Phase Space (59 page)

But the intense radiation bath likewise assailed matter. True, wherever it got the chance – in pockets of relative cool – atomic matter formed, electrons clinging to nuclei like long-separated siblings, the new atoms gravity-tugging each other. But, bombarded by the blistering photons, any matter cluster was quickly shattered. The brief frost banks evaporated, the atoms smashed, the plasma restored.

In this ferocious heat there could be no solid structure: no planets, no stars, no galaxies.

But the plasma ocean was not uniform. Not featureless.

Cold said she would take Shine and Harmony to a place where, she said, they could see the future.

The two of them joined her reluctantly, in the place where the people hung in a great cloud, rippling on the Ocean’s softly swelling currents.

There was a full ecology here. Instabilities generated little pockets of turbulence, like spinning flowers in the plasma, and on these small structures fed greater forms, which were consumed in their turn. The pinnacle of this food chain was reached in the dense, complex, hot-as-sun bodies of the We Who Sing. And so they fed now, browsing on the turbulence and scurrying, mindless forms.

Cold, with Shine and Harmony, moved out of this glowing crowd and away into swelling emptiness.

Soon they were alone, three points of brightness swimming through a sea of yellow-white light.

Harmony was younger than Shine, her sparkling structure less subtly developed. But she was nevertheless a handsome creature who, like Shine, had somehow been snared by Cold’s discordant words. She sang as they jetted along, but her songs betrayed her unease and boredom.

Cold’s body was smaller than Shine’s or Harmony’s: small, ugly, her inner structure decaying, her circumference ragged. Denying the dissolution of the triple, she had been subject too long to the great pulses of heat and cold that washed through this Ocean-sky.

They were an odd trio, uncomfortable with each other.

‘ … Here,’ said Cold at last. ‘This will do. Look now …’

They had come to a place where the Ocean glowed with a little less vigour than elsewhere. Instinctively Shine contracted, compressing the warmth of her own structure.

Here was a great sculpture of frost, a wispy glimmering spiderweb. But already the Ocean’s turbulence was closing this random pocket of coolness, and the frost, twisting, crumbling, was breaking up.

Harmony grumbled, ‘There’s nobody here.’

Cold said, ‘It isn’t
people
I’ve brought you to see.’

‘Nothing, then,’ said Harmony. ‘There’s
nothing
here.’

‘Nothing but frost,’ Shine said.

‘Who cares about frost?’ said Harmony. ‘Frost is dead. Frost cannot sing.’

She said, ‘There has always been frost – wispy structures like this, gathering in the transient cold pockets.
But there is more frost now than in the past.
’

‘I don’t believe you,’ Harmony said haughtily.

‘Nevertheless it is true.’

Shine struggled to find the right questions.
What is ‘past’? What is ‘future’? What is ‘change’
? ‘How can you know such a thing?’

Cold’s ragged body pulsed. ‘Because I have lived long enough to see it. Time is a great gift. I have seen the frost gather, Shine … I have built my memory, so that I may understand the world. And I have learned that there is a deeper sort of memory, that lingers even when we are gone.’

‘What do you mean?’

Cold began to sing, quite beautifully. Her body glowed with colour.

The song was part of the standard canon of the We Who Sing, and it had structure: subtle rhythms, themes composed of repetitive phrases, ‘notes’ expressed in a discrete suite of colours, even a kind of refrain like a rhyme.

A human could have appreciated the song’s beauty. A whale could.

At last Cold finished.

Shine found herself drawing subtly closer. ‘You sing well,’ she said.

Cold emitted a kind of laugh, and she spun. ‘And so you come to me. Of course you do. That was how our songs began: as simple tripling calls.
Look at me. Hear how well I sing! Think how well we could merge, how strong and dense with structure our children would be …
But the songs have become more than that. Passed from one generation to the next, they have become elaborate. They have come to tell what happened before: of great beauties, of spectacular triples – and of the Ocean itself, the Waves and the frost.’

Harmony, moodily, spun away. ‘I don’t like this game.’

‘Shine – Harmony – I have heard this happen.
I have heard the songs grow,
just a phrase or two at a time, from triple to triple. And so I thought
back.
I imagined the songs being stripped of their layers of meaning, becoming simpler, more elemental, until – in the beginning – they were no more than a mating cry.’

Shine was still struggling to comprehend the idea that she might live in a universe in which the past might be different from the future. It was almost impossible for her to absorb Cold’s efforts to describe how she had observed a trend.

Of her kind, Shine saw, Cold was a genius: but hers was a chill, repellent brilliance, and Shine felt herself shrink away.

Cold seemed to observe this, and withered regretfully.

Harmony, despite herself, seemed intrigued. ‘If the songs tell stories, what do they say?’

‘That the Ocean is not limitless,’ Cold said quickly. ‘That is the first thing, despite what most people believe. The songs tell of the Waves. Everyone knows that. But over enough time – so the songs say –
the same Waves return.
It is as if the Ocean is a single body, like yours, Harmony, within which Waves echo back and forth, subtly changing. That is how I know the Ocean is a small place.

‘And here is the next thing.
The Ocean will not last forever.
It changes. I am old enough now to have seen it for myself –’

Shine, reluctantly, understood. ‘You’re talking about the frost.’

