Exultant (55 page)

As the record time of two hours flying behind a shield approached, Pirius felt some of the tension seep out of his body.

Nilis, a Virtual uncomfortably lodged in the cockpit with Pirius, was, after the first hour or so, relaxed enough to dip into the comm loops between the ships. He was particularly intrigued by the conversation between This Burden Must Pass, the notorious Friend of Wigner, and the Silver Ghost in the lead ship. Burden was taking the chance of talking to the Ghost away from its Guardians.

“And so you believe,” came the Ghost’s simulated voice, “that this universe is essentially transient—all you sense, all you achieve, even your experiences of your inner self will pass away.”

“Not transient, exactly,” Burden called back. “Just one of an uncountably infinite number of possibilities which will, cumulatively, be resolved at timelike infinity, after the manner of a collapse of quantum functions.”

“But in that case, what basis for morality can there be?”

“There is a moral basis for every decision,” said Burden. “To show loyalty to one’s fellows—to put oneself in harm’s way for the sake of one’s species. And while this is only one out of a myriad timelines, we believe that the, umm, the
goodness
in each timeline will sum at the decision point at timelike infinity to gather into Optimality . . .”

“Fascinating,” Nilis said to Pirius. The Commissary whispered, as if he might be overheard. “They are fencing, in a way. Each knows far more about the other’s beliefs than either is prepared to reveal. Fencing, and yet looking for common ground.”

Pirius Red was light on moral philosophy. “That stuff about putting one’s self in the way of harm for others—that sounded like Doctrine to me.”

“So it is,” Nilis said. “Much of the Friends’ ‘philosophy’ is actually recycled Druzism—as you’d expect, given the environment it sprang from. Hama Druz seems to have believed that self-interest is the primary driver of any unthinking human action. He said that soldiers are therefore the only moral citizens of any society because only they have
demonstrated
their selfless morality by putting themselves in harm’s way.” He sniffed. “Of course Druz ignored the plentiful evidence of kinship bonds among the animals and insects—an ant isn’t driven by simple selfishness—and he certainly ignored Coalescences, human hive societies, which were plentiful even in his day. Druz was a good sloganeer, and he obviously was a key figure in human history. But he really wasn’t a very sophisticated thinker—I’ve always found his arguments terribly one-dimensional—haven’t you?”

Even now Pirius was horrified by such blasphemy, and he deflected the remark. “There’s more than just Druzism in Burden’s beliefs.”

“Oh, of course. The other element is this basic notion that this universe is an imperfect place that can somehow be fixed. It’s an expression of a feeling of betrayal, you see, a sense that one’s life is irredeemably imperfect and can never be made good. I can quite understand such a creed arising in a society of child soldiers—deliberately kept in miserable conditions as a motivator to fight—whose only escape is either to die young fighting, or grow old in shame. No wonder they want to believe things can be made better. They are quite right!

“But what’s interesting is that the Silver Ghosts came up with a similar belief. They too were betrayed by the universe, when their sun failed and their world froze over.
They
elaborated such traumas into a belief that the universe is a hostile place that must be tamed. But they sublimated their feelings of anger, not into the passive acceptance of the Friends, but into programs of exotic physics. They sought ways to change the universe—they tried to make it better!”

Pirius frowned. “You’re saying that the Friends are a Ghost cult?”

“Perhaps not as crude as that. But Ghost philosophy is the most interesting element in the whole volatile mix of this new creed.

“Humans fought Ghosts for long enough, and earlier we worked with them, too. Perhaps humans swapped beliefs with Ghosts. And if
that’s
so, perhaps the Friends may be the first interstellar religion, the first to fuse the traditions of two species. . . .
The Ultimate Observer could plausibly be a Ghost deity!
”

Pirius frowned. “No human would follow a Ghost.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure, Pilot. People have followed more bizarre beings in the past, though they were mostly imaginary!” He sipped an invisible drink, not reproduced in the Virtual. “One has to wonder, though, if some such encounter as this wasn’t in the mind of that Ghost up there all the time—perhaps we have been
given
the gravastar technology as a ploy, so that the Ghosts can achieve their own ends, whatever they are. I suppose the great mixing-up that Project Prime Radiant is inflicting on the orderly pools of the Coalition is a good opportunity for subversion. . . . I always did intend that we should shake up history, you and I. But one must wonder what great oaks might grow from the seeds we are planting today.”

