It was as if they were laying up for a snowstorm, Kate thought. The living room was littered with pails of water, cans of food. ‘I guess that’s it.’ He moved around the room, setting candles on tables and the fire hearth their glow was oddly comforting.
But Kate didn’t blame her it was an understandable human impulse. Saranne, clutching her baby, stalked around the house’s big living room, pulling curtains, as if that would shut it all out. Saranne snapped, ‘Come back in and close the damn door.’ Well, what else is there to do but try? God bless America.’ At least after her death she wouldn’t know about it would even that be true after this? It was unimaginable – even more so than her own death. 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. Everybody had gone home, or anyhow found a place to hunker down, until – We’re glimpsing the wider phase space of the universe, Malenfant.’ ‘The phase space of a system is the set of all conceivable states of that system. ‘ Phase space.’ Cornelius seemed coldly excited. Malenfant said, ‘So what are we looking at?’ It was just seven days since the failed echo from Alpha Centauri.
Baby Michael – son of Mike – Malenfant’s grandson.Īnd 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. Kate Manzoni, with Reid Malenfant and Cornelius Taine, stood on Mike’s porch. Whilst there were elements of the story I enjoyed (and I am a bit of a sucker for alternate histories), you would really have to be a Beatles fan to fully understand the somewhat anoraky references to different Beatles LPs. 'The Twelfth Album' is an alternative reality story involving the Beatles. (Well, in some futures.)The final story in the collection, though, is one I'd be unlikely to return to. I suspect this is more useful as a book to dip into, and I can see me doing this in future. I therefore found this to feel a bit 'samey' (and I wasn't reading it in extended reading sessions). There are also a handful of stories that have been included because they seemed thematically appropriate, even if they don't fit the 'Manifold' sequence.I came to this book directly after reading the whole trilogy, but that meant that I'd already lived with different versions of the same characters in quite a few instances. Some are stories involving characters from one or another of the novels (not forgetting that the three novels in 'Manifold' depict different universes but have the same characters ) others appear to be variant stories or even early thoughts on some of those novels. A collection of stories, for the most part connected with Baxter's 'Manifold' trilogy.
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