Time - Stephen Baxter

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      STEPHEN BAXTER

      TIME

      MANIFOLD 1

       COPYRIGHT

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 1999

      Copyright © Stephen Baxter 1999

      Cover image of Calabi-yau manifold © Laguna Design/Getty Images

       Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Stephen Baxter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any written content or picture content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

      Source ISBN: 9780006511823

       Ebook Edition © June 2012 ISBN: 9780007383009 Version: 2018-12-03

       PRAISE

      Praise for Stephen Baxter:

      ‘Stephen Baxter proves what a cosmic thinker he is’

       Washington Post Book World

      ‘Baxter handles a complex and gripping plot with his customary aplomb … The ending will blow your mind … go out and buy everything else that Baxter has ever written’

       New Scientist

      ‘Baxter has emerged as a master of cosmological hard SF, a writer enamored of alien viewpoints and radical settings, with a sense of sublime immensities and an ingenuity at working permutations on the question of what is human’

       Locus

       DEDICATION

      To two space cadets: My nephew, James Baxter Kent Joosten, NASA

      CONTENTS

       Title Page

       3: Cruithne

       4: Manifold

       Afterword

       Keep Reading

       About the Author

       Also by the Author

       About the Publisher

       Reid Malenfant:

      You know me. And you know I’m a space cadet.

      You know I’ve campaigned for, among other things, private mining expeditions to the asteroids. In fact, in the past I’ve tried to get you to pay for such things. I’ve bored you with that often enough already, right?

      So tonight I want to look a little further out. Tonight I want to tell you why I care so much about this issue that I devoted my life to it.

      The world isn’t big enough any more. You don’t need me to stand here and tell you that. We could all choke to death, be extinct in a hundred years.

      Or we could be on our way to populating the Galaxy.

      Yes: the Galaxy. Want me to tell you how?

      Turns out it’s all a question of economics.

      Let’s say we set out to the stars. We might use ion rockets, solar sails, gravity assists. It doesn’t matter.

      We’ll probably start as we have in the Solar System, with automated probes. Humans may follow. One per cent of the helium-3 fusion fuel available from the planet Uranus, for example, would be enough to send a giant interstellar ark, each ark containing a billion people, to every star in the Galaxy. But it may be cheaper for the probes to manufacture humans in situ, using cell synthesis and artificial womb technology.

      The first wave will be slow, no faster than we can afford. It doesn’t matter. Not in the long term.

      When the probe reaches a new system, it phones home, and starts to build.

      Here is the heart of the strategy. A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore anticipate massive exploitation of the system’s resources, without restraint, by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore economically free to us.

      I thought you’d enjoy that line. There’s nothing an entrepreneur likes more than the sound of the word ‘free’.

      More probes will be built and launched from each of the first wave of target stars. The probes will reach new targets; and again, more probes will be spawned, and fired onward. The volume covered by the probes will grow

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