‘They both died.’
‘Are you with friends? At home?’
‘It’s difficult. I can’t talk about it.’
‘We’re in such different places. But we don’t have easy lives, do we?’
‘Different places? Coton, I don’t understand any of this. I know you’re speaking to me through the Mole. I don’t know where you are.’
‘Where do you think I could be?’
‘In another of the nebulae that are orbiting the big-star. But there are lots of big-stars orbiting the Core of Cores. Perhaps you’re closer to one of them. Are you on a tree, or in a whale?’
‘I don’t understand much of that. No, Lura, I’m not in any of those places.’
‘Are you further away, then?’
‘Lura, I’m in another universe.’
‘A what? Another everything? What does that mean?’
‘I think sometimes the translation isn’t very good. Maybe you don’t have the word in your language. I’m in the place people originally came from. Your people. Your ancestors went through a kind of gate, and ended up where you are. They couldn’t get back. Everything is different here. The stars, the stars are bigger than you can imagine—’
‘Humans don’t belong here.’
‘What?’
‘My parents taught me that when I was small. They said it’s the most important thing people should remember. The Brothers would punish you if they caught you saying it. But you can’t do that now, can you, Pesten? Humans don’t belong here! It’s true! Here’s the proof!’
‘You haven’t forgotten, then. After all this time. In a way, your Mole never forgot either. It must have been a component of the original ship—’
‘The Ship! We have stories about the Ship – some of us. People lived on it for a while, and then they made the Raft out of it, but they had to give that up too.’
‘And in the end the Mole called. I managed to hear it . . . It’s complicated.’
‘Why did it call?’
‘Because it thinks you need help, Lura. All of you, in that universe.’
‘I like talking to you, Coton.’
‘And I like talking to you. Tell me what you see.’
‘The air is red and filled with stars, all falling down . . .’
8
Coton lay on his pallet, propped up on pillows, outside Vala’s tetrahedral house. His talks with Lura were draining, and after a half-hour session he always felt as if he hadn’t slept for days.
Meanwhile Sand and Vala argued over their data, their interpretations, their Virtual reconstructions. They were using facilities loaned by the local Second Coalition authority and imported into this ancient Map Room – and, remarkably, the Marshal herself had invested the time to come here in person.
What they were discovering was remarkable, inspiring, haunting. Vala had actually found a scrap of a log fired back by the crew of the Integrality’s Constancy of Purpose as the warship, its engine blazing, had fallen through Bolder’s Ring, an immense Xeelee artefact under assault from human fleets – fallen into a new universe . . .
The ship imploded, and fell into a compact, glowing nebula. Crew members hurried through the corridors of their failing vessel. Smoke filled the passageways as lurid flames singed the air. And then the hull was breached. The raw air of the nebula scoured through the cabins, and through rents in the silver walls the crew saw flying trees and huge, cloudy whales, all utterly unlike anything in their experience . . .
‘It’s a miracle anything survives at all,’ Vala said. ‘It’s nearly nine hundred thousand years since this ship was lost! A date, incidentally, we confirmed from the linguistic drift between Lura’s tongue and our own.’
‘Perhaps you could skip the self-congratulation, Academician—’
‘Gravity!’ Vala said forcefully. ‘That’s the key to universe Beta – which is what the Integrality archivists of the time called it.’
‘Our own universe being Alpha, I suppose,’ said Sand drily.
Vala smiled. ‘Gravity in Beta is a billion times stronger than in Alpha – you understand I mean the fundamental force, the magnitude of the constant of gravity. Other physical constants, the speed of light for instance, are the same.’
‘Then everything is different there,’ Sand said, pondering. ‘If Earth was projected into universe Beta—’
‘It would have a surface gravity of a billion gees – but it would implode in an instant. Even a mass as small as a human body would have a perceptible gravity field. In Beta, you could make a “star” with the mass of a small comet, say; that would give enough pressure to initiate fusion in the core. Stellar masses scale inversely as the gravity constant raised to the power of three over two . . . Other cosmic objects scale similarly – neutron stars, black holes.
‘The cosmology in Beta, reconstructed from what Lura has been able to tell us, is quite unlike our own. Well, you’d expect that.’
She conjured up a Virtual that looked to Coton like a false-colour