Exultant dc-2

by Stephen Baxter

  “You have what?”

  “The truth about Chandra. The Xeelee live off the black hole. But the Xeelee aren’t alone…”

  Chapter 57

  The monads cared nothing for humans, of course, or for quagmites, or Xeelee, or photino birds, or any of the rest of the universe’s menagerie at this or any other age. But they liked their universes to have story; and it was living things that generated the most interesting sagas.

  And so in the time before time, when they picked out their seedling universes from the reef of possibilities, the monads, midwives of reality, exerted a subtle selection pressure. They chose for enrichment only the brightest bubbles in the cosmic spindrift: bubbles with a special, precious quality. A tendency to complexify.

  Thoughtful beings, human and otherwise, would wonder at the endless fecundity of their universe, a universe that spawned life at every stage of its existence — and wonder why it had to be so.

  Some of them came to understand that it was the universe’s own innate tendency to complexify that had created the richness of structure within it.

  Simple laws of molecular combination governed the growth of such intricate, inanimate forms as snowflakes and DNA molecules. But autocatalysis and homeostasis enabled simple structures to interact and spin off more complex structures still, until living things emerged, which combined into ever more complicated entities.

  The same pattern showed in other aspects of reality. The hive structures of ant colonies and Coalescent communities emerged without conscious design from the small decisions of their drones. Even in the world of human ideas, the structures of religions, economies, and empires fed back on themselves and became ever richer. Even mathematical toys, like games of artificial life run in computer memories, seemed to demonstrate an unwavering tendency to grow more complicated. But then, human mathematics was a mirror of the universe humans found themselves in; that was why mathematics worked.

  Complexifying seemed inevitable. But it was not. A universe could be imagined without this tendency.

  If the ability to complexify had suddenly been turned off, the universe would have seemed very different. Snowflakes would not form, birds would not flock, ants and Coalescents would have tumbled out of their disintegrating hives, baffled. On larger scales, economic and historical cycles would break up. Ecosystems would fail; there would be no coral reefs, no forests. The great cycles of matter and energy, mediated by life, on a living world like Earth would collapse.

  But of course there would be no observers of such catastrophes, for without complexity’s search for feedback loops and stable processes, hearts could not beat, and embryos could not form.

  Humans had the good fortune to exist in a universe in which there was no law of conservation of complexity, no limit to its supply.

  But it didn’t have to be that way. That the universe could complexify, that richness of existence was possible at all, was thanks to the monads, and their subtle pan-cosmic selection. The monads had selected, designed, nurtured a universe that would be fruitful forever, in which there was no limit to the possibilities for life and energy, for life and mind, as far ahead as it was possible to look.

  While empires rose and fell, while the universe continued its endless unraveling of possibility after possibility, the monads slumbered. They had done their work, made their contribution. Now they waited for the precious moments of the furthest future when this universe, in turn grown old, spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.

  But in their epochal sleep, even the monads could be drawn into history. And even they could be harmed.

  Chapter 58

  Luru Parz watched the Commissary with blank hostility, Enduring Hope with bafflement.

  Nilis tried to tell his complex story too quickly, too briefly. For months he had been trying to assemble all the data on Chandra that he could find: on the Xeelee and quagmites and other denizens, on cosmological data like the relic Big Bang radiation, on the astrophysics of the black hole itself and the knotted-up singularity at its heart — and now even on the extraordinary artifact the Xeelee had wrapped around the event horizon. And he had come to a new conclusion.

  Nilis said triumphantly, “Do you see? Do you see now?”

  “No,” snapped Kimmer.

  There was a story in this information, said Nilis. And that story was the secret history of the universe.