Pirius didn’t like the sound of any of that. It sounded too much like the paranoia Nilis had criticized him for before. With a curt command, he shut down unnecessary chatter on the loops; the conversation between Ghost and Friend immediately stopped.

The little flotilla sailed on, huddling behind its wall of distorted spacetime, with only formal technical communications passing between the ships.

Chapter
47

The universe was expanding at half the speed of light. It was small and ferociously dense, still many times as dense as an atomic nucleus.

At least quarks were stable now. But in this cannonball of a cosmos the matter familiar to humans, composed of protons and neutrons—composites of quarks, stuck together by gluons—could not yet exist. There were certainly no nuclei, no atoms. Instead, space was filled with a soup of quarks, gluons and leptons, light particles like electrons and neutrinos. It was a “quagma,” a magma of quarks, like one immense proton.

As time wore inexorably away, new forms of life rose in the new conditions.

The now-stable quarks were able to combine into large assemblies; and as these assemblies complexified and interacted, the usual processes of autocatalysis and feedback began. The black holes were still there to provide structure, but larger clumps of matter also served as a stratum for life’s new adventures, and there was energy for free in the radiation bath that still filled the universe.

Among the new kinds, ancient strategies revived. There were exploiters and synthesizers. “Plants” fueled their growth with radiant energy—but there were no stars yet, no suns; rather the whole sky glowed. “Animals” evolved to feed off these synthesizers, and learned to hunt each other.

As always the variation in life-forms across the cosmos was extraordinarily wide, but most shared certain basics of their physical design. Almost all of them stored information about themselves in their own complicated structures, rather than in an internal genetic data store, as humans one day would: for these creatures their genotype
was
their phenotype, as if they were made wholly of DNA.

Their way of communicating would have seemed ferocious to a human. A speaker would modify its listener’s memories
directly,
by firing quagma pellets into them; it was a message carried in a spray of bullets. They even reproduced rather like DNA molecules. They opened out their structures, like flowers unfolding, and constructed a mirror-image version of themselves by attracting raw material from the surrounding soup of loose quarks. These “quagmites” were not quite like the creatures humans would one day encounter in the Galaxy’s Core, but they were their remote ancestors.

There was little in common in the physical basis of human and quagmite; a quagmite was not much bigger than an atomic nucleus. But the largest of the quagma creatures were composed of a similar number of particles to the atoms which would comprise a human body. So humans and quagmites were comparable in internal complexity, and their inner lives shared a similar richness. Many humans would have appreciated the best quagmite poetry—if they could have survived being bombarded by it.

Meanwhile, the quagmite creatures shared their universe with older forms of life.

The ancient spacetime-chemistry creatures, having survived yet another cosmic transition, gradually found ways to accommodate themselves to the latest climate, even though to them it was cold and dark and dead. In their heyday there had been no “matter” in the normal sense. But now they found they could usefully form symbiotic relationships with creatures formed of condensate matter: extended structures locked into a single quantum state. A new kind of being ventured cautiously through the light-filled spaces, like insects with “bodies” of condensate and “wings” of spacetime defects. It was the formation of a new kind of ecology, emerging from fragments of the old and new. But symbiosis and the construction of composite creatures from lesser components were eternal tactics for life, eternal ways of surviving changed conditions.

In the unimaginably far future humans would call the much-evolved descendants of these composite forms “Xeelee.”

The proto-Xeelee were, meanwhile, aware of another species of matter born out of this turbulent broth. This would one day be called dark matter by human scientists, for it would bond with other types of matter only loosely, through gravity and the weakest nuclear force. There was a whole hierarchy of particles of this stuff, even a sort of chemistry. This faint stuff passed through the quark-cluster cities and the nests of the proto-Xeelee alike as if they didn’t exist. But it was there—and, like the Xeelee, this dark matter was going to be around for good.

