Human and Qax, huddled around the chill proton star, did not attempt to communicate. There was nothing more to say.
The river of time flowed, unmarked, towards the endless seas of timelike infinity.
Epilogue
EVE
EVE WAS RECEDING FROM ME. I saw her face, as if it was turned up towards me, and I was rising, away from her.
The walls, the apartment, had disappeared. There was only Eve's face, and darkness.
"You must remember what you have seen, Jack. You must understand. You can see now why the Ghosts' project must go ahead. Can't you? Can't you, Jack?"
I shouted at her: "Tell me who you are, damn you. Tell me how you know all this, the future. Tell me!"
But my voice was a whisper, an insect-rustle; and she didn't reply.
Her face faded, as if a light had been turned off. And the Galaxy came out, crystallizing above me like a gaudy frost.
A Ghost hovered before me, concern sending ripples across its skin. "Jack Raoul. Can you hear me?"
I looked down. My hands were chrome, shimmering, returning complex highlights from the Galaxy's glow. "Oh, Lethe. I'm back."
"Jack Raoul? You have been unresponsive to stimuli for some time—"
I wanted to punch a hole in the Ambassador's complacent hide, and then retreat into the safe warmth of my own metal stomach. "What have you done to me? What right have you — what right..."
Slowly, I became aware that all around me the Ghosts were rising, clustering around their skeletal ships, and sailing away from the deformed moon.
I tried to think beyond my own concerns. "Ambassador. What's going on?"
"Jack Raoul, it seems you have, after all, achieved your purpose. You have come here to observe our experiment. Now, you are ready to witness its climax, its magnificent conclusion." I heard pride in those thin translated tones, saw an insufferable arrogance about the Ambassador's sleek shimmer.
I looked down at the moon. The intrasystem pods were active, working symmetrically around its battered surface, holding the moon in place.
And, down through the splayed-opened hearts of ancient craters, the quagma pods were descending towards the core.
With the Ambassador, I fell away from the Galaxy, descending beneath the moon.
The sky was empty of stars. The Galaxy was a mottled, glowing ceiling above us, and beneath my feet there was only the distant, etiolated smudge of remote galaxies.
I looked at it all with new eyes. Those shining stars were already infected by the photino birds. Even the most remote galaxy I saw would be affected by the final conflict, between the birds and the doomed Xeelee.
Behind the bright light of the Universe, I had glimpsed the skulllike dismalness of the end of time.
The Ghosts and their ships had gathered into a rough sphere, a couple of thousand miles from the moon's surface; the moon hovered above me, a fat, battered orange, made three-dimensional by the subtle shading of Galaxy-core light.
The Sink Ambassador said, "The climax is approaching." I sensed excitement in the complex patterns which shivered across its surface.
"Tell me how you can make a star of dark matter."
"Jack Raoul, there are ways to generate compact, self-gravitating solitonlike equilibrium states of bosonic fields. Here we are seeking an oscillating solution, known as an oscillation, which—"
"Lethe," I said. "I wish Eve was here."
"Your wife."
"The real Eve. She was the only one who could make sense of all this stuff for me."
The Ghost said nothing.
"Keep talking," I said.
The Ambassador, tried again, in language only slightly less technical, and my internal stores began to feed back trickles of interpretation to me, integrating what the Ghost was saying with the best human models.
Gradually, I began to figure out what the Ghosts were trying to do.
Dark matter can't form stars, because it can't cool down fast enough.
When a clump of baryonic gas — normal matter — collapses under gravity, electromagnetic radiation carries away much of the heat produced. It is as if the radiation cools the gas cloud. The residual heat left in the cloud eventually balances the gravitational attraction, and equilibrium is found: a star has formed, a compact, stable body, with internal radiation pressure balancing out the tendency to collapse through gravitation.
But dark matter doesn't produce electromagnetic radiation. And without the cooling effect of radiation, a dark matter cloud, collapsing under gravity, traps much more of its heat of contraction. So large, diffuse clouds are the equilibrium form for dark matter.
