The Siege of Eternity

BOOKS BY FREDERIK POHL

BIPOHL

The Age of the Pussyfoot

Drunkard's Walk

Black Star Rising

The Cool War

The HEECHEE SAGA

Gateway

Beyond the Blue Event Horizon

Heechee Rendezvous

The Annals of the Heechee

The Gateway Trip

The ESCHATON SEQUENCE

The Other End of Time

The Siege of Eternity

Homegoing

Mining the Oort

Narahedla Ltd.

Pohlstars

Starburst

The Way the Future Was

(memoir)

The World at the End of Time

Jem

MIDAS World

Merchant's War

The Coming of the Quantum Cats

The Space Merchants (with

C. M. Kornbluth)

Man Plus

Chernobyl

The Day the Martians Came

Stopping at Slowyear

The Voices of Heaven

With Jack Williamson:

The Starchild Trilogy

Undersea City

Undersea Quest

Undersea Fleet

Wall Around a Star

The Farthest Star

Land's End

The Singers of Time

With Lester del Rey:

Preferred Risk

The Best of Frederik Pohl (edited by Lester del Rey)

The Best of C. M. Kornbluth (editor)

Frederik Pohl

SIEGE OF ETERNITY

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

THE SIEGE OF ETERNITY Copyright (c) 1997 by Frederik Pohl

First Edition: November 1997 Printed in the United States of America 0987654321

With affection and gratitude this book is dedicated to my shipmates on the schooner Rembrandt van Ryjn, who know why.

THE

SIEGE OF ETERNITY

BEFORE

THE WORLD WAS GOING ABOUT ITS EVERYDAY BUSINESS WHEN something happened that was quite strange.

For one part of the world, that everyday business it was going about amounted to nothing more than watching its television screens. Some of the world's people gazed at a prizefight in Kenya, some watched cop shows and soap operas in the Americas, a tiny fraction sat somnolent before the finals of the English National snooker matches. When those programs were interrupted for a news bulletin that part of the world was seriously annoyed.

The bulletin that interrupted their programs quickly made the viewers forgive the annoyance-at least, it did for that fraction of those viewers who believed it was real. The bulletin said that a Genuine message from space had been received on a seldom used radio frequency. Most of the message was indecipherable. A small portion was easier to decode and it turned out to be a crude form of video. Before long the simple animated drawing it displayed filled all the world's screens.

The animated sequence started with a dark screen, except for one tiny pinpoint of intense brilliance. Then that spot exploded. Smaller, less brilliant spots of light flew in all directions. That runaway expansion gradually slowed. Then it stopped entirely and reversed itself as all the spots, first slowly, at increasing velocity, fell back to the center of the screen.

That was it. That was all there was.

As entertainment, it was pretty poor stuff. But, after all, it did come from some off-Earth source. The people at the radio telescopes sure of that; so the scientists and the newsmakers began to try to figure out what the cartoon meant. Their best guess was that it represented a condensed account of the life of the universe: beginning in the Big Bang, expanding as far as that original impetus would carry it, then recollapsing into the Big Crunch as everything fell back together again. So said the pundits. But not even they could think of any good reason why some extraterrestrials would want to tell the human world about it.

However, that wasn't the end of it. A few months later there was another of the same. This one was somewhat more interesting, too. It had people in it-well, sort of people, at least, though they were not in any way human ones.

This second message ran a little longer than the first. It started with that same old birth-and-death-of-the-universe bit, only this time a figure then appeared. The figure looked either comical or terrifying, depending on how seriously you took it. The creature depicted was as skinny as a scarecrow, and it had a head with a wide, toothed mouth that grinned like a Hallowe'en pumpkin. Its "hands" were a forest of fingers, at least a dozen of them on each side; each digit ended in a menacingly sharp talon, and what the creature was doing with them was pitilessly crushing the bright coal that had been the universe. It wasn't alone, either. Around it appeared seven other, smaller figures, each one uglier than the next. One had a beard. One had a stupid smile. One had half-closed eyes. All were perfectly hideous, by the standards of any ethnic group on Earth.

That was it. A moment later the picture winked out. All that was left was the attempts of the world's savants (and some of the world's nonsavants, who played it for laughs) to figure out what it was all about.