never going to stop,’ Malenfant whispered. ‘It will consume the Solar System, the stars—’
This isn't some local phenomenon, Malenfant. This is a fundamental change in the structure of the universe. It will never stop. It will sweep on, growing at light speed, a runaway feedback fueled by the collapse of the vacuum itself. The Galaxy will be gone in a hundred thousand years, Andromeda, the nearest large galaxy, in a couple of million years. It will take time, but eventually—
‘The future has gone,’ Malenfant said. ‘My God. That’s what this means, isn’t it? The downstream can’t happen now. All of it is gone. The colonization of the Galaxy; the settlement of the universe; the long, patient fight against entropy...’ That immense future had been cut off to die, like a tree chopped through at the root. ‘Why, Michael? Why have the children done this? Burned the house down, destroyed the future—’
Because it was the wrong future. Michael looked around the sky. He pointed to the lumpy, spreading edge of the unreality bubble.
There. Can you see that? It's already starting...
‘What is?’
The budding... The growth of the true vacuum region is not even. There will be pockets of the false vacuum—remnants of our universe—isolated by the spreading true vacuum. The fragments of false vacuum will collapse. Like—
‘Like black holes.’ And in that instant, Malenfant understood. ‘That’s what this is for. This is just a better way of making black holes, and budding off new universes. Better than stars, even.’
Much better. The black holes created as the vacuum decay proceeds will overwhelm by many orders of magnitude the mere billion billion that our universe might have created through its stars and galaxy cores.
‘And the long, slow evolution of the universes, the branching tree of cosmoses?...’
We have changed everything, Malenfant. Mind has assumed responsibility for the evolution of the cosmos. There will be many daughter universes—universes too many to count, universes exotic beyond our imagining—and many, many of them will harbor life and mind.
‘But we were the first.’
Now he understood. This was the purpose. Not the long survival of humankind into a dismal future of decay and shadows, the final retreat into the lossless substrate, where nothing ever changed or grew. The purpose of humankind—the first intelligence of all—had been to reshape the universe in order to bud others and create a storm of mind. We got it wrong, he thought. By striving for a meaningless eternity, humans denied true infinity. But we reached back, back in time, back to the far upstream, and spoke to our last children—the maligned Blues—and we put it right. This is what it meant to be alone in the universe, to be the first. We had all of infinite time and space in our hands. We had ultimate responsibility. And we discharged it. We were parents of the universe, not its children.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed.”
“Where do you think they are going?”
“Maybe that isn’t the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The squid are leaving, Maura…”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“This is what I have learned, Malenfant. This is how it is, how it was, how it came to be.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered. “Wait.” He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor. “Emma?” She licked her lips. “Look. Up there.” No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?” Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath … “Holy shit,” he said. She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.” And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon. It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit.

He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed. It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain. It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something—”
“Transcendent.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“I owe Kent Joosten of the Johnson Space Center, NASA, even more gratitude than usual for his contribution to the cephalopod sections. Thanks also to Eric Brown and Simon Bradshaw for reading manuscript drafts. • The idea that squid and other cephalopods may be intelligent is real. A recent reference is New Scientist of 7 June 1997; Cephalopod Behaviour by R. T. Hanlon and J. B. Messenger (Cambridge University Press, 1996) was a valuable source. • The riches available to us from the asteroids and other extraterrestrial resources, and plans to exploit those riches, are real. A good recent survey is Mining the Sky by John S. Lewis (Addison Wesley, 1996). • The probabilistic doomsday prediction called here the “Carter catastrophe” is real. It has been well expressed by John Leslie in The End of the World (Routledge, 1996). • The “Feynman radio” idea of using advanced electromagnetic waves to pick up messages from the future is real. This has actually been attempted, for example by I. Schmidt and R. Newman (Bulletin of the American Physical Society, vol. 25, p. 581, 1979). And the extension of the idea to quantum mechanics (the “transactional interpretation”) is real. See John Cramer, Reviews of Modern Physics, vol. 58, p. 647, 1986. • Cruithne, Earth’s “second Moon,” is real. Its peculiar properties were reported in Nature, vol. 387, p. 685, 1997. • The “quark-nugget” idea of collapsed matter, with its potentially disastrous implications, is real. It was proposed by E. Witten in “Cosmic Separation of Phases,” Physical Review D, vol. 30, p. 272, 1984. • The physics of the possible far future drawn here is real. A classic reference is “Time without End: Physics and Biology in an Open Universe,” F. Dyson, Review of Modern Physics, vol. 51, p. 447, 1979. • The idea that our universe is one of an evolutionary family is real. A recent variant of the theory has been developed by L. Smolin in his book The Life of the Cosmos (Oxford University Press, 1997). • The notion of vacuum decay is real. It was explored by P. Hut and M. Rees in “How Stable Is Our Vacuum?” Nature, vol. 302, p. 508, 1983.
