Astronomic Distance, Geologic Time

Bud Sparhawk

Just to put things in perspective...

* * * *

Gerald Homer Cahille giggled. It was the happy laugh of a two-year-old enjoying his first warm, wet experience of a puppy’s tongue.

If his father hadn’t been delayed at the bus stop he never would have seen the romping puppy in the window and decided, there on the spot, that it would be the ideal companion for his son.

“It’ll be good companionship for the boy while I’m gone,” he told his wife mere weeks later as he embraced her, lifted his bag to his uniformed shoulder, and headed off to war.

“Yes,” she replied with a smile, knowing exactly who would be cleaning up the messes, doling out the nightly food ration, and trying to manage two unruly creatures that had no concept of civilized behavior and therefore would bring so much trouble into her life while he was away.

Still, after seeing the joyful smile on her son’s face and knowing the companionship the dog would provide—hardly a substitute for a father—she accepted the inevitable.

For the next few years Gerald and Rex, the dog, were inseparable, happily destroying his mother’s carefully tended victory garden, inflicting visible damage on his family’s shoes, and managing to transport enough dirt and grime indoors, although not all at once, to build a second yard. Only his entry into school eventually separated them, making each afternoon a delightful, romping reunion when the bus deposited Gerald at the curb.

During the first half of his life Rex chased seventy-five squirrels; chased twenty cars and trucks; pissed on nearly three thousand trees, bushes, and poles; humped three bitches and uncounted legs; ate nine hundred pounds of dog food, occasional table scraps, and a quarter of the turkey and associated dressing his mother had prepared for Thanksgiving shortly after the war, when such luxuries became once again available.

Rex also utterly destroyed every toy he was given except for a prized, saliva-soaked, grimy tennis ball that he lovingly dropped on the laps of unsuspecting guests.

The age of technology had long passed, as had the age of arts and, inevitably, the age of knowledge. The race knew that there was little left for them, for even immortality can exhaust its attractiveness.

Their last great project began when a few retrograde individuals decided to create something that would answer the question of why they, of all the creatures who must occupy the Universe, were so lucky as to be at the precise center. The answer was to send something to the distant “edge” of the Universe, ten billion light-years away. The likelihood of their descendants hearing the answer after that much time was negligible. Even if they never learned the answer, the question would finally be settled, which was sufficient reason to regain the long-forgotten skills and knowledge so necessary to conceive and build something that would endure the trip.

It took over four thousand cycles for them to devise the plans, another two thousand to muster the resources, and five more for the actual construction. Perfection is not something easily achieved, even for these incredibly advanced beings that used everything they’d learned from millennia of unbroken, continual advances in every imaginable field.

The six tiny ships, each no larger than the seed of thistledown, were wonders—part mechanism, part dream, and entirely an exercise in aesthetic perfection. Once released, the ships would sip on photons for sustenance and use dark energy for fuel.

Despite their beauty, they were nevertheless rugged enough to outlast the worst disaster imaginable and intelligent enough to deal with any obstacles encountered, such as black holes, maelstrom nebulae, and deep time pools. Since they would be moving at near light-speed they would avoid close encounters where their immense relativistic mass might perturb the balance of entire systems.

With great fanfare the six craft, Emanni, Kilasta, Majat, Remmin, Boinit, and Istophel, were launched in the six cardinal directions. During the course of their journey each ship would pass through the nearest galaxies and, eventually, through those that had not yet begun to form from the aggregation of star stuff, gases, and other random parts of the Universe.

Initially slow moving, they rapidly gathered speed so that, in the first infinitesimally tiny fraction of the planned voyages, they’d achieved nearly three-quarters of the speed of light. After that they followed what would become a zigzag course of looping curves around black holes and dense stars to boost their speed by fractions of a percent. Since they started in a dense volume of their galaxy, it only took fifty thousand years to reach 90 percent of light-speed.

The ship that would eventually pass quite near the yet-to-be-formed solar system was initially pointed at a galaxy six billion light-years away, a trivial though time-consuming distance for the indestructible and immortal Istophel.

Rex must have heard the jingle of car keys as twelve-year-old Gerald, who now insisted on being called Jerry, entered the small room off the kitchen that they’d turned into the old dog’s refuge. Rex whimpered as he tried to rise and then fell when his weak hind legs gave way. He finally settled for feebly lifting his head and giving a few half-hearted wags of his tail.

The dog’s health had been going downhill for months. His hair had been falling out for some time, leaving bald spots on the bony protuberances of his arthritic hips. In the last two weeks he had lost control of both bladder and bowels. He refused to eat more than a bite or two of handheld soft food when Jerry desperately tried to bring him back to health.