As the endless expansion continued, the quagmites swarmed through their quagma broth, fighting and loving and dying. The oldest of them told their legends of the singularity. The young scoffed, but listened in secret awe.

It seemed to the quagmites that the ages that had preceded their own had been impossibly brief, a mere flash in the afterglow of the singularity. But it was a common error. The pace of life scaled to temperature: if you lived hot, you lived fast. The quagmites did not suspect that the creatures who had inhabited earlier, warmer ages had crammed just as many experiences—just as much “life”—into their brief instants of time. As the universe expanded, every generation, living slower than the last, saw only a flash of heat and light behind it, nothing but a cold dark tunnel ahead—and each generation thought that it was only
now
that a rich life was possible.

The comfortable era of the quagmites couldn’t last forever; nothing ever did. It was when the universe was thirty times older than it was at the end of the matter-antimatter conflict that the first signs of the quagmites’ final disaster were detected.

Chapter
48

After five weeks of Kimmer’s ten, Exultant Squadron was to be transferred to Orion Rock, from which the assault on Chandra would be mounted.

It took three days for Rock 492 to be evacuated: the living areas emptied out, the squadron’s fifteen greenships lifted off the surface. When Pirius Red had first arrived on 492 it had been a garbage heap, but now that it was time to leave he was sorry. After all, he and Torec had taken this ruin and made it, not just their base of operations, but their home.

And, of his motley assembly of superannuated veterans and misfits, two had died in operations run out of this Rock. So there was blood soaked into its silvery regolith, human bones buried in its loose dirt, as they were buried on a billion other worlds and moons and asteroids across the face of the Galaxy.

On the last night, as the close-out crews did their work, Pirius kept Torec back. In their skinsuits they wandered through the empty chambers, the stripped-out barracks and refectories and dispensaries, the big engineering bays with their floors grooved and shaped to take equipment now removed. They could hear systems shutting down, one by one, the vibrations diminished, the circulation of air and water stopping, as if the Rock itself was slowly dying. As they walked from one chamber to the next, the light cut out behind them, so they were always walking out of darkness.

In the last chamber, they found a corner where they unzipped their skinsuits. The air was rapidly losing its heat, making them both shiver deliciously. They pushed the seams of their suits together and sealed themselves inside.

The inertial generators shut down. They found themselves rising from the floor. All around them specks of asteroid dust, disturbed by the Rock’s residual vibrations, rose up to make the air sparkle.

Deep inside the Cavity, a long way inside the Front, Orion Rock was buried in the North Arm of the Baby Spiral.

To reach it, Exultant Squadron formed a tight convoy. The ten prime greenships, with five backups, were at the center. All the greenships had been modified with the gear for Project Prime Radiant, but the equipment was bedded in now, and after the hours of training flights the crew knew how to handle their ungainly craft. The fighting ships were accompanied by equipment freighters, tenders, and other support craft, and a handful of command vessels, including Commissary Nilis’s corvette. One massive Spline warship loomed over them. Bristling with weapons, its moonlike bulk dwarfed its charges.

It was an unlikely flotilla, Pirius supposed. It was strange to reflect that on this handful of battered, hastily modified old hulks might rest the destiny of the Galaxy.

The group sailed through the Front and made their way down the spine of the Baby Spiral’s arm, moving in a series of FTL hops and sublight-drive glides. Despite the time pressure, the only way to proceed was cautiously: the spiral arm was a crowded corridor of molecular dust, drifting rock, and young stars, a difficult jaunt. But there was so much noise and clutter here in this tunnel of bombarded gas that there was a good chance they would remain undetected by Xeelee scouts all the way in.

After two sleepless days and nights, with the crews stressed-out and weary, they reached Orion Rock.

Pirius, sitting in his pilot’s blister, gaped. He had never seen anything like it. The Rock
shone.