For the last quagmites, huddled in their arks, it was hard to imagine any form of life that could exploit such double-dead stuff, with quarks locked inside baryons locked inside nuclei. But from a certain point on, such nuclear matter must inevitably dominate the universe, and any life that arose in the future would be constructed of it.
The quagmites wanted to be remembered. They had determined that any creatures of the remote future, made of cold, dead, nuclear stuff, would not forget them. And they saw an opportunity.
At last the moment of nucleosynthesis arrived.
The universe’s prevailing temperature and pressure determined the products of this mighty nucleus- baking. Around three-quarters of the nuclei formed would be hydrogen — simple protons. Most of the rest would be helium, combinations of four baryons. Any nuclei more complex would be — ought to be — vanishingly rare; a universe of simple elements would emerge from this new transition.
But the quagmites saw a way to change the cosmic oven’s settings.
The fleet of arks sailed through the cosmos, gathering matter with gauzy magnetic wings. Here a knotted cloud was formed, there a rarefied patch left exposed. They worked assiduously, laboring to make the universe a good deal more clumpy than it had been before. And this clumpiness promoted the baking, not just of hydrogen and helium nuclei, but of a heavier nucleus, a form of lithium — three protons and four neutrons. There was only a trace of it compared to the hydrogen and helium; the quagmites didn’t have enough power to achieve more than that. Nevertheless there was too much lithium to be explained away by natural processes.
The scientists of the ages to follow would indeed spot this anomalous “lithium spike,” and would recognize it for what it was: a work of intelligence. At last cold creatures would come to see, and the quagmite arks would begin to tell their story. But that lay far in the future.
With the subatomic drama of nucleosynthesis over, the various survivors sailed resentfully on. There were the last quagmites in their arks, and much-evolved descendants of the spacetime-condensate symbiotes of earlier times yet, all huddling around the primordial black holes. To them the universe was cold and dark, a swollen monster where the temperature was a mere billion degrees, the cosmic density only about twenty times water. The universe was practically a vacuum, they complained, and its best days were already behind it.
The universe was three minutes old.
Chapter 52
That night, the last night before the action, Torec came to the bed of Pirius Blue. She stood at the side of his bunk, silhouetted in the dark.
He hesitated. He had lost Torec before the magnetar action, on the day his life split in two, and since this younger copy of his own Torec had come into his life, he had avoided her. But when she slid into his arms, her scent, her touch, were just as they had been before.
They came together once, quickly; and then again, more slowly, thoughtfully. Then they lay together in the dark.
Around them the barracks was half-empty. A lot of crew were unable to sleep. Pila had arranged for the refectories to stay open, so some were eating, and elsewhere people were gambling, joking, playing physical games, all looking for ways to let off the tension.
Torec lay with her head on Blue’s chest, a firm, warm presence. She whispered, “I thought you weren’t going to let me in.”
“I didn’t know if I should.”
“Why?”
“Because…” He sighed. “It’s been a long time since the day I left you on Arches, on that final mission. And you’ve been to Earth! You’ve changed. You always were full of depths, Torec… And I’ve changed, too. I’ve had a chunk deleted out of my life, and been thrown back in time. I’m not me anymore.”
“You’re the same person you were before you left.”
“Am I?” He turned so he could see her shadowed face. “Think about it. In the timeline I came from, I was with you for two years after the point at which I returned to the timeline of Pirius Red, and everything got skewed. You see? We spent all that time together, you and I. But you never lived through those two years, did you?”
“I did,” she murmured. “A copy of me did. But that copy has gone, or never existed — gone to wherever deleted timelines go… It’s so strange, Pirius Blue.”
“I know. And sad.”
“Sad? Oh. Because I’m not your Torec.” She snuggled back down to his chest. “But there’s nothing we can do about that, is there? So we may as well get on with things.”
“Get on?”
“What else is there to do?”
Pirius Blue laughed. “As Nilis would probably say, we haven’t evolved to cope with time-looped relationships.”
“I know what your real problem is,” she said. “And it’s got nothing to do with time paradoxes.”
“What, then?”
“I’ve been with him. Your evil time-clone rival.”
He stifled a laugh. “He thinks the same about me.”
“Well, you both resent each other. But you’re not the same. I think he’s in awe of you.”
“But he’s your Pirius.”
“I don’t think it works like that. You’re growing apart, becoming different people. But you’re still both you.”
“Does he love you?”
She sighed. It was the first time either Pirius had used that word to her. “You know I love you. Both of you.”
He stroked her back, a spot between her shoulder blades where her skin felt like the smoothest, softest surface he had ever touched. “It’s a mess. A stupid triangle. I don’t know how we will sort it out.”
“Wait until the mission is over,” she said.
And see if any of us come back — that was what she left unsaid.
After a time she drew away from him.
“You’re going to him,” he said.
“He needs me, too. And I need him.”
“I understand,” he said, though he wasn’t sure if that was true.
When she had gone, Blue rolled into the part of the bunk still warm from her body, and tried to sleep.
Two hours before reveille, Cohl was already on the surface of Orion Rock. In her massive, armored skinsuit, she was propped up in a foxhole with the members of her platoon around her. The monopole-cannon emplacement they were ordered to protect was a couple of hundred meters away, a complicated silhouette against a shining sky.
As it had been since its chthonic birth, this Rock was still immersed in the glowing molecular clouds of the North Arm of the Baby Spiral. But if she looked ahead, she could see a gaggle of stars through the mist, like light globes hanging in smoggy air. That was IRS 16, the cluster of very crowded, very bright stars that coalesced out of the Baby’s infalling material as it poured into the crowded space that surrounded Chandra.
Orion Rock itself was probably almost as old as the Galaxy itself, and for all that time it had been swimming helplessly along this lane of gas. For a thousand years humans had dug their way into this Rock. Now both those immense intervals of time were coming to a close, for, in two hours from now, this Rock would burst through the last veils of cloud that separated it from IRS 16. It was hard to believe that Cohl should be here at a moment like this.
What was even harder to believe was that at least half her platoon were asleep, and the rest were eating. But that was life in the infantry. Your priority was eating and sleeping, and you took whatever chance you had to do either — even now, on the brink of battle.
Cohl was an ambassador. Her mission, given her by Pirius Red, was to ensure that the two halves of the operation — the Navy fliers who would take the greenships to Chandra and the Army infantry down here on the Rock — communicated properly, shared the same objectives, and worked well together when the crunch came. That was what she had been working toward in the weeks since she had been brought here from Quin.