Jerry knelt and stroked the old dog’s head for a moment, trying not to think of what they had to do. “He’s miserable, Jerry. You wouldn’t want him to suffer, would you?” his father had asked the night before.

Jerry had protested putting Rex down for days, hoping against hope that the dog’s health would improve, that he would somehow start eating again, recover, and be able to run and fetch and tumble and play as they always had, even while knowing that running, fetching, and tumbling were years and tears in their past.

“The best thing we can do is to end his pain, son,” his father had insisted. “You have to let him go.”

Jerry lifted Rex in his arms, refusing any assistance, and carried the old dog to the car, there to lovingly hold him close and dear all the way to the veterinarian, releasing his embrace only when they were about to give Rex his final injection, holding his best friend’s head as his eyes closed, his breath slowed, stopped, and the long tongue that had licked Jerry’s two-year-old cheeks fell from his open mouth.

“Dogs don’t live forever, so we have to love them for the brief time they have. He had a good life, Jerry. Be happy about that.” His father’s consoling words went unheard and Jerry sobbed softly at the loss of his best friend as they drove home.

A billion years into the voyage, barely a tenth of the way toward the solar system, Istophel was moving at nearly 95 percent of light-speed and ever so slowly accelerating. Her creators would have been proud of their accomplishment if their creator’s descendants’ descendants hadn’t faded beyond memory four hundred million years before, leaving the six immortal spacecraft racing ever outwards as the only remaining evidence of their existence.

Istophel periodically analyzed a distant dot of light, barely perceivable at the edge of the observable Universe, to gauge how far she had yet to go and, in each instance, the answer was the same—she still appeared to be in the center of the observable Universe.

As Istophel covered another eight million light years, cyanobacteria began staining Earth’s rocks. As she covered many more millions of light-years, the bacterial colonies wrote their signatures in Earth’s geologic record.

Earth’s oceans and seas were 250 million years ahead.

***

Istophel pondered the observation problem over the next two million light-years of the voyage, while the still young Earth’s volcanoes vomited continents and buried the stromatolite formations under thick layers of magma, crushing the layers one by one as they filled the sky with fire and sulfurous fumes.

Jerry had long forgotten about his first beloved childhood dog after three more came into the household, grew old, and died. By the time he set off on his own, his parents had graduated to cats and their disgusting litter boxes, which was only marginally better than scooping dog poop off the sidewalk.

Jerry often wondered how his life might have changed had the dryer in his apartment not broken down and forced him to carry his clothing to the local laundromat. What happened next was the plot of a thousand stories whose details consisted of a sock left in a dryer, a cute smile, conversation over coffee, a brief fling, some disappointment, the inevitable breakup, and finally having Maria as one of his wife’s bridesmaids two years later.

Children followed and, although they gave Jerry more trouble than he felt he deserved, they eventually turned out to be decent adults who started on their own independent journey down life’s path. He didn’t regret the passing of their childhood or the loss of his own parents years before. “There’s a cycle,” he was fond of saying. “All things pass in time.”

When Istophel was nearly halfway to Earth, the deadly Great Oxygenation Event wiped out the majority of bacterial life. A billion light-years later, single-cell life forms dined on bacterial mats as the supercontinent of Rodinia formed around Earth’s equator. The atmospheric flow of rich moist air was so disrupted by the continent that the polar caps and oceans froze solid, turning the planet into a four-hundred-million-year snowball.

Istophel had barely entered the Horologium Supercluster when the Earth warmed enough for the Cambrian explosion of multicellular life. The oceans swam in a variety of forms until a huge chunk of debris screamed through the atmosphere, cracked one of the tectonic plates, and brought on a thousand years of dark winter. The result was so devastating that the majority of ocean life died, leaving only those who feasted on the remains of others and the issue of the volcanic vents.

Istophel continued to use curving paths around huge gravitational masses to maintain her speed of 98 percent of the speed of light as she covered another hundred million light years. During this brief time Earth had been become blessed with plants and true fishes.

There were only 425 million light-years left before Istophel would pass Earth.

Three surviving children, six grandchildren, sixteen great-grandchildren and two great-great-grandchildren surrounded Gerald “Jerry” Homer Cahille at his final birthday in Flagstaff, Arizona’s Happy Trails Assisted Living Facility.

At one hundred and forty, he had experienced a lot of changes in the world—wars, love, and, particularly during the latest phase of his life, misery.

At the moment he felt great, no doubt due to the generous dosage of happy juice the compliant hospice people were willing to provide whenever he asked and, most of the time, when he hadn’t. The drugs took the edge off the pain from the cancer and isolated him from an awareness of the feeding tube, catheter, transfusion, and various monitoring devices that snaked through the bedclothes. There was so much equipment around him that he felt like one of his great-grandson’s high school science projects.