The rest is fiction.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“She looked out her window, and there was the Moon in the daylit sky. Beneath her the planet turned; sun and Moon and stars continued to wheel through the sky. She felt lifted out of herself, transcending her small concerns, as if she were a mouse running around some grand, incomprehensible clockwork.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“His voice, his bizarre speculation, was a noise from the past for Maura. It’s all receding, she thought. She sighed. “I think it no longer makes a difference one way or the other, Dan. And you ought to be careful who you discuss this with.” Yes. “Where are you working now?” Brazzaville. I got a job in the dome here. Biosphere reclamation. “Rewarding.” I guess. Life goes on … Those redshift numbers. The cephalopods must be leaving at close to light speed. “Where do you think they are going?” Maybe that isn’t the point, Maura. Maybe the point is what they are trying to flee.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“News from the Trojans,” she told him. “One of NASA’s satellites has picked up anomalous radiation. Strongly redshifted.” She read out details, numbers. My God. You know what this means? “Tell me.” The squid are leaving, Maura … He talked, fast and at length, about what had become of his enhanced cephalopods. I guess he doesn’t get the chance too often, Maura thought sadly. We know they’ve spread out through the cloud of Trojans. We can only guess how many of them there are right now. The best estimate is in excess of a hundred billion. And it may be they are all cooperating. A single giant school. Do you know why the numbers are significant? A hundred billion seems to be a threshold … It takes a hundred billion atoms to organize to form a cell. It takes a hundred billion cells to form a brain. And maybe a hundred billion cephalopod minds, out in the Trojans, just light-minutes apart, have become something— “Transcendent.” Yes. We can’t even guess what it must be like, what they’re capable of now. Any more than a single neuron could anticipate what a human mind is capable of. Space is for the cephalopods, Maura. It never was meant for us.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“It was impossible. But they were having a damn good try. An obvious method was to treat it all as a conspiracy by the people who had been close to it all. People like Maura. But such orders were easy to hand out in executive offices in Washington; this was the Moon, and after three days in space—presumably without proper training or orientation—this poor grunt was green as a lettuce leaf and looked as if he could barely stand up, here in the cold, antiseptic light of the NASA base. Meanwhile she had heard other rumors that the Witnesses—as they were called—were being recalled for fresh “trials,” whether or not they had already recanted as required. And this time, it was said, when the Witnesses walked into custody, they were not coming out again. She was still a citizen of the United States. She had always regarded it as her duty to uphold and submit to her country’s laws, whatever she thought of their philosophical basis. Maybe she should pack up her bag and go home with the goon Marine, and submit herself, like Galileo, like Jesus. Maybe it would be an example that might even do some good. But Maura Della never had been good at turning the other cheek.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“U.S. Constitution as amended” and “emergency powers.” Maura Della was ordered to return to Earth—specifically, to submit herself to a Washington court within a couple of weeks. They wanted her to denounce the future. To deny that the information Reid Malenfant gleaned from his Feynman radio came from the future. To deny that the Blue kids were influenced by information from the future. Of course it wouldn’t be true. But America was run by a government now that had been elected, essentially, on a platform of removing all this stuff, this madness, from public life.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Malenfant, how can you be bored? You’re being transported between universes. Not only that, you only have a few hours to live. What do you want, dancing girls? And what difference does it make? We’re surely going to die soon anyhow, in some chunk”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“He led her to a coffee machine. The sludge-brown drink was free, but bad. The lack of fresh coffee was one of the consequences of the world trade minicollapse: something small but annoying, the removal of something she had always taken for granted, a sign of more bad news to come.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Amidst all this, the business of government went on; and as ever it was just one damn thing after another, as Maura and others strove to contain the damage.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“In a way, a part of him wished it wasn’t so: that this had been a simple story of asteroid mines and O’Neill colonies and homesteads in space, that the extraordinary future hadn’t intruded. Simple dreams, easily fulfilled. But that had never been an option.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“It struck him that it had been the dream of his whole life to come to a place like this: to stand here on the surface of another world, to watch heavy machinery tear into its rock and begin the construction of a living space, to watch the beginnings of the expansion of Earth life beyond the planet, fulfilling the dreams of Tsiolkovski and Goddard and Bernal and O’Neill and so many others.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The future, it seemed, was turning out to be one damn thing after another.