“Thanks,” Pirius said to Torec.
Nilis said, “You’ve already been a hero once, Pirius, in another timeline. Now you have to do it again.”
“But sir, I can’t command. I’m not even commissioned.”
Darc grinned. “You are now.”
“But — ten weeks?”
Darc shrugged. “That’s the hand we’ve been dealt; we make it or we don’t.”
Nilis was watching Pirius. “Of course you have to make up your own mind, Pirius. Do you remember the conversation we had at Venus?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So tell me — where has your self-analysis got to now?”
Torec said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”
Pirius said, “He’s asking me if I have found anything to fight for.” He faced Nilis. “There’s only one goal worth dying for,” he said.
“Yes?”
“And that’s victory — an end to this war. And then we will have to find out what humans are supposed to do with their time.”
Nilis nodded, apparently not trusting himself to speak.
“Oh, how noble you all are.” Pila shook her elegant head. “The preening of you military types never ceases to astound me.”
Darc ignored her. “So what do you say, squadron leader?”
“Where do I start, sir?”
Darc murmured, “Well, that’s up to you. But first I rather think you’ll need to find your crews.”
It was a relief to be able to get back to Rock 492.
At first Pirius and Torec had had to live in their skinsuits, relying on their backpacks for warmth, food, water, even air when the dust got too bad. Before the lavatories had started working they had to relieve themselves in their suits, and every couple of days went out to a flitter to dump their waste. But as the systems recovered, they had begun to sleep with their faceplates open, and at last, as the air slowly became fresh and warm, they abandoned the skinsuits altogether. The filters couldn’t do much about the suspended asteroid dust, and they both suffered irritated sinuses.
That night after the meeting with Kimmer, they slept as usual, huddled together in a corner of the bubble dome, their bodies pressed together under a blanket. The touch of microgravity was so gentle they all but hovered over the floor, drifting like soap bubbles. In the quietest hour, the inertial adjustors suddenly came online. As a full gravity grabbed them they ended up in a tangle of limbs, laughing. The floor was suddenly full of ridges and knobs — they would need a mattress tomorrow, Pirius told himself — and they felt the new, uneven gravity field pull at their internal organs.
The Rock, too, adjusted to its new state. Like most asteroids, 492 wasn’t a solid mass, but a loose aggregate of dust and boulders. As the inertial machines in its core did their work, 492’s components scraped and ground against each other as they sought to find a more compact equilibrium. Pirius could hear the deep groaning of the asteroid, a rumbling that shivered through his own bones, as if they were lying on the carcass of some huge uncomfortable animal.
In the morning, they found their faces and hands were covered with a silvery patina: it was the asteroid dust, which had at last settled out of its suspension in the air.
Chapter 37
The balancing sword tipped and fell. The primordial simplicity of the new universe was lost. From the broken symmetry of a once-unified physics, two forces emerged: gravity, and a force humans would call the GUT force — “GUT” for Grand Unified Theory, a combination of electromagnetic and nuclear forces. The separating-out of the forces was a phase change, like water freezing to ice, and it released energy that immediately fed the expansion of the seedling universe.
Gravity’s fist immediately clenched, crushing knots of energy and matter into black holes. It was in the black holes’ paradoxical hearts that the sleeping monads huddled. But the black holes were embedded in a new, unfolding spacetime: three dimensions of space and one of time, an orderly structure that congealed quickly out of the primitive chaos.
Yet there were flaws. The freezing-out had begun spontaneously in many different places, like ice crystals growing on a cold window. Where the crystals met and merged, discontinuities formed. Because the spacetime was three-dimensional, these defects were born in two dimensions, as planes and sheets — or one dimension, as lines of concentrated energy scribbled across spacetime’s spreading face — or no dimensions at all, simple points.
Suddenly the universe was filled with these defects; it was a box stuffed with ribbons and strings and buttons.
And the defects were not inert. Propagating wildly, they collided, combined, and interacted. A migrating point defect could trace out a line; a shifting line could trace out a plane; where two planes crossed, a line was formed, to make more planes and lines. Feedback loops of creation and destruction were quickly established, in a kind of spacetime chemistry. There was a time of wild scribbling.
Most of these sketches died as quickly as they were formed. But as the networks of interactions grew in complexity, another kind of phase shift was reached, a threshold beyond which certain closed loops of interactions emerged — loops which promoted the growth of other structures like themselves. This was autocatalysis, the tendency for a structure emerging from a richly connected network to encourage the growth of itself, or copies of itself. And some of these loops happened to be stable, immune to small perturbations. This was homeostasis, stability through feedback.
Thus, through autocatalysis and homeostasis working on the flaws of the young spacetime, an increasingly complex hierarchy of self-sustaining structures emerged. All these tangled knots were machines, fundamentally, heat engines feeding off the flow of energy through the universe. And the black holes, drifting through this churning soup, provided additional points of structure, seeds around which the little cycling structures could concentrate. In the new possibilities opened up by closeness, still more complex aggregates grew: simple machines gathered into cooperative “cells,” and the cells gathered into colonial “organisms” and ultimately multicelled “creatures"…
It was, of course, life. All this had emerged from nothing.
In this universe it would always be this way: structures spontaneously complexified, and stability emerged from fundamental properties of the networks — any networks, even such exotica as networks of intersecting spacetime defects. Order emerging for free: it was wonderful. But it need not have been this way.
Deep in the pinprick gravity wells of the primordial black holes, the feeding began.
Chapter 38
When Squadron Leader Pirius Red went back to the barracks, with his new officer’s epaulettes stitched to his uniform, he walked into a silent storm of resentment and contempt. After a few minutes he ducked into a lavatory block and ripped his epaulettes off his shoulders.
The new squadron leader spent twenty-four hours paralyzed by uncertainty and indecision. He had no real idea where to start.
Nilis called Pirius to his cluttered room in Officer Country.
When he got there, the Commissary, irritated and distracted, was working at a low table piled with data desks, while abstract Virtuals swirled around him like birds. He seemed to be pursuing his studies of Chandra. There was nowhere to sit but on Nilis’s blanket-strewn, unmade bed. There was a faint smell of damp and mustiness — it was the smell of Nilis, Pirius thought with exasperated fondness, a smell of feet and armpits, the smell of a gardener.
Pila was here, to Pirius’s surprise. Minister Gramm’s assistant, slender and elegant, looked somehow insulated from Nilis’s clutter. Her skin shone with a cold beauty, and her robe of purple-stitched black fell in precise folds around her slim, sexless body. She didn’t acknowledge Pirius at all.