Five billion years early, the Sun left the Main Sequence, and ballooned into a red giant.
With such cool calculation, such oceanic persistence, the photino birds made the stars old.
Soon the first supernovae began. They spread like a plague from the photino birds’ center of operation.
And the Xeelee became troubled.
By this time, Paul speculated, the Xeelee were already lords of the baryonic Universe. They had initiated many of their vast cosmic engineering projects, and a host of lesser races had begun to dog their gigantic footsteps.
The Xeelee focused attention on the photino birds’ activities, and rapidly came to understand the nature of the threat they faced. In peril was not just the future of the Xeelee themselves, but of all baryonic life.
Perhaps they had tried to communicate with the birds, Paul speculated; perhaps they even succeeded. But the conflict with the photino birds was so fundamental that communication was meaningless. This was a dispute not between individuals, worlds, even species; it was a struggle for survival between two inimical life modes trapped in a single Universe.
It was a struggle the Xeelee could not afford to lose. They abandoned their projects and mobilized.
The final War must have started slowly. Paul imagined Xeelee nightfighters descending on stars known to harbor key photino bird flocks, cherry-red starbreaker beams shining like swords. And there would be reciprocal action by the photino birds; their unimaginable weapons would slide all but unobserved past the best defenses of the Xeelee.
And the Xeelee must, about the same time, have initiated the construction of the great causal loop controlled by the antiXeelee with its seed pods. At last Paul understood the antiXeelee’s purpose: the Xeelee had, with awesome determination, decided to modify their own evolutionary history in order to equip themselves for the battle with the photino birds. Paul pictured a branching of the Universe as the antiXeelee changed the past. The Xeelee, modified and pre-warned, had time in this new history to prepare for the coming conflict, including the construction of the mighty artifact called Bolder’s Ring — an escape route in case, despite all their preparation, the War were lost.
And all the time humans and other races, oblivious to the great purpose of the Xeelee, had scrambled for abandoned Xeelee toys. Eventually humans had even had the audacity to attack the Xeelee themselves, unaware that the Xeelee were waging a total War against a common enemy far more deadly than the Qax, or the Squeem, or any of man’s ancient foes.
The Xeelee wars had been a ghastly, epochal error of mankind. Humans believed they must challenge the Xeelee: overthrow them, become petty kings of the baryonic cosmos.
This absurd rivalry led, in the end, to the virtual destruction of the human species. And — worse, Paul reflected — it blinded humanity to the true nature of the Xeelee, and their goals: and to the threat of the dark matter realm.
There was a fundamental conflict in the Universe, between the dark and light forms of matter — a conflict which had, at last, driven the stars to their extinction. Differences among baryonic species — the Xeelee and humanity, for instance — are as nothing compared to that great schism.
And, even as the wars continued, still the cancer of aging, swelling and exploding stars had spread. The growth of the disrupted regions must have been little short of exponential.
At last the Xeelee realized that — despite the deployment of the resources of a Universe, despite the manipulation of their own history — this was a War they could not win.
It remained only to close the antiXeelee’s causal loop, to complete the Ring, and to flee the Universe they had lost.
But already the birds were gathering around the Ring, intent on its destruction.
Paul brooded on what he had learned, on the desolation of the baryonic Universe which lay around him. Though the Ring survived still, the Xeelee had gone, evacuated.
Baryonic life was scattered, smashed, its resources wasted — largely by humanity — on absurd, failed assaults against the Xeelee.
Paul was alone.
At first Paul described to himself the places he visited, the relics he found, in human terms; but as time passed and his confidence grew he removed this barrier of words. He allowed his consciousness to soften further, to dilute the narrow human perception to which he had clung.
All about him were quantum wave functions.
They spread from stars and planets, sheets of probability that linked matter and time. They were like spiderwebs scattered over the aging galaxies; they mingled, reinforced and canceled each other, all bound by the implacable logic of the governing wave equations.
The functions filled space-time and they pierced his soul. Exhilarated, he rode their gaudy brilliance through the hearts of aging stars.
He relaxed his sense of scale, so that there seemed no real difference between the width of an electron and the broad sink of a star’s gravity well. His sense of time telescoped, so that he could watch the insectlike, fluttering decay of free neutrons — or step back and watch the grand, slow decomposition of protons themselves…
Soon there was little of the human left in him. Then, at last, he was ready for the final step.
After all, he reflected, human consciousness itself was an artificial thing. He recalled Green, on the Sugar Lump, gleefully describing tests which proved beyond doubt that the motor impulses initiating human actions could often precede the willing of those actions by significant fractions of a second. Humans had always been adrift in the Universe, creatures of impulse and acausality, explaining their behavior to each other with ever more complex models of awareness. Once they had believed that gods animated their souls, fighting their battles through human form. Later they had evolved the idea of the self-aware, self-directed consciousness. Now Paul saw that it had all been no more than an idea, a model, an illusion behind which to hide. Why should he, perhaps the last human, cling to such outmoded comforts?
There was no cognition, he realized. There was only perception.
With the equivalent of a smile he relaxed. His awareness sparkled and subsided.
He was beyond time and space. The great quantum functions which encompassed the Universe slid past him like a vast, turbulent river, and his eyes were filled with the gray light which lay behind all phenomena.
Space had never been empty.
Within the tight space-time limits of the Uncertainty Principle, “empty” vacuum was filled with Virtual particle sets which blossomed from nothing, flew apart, recombined and vanished as if they had never been — all too rapidly for the laws of mass/energy conservation to notice.
Once, human scientists had called it the seething vacuum. And now it was inhabited.
The Qax was a creature of turbulent space, its “cells” a shifting succession of Virtual particle sets. Physically its structure extended over many yards — a rough sphere gigantic in subatomic terms containing a complex of Virtual particle sets which stored terabits of data: of understanding, of memory stretching back over millions of years.
Like the shadow of a cloud the Qax cruised over turbulent space, seeking humans…
PART 7
ERA: Photino Victory
…Is it over? Is humanity destroyed? Lethe, Eve, we’ve covered millions of years. We’ve seen the flight of the Xeelee, the victory of those photino birds. It must be over. What can be left to show me?”
“Watch,” she said patiently. “Watch…”
Shell