Harry looked uncomfortable. ‘It’s just a copy. There are other backups, earlier copies—’
‘Lethe, Dad,’ Michael Poole said, and he walked away, bunching his fists. I wondered how many similar collisions with his father the man had had to suffer in the course of his life.
‘What’s done is done,’ came a whisper. And they all quit their bickering, because it was Michael Poole who had spoken – the backup Poole, the one recently revived, the one beyond the spacetime barrier. ‘I know I don’t have much time. I’ll try to project some imagery back . . .’
Harry, probably gratefully, popped out of existence, thus vacating the available processing capacity, though I was sure his original would be monitoring us from the Crab.
Poole murmured to Miriam, ‘You speak to him. Might be easier for him than having to deal with me.’
She clearly found this idea distressing. But she said, ‘All right.’
Gradually images built up in the air before us, limited views grainy with pixels and flickering.
And we saw Virtual Poole’s strange universe.
The Virtual Crab floated over a small object – like an ice moon, like one of Titan’s Saturnian siblings, pale and peppered with worn impact craters. I saw how its surface was punctured with holes, perfectly round and black. These looked like our hatch; the probe we had dispatched must have emerged from one of them. Things that looked like our spiders toiled to and fro between the holes, travelling between mounds of some kind of supplies. They were too distant to see clearly. All this was bathed in a pale-yellow light, diffuse and without shadows.
The original Poole said, ‘You think those other interfaces connect up to the rest of Titan?’
‘I think so,’ Miriam said. ‘This can’t be the only deep-sea methane-generation chamber. Passing through the wormholes and back again would be a way for the spiders to unify their operations across the moon.’
‘So the interface we found, set in the outer curved surface of Titan’s core, is one of a set that matches another set on the outer curved surface of that ice moon. The curvature would seem to flip over when you passed through.’
This struck me as remarkable, a paradox difficult to grasp, but Poole was a wormhole engineer, and used to the subtleties of spacetime manipulated and twisted through higher dimensions; slapping two convex surfaces together was evidently child’s play to him, conceptually.
Miriam asked Virtual Poole, ‘But where are you? That’s an ice moon, a common object. Could be anywhere in the universe. Could even be in some corner of our own System.’
Poole’s Virtual copy said, his voice a whispery, channel-distorted rasp, ‘Don’t jump to conclusions, Miriam. Look up.’
The viewpoint swivelled, and we saw Virtual Poole’s sky.
A huge, distorted sun hung above us. Planetoids hung sprinkled before its face, showing phases from crescents to half-moons; some were entirely black, fly-speck eclipses against the face of the monster. Beyond the limb of the sun more stars hung, but they were also swollen, pale beasts, their misshapen discs visible. And the space between the stars did not look entirely black to me, but a faint, deep crimson overlaid with a pattern, a network of threads and knots.
‘What a sky,’ Poole murmured.
‘Michael, you’re far from home,’ Miriam called.
Virtual Poole replied, ‘Yes. Those stars don’t fit our main sequence. And their spectra are simple – few heavy elements. They’re more like the protostars of our own early universe, I think: the first generation, formed of not much more than the hydrogen and helium that came out of the Big Bang.’
‘No heavy elements,’ observed Miriam Berg. ‘No metals.’
‘I’ll send through the data I’m collecting—’
‘Getting it, son,’ came Harry Poole’s voice.
The others stayed quiet to let Virtual Poole speak. His words, the careful observations delivered by a man so far from home, or at least by a construct that felt as if it were a man, were impressive in their courage.
‘This is not our universe,’ he whispered. ‘I think that’s clear. This one is young, and small – according to the curvature of spacetime, only a few million light years across. Probably not big enough to accommodate our Local Group of galaxies.’
‘A pocket universe, maybe,’ Miriam said. ‘An appendix from our own.’
‘I can’t believe the things you have been calling “spiders” originated here,’ the Virtual said. ‘Their fabric is heavily reliant on metals. You said it, Miriam. No metals here, not in this entire cosmos. I guess that’s why they were scavenging metals from probes, meteorites.’
‘They come from somewhere else, then,’ Poole said. ‘There was nothing strange in the elemental abundance we recorded in the spider samples we studied. They come from elsewhere in our own universe. The pocket universe is just a transit interchange. Like Earthport.’
The Virtual said, ‘Yes. And maybe behind these other moons in my sky lie gateways to other Titans – other sustained ecologies, maybe with different biological bases. Other experiments, elsewhere in the universe.’
Miriam said, ‘So if metals are so essential for the spiders, why not have supplies brought to them through the interchange?’
‘Maybe they did, once,’ the Virtual said. ‘Maybe things broke down. There’s a sense of age here, Miriam. This is a young cosmos maybe, but I think this is an old place . . .’
The real Poole murmured, ‘It makes sense. The time axis in the baby universe needn’t be isomorphic with ours. A million years over here, a billion years there.’
The Virtual whispered, ‘Those spiders have been toiling at their task on Titan a long, long time. Whoever manufactured them, or bred them, left them behind a long time ago, and they’ve been alone ever since. Just doing their best to keep going. Looking at them, I get the impression they aren’t too bright. Just functional.’
‘But they did a good job,’ Miriam said.
‘That they did.’
‘But why?’ I blurted out. ‘What’s the purpose of all this, the nurturing of an ecology on Titan for billions of years – and perhaps similar on a thousand other worlds?’
‘I think I have an idea,’ Virtual Poole said. ‘I never even landed on Titan, remember. Perhaps, coming at all this so suddenly, while the rest of you have worked through the stages of your discovery, I see it differently . . .
‘Just as this pocket universe is a junction, so maybe Titan is a junction – a haven where different domains of life can coexist. And it’s been designed that way.
‘You’ve found the native ammono fish, the CHON sponges that may originate in the inner System, and the silanes from Triton or beyond. Maybe there are other families to find, if you had time to look. All these kinds of life, arising from different environments – but all with one thing in common. All born of planets, and of skies and seas, in worlds warmed by stars.
‘But the stars won’t last for ever. In the future the universe will change, until it resembles our own time even less than our universe resembles this young dwarf cosmos. What then? Look, if you were concerned about preserving life, all forms of life, into the very furthest future, then perhaps you would promote—’
‘Cooperation,’ said Miriam Berg.
‘You got it. Symbiosis. Maybe Titan is a kind of prototype, a forced cooperative ecology where life forms of such different origins are compelled to mix, to find ways of using each other to survive—’