"But," I said drily, "you've found a way around that." The Sink Ambassador spun complacently. "We are going to use another way to cool a clump of dark matter: gravitational cooling."
I imagined a swarm of photinos, orbiting each other. The swarm could eject its own faster-moving members, sling-shotting them out like miniature spacecraft around shadowy planets. Because kinetic energy was equivalent to heat, the clump left behind would be cooler, more compact.
"The mechanism is similar to what you know as the Lynden-Bell analysis of the Jeans instability," the Ghost said. "The mechanism whereby a star cluster can settle to a compact, stable equilibrium by collisionless relaxation: ejecting its own faster-moving components to an outer halo—"
"Enough. So you're going to use gravitational cooling to form a dark matter star, right here."
"The quagma pods will impact in the core of the moon, in a complex manner. They will be induced to decay and coalesce; their stores of superforce energy will be released in shaped pulses. The resulting gravitational waveforms will initiate the process. A photino cloud of approximately the mass of a small planet will begin to coalesce. Some thirteen percent of the cloud's mass will be ejected during the violent relaxation process. The final soliton star will be just a few feet across, at the heart of this moon. A complex massive Klein-Gordon scalar field will be produced, with no self-interaction save through gravity, which..."
I tuned him out. I fed all this into my Notebooks.
"Why here?"
The Ghost spun, bobbing in space. "There is much dark matter, here in the galactic halo. And few Xeelee."
"And few humans, right?"
"I would be interested to know of the source of your information on the project, which—"
"It's going to take some close control," I said. "The crucial events will last just microseconds: that complex sequence of quagma collisions in the core... Ambassador, you must have one giant AI controller built into that moon."
It said nothing to that, and a grain of suspicion lodged in my mind. But I had other issues to pursue.
"Tell me why you're doing this, Sink Ambassador. If you make a soliton star — so what? What will you have achieved?"
It rolled, as if it was turning to face me.
"You know as much as we do, now, about the fundamental truths of the Universe," it said. "The secret history of the cosmos: the epochal conflict between light and dark matter, whose effects we have only begun to discern.
"To sustain their existence, the creatures of photino matter need stable baryonic star cores. And therefore they are accelerating the evolution of the stars." It rolled in space. "Even now," the Ambassador said, "photino creatures are clustered in the hearts of those hundred billion stars, choking them. Even the original star of mankind, called Sol."
"But they face resistance."
"Yes. From the baryonic life forms whose habitats they are destroying. But even the Xeelee, immeasurably stronger than my race or yours, will be defeated."
I knew that was true, from the glimpses Eve had vouchsafed me.
"And so—"
"And so," the Ambassador said, "we are striving to generate another option. A better way." It wheeled over the shaped moon. "Raoul, the quagma pods are merging in the moon's core. It begins..."
I started to understand. "You think that if you can show the photino birds how to build star-sized objects
of dark matter — without using the cores of baryonic stars — they will stop destroying the stars."
"That is the goal. The dream, if you will."
"And the great Xeelee war can stop, and we'll all coexist; we'll live together, photino birds and Xeelee and humans and Ghosts, like one huge family." I felt like laughing at it. "Lethe, Ambassador. At least you Ghosts can't be faulted for thinking big."
"Now," it said, "you must understand why your opposition to this project must be withdrawn. On the success of this experiment, the future of the cosmos could hinge."
I looked up at the engineered moon. There was a sense of mistiness about it, as if a great liquid lens had gathered over that pulverized surface; the light of the Galaxy was refracted, shimmering and softened. I stared into the dark matter mist, hunting for structure.
"It is working," the Ghost said. "The photinos are coalescing. Soon, the equilibrium oscillations will be induced..."
A trickle of data started whispering in my head. Interpolations and feedback from my datastores, Eve's Notebooks. Shadowy Virtuals glimmered around me: schematics of the moon, the photino star the Ghosts were building, little charts of growth rates, density-time fluctuations.