‘Yes. There is more of it – always more, never less.’

Shine tried to think like Cold.
Before, less. Now, more. If this goes on …
‘Soon
all
the Ocean will be frost. That is what you are saying.’

‘Yes,’ Cold said, but with a kind of exultance. ‘At last somebody hears me!
That
is what is going to happen.’

Harmony spun and spat bits of light, growing agitated.

Shine tried to imagine a universe full of lifeless, static frost. ‘How will we live? Where will we go? What about the Waves, the triples?’

‘There will be nowhere to go,’ said Cold harshly. ‘It will happen all at once, everywhere. When the next Wave comes –’

‘These are terrible things to be saying!’ Harmony cried suddenly. ‘You are stupid and ugly, Cold, and I don’t want to finish up like you!’ And with a final dazzling burst she surged away, leaving Shine and Cold alone.

Shine said, ‘I should go after her.’

‘She is smart,’ Cold said. ‘She understands too, despite herself. That is why she is frightened.’

Frightened and repelled, Shine thought.

‘You must help me, Shine.’

‘Help you?’

Cold spun around, a ragged cloud. ‘Look at me. Unless I triple soon, I will die. And I will not triple. I will not let my mind dissolve.’

‘You will not live long enough to see the next Wave. That is what you are saying … Ah. But I could.’

Cold came to her anxiously. ‘It will be up to you,’ she said. ‘I will be long dead. You must make them see …’

Suddenly Shine was angry. ‘I don’t want such a life. I wish I was as old as you. I would rather die.’

‘No,’ said Cold urgently. ‘You must not forget what I have told you. You must not lose it in the tripling – for then, you doom your mindless offspring to die in your place.’

Shine flinched from her chill logic.

Cold, it seemed to her, was not natural. She had put aside the ultimate joy of the triple; this dismal knowledge scarcely seemed a consolation.

But then – if Cold was right – what was the natural thing to do?

Shine said slowly, ‘We are evanescent. Here and gone, like a song.’

‘What are you saying?’

Shine watched the ugly frost evaporating as the Ocean’s warmth gushed over it. ‘If you are right – if all this must pass – perhaps we should accept what is to come.’

Cold was very still.

The young cosmos expanded relentlessly.

It was a bath of plasma, almost at thermodynamic equilibrium, with no large-scale energy flows, no large structure. But still, on small scales, there was unevenness and instability, undulations in the background density. And so there were flows of energy, heat cancelling cold.

Where energy flowed, life fed. Life: even in this chaotic, glowing soup.

And there were the Waves.

In its first instants this universe had endured a pulse of drastic inflation, during which it had ballooned from a region of space smaller than a proton to the size of the Earth. And as spacetime was stretched so dramatically, some of the pulsing cosmic energy condensed to matter.

It was as if rocks had been thrown into a great opaque pond.

Though light was hindered by the plasma, sound waves could travel freely. The ripples cast by that inflationary explosion were tremendous acoustic pulses of compression and decompression that marched across the swelling cosmos. With time, the oscillations developed on ever larger scales.

The growing universe was filled with a deepening roar.

But as it grew, so it cooled.

Already the Wave could be seen in the glimmering distance, like a bank of spotlights approaching through a glowing fog. Already its throaty roar could be heard.

The We Who Sing began to cluster, like migrant birds.

By now, Shine herself had grown old.

And she had learned that Cold was right. All you had to do was look around.

You could even hear change in the Wave itself. The Waves were stretching, their tone deepening. The Ocean was filled with great descending groans, as if immense creatures were dying.

But not one in a hundred of the great soaring throng around her understood this. Not one of them was old enough to remember a time when this fast-evolving world of theirs had been any different – and few would listen to Shine.

Just like Cold, Shine had gradually become ostracized by We Who Sing. It was Shine now who had endured long past her time of tripling, she whose ragged, slowly decohering form repelled those around her.

But Shine was not Cold. Whatever became of her, without tripling she would forever be incomplete. And she dreaded following the final destiny of poor Cold, who, in the end, had evaporated, her precious, hoarded memories lost forever in the currents of light.

Often she wished she had defied Cold’s wishes and embraced the tripling. The chill logic of a coming extinction seemed to her a poor reward for the loss of such terminal joy.

But Shine, resolutely, put such thoughts aside.

In the midst of the gathering gaiety, she brought together those who followed her. There was a bare hundred of them – no more, even after a lifetime of Shine’s increasingly impassioned proselytizing. Now they clustered around Shine, gathering almost as tightly as partners keen to triple.

‘I don’t like this,’ said Harmony. ‘I don’t want this to happen.’

Others assented, swarming closer.

‘I know,’ said Shine, as soothing as she could be, despite her own fear. ‘We must stay together. We must stay close. It is the only way.’

This was not Harmony herself, but one of her triple-daughters. The old Harmony had been unable, in the end, to resist the brilliant lure of the triple. But Shine had wooed her triple-daughters, and she had been rewarded to find much of Harmony’s character lingering in them: high intelligence mixed with a stubborn refusal to believe the worst.

Thus Shine had sought to find in the daughters what she had perceived in their mothers. It was just as Cold had once pursued her. She had often wondered whether it was herself that Cold was after, or something she had seen in Shine’s triple-parents …