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" It got to the point where he didn’t even look up at the sky any more as he blundered back and forth. The human mind had evolved for just one universe, he thought. How much of this crap was he supposed to take? He felt exhausted, resentful, bewildered.
“Wait.”
He paused. He had loped out of the portal onto another stretch of scuffed, anonymous regolith. She was lying in his arms, her weight barely registering. He looked down into her face, and pushed up her gold sun visor.
“Emma?” She licked her lips.
“Look. Up there.”
No Galaxy visible, but a starry sky. The stars looked, well, normal. But he’d learned that meant little. “So what?”
Emma was lifting her arm, pointing. He saw three stars, dull white points, in a row. And there was a rough rectangle of stars around them—one of them a distinctive red—and what looked like a Galaxy disc, or maybe just a nebula, beneath …
“Holy shit,” he said.
She whispered, “There must be lots of universes like ours. But, surely to God, there is only one Orion.”
And then light, dazzling, unbearably brilliant, came stabbing over the close horizon.
It was a sunrise. He could actually feel its heat through the layers of his suit.
He looked down at the ground at his feet. The rising light cast strong shadows, sharply illuminating the miniature crevices and craters there. And here was a “crater” that was elongated, and neatly ribbed.
It was a footprint. He stepped forward, lifted his foot, and set it down in the print. It fit neatly. When he lifted his foot away the cleats of his boot hadn’t so much as disturbed a regolith grain.
It was his own footprint. Good grief. After hundreds of universes of silence and remoteness and darkness, universes of dim light and shadows, he was right back where he started. "
― Stephen Baxter , Time (Manifold #1)