There was something odd. The projections of the soliton star's formation — based on human mathematics — didn't match up with what the Ghost had told me...
But I was still preoccupied with my hardening suspicions. I thought about prophecy.
Humans had built Michael Poole's wormhole, and benefited from the fragments of data it had delivered: data from the ends of time. Perhaps the Ghosts, and other races, had achieved similar glimpses of the future.
But all such glimpses are fragmentary and incomplete.
Prophecy is possible using scientific laws, where sufficiently simple events are concerned: the eclipse of a sun, or the return of a long-period comet. And prophecy based in the more complex human arena has been used, after a fashion, for most of humanity's recorded history. My Notebooks told me about actuarial tables, devices for predicting death rates, that even predated human spaceflight. The more computing power is available, the more detailed a prophecy is possible.
To spin out a future vision as detailed and granular as the one I'd been vouchsafed by Eve must have required computing power an order of magnitude more powerful than anything available to humanity.
Or to the Ghosts.
All at once the Ghosts were rich in processing power.
Suddenly, I saw it.
"You let it out," I accused the Ambassador.
"Jack Raoul—"
"You let it out. The Planck Zero AI. You released it."
"It proved possible to accelerate the production of Hawking radiation, the natural evaporation of the black hole within which the AI was contained, which—"
"Lethe. That AI was insane. You Ghosts may have destroyed us all. Ambassador, I'm going to file a full report about this. I'm going to get this operation shut down, and have human monitors placed in every Ghost research establishment from now on."
"The AI is a powerful resource. Jack Raoul, we face cosmic obliteration. Even the Xeelee cannot shelter us. Surely the risk was justified. And as to the project, it is too advanced for—"
I was aware of agitation among the flock of watching Ghosts. They started withdrawing further from the moon.
An internal warning started to sound in my head. The Notebooks had come up with something they didn't like. More Virtual schematics, primary-color projections, started filling up my vision.
The vents dug into the moon had started to glow, dull red. I saw molten rock bubble at the edge of one pit, its lip slumping into the cylindrical tunnel below. It was as if a fire burned in the moon's core; light poured out into space, illuminating the construction debris which clustered around the moon, and glimmering off the hides of the watching Ghosts, turning them to beads of fire.
In the moon's surrounding veil of dark matter mist, I saw shadowy shapes hurtle, agitated, birdlike.
...And Eve was beside me now. She was Ghost-transformed as I was, her long-boned face easily recognizable under the chrome.
She watched the metamorphosing moon, its fiery glow reflecting from her silvered eyes.
The Sink Ambassador twisted in alarm, its hide glowing red, chattering on many frequencies to its fellows.
"It isn't stable. The photino star. Is it, Eve?"
"No," she said dreamily, not taking her eyes off the moon. "The density of photinos is too high."
"Yes." That fit with what Eve's Notebooks were telling me. "The high density at the core is stimulating photino decay. The free Klein-Gordon field the Ghosts want to create is collapsing. Imploding—"
Abruptly the Ghosts fled, including the Sink Ambassador, abandoning us; I saw their receding ships, shining threads against the intergalactic darkness.
The surface of the moon was almost entirely molten now. It was subsiding, collapsing inwards.
"The Ghosts thought they were creating a home for the photino birds," I said. "But they were wrong. You knew that. They have made—"
"A bomb," she said. "A dark matter bomb."
"It's you, isn't it? The Planck Zero AI. Behind the mask of my wife—"
She pressed her face against my metallic chest.
My anger was gone. Only pity remained.
I embraced Eve, enfolding her within my arms. Her skin felt warm — impossibly so — human.
"But this will destroy you," I said. "Whatever it is that sustains you, is in that moon."
She turned to me, silver eyes empty, and smiled. I saw that she wore my ring on her finger.
The thing at the heart of the moon turned white, dimming the sickly glow of the Galaxy's core.
The moon blew apart.
Molten rock, quivering droplets of it, showered up past us, patterning against my skin. I closed my mechanical eyes and huddled with Eve, waiting for the rocky storm to pass.
