Of course, it was only a single starbreaker. I’m told it took a couple of days before the flares started.
Lipsey died alone, surrounded by the rage of humanity’s conquerors. It was the end of an undeservedly long life. But he died laughing at them. I heard him.
A Spline freighter ingested me after a day.
The Spline sold me access to a human news channel. I figured, why not. Since I was still broke, in spite of everything, I wasn’t going to be able to pay them anyway…
Humanity was rejoicing. Qax-owned ships were disappearing from the skies of the human worlds of the Solar System. The Qax were going to need every cubic foot of carrying capacity to get themselves off their home world before their sun blew up. They were going to be busy for a long, long time, and much too preoccupied to hunt me down.
And once I released my news about the Xeelee, we’d be busy, too. One day we’d go back to the Great Attractor, take on the Xeelee starbreakers.
But in the meantime I’d have to find a job. My adventure was over and I faced the dreary prospect of spending the rest of my life paying off the Spline — among others. I reached for my suit and dug out my handful of Great Attractor fragments. Cold as ice, and just as worthless, they sparkled even in the Spline’s blood-tinged light—
Worthless?
Suddenly I imagined these stones set in platinum and resting against tanned flesh: Xeelee-made gems from half a billion light years away.
Maybe I had a way to pay off my debts after all. Soon, AS technology would be available again. And after that I could buy my own ship, start a small line…
I put away the stones and began to dream again.
Eve said, “Jim Bolder was a brave, impulsive man. But he thought big. He immediately saw the significance of the knowledge of the Xeelee artifact, the thing he called the Great Attractor, to mankind.
“Bolder lived for the moment. But his actions would resound through millions of years. It is entirely appropriate that, for humans, the artifact he found would always bear his name:
“Bolder’s Ring.
“But the impact of his actions on the Qax was devastating…”
The pathetic Qax evacuation armada consisted of hundreds of Spline ships.
The craft, their spherical hulls open, settled into the Qax ocean. Each hull was lined with heaters designed to simulate the volcanism of that mother sea; convection cells were stirred to life inside the ships, and the awareness of a Qax slid reluctantly aboard each craft.
The Spline carriers lifted cautiously from the amniotic ocean. Flares like human fists already punched out of the sun, and gales howled through the atmosphere, buffeting the stately rise of the Spline. With each jolt the delicate convection patterns were disrupted; the Qax endured the gradual paring away of their awareness.
Over half the race expired.
But after the evacuation, the inventiveness and enterprise of the Qax were reasserted. Soon traders were once more spreading Qax goods and services through the neighboring star systems. And the Qax, adrift in their Spline fleet, began to explore new homes for their delicate structures.
They were creatures of turbulence, and they found turbulence everywhere.
Qax awareness took root in the roiling air of Jovians… in the slow, stately gravitational rhythms of galactic orbits… and at last they learned how to colonize the structure of seething space itself.
On their reemergence as an interstellar power the Qax sought out humanity, but — as Bolder in his blundering way had evidently hoped — the Qax’s long, forced withdrawal from affairs had given mankind time to grow powerful.
The history of the two species diverged, with humanity resuming its vigorous expansion, and the Qax beginning an introspective retreat into the structure of space.
Soon the Qax were numberless, and had become immortal.
But they remembered the moment at which a single human being had brought them to the brink of extinction.
Meanwhile, humans prospered.
Some argued that access to Xeelee technology damaged human inventiveness. It was too easy to take rather than build.
But not all exploration was finished. And, in the course of that exploration, evidence was unturned — fragmentary and incomplete — of a technology even older than the Xeelee…
The Quagma Datum
The soup was cold. I pushed it away. “Tell me why I’m here.”
Wyman didn’t answer until the next course arrived. It was a rich coq au vin. He forked it into his mouth with an enthusiasm that told me he hadn’t always been accustomed to such luxury. Earthlight caught the jewelry crusted over his fingers.
Faintly disgusted, I lifted my eyes to the bay window behind him. Now that we’d left the atmosphere the Elevator Restaurant was climbing its cable more steeply. The Sahel ground anchor site had turned into a brown handkerchief, lost in the blue sink of Earth.
Suddenly the roof turned clear. Starlight twinkled on the cutlery and the table talk ebbed to silence.
Wyman smiled at my reaction.
“Dr. Luce, you’re a scientist. I asked you here to set you a scientific puzzle.” His accent was stilted, a mask for his origins. “Did you read about the lithium-7 event? No? A nova-bright object fifteen billion light years away; it lasted about a year. The spectrum was dominated by one element. Doctor, the thing was a beacon of lithium-7.”
A floating bottle of St. Emilion refilled my glass.
I thought about it. “Fifteen billion years is the age of the Universe. So this object went through its glory soon after the Big Bang.”
Thin fingers played with coiffed hair. “So, Doctor, what’s the significance of the lithium?”
“Lithium-7 is a relic of the early Universe. A few microseconds after the singularity the Universe was mostly quagma — a magma of free quarks. Then the quarks congealed into nuclear particles, which gathered into the first nuclei.
“Lithium-7 doesn’t form in stars. It was formed at that moment of nucleosynthesis. So all this points to an early Universe event.”
“Good,” he said, as if I’d passed a test.
Our empty plates sank into the table.
“So what’s this got to do with me? I hate to disappoint you, Wyman, but this isn’t my field.”
“Unified force theories,” he said rapidly. “That’s your field. At high enough energies the forces of physics combine into a single superforce. The principle of the old GUTdrive. Right? And the only time when such energy densities obtained naturally was right after the Big Bang. The superforce held together your quagma.” He was a slight man, but the steadiness of his pale eyes made me turn aside. “So the early Universe is your field, after all. Dr Luce, don’t try to catch me out. You think of me, no doubt dismissively, as an entrepreneur. But what I’m an entrepreneur of is human science. What’s left of it… I’ve made myself a rich man. You shouldn’t assume that makes me a fool.”
I raised my glass. “Fair enough. So why do you think this lithium thing is so important?”
“Two reasons. First, creation physics. Here we have a precise location where we can be certain that something strange happened, mere moments after the singularity. Think what we could learn by studying it. A whole new realm of understanding… and think what an advantage such an understanding would prove to the first race to acquire it.”