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.