“I’ve got it,” Blue called. “Good work, Bilson. But we need to have a word about your flying, Red.”
“Have you got the event horizon?”
Blue said quietly, “We have a fix.”
Pirius’s cabin flared with cherry-red light. The starbreakers were close. He ignored the glow, overrode the automatics, and held the ship to its line. “Only a few seconds more, crew—”
The blister shuddered around him, and a telltale blared. He had lost one nacelle, one crew blister: it was Cabel, probably the best engineer in the squadron, gone, burned away, a scrap of flesh in this tremendous tumult of energy. Regret stabbed, but he had no time now, no time. Still he stuck to his line. “Blue, drop the damn bombs—”
“Gone!” Blue called.
Pirius hurled the ship sideways. But the starbreakers tracked him, and still the ship shuddered.
Blue reported, “Gone and — Lethe!”
“What? Blue, I can’t see.”
“The black holes converged — we picked up the gravity wave pulse, right on the event horizon. And the Xeelee — Lethe, it’s working!… Oh.” He sounded oddly disappointed.
Pirius wrenched his ship around once more. “Blue! Report.”
“The flak has got me. I can’t maneuver — I’m wallowing like a hog—”
“Blue!”
“I always did want to be remembered,” Blue said.
“So did I.”
“Maybe we will be after all. Good-bye, brother. Tell Nilis…” But his voice winked out, and Pirius heard no more, nothing but Bilson’s quiet sobbing.
In the ops room the cheering was loud.
That netting around the event horizon looked as if it had been punched open by a vast fist. The surface beneath, a mist of sheets and threads of plasma falling into the event horizon, was awash with waves of density that flared brightly — some were so dense, the monitors said, that hydrogen fusion was briefly sparking. These waves were caused by oscillations of the event horizon itself, where it had been struck a mighty punch by the coalescing black holes of Blue’s cannon. All around this part of Chandra, intense pulses of gravitational waves were washing out, and it was those waves that were wreaking such damage on the netting structure, far overwhelming the feeble human efforts.
It was Nilis’s moment of triumph. When Enduring Hope looked for the Commissary, he was nowhere to be seen.
Luru Parz watched, her eyes cold.
“Lethe, Nilis was right,” Marshal Kimmer said. “It worked! Where is that oaf? Commissary!”
At last Nilis came running onto the walkway. He was carrying a data desk which he waved in the air. He hurried up to Kimmer. “Marshal! I have it at last. Those final images of the web structure were the key — I knew there was more to this black hole than we suspected!”
Kimmer evidently didn’t know what he was talking about, and didn’t care. He wrapped one arm around Nilis’s shoulders. “Commissary, you old fool! Unlike you, I have no imagination. I had to see it with my own eyes to believe it. But you’ve done it! You’ve ripped a hole in that peculiar Xeelee nest — and we still have four armed ships left to finish the job. By the time we’re done that black hole will be as naked as the day it was formed, and the Xeelee will have nowhere to hide. I tell you, if you told me you had found a way to beat the Xeelee in a bare-knuckle fight I’d believe you now!”
Nilis pulled away forcibly. When he spoke, it was practically a shriek. “Marshal — listen to me. We have to call off the attack?
Kimmer, shocked, was silenced.
Luru Parz said, “And the remaining ships—”
“Call them home. Let no more lives be lost today.”
Kimmer looked thunderous. “You had better explain yourself, Commissary.”
Nilis waved his data desk. “I told you. I have it!”
“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.