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not present at the event horizon itself, space would seem to expand until it appeared infinite.” He looked through the big glass again. “What else do we see, when we look upwards?”
    Look.
    “So we’re still,” I said, my voice low, “ outside the event horizon?”
    “If we were outside the event horizon, the rate of apparent expansion of space would be an asymptote approaching a fixed rate—a simple acceleration. And until a few decades ago that was what the data showed. But then the data starting showing that the rate of apparent expansion of the universe is speeding up . That can only mean that we’re approaching the event horizon itself. That also explains why we’re locked into the one direction of time. In the timespace manifold, generally speaking, we ought to be able to go forwards, backwards, whatever we wanted. But we’re not in the manifold generally; we’re in a very particular place. Like an object falling into a black hole, we’re locked into a single vector.”
    I thought about it. No—that’s not right. The truth is I didn’t need to think very hard. It fell into place in my mind. I grokked its rightness. Like the others I found myself thinking, how could I not see this before? It is so very obvious. “But if you’re right—wait,” I said. “Wait a moment.”
    I pulled out my phone, and jabbed up the calculus app. It took me a few moments to work through the relevant equations. Of course everything fitted. Of course it was true.
    I looked at him, feeling distant from myself. “When we reach the actual temporal event horizon,” I said, “tidal forces will rip us apart.”
    “Or rip time apart,” he said, nodding slowly. “Yes. Of course, that amounts to the same thing.”
    “When?”
    “You’ve got the equations there,” he said, looking at my phone as it lay, like a miniature 2001 monolith, flat on the table. “But it’s hard to be precise. The scale is fourteen billion years; the calculation tolerances are not seconds, or even days. Years. I calculated seven years, plus or minus four. That was a decade ago.”
    I shook my head, the way a dog shakes water of its pelt; but there was no way this idea could be shaken out of my mind. It was true; it was there. “It could be—literally—any day now,” I said.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “Not for you, so much, as for—you know. The fact of you having a small kid.”
    “That’s why Noo-noo was so circumspect with me,” I said. “I see. He kept glancing at my belly. And, yes, alright, I see why you haven’t published this. It’d be akin to wandering the highways with an End-Is-Nigh sandwich board.”
    “Not that,” he said, his glittering eye meeting mine. “More that it’s so obvious. When you think about it, how could the expanding universe be anything other than this? We know what physical conditions cause time dilation; so we ought to know what temporal conditions cause space dilation.”
    “Not the big bang.”
    “The big bang was an effect, not prime cause.”
    “Yes,” I said. “Of course. I’m going home now,” I told him. But I embraced him before I left, and felt the sharkskin roughness of his unshaved cheek against my own. Then I wheeled Marija home. I called M. and told him to leave work and join me. He was puzzled, but acquiesced.
    He hasn’t gone back.
     
     
    :6:
     
    T HE EQUATIONS DEPEND upon precision over prodigious lengths of time—since the big bang, or (rather) since the dilation effect first affected what until then must have been a stable cosmos existing within an open temporal manifold. But I’ve done my best. Tessimond’s 7 +/-4 years was, I suspect, deliberately vague; erring on the side of generosity, to ease his own mind. I think the timescale is much shorter. Download the data on the rate of acceleration of cosmic expansion, and you can do your own sums.
    It’s a matter of days. Just that.
    Of course I never flew to Stockholm. Why would I waste three days away from my