Gramm rubbed his eyes with fleshy fingers. “Lethe, Ensign, that pompous old fool Kolo Yehn was right. Whatever we’re running out of, at least there’s no shortage of courage. Get out of here.” He waved his hand. “Go, before I have to throw you out.”
Pirius reported this conversation to Nilis. He didn’t anticipate the Commissary’s reaction.
“You see what this means.” Nilis was whispering, wide-eyed, his hands locked together in a white- knuckled grip.
“Sir?”
“Gramm is going to say yes — he’s going to back us. Of course he has to get the decision from his committee. But if he backs it, it will be hard for any of them not to follow along. We’re going to the Core, Ensign. We’re going to have our squadron.” Nilis padded around his room, plucking at his fingers.
Pirius shook his head. “Then why aren’t you leaping with joy, Commissary?”
“Because they’ve called my bluff,” he said rapidly. He seemed terrified. “While I was pushing against a locked door it was easy to be bold. But now the door has swung open, and I have to deliver on my promises.” He turned to Pirius. “Oh, my eyes, my eyes! What have I done? Pirius, what have I done?”
PART THREE
Genetically, morphologically, I am indistinguishable from an inhabitant of Earth of the long dark ages that preceded spaceflight.
I rejoice. For that changelessness is what makes me human.
Let others tinker with their genotypes and phenotypes, let them speciate and bifurcate, merge and blend. We unmodified humans are a primordial force who will sweep them all aside.
It must be this way. It will avail us nothing if we win a Galaxy and lose ourselves.
Chapter 35
There was no place. There was no time. A human observer would have recognized nothing here: no mass, energy, or force. There was only a rolling, random froth whose fragmented geometry constantly changed. Even causality was a foolish dream.
The orderly spacetime with which humans were familiar was suffused with vacuum energy, out of which virtual particles, electrons and quarks, would fizz into existence, and then scatter or annihilate, their brief walks upon the stage governed by quantum uncertainty. In this extraordinary place whole universes bubbled out of the froth, to expand and dissipate, or to collapse in a despairing flare.
This chaotic cavalcade of possibilities, this place of nonbeing where whole universes clustered in reefs of foamy spindrift, was suffused by a light beyond light. But even in this cauldron of strangeness there was life. Even here there was mind.
Call them monads.
This would be the label given them by Commissary Nilis, when he deduced their existence. But the name had much deeper roots.
In the seventeenth century the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz had imagined that reality was constructed from pseudo-objects that owed their existence solely to their relation to each other. In his idea of the “monad,” Leibniz had intuited something of the truth of the creatures who infested this domain. They existed, they communicated, they enjoyed a richness of experience and community. And yet “they” didn’t exist in themselves; it was only their relationships to each other that defined their own abstract entities.
No other form of life was possible in this fractured place.
Long ago they had attended the birth of a universe.
It had come from a similar cauldron of realities, a single bubble plucked out of the spindrift. As the baby universe had expanded and cooled, the monads had remained with it. Immanent in the new cosmos, they suffused it, surrounded it. Time to them was not as experienced by the universe’s swarming inhabitants; their perception was like the reality dust of configuration space, perhaps.
But once its reality had congealed, once the supracosmic froth had cooled, the monads were forced into dormancy. Wrapped up in protective knots of spacetime, they dreamed away the long history of their universe, with all its empires and wars, its tragedies and triumphs. It had been the usual story — and yet it was a unique story, for no two universes were ever quite the same. And something of this long saga would always be stored in the monads’ dreaming.
The universe aged, as all things must; within, time grew impossibly long and space stretched impossibly thin. At last the fabric of the universe sighed and broke — and a bubble of a higher reality spontaneously emerged, a recurrence of the no-place where time and distance had no meaning. Just as the universe had once been spawned from chaos, so this droplet of chaos was now born from the failing stuff of the universe. Everything was cyclic.
And in this bubble, where the freezing of spacetime was undone, the monads awoke again; in their supracosmic froth, they were once more briefly alive.
The monads considered the bubbling foam around them.
They dug into a reef of spindrift, selected a tangle of possibilities, picked out one evanescent cosmic jewel. This one — yes. They closed around it, as if warmed by its glow of potentialities.
And, embedding themselves in its structure, they prepared to shape it. The monads enriched the seedling universe with ineffable qualities whose existence few of its inhabitants would even guess at.
The new universe, for all its beauty, was featureless, symmetrical — but unstable, like a sword standing on its point. Even the monads could not control how that primordial symmetry would be broken, which destiny, of an uncountable number of possibilities, would be selected.
Which was, of course, the joy of it.
For the inhabitants of this new cosmos, it began with a singularity: a moment when time began, when space was born. But for the monads, as their chaotic Ur-reality froze out once more into a rigid smoothness, the singularity was an end: for them, the story was already over. Encased in orderly, frozen spacetime, they would slumber through the long ages, until this universe in turn grew old and spawned new fragments of chaos, and they could wake again.
But all that lay far in the future.
There was a breathless instant. The sword toppled. Time flowed, like water gushing from a tap.
History began.
Chapter 36
So Pirius Red and Torec, having completed a circuit across the face of the Galaxy that had taken them all the way to Earth, returned at last to where they had started.
The flight through the complicated geometry of Arches Base lifted Pirius’s heart. Past the asteroids that wheeled like fists, he made out the burning sky of the Core, the giant stars and light-year-long filaments of glowing gas, the endless explosion of astrophysics beyond. Compared to the cold clockwork emptiness of Sol system, out on the Galaxy’s dead fringe, where you couldn’t even see the Core, this crowded, dangerous sky teemed with life and energy.
“Lethe, it’s good to be home,” he said with feeling.
When they disembarked, Captain Seath herself greeted them. She allowed the Commissary to pump her hand, and nodded curtly to Pirius and Torec. But Pirius read the expression on her reconstructed face. Whatever they had achieved in Sol system, they would always be two jumped-up ensigns to her. It was almost reassuring.
Seath told them that the accommodation for the new “squadron” that was being formed to carry out Nilis’s “project” — she pronounced those words with unmistakable disdain — wasn’t ready yet. So Nilis was offered a room in Officer Country, while Pirius and Torec were taken to a Barracks Ball.