  Nilis said he had looked deep into the structure of Chandra, and had found life infesting even the singularity at its heart. “These deep ones — the ones I call monads; it is a very antique word — they are older than all of us. Older than the Xeelee, older than the universe itself! It will take a lot of study to figure it all out. But it’s clear that the monads are responsible for life in this universe. Or rather for the tendency of this universe to complexify, to produce life. It is a level of deep design about the universe nobody ever suspected. And in their nests of folded spacetime, huddled inside the event horizons of black holes, they slumber — waiting for our petty ages to pass away — until the time comes for a new universe to be born from the wreckage of the old.”

  “And the Xeelee—”

  “They live off Chandra, the black hole. Their net structure is the great machine which allows them to achieve their goals: to birth nightfighters, to use the black hole as a computing engine, all of it. But that’s trivial. It’s what’s inside the black hole that counts. The Xeelee are just parasites. Secondary. They don’t matter!”

  Kimmer said dangerously, “They matter rather a lot to me.”

  Enduring Hope thought he understood. “And if we attack the black hole,” he said doggedly, “we could destroy the monads. Is that what you fear?”

  “Yes,” Nilis said gratefully, sweat beading his brow. “Oh, my boy — yes! That is precisely what I fear.”

  Kimmer said, “But even if you are right, there are other galaxies. Other nests of monads.”

  Nilis insisted, “We can’t make any simple assumptions about this situation, Marshal.” He spoke rapidly about levels of reality, of interconnectivity in higher dimensions. “By striking a blow in this one place we may wreak damage everywhere, and for all time…”

  Luru Parz said slowly, “The Commissary fears that if we destroy the monads we will break the thread — don’t you, Nilis? — the shining thread of life, of creativity, that connects this universe to those that preceded it, and to those that will follow. To kill them would be patricide — or deicide, perhaps.” She smiled. “Ah, but I forgot. In this enlightened age you don’t have gods — or fathers, do you? It’s entirely appropriate of humanity that when we do find God, we try to turn Him into a weapon, and then kill Him.”

  “Shut up, you old monster,” Kimmer said.

  Luru Parz said coldly, “But this is why I’ve been trying to stop you, Nilis. To stop this pointless research.”

  His jaw dropped. “You — it was you? You obstructed me, you blocked me from the data, the processing resources I needed? I thought you were my ally, Luru Parz. It was you who said we must study the black hole in the first place!”

  “Study it sufficiently to destroy it — that’s all we needed. Not this! Knowledge is a weapon, Nilis. That’s all it is. I always feared that if you rooted around for long enough you’d find some reason not to complete the project. Academic fools like you always do.”

  Maybe she was right to block him, Enduring Hope thought. He recalled his conversation with Blue, who had foreseen exactly this outcome: that sooner or later Nilis would find a reason to fall in love with Chandra, and would try to stop the attack.

  Nilis said darkly, “Listen to me. My analysis is hasty. And it contains more questions than answers. Regardless of any pan-cosmic responsibility, if we were to destabilize this monad complex, we don’t know what the result would be. The damage could be huge. I can’t begin to estimate it—” He shook his head. “Damage on a galactic scale, perhaps.”

  Luru Parz pushed past Nilis to face Kimmer. Her face was alive, intense,
but Hope thought it had the intensity of a sharpened blade, not a human expression. “Then let it be so. Marshal — we must do it regardless of the consequences. This is our one chance, don’t you see?”

  Kimmer said, “But if we cause such devastation — if the Galaxy center detonates—”

  Luru shouted, “What of it? Let the Galaxy be cleansed! Marshal, I have seen the human race populate a Galaxy once; we can do it again. And this time it would be a Galaxy free of Xeelee. We must do this!”

  Nilis laughed, a brittle sound. “Marshal, you aren’t listening to her? Why, you fool—”

  Kimmer’s reaction was immediate. He swung around and swatted the Commissary aside with one gloved fist. Nilis fell backward, clattering clumsily against a bulkhead, blood seeping from his mouth.

  Enduring Hope ran to him and cradled his head. “Commissary, Commissary,” he whispered. “You can’t go around calling a marshal a fool!”

  Luru Parz seemed to have recovered her detachment. Breathing hard, she said, “Our debate here is irrelevant anyway.”