Eve — the Planck Zero AI — wasn't destroyed. It proved possible to reconstruct some of it from the records and fragmented datastores left behind.
It was still sentient, but it was crippled. Its residual abilities were not much more than a human's.
I took it — her — home.
Now, we spend most of our time in a simulation of our old apartment, in a Virtual never-never-land.
I've tried to figure out why she did what she did.
Already mad with the desolating quantum loneliness of her birth, she'd been brought out of her black hole prison, and was presented with all the Ghosts' data on the future.
And, desperately intelligent, she suffered a vision of that future.
It was a vision of the destruction of all baryonic life, the desolate victory of the photino creatures: it was a rigid, logical and inescapable product of her own infinite intellect. It was a vision she couldn't bear.
So — perhaps — she subverted the Ghosts' hubristic experiments — which do, incidentally, seem to have been genuinely aimed at a peaceful rapprochement with the photino birds. She allowed the Ghosts to make a dark matter bomb. Perhaps she was trying to open up a war with the photino birds, a new front, with a weapon that even the Xeelee had never considered.
Or perhaps she sought, simply, her own destruction. Release, from the terrible burden of infinite knowledge.
Even she doesn't know any longer.
As for myself, I can never know if Eve's bleak vision — given to me in those startling, fragmented glimpses — represents the true future history of our Universe. Perhaps it was just some mad fiction, concocted by her huge but damaged soul. Or perhaps it is only one strand of the truth; perhaps that gloomy future can, in the end, be averted.
Otherwise, in just a few million years, all humankind will be extinct in this Universe. And all our technology and intelligence and courage won't make a damn bit of difference in averting that fate.
If that's true, it's up to us to live as if it were not so.
I care for Eve, as best I can. We go on. What else
is there for us to do?
The Xeelee Sequence-Timeline
Singularity: Big Bang
Era: Primeval
20 bya (billion years ago): Life forms in quagma broth. First contact between Xeelee and photino birds. Xeelee timeships begin modification of Xeelee evolutionary history.
10 bya: Construction of Ring begins. Birth of Sol.
5 bya: Assault on Ring by photino birds begins. Life on Earth emerges.
1 bya: First infestation of Sol by photino birds.
Era: Expansion
A.D. 3000 +: Opening up of Solar System with GUT and wormhole technology. First human extra-Solar expansion begins.
A.D. 3621: Birth of Michael Poole.
A.D. 3672: "The Sun-people"
A.D. 3698: "The Logic Pool"
Timelike Infinity
A.D. 3717: Launch of GUTship Cauchy.
A.D. 3825: "Gossamer"
A.D. 3829: Wormhole time-travel invasion by Occupation-Era Qax.
A.D. 3948: "Cilia-of-Gold"
A.D. 3951: "Lieserl"
A.D. 3953: Launch of GUTship Great Northern.
Era: Squeem Occupation
A.D. 4874: Conquest of human planets by Squeem.
A.D. 4874: "Pilot"
A.D. 4922: "The Xeelee Flower"
A.D. 4925: Overthrow of Squeem.
A.D. 5000 +: Second expansion begins.
A.D. 5024: "More Than Time or Distance"
A.D. 5066: "The Switch"
Era: Qax Occupation
A.D. 5088: Conquest of human planets by Qax.
A.D. 5274: Return to System of GUTship Cauchy. Launch of backward time-travel invasion by Qax.
A.D. 5406: "Blue Shift"
A.D. 5407: Overthrow of Qax. Humans acquire Spline and starbreaker technology.
A.D. 5500 +: Third expansion begins.
A.D. 5611: "The Quagma Datum"
A.D. 5653: "Planck Zero"
A.D. 5664: "Eve"
Era: Assimilation
A.D. 10,000 +: Humans dominant sub-Xeelee species. Rapid expansion and absorption of species and technologies. Launch of Xeelee time-ships into deep past.
Vacuum Diagrams Page 43