At the same time, all the gadgets and pipes meant he no longer had to worry about eating, taking a piss, or whether his bowels were going to move or not. The machines and the facility’s grossly underpaid staff took care of those mundane matters for him.

On reflection, he thought, he’d raised a good crew. No murderers, criminals, or lawyers among the bunch, although one of the older great-grandkids was showing disturbing signs of political activism. “Watch that one,” he’d once warned his grandson. “Shoot him if he tries to run for office.”

Jerry died quietly in his sleep, at night, with no one near to hold his hand. The funeral was brief and attended mostly by family. Jerry’s close friends had preceded him years before and by the time he entered Happy Trails, he was past the age for developing friendships with his geriatric neighbors.

His sons were saddened by Jerry’s passing, but since they were all within sight of their own demise, they accepted the inevitability of death. “All things pass,” they repeated their father’s favorite saying at the funeral.

Jerry’s death was hardest on the grandkids, who were young and, like all youth, still of the opinion that they were going to live forever. It was they who challenged the inevitability of it, who mourned that the old man wouldn’t be there this Christmas or any after, and who felt the pain of loss.

After the ashes were put into the ground everyone retired to hold the wake. The youngest of the great-great-grandchildren played between the legs of the great-grandkids who were busy debating when the caterer was going to serve the food and whether they could sneak a sip of beer when their parents weren’t looking.

Eventually, like his childhood puppy, Jerry sank deep into memory.

Istophel was in the Eridanus Supercluster, 97 percent of the way to Earth, as plants and fishes flourished in Earth’s melting ice. As it passed through the Supercluster, continuing to adjust its course to take advantage of gravitational boosting, the warm oceans witnessed the breakup of Rodinia and the formation of the Pangean supercontinent while dinosaurs ruled the Earth.

Istophel spent the next one hundred and fifty million light-years trying to precisely determine her position and puzzling over the fact that the observable Universe, despite her obvious progress, now appeared to be almost twelve billion light-years away in every direction.

As she analyzed reasons for this, Rodinia broke into Laurasia and Gondwana and, by the time she reached a conclusion near Gla&*/k, which, translated from the predominant native tongue as “that great big bright thing up there,” Gondwana had broken in two, just in time for another massive meteor strike to send Earth into an ages-long night.

It was obvious to Istophel that the Universe was continuing to expand, which meant the journey would take longer than expected. Being immortal and uncaring of consequences, she merely digested this as another data point.

Only seaweed thrived as a survivor of the plant kingdom and would have, when Istophel was another fifty million light-years further along her wavering path, diversified into the forests, grasses, vines, and plants that nourished those creatures who were starting to populate the edges of the fragmented Gondwanaland.

The wonder of flowering plants occurred when Istophel was 98.5 percent of its way to Earth and, after it had gone just half a percent farther—twenty-five million light-years—Earth’s mammals were struggling to survive one of the planet’s periodic ice ages.

When she was a quarter of a million light-years nearer, ice began to creep toward Earth’s temperate region, the Swiss mountains began forming, and the ancient Appalachian hills, a relic of Gondwana’s brief reign, began sinking into the crust.

Sometime in the early sixteenth century a scrawny Midland cobbler decided that he needed some way to differentiate him from the unpleasant peasant down the road. They both couldn’t be Arid of Midland, and he was damned if he was going to change the name the church had given him. Instead he decided to align himself with the Lord and tell everyone he was Arid Caholesphor of Midland.

Jerry’s descendants were justifiably proud of their family name, even if it had changed slightly to Cahille as it traveled down the centuries. There were few families, they frequently bragged, who could boast a documented history of forty unbroken generations. There had obviously been many more, but since none of their ancestors had used family names prior to old Arid, discovering the identities of that worthy’s precursors was futile.

So it was a bitter day when Arid Caholesphore’s last named descendent, a bachelor and near-hermit of a prospector on Mars’ desolate Planitia Olympia, passed away without issue, putting an end to Arid’s long family line.

Istophel had covered 99.9 percent of the distance to Earth and, thanks to a huge boost from a massive black attractor, was moving at ninety-nine and five nines light-speed when it passed Xylink, the name its second planet’s inhabitants had given it. None of them noticed, for all traces of their existence had disappeared a few hundred million years earlier. Neither would any of Xylink’s browsing herbivores, even if they had intelligence, have cared.

Even at her incredible speed, Istophel took another half million years to curve its path through the Andromeda galaxy. During its passage among the fifty trillion stars that made up Andromeda, her passage was noted by the Perpeit Collectivism, which sparked them into an examination of a new physics. As Istophel covered the next five hundred thousand light-years, the Perpeit achieved greatness beyond the dreams of their predecessors only to disappear when their star went nova and destroyed their planet, their colonies, and the pathetically few ships creeping at half of light- speed to escape the disaster.

