For every action, there’s an infinity of outcomes. Countless trillions are possible, many milliards are likely, millions might be considered probable, several occur as possibilities to us as observers - and one comes true.
“QX. Well, when it was discovered that there were millions of times as many planets in the galaxy as could be accounted for by a Wellington Incident occurring once in two times ten to the tenth years or so, some way had to be figured out to increase, millionfold, the number of such occurrences. Manifestly, the random motion of the stars within the galaxy could not account for it. Neither could the vibration or oscillation of the globular clusters through the galaxy. The meeting of two galaxies—the passage of them completely through each other, edgewise—would account for it very nicely. …”
A wormhole yawned in its sleep and the yawn ricocheted through a stack of realities like a snapped powerline, and suddenly everyone could see a new glittering gap in the sky and on the other side of that gap lay the far side of the galaxy, unexplored, untapped, unreachable by the usual party ships until that moment.
“The worm is now beneath the crawler,” Kynes said. “You are about to witness a thing few have seen.”
Flecks of dust shadowed the sand around the crawler now. The big machine began to tip down to the right. A gigantic sand whirlpool began forming there to the right of the crawler. It moved faster and faster. Sand and dust filled the air now for hundreds of meters around.
Then they saw it! A wide hole emerged from the sand. Sunlight flashed from glistening white spokes within it. The hole’s diameter was at least twice the length of the crawler, Paul estimated. He watched as the machine slid into that opening in a billow of dust and sand. The hole pulled back.
If you read fast and read all, maybe some of the sand will stay in the sieve.
I don’t like sand. It’s coarse, and rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere.
He watched the desert slip under the airship’s nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.
The reason all this happened in the first place—the way our little group of stars took off at relativistic speeds. I’ve been trying to figure it out. The only thing I can think is that we were traveling so fast that time dilation took over—for a long time, Pelly, I can’t even guess how long-long enough so that all the stars went through their life cycles and died while we were traveling.
The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire.
She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star.
Do you remember where you were when the Meteor hit?
Good evening. A few minutes ago, the United States ambassadors to every country in the world told the leaders of those nations what I’m about to tell you. It’s a bit complicated, so we’ll take some time, so I hope you’ll bear with me, hear what I have to say. A little over a year ago, two American astronomers, Marcus Wolf and Leo Biederman, working on a mountaintop in Arizona, saw something in the night sky that caused them great concern. A comet. But the comet was… well, there was a remote possibility that the comet was on a path that could bring it into direct contact with the Earth. Now, we get hit all the time by rocks and meteors, some of them the size of cars, some no bigger than your hand. But the comet we discovered is the size of New York City, from the North side of Central Park to the Battery. About seven miles long. Put another way, this comet is larger than Mount Everest. It weighs 500 billion tons.
Out to sea, the calm lagoon waters were darkening, while the comets overhead glowed brighter, omens in the gloaming.
He thought about stars. Astronomy was his mental focus. Red means cool, he pondered. That red one there might be a small, nearby ancient—or a distant giant already in its death throes. And that bright one over there could be a blue supergiant. Very rare. Was there one in this area of space? He ought to remember.
Tom blinked. The blue “star” was moving. He watched it drift across the starfield, until it intercepted another bright pinpoint, this one a brilliant green. There was a flash as the two tiny lights met. When the blue spark moved on, the green was no more.
Now what were the chances I’d witness that? How likely to be looking at just the right place at the right time? The battle must still be pretty hot and heavy up there. It isn’t over yet.
The Age of the Stars had come to an end. Once in a billion years, a feeble supernova illuminated the vestiges of its home; brown dwarfs, neutron stars, blackholes… lifeless echoes of their former majesty.
The last of the big, bright stars had long since gone supernova; the last of the Sol types had gone supergiant and turned into a white dwarf; all of those profligate wastrels of energy had long since burned themselves out. The red dwarfs had a somewhat longer run for their money. They were the smallest and longest-lived of those furnaces of nuclear fusion that were called stars, but then they had gone, too. The last of them had long before burned itself to a lump of iron, warmed by the only energy source that was left, the terminally slow decay of the protons themselves.
Proton decay! It hurt Wan-To’s pride to have to live by so feeble an energy source as proton decay.
The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along and it will go right on after they’re scattered up, down and sideways.
None of the quadrillions living now among all the stars of the Galaxy will be living a century from now. Why, then, should we concern ourselves with events of three centuries’ distance?
And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.
My birthday-present! It came to me on my birthday, my precious.