Search Worlds Without End

This short story originally appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, December 2001. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 7 (2002), edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

This novelette originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1999. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 5 (2000), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

Sturgeon Award nominated short story. It originally appeared in Analog Science Fiction and Fact, May 2000. The story can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 6 (2001), edited by David G. Hartwell. It is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

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This short story originally appeared in Interzone, #130 April 1998. It can also be found in the anthology Year's Best SF 4 (1999), edited by David G. Hartwell. The story is included in the collection Phase Space: Stories from the Manifold and Elsewhere (2002).

The year is 2010. More than a century of ecological damage, industrial and technological expansion, and unchecked population growth has left the Earth on the brink of devastation. But as the world's governments turn inward, one man dares to gamble on a bolder, brighter future. That man--Reid Malenfant--has a very different solution to the problems plaguing the planet: the exploration and colonization of space.

Battling national sabotage and international outcry, Malenfant's bootstrap company builds a spacecraft, plots its course, and trains the genetically enhanced Sheena 5 for her one-way journey. As apocalyptic riots sweep the globe, Malenfant launches the rocket. But Sheena has plans of her own. And even as she sets them in motion, the situation on Earth grows more desperate and violent.

Now Malenfant--together with a brilliant but disturbed mathematician, a child prodigy, and his ex-wife--must gamble the very existence of time and space on a single desperate throw of the dice. The odds are a trillion to one against him...

Or are they?

The year is 2020. Fueled by an insatiable curiosity, Reid Malenfant ventures to the far edge of the solar system, where he discovers a strange artifact left behind by an alien civilization: A gateway that functions as a kind of quantum transporter, allowing virtually instantaneous travel over the vast distances of interstellar space. What lies on the other side of the gateway? Malenfant decides to find out. Yet he will soon be faced with an impossible choice that will push him beyond terror, beyond sanity, beyond humanity itself.

Meanwhile on Earth the Japanese scientist Nemoto fears her worst nightmares are coming true. Startling discoveries reveal that the Moon, Venus, even Mars once thrived with life, life that was snuffed out not just once but many times, in cycles of birth and destruction. And the next chilling cycle is set to begin again...

In the year 2015, astronaut Reid Malenfant is flying over the African continent, intent on examining a mysterious glowing construct in Earth's orbit. But when the very fabric of the sky tears open, spilling living creatures to the ground and pulling others inside (including his wife, Emma), Malenfant's quest to uncover the unknown becomes personal. While desperately searching to discover what happened to the woman he loves, Malenfant embarks upon an adventure to the very fount of human development... on earth and beyond.

Tied in to Baxter's masterful Manifold trilogy, these thematically linked stories are drawn from the vast graph of possibilities across which the lives of hero Reid Malenfant have been scattered. It is the year 2025. Reid Malenfant is the commander of a NASA earth-orbiting science platform. The platform is intended to probe the planets of the nearest star system by bouncing laser pulses off them. But no echoes are returned... and Malenfant's reality begins to crumble around him. Huddling with his family, awaiting the end - or an unknown new beginning - Malenfant tells stories of other possibilities, other realities.

The linked stories encompass the myriad possibilities that might govern our relationship with the universe: are we truly alone, or will we eventually meet other lifeforms? Perhaps intelligent species decide to turn their back on the stars, or maybe expansionist species are destined to fail. The final possibility - that the Universe as we know it is in fact an elaborate illusion designed to protect us from the fearful reality - is brilliantly explored in the tour de force novella that ends the volume.

Table of Contents:

• 1 - Prologue (Phase Space) - short story
• 5 - Moon-Calf - (1998) - short story
• 21 - Open Loops - (2000) - novelette
• 48 - Glass Earth, Inc. - (1997) - novelette
• 70 - Poyekhali 3201 - (1997) - short story
• 86 - Dante Dreams - (1998) - short story
• 104 - War Birds - (1997) - short story
• 127 - Sun-Drenched - (1998) - short story
• 136 - Martian Autumn - (2002) - short story
• 149 - Sun God - (1997) - novelette
• 170 - Sun-Cloud - (2001) - short story
• 185 - Sheena 5 - [Manifold] - (2000) - short story
• 203 - The Fubar Suit - [Manifold] - (1997) - short story
• 220 - Grey Earth - [Manifold] - (2001) - short story
• 236 - Huddle - [Manifold] - (1999) - novelette
• 265 - Refugium - (2002) - short story
• 284 - Lost Continent - (2001) - short story
• 295 - Tracks - (2001) - short story
• 305 - Lines of Longitude - (1997) - short story
• 317 - Barrier - (1998) - novelette (variant of The Barrier)
• 334 - Marginalia - (1999) - short story
• 345 - The We Who Sing - short story
• 356 - The Gravity Mine - (2000) - short story
• 364 - Spindrift - (1999) - short story
• 380 - Touching Centauri - novelette
• 411 - The Twelfth Album - (1998) - short story
• 423 - Afterword (Phase Space) - essay