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“She let his words wash over her. For, beyond the small, curving window, she saw black, gray, brown-white, a mesh of curves and inky darkness, sliding across her view like oil. It was a crescent bathed in sunlight, pocked with craters, wrinkled by hills. On the plains she could see boulders, pinpoints of brightness sending long, needle-fine shadows across the dusty ground. And the crescent was growing. The ship was flying into the shadow of the Moon toward the terminator, the line between night and day. The sunlit crescent narrowed, even as it spread across space. It was soon too large to be captured by a single window, and she leaned forward to see the sweep of the Moon, from horn to skinny horn. At last the crescent narrowed to invisibility, and she was flying over the shadowed Moon, a hole in the stars. She found she was holding her breath. The noises of the ship’s systems, little gadgets humming and ticking, seemed sacrilegious in this huge dark quiet. There was an explosion of light. She craned to see. Far ahead of the craft, the sun was rising over the Moon. A line of fire had straddled the horizon, poking through the mountains and crater rims there. The light fled across the bare surface, casting shadows hundreds of miles long from mountains and broken crater walls. The smaller, younger craters were wells of darkness in the flat light.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The galley was a neat little unit the size of a domestic freezer. It had hot and cold water dispensers, serving trays, a range of plastic plates and cutlery, and a teeny-tiny microwave oven. On the door of the galley was a complete food list, everything from apple sauce to turkey tetrazzini. The food, stowed under the galley, came in dehydrated packages, sliced meats with sauce or gravy in foil packages, plastic cans with tear-off lids. There were also a few treat items like candy bars in, the labels said, “their natural form.” There was even a tap that would dispense Shit Cola, the relic of some long-forgotten sponsorship deal. Experimentally she found a cup, a globe with an inlet valve and nipple, and tried a little of the Shit. The carbonation didn’t seem to be working right—no doubt some low-gravity problem—and it tasted lousy.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The galley was a neat little unit the size of a domestic freezer. It had hot and cold water dispensers, serving trays, a range of plastic plates and cutlery, and a teeny-tiny microwave oven. On the door of the galley was a complete food list, everything from apple sauce to turkey tetrazzini. The food, stowed under the galley, came in dehydrated packages, sliced meats with sauce or gravy in foil packages, plastic cans with tear-off lids. There were also a few treat items like candy bars in, the labels said, “their natural form.” There was even a tap that would dispense Shit Cola, the relic of some long-forgotten sponsorship deal. Experimentally she found a cup, a globe with an inlet valve and nipple, and tried a little of the Shit. The carbonation didn’t seem to be working right—”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Each crew member had a personal hygiene kit, more airline-complimentary stuff: a toothbrush, toothpaste, dental floss, nail clippers, soap, a comb, a brush, antichap lipstick, skin lotion, stick deodorant, a tube of shaving cream and a shaver that, bizarrely, worked by clockwork. There was a little hand-washing station, a hole in the wall through which you thrust your hands, and jets of hot and cold water played over your skin. It was also, thankfully, possible to take a shower, with a hose and a nozzle that you passed over your body inside a concertina-type wraparound curtain. But the curtain was imprinted with stern instructions about the importance of washing down the shower properly after use, to avoid algal growths.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The john—strictly speaking the Waste Management System—looked like it would be less fun. It was the old space shuttle design, a lavatorial veteran of decades of spaceflight. There was a commode with an operating handle and, God help her, a control panel. Liquid waste would be captured and pumped away for recycling. Solid waste wasn’t recycled; a valve would open to the vacuum of space to dry out the feces, and it would then be dumped overboard. When she turned the handle a vent opened and air started sucking its way down into the commode, big vanes turning in a very intimidating way. The toilet could only be used four times an hour, she noted with apprehension. She suspected that in the early days at least they would need more capacity than that.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“The crescent Earth shrank, becoming more round, more three-dimensional, more vividly blue against the empty blackness of space, a planet rather than a world. And, she wondered, could it be really true that all the mind and love and hope in the universe was confined to that thin blue film of dirt and water and air?”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“But how are we supposed to react? As a species we’ve never before had a proper debate about the structure of the future. And now we’re all online, all our voices joined, and everybody is having a say. None of us knows what the hell we’re talking about, of course. But I think it’s healthy. The debate has to start somewhere. Maybe it’s all part of our growing up as a race. Maybe every technical civilization has crises to survive: the invention of weaponry that can destroy its planet, the acquisition of the capability to trash its environment. And now here is a philosophical crisis: we must come to terms with the prospect of our own long-term destiny or demise. Just as each of us as individuals must at last confront death.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“Brightly lit, the hut was crammed with humming information technology, much of it looking a little antiquated. There were a few junior researchers working here, quietly bullshitting as they gave up another night of their lives to this slow, obsessive work, waiting for Earth to pass through the starlight shadow of some rock in space. The dedication, the ingenuity with which data was squeezed out of such invisibly small opportunities, was awesome.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“It seems to me that age, growing old, is a war between wisdom and bitterness. I’m not sure how I’ll come out of that war myself, assuming I get so far.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“I believed—still believe— that we are, if not perfectible, at least improvable as a species. And that basic worldview, I think, informs much sf.

Maybe all that was naive.”
― Stephen Baxter, Time

“zhilu weima,”
― Stephen Baxter, Time