  Kimmer, confounded by the rapid turning of events, glowered at her. “What do you mean?”

  “The decision to go on doesn’t belong to us. It belongs to Pirius Red. Who has heard every word we have said. Haven’t you, Pilot?”

  The voice from the center of the Galaxy was sepulchral. “I have, Luru Parz.”

  Pirius Red pressed his gloved hands to his temples.

  He and Bilson, his surviving crewmate, had made it back to the rump of his squadron. But he was grateful that he was alone in his blister. He was still trying to absorb the shocks of the last few minutes — the death of his engineer and the sudden loss of his own older self. He had no idea how he was supposed to feel about that. And now this, a questioning of the whole basis of the mission by the man who had instigated it all.

  He found it difficult even to speak. He knew he was close to burnout.

  This Burden Must Pass said, “It’s your decision, Squadron Leader.”

  Pirius’s laugh was bitter. “Now you have something to say.”

  Torec, her voice strained by grief, snapped at Burden, “Yes. And for you it doesn’t matter, because, right or wrong, everything will be put right at the end of time, won’t it?”

  “Perhaps not this,” Burden said softly.

  “We should wait,” Bilson said hesitantly. “We need time. If Nilis is right… We need time to check.”

  Torec said, “But we won’t get as good a chance to strike again. We know that. The Xeelee will be waiting for us next time.”

  “We will find another way,” Bilson said. “People are smart like that.”

  “Yes, we are,” said Burden.

  Pirius was anguished. If Nilis was even half-right, they could be committing a terrible crime, a crime that might transcend the universe itself. How could he possibly know the right thing to do? Who was he to have such a decision thrust upon him?

  And yet the choice seemed clear.

  Pirius said, “Enough of us have died today.” Including half of myself, he thought. He tried to rehearse the words. We pull back…

  “Pilot.” Bilson’s voice was full of wonder.

  Pirius looked down at the accretion disc. A kind of cloud was rising above that puddle of light, a black cloud. When he increased the magnification of his images, he saw they were ships, a horde of them, rising like insects.

  “It’s the Xeelee,” Torec said. “They’re streaming out of the Cavity. I don’t believe it. They are abandoning Chandra.”

  Burden said, “It looks as if they agree with Nilis. There are some things just not worth destroying, whatever the cost.”

  “Let’s go home,” Pirius said.

  The five battered ships swiveled as one and turned away from the heart of the Galaxy, where the Xeelee ships were still rising, countless numbers of them.

  When Pirius Blue came to, he was embedded in darkness, unable to move. Impact foam, he realized.

  To his own surprise, he was still alive. He had survived the flak assault, and the destruction of his ship. He wasn’t even injured, as far as he could tell.

  With voice commands he brought up sensor data, which flickered before his eyes inside his visor. Drifting at the center of the accretion disc, he learned, he was rather a long way away from any possible pickup. And nobody knew if he was alive or dead. Suspended in darkness, locked into the foam, he came to a quick decision. He uttered a command.

  His foam shell burst and flew apart, leaving him in his skinsuit. He was falling in a cloud of fragments, and a bath of brilliant Galaxy-center light. His visor turned jet black, and its inner surface immediately lit up with red warning flags.

  He checked his suit’s systems. All overloaded, all on the brink of failure. A skinsuit wasn’t designed to withstand the ferocious conditions of the center of the Galaxy, and it knew it. But it didn’t matter. This would be over soon, one way or another.

  With more commands he coaxed his visor to leak through a little of the hard light that battered it. Soon he could see again, if sketchily.

  He was floating through a forest of shining threads, silvery lines as straight as laser beams — but some of the threads were broken, twisted.

  With a jolt, he understood. He was falling through the net structure around the black hole. There was no sign of those vessels they had spotted crawling over the net, however. And there was no sign of his ship, or his crewmates, who, if they had not died immediately, must be drifting as helplessly as he was.

