"That the scalarity drive had the potential to be turned into a weapon of unimaginable power? Oh yes. The ability to remove any enemy from reach, to banish them beyond the edge of the universe. To exile them from the universe itself, instantly and irrevocably."
"Yes, I can understand that, and that you did what you did altruistically. They were moral genocides. But our intention was never to use it as a weapon—if it had been, wouldn't we have used it on you?"
Silence in the darkness beyond dark.
"Explain then."
"I have one more demonstration."
The mathematics were critical now. The scalarity generator devoured cometary mass voraciously. If there were not enough left to allow him to return them home… Trust number, Oga. You always have. Beyond the edge of the universe, all you have is number. There was no sensation, no way of perceiving when he activated and deactivated the scalarity field, except by number. For an instant, Oga feared number had failed him, a first and fatal betrayal. Then light blazed down onto the dark ice. A single blinding star shone in the absolute blackness.
"What is that?"
"I pushed a single proton beyond the horizon of this horizon. I pushed it so far that space and time tore."
"So I'm looking at-"
"The light of creation. That is an entire universe, newborn. A new big bang. A young man once said to me, "Every particle will be so far from everything else that it will be in a universe of its own. It will be a universe of its own." An extended object like this comet, or bodies, is too gross, but in a single photon, quantum fluctuations will turn it into an entire universe-in-waiting."
The two men looked up a long time into the nascent light, the surface of the fireball seething with physical laws and forces boiling out. Now you understand, Oga thought. It's not a weapon. It's the way out. The way past the death of the universe. Out there beyond the horizon, we can bud off new universes, and universes from those universes, forever. Intelligence has the last word. We won't die alone in the cold and the dark. He felt the light of the infant universe on his face, then said, "I think we probably should be getting back. If my calculations are correct-and there is a significant margin of error-this fireball will shortly undergo a phase transition as dark energy separates out and undergoes catastrophic expansion. I don't think that the environs of an early universe would be a very good place for us to be."
He saw portly Cjatay smile.
"Take me home, then. I'm cold and I'm tired of being a god."
"Are we gods?"
Cjatay nodded at the micro verse.
"I think so. No, I know I would want to be a man again."
Oga thought of his own selves and lives, his bodies and natures. Flesh indwelled by many personalities, then one personality-one aggregate of experience and memory-in bodies liquid, starship, nanotechnological. And he was tired, so terribly tired beyond the universe, centuries away from all that he had known and loved. All except this one, his enemy.
"Tejaphay is no place for children."
"Agreed. We could rebuild Tay."
"It would be a work of centuries."
"We could use the Aeo Taea Parents. They have plenty of time."
Now Cjatay laughed.
"I have to trust you now, don't I? I could have vaporized you back there, blown this place to atoms with my missiles. And now you create an entire universe."
"And the Enemy? They'll come again."
"You'll be ready for them, like you were ready for me. After all, I am still the enemy."
The surface of the bubble of universe seemed to be in more frenetic motion now. The light was dimming fast.
"Let's go then," Cjatay said.
"Yes," Oga said. "Let's go home."
OGA, RETURNING
* * *
Galactic Empires Page 42
