Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

bone dry.
    Hektor said, ’Look down there. Nothing left but bugs in the deep
rocks. Everything that can burn in those cities has gone already.
Son, if you transplanted our villa down there it would turn into a
shining puddle of melted glass. And it’s getting worse.’
    ’Because the sun is still heating up.’
    ’So it is. There is nothing we can do to reverse this. Soon the
twilight belt will close, squeezed between hot and cold, and Mars
will be uninhabitable, just as it was before humans came and
terraformed it. And the last of us will have to leave, or die.’
    This desolate prospect filled Symat with gloom, which it was in
his nature to resist. ’It might not come to that. What if the sun
cools again?’
    Pelle touched Symat’s arm. ’It won’t. Those who are destroying the
sun won’t allow it.’
    To swell into a giant would have been the sun’s eventual fate, but
not for billions of years yet. This premature destabilisation of the
sun was deliberate. Creatures, malevolent and relentless, swarmed in
its core, puddling the fusion processes there, and so compressing
aeons of a stellar lifetime into mere megayears. And Sol was not the
only star being smothered in its own heat. You only had to look
around the sky, littered with red stars, to see that. ’But it’s not
personal,’ a teacher had told Symat once, with black humour. ’The
photino birds in the heart of the sun probably don’t even know we
humans exist…’
    ’The sun is dying,’ Hektor said with bleak finality, ’and Mars is
dying with it, and there isn’t a thing we can do about it. And then
there’s the Scourge.’
    This was the trap of history, closing in Symat’s lifetime. For
even as one agency was murdering the sun, another, the Xeelee, was
driving mankind back from the stars.
    ’We were left with nowhere to go,’ Hektor said. ’Until we
discovered the booths.’
    Symat said suspiciously, ’Discovered? ’
    ’Yes, discovered. You didn’t imagine they are a human
invention?’
    Symat supposed he had, but he had never thought hard about it.
Besides, it just wasn’t something you talked about.
    A few generations back, the booths had simply appeared at
scattered locations, studded around the cities and parks of mankind’s
remaining worlds. Their operation was simple, the execution
awe-inspiring. If you walked through a booth, you would be
transported, not just to another place as if this was some fancy
teleport system, but to another universe: a pocket universe, as the
cosmologists called it, a fold in the fabric of spacetime stitched to
the parent by a wormhole-like umbilical. You could walk between
universes with your luggage on your back and your child in your arms.
And once you were through you would be safe, preserved from Xeelee
and photino bird interventions alike.
    Nobody was clear exactly how this common knowledge about the
booths had reached the human population. Certainly not from the
booths themselves, which were one way: nobody came back to tell the
tale of what was on the other side. The folk wisdom just seemed to be
there, suddenly, in the databases, in the air. But it was believed
widely enough for a steadily increasing fraction of humanity to trust
their own futures and their children’s to this strange exit.
    Hektor said, ’Obviously there has been speculation. The booths
could be an ancient human design, I suppose; who can say what was
once possible? Or they could come from some alien culture, though our
habit of enslaving, assimilating or eliminating most aliens we came
across might seem to argue against that.’ He said conspiratorially,
’Perhaps it was the Xeelee themselves. What do you think about that?
Our greatest foe, eradicating us from the universe - and yet giving
us a bolt-hole in the process.’
    ’And this is what you want me to walk into,’ Symat said.
    Hektor said stiffly, ’We can’t tell you anything we haven’t told
you a dozen, fifty times before. Somehow it never stuck with you, the
way it did with other children.’
    ’But I thought that if we showed you,’ Pelle said, ’showed you the
world, the sky, the state of things, then it might make things
clearer.’
    ’Clearer? But walking into a booth is like dying. You can’t come
back. And you don’t know what’s on the other side, because nobody
ever came back to tell us. Just like dying.’
    ’Here we go again,’ Hektor growled. ’Pelle, I told you this was a
waste of time. We’ve had conversations like this since