  To his surprise, one comm loop was still working. He couldn’t talk to the squadron, but there was a line to the ops room on Arches. With brisk commands, he set it to transmit only, and patched in a visual feed from his visor. He was happy for them to watch what he watched. There might be much for them to learn, however the operation worked out. But he didn’t want to talk to anybody. No good- byes. Not when there was another version of himself who could do all that for him.

  Still falling helplessly, he swiveled in space, and looked down at the event horizon.

  Though infalling plasma crawled across its surface, reddening as it fell out of existence, it was dark, a dark plane beneath him. The ferocious light that bathed this place was either absorbed by the event horizon or else was deflected by the black hole’s immense gravity field; he was in the shadow of the black hole, a strange relativistic shadow left by bent and distorted light.

  He lifted his head. The event horizon was like a monstrous planet, so vast it was a plain beneath him that cut the universe in two. Everywhere redshifted plasma writhed and crawled, raining into the hole, and immense auroras flapped. But at its straight-line horizon he saw bands of light; one, two, perhaps three stripes, running parallel with the edge. The rings were another product of the hole’s huge gravity field, as light was not simply deflected but pulled through one orbit, two, before being flung away.

  But now he was falling ever more rapidly toward that fatal surface. Telltales warned him that his signal lock to Arches was being lost: the increasing redshift he must be suffering was affecting the frequency control. It was a secondary effect of the distortion of time itself by the black hole’s gravity. He tried to divert some of his processing power to adjusting the signal, to keep the lock as long as possible.

  Time, time: from the point of view of his own younger self in the outside universe, time would pass more and more slowly for Blue as he approached the event horizon, until at last duration ceased altogether, and he was pinned against the horizon like a fly embedded in glass. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, before relativity played a final trick on his tangled lifeline, and Pirius Red became the older twin after all.

  Blue would know nothing of that. He probably wouldn’t feel anything when he passed through the event horizon itself. This far out from such a massive object, tidal forces had not yet begun to pluck at a body as small as his. Once inside the horizon, though, his fate would be determined.

  Inside a black hole space and time pivoted about the con
stancy of lightspeed, and exchanged roles. Outside, time proceeded inexorably forward, but you could move back and forth in space. But inside a hole it was space that was one-directional. No matter how hard he struggled, his progress would be one way, toward the singularity at the geometric center of the hole — the singularity was now his only future. And there, long after the tides had torn his body apart, the strings and membranes that underlay the very particles of his body would be stretched and torn, before being crushed out of existence altogether.

  The telltale acknowledgment signal from Arches turned to a high-frequency chirp that disappeared into inaudibility. He turned the comm system off; it was no use now.

  He glanced back the way he had come. Though the crowded sky directly above him seemed unaffected, toward the hole’s horizon his view was blueshifted and muddled. It was as if he was looking out through a shallow, mirrored cone: even light was being pulled into the hole’s gravity field, and was starting to rain down on him. As he fell further the light would fold up behind him, and eventually all the light in the universe would be pulled tight into a pencil-thin cone, spearing down after him as he fell into darkness.

  Of course the most likely cause of his death would be his suit’s failure. But perhaps he could juggle its systems, force the hole itself to kill him. He grinned fiercely. It would be a challenge.

  Chapter 59

  On the long journey back to Arches they saw no sign of Xeelee.

  Ops told them that when the black hole web was abandoned, the Xeelee appeared to have ceased their operations, right across the face of the Galaxy, from Core to rim. Pirius found it hard to believe that this one action had made such a difference. But he was glad that they weren’t harassed; they would have been easy targets.

  He was only bringing back four ships, though. This Burden Must Pass had volunteered to stay at Chandra for an additional day. He would record what he could of the field of action, and search for any survivors of the lost ships. Pirius agreed to this reluctantly. It was standard operating procedure, and as the sole surviving flight commander Burden was the right man for the job. But Pirius knew that this offer had more to do with the contents of Burden’s own head.