Phase Space

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Kate Manzoni, with Reid Malenfant and Cornelius Taine, stood on Mike's porch. Inside the house, the baby was crying. Baby Michael - son of Mike - Malenfant's grandson.

And in the murky Houston sky, new Moons and Earths burst like silent fireworks, glowing blue or red or yellow, each lit by the light of its own out-of-view sun.

It was just seven days since the failed echo from Alpha Centauri.

Malenfant said, 'So what are we looking at?'

'Phase space.' Cornelius seemed coldly excited. 'The phase space of a system is the set of all conceivable states of that system. We're glimpsing the wider phase space of the universe, Malenfant.'

Kate wondered how that remark helped.

No traffic moved on the street. Everybody had gone home, or anyhow found a place to hunker down, until -

Well, until what, Kate? As she had followed this gruesome step-by-step process from the beginning, she had studiously avoided thinking about its eventual outcome: when the wave of unreality, or whatever it was, came washing at last over Earth, over her. It was unimaginable - even more so than her own death. At least after her death she wouldn't know about it; would even that be true after this?

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