On Earth, the dawn humans strode out of Africa and began to spread across the land as Istophel passed M30 and, three-quarters of a million years later, Homo sapiens had become the predominant human form.

Humans scurried to occupy nearly every continent as the glaciers retreated. The warming also caused an ice bridge that had held the vast Missoula Lake in check to collapse and started a two-thousand-year, one-hundred-foot high, sixty-mile-per-hour flood that would carve out much of America’s Northwest between Montana and the Pacific. Istophel neared the Canes Dwarf as ash from the Yellowstone eruption darkened most of the continent and wiped out many of North America’s megafauna.

A mere thousand years later Earth began heating up from its chill ice age. In the warming climate it took only eight thousand years for humans to decimate the remaining large animal populations just before the Quaternary Ice Age dawned.

Istophel was entering the Lagoon Nebula when the Chinese began scratching out the first elements of their written language on pieces of bone and hides.

A small band of humans and dogs trekked across the bleak ice fields to find refuge against the cold as Istophel exited Andromeda. Both of the tribe’s babies had died a month earlier and two of the fecund females had fallen prey to the bears who were systematically hunting the human packs in competition for the increasingly scarce food supplies.

To the north, the glaciers were steadily grinding down civilization’s long-abandoned crystal towers and massive dams that no human survivor cared about. There were more important things in life than a history so ancient that none of the tale spinners spoke of it.

Later, as Istophel left the Lagoon Nebula, a two-mile-wide chunk of rock slammed into what was formerly known as Seattle, splitting the Pacific plate and sending Earth into a hundred-year darkness that wiped out 80 percent of animal and vegetable life and put an end to the age of mammals.

There were no longer any humans to witness the demise of the hated bears.

Istophel barely registered Ross 154 as it flashed by a fraction under the speed of light ten years later. She was too preoccupied with the disconcerting discovery that the edge of the observable Universe now appeared to be more than thirteen billion light-years away. Since there was clearly something wrong with the measurements, she shut that system down until she could find some solution to the measurement problem.

It might have been nice had some human—as the Perpid Collective had done—analyzed the gravitational ripple of Istophel’s passage, but her passage was ten million years too late to catch mankind’s brief interest in astronomy or even its existence.

Instead the tiny ship flashed by a landscape much changed from when humans flew to distant stars and claimed dominion over all. Signs of all of mankind’s great works throughout the Earth were long gone, its cities having been crushed by glaciers, buried by molten magma, or buried in the mud of floods.

Had Istophel been 0.0000001 percent faster, its passage might have been noted by humanity, but that fraction of a fraction of a fraction of time in which mankind existed was so small, so insignificant to Earth’s eons-long history, that it would have been a wonder of coincidence.

Istophel covered another fifty million light-years toward Arcturus as Earth’s African plate continued driving northward to squeeze the Mediterranean into a wide river. Volcanoes erupted from a new plate separation in the Indian Ocean and a massive volcanic eruption buried the Hawaiian Islands under a hundred-yard-deep layer of ash and magma. By the time Istophel had gone an additional quarter of the distance it had already covered, subduction of the tectonic plates had erased every sign that humanity had ever existed.

Another five million light-years further and somewhere in Earth’s forests of equatorial New Pangaea a multilimbed creature raised its snout and bellowed its dominance of the world. Three hundred million light-years after that, Istophel passed the planet Tripplit, where a cephalosapient was puzzling whether it should toss some scraps to the small incrippi who had begun staying near the campfire. Maybe, it thought, the small pest might be useful in finding game.

Back on Earth, another ice age had descended as Australia collided with China, pushed northward by the relentless movement of Antarctica toward the equator. Scarcely a thousand years later, due to drastic changes in atmospheric flow, all the lands were covered in miles-deep layers of ice. Only in the chill depths did those creatures that had chosen to return to the sea survive. The most fearsome of these included the voracious, marginally intelligent, and multiply segmented squalidies.

Long after, blind Istophel still failed to realize that, despite her steady and accelerating progress, she remained at the center of the observable Universe, whose distant speck of light would now appear, had she not shut her system down, to be eighteen billion light-years distant.

Most of the stars and planets she had passed during her journey had died, clusters of galaxies had disintegrated, and an atom that in the far distant past might have once been part of Rex or Jerry or even old Arid combined with another that might have been part of old Earth or even Istophel’s creators.

The two atoms began to exert a slight attraction to other atoms in a process that might, in the fullness of time, coalesce into a new world and create, in the best of all possible universes, an intelligent race, a loving family, a laughing baby, and even a warm puppy’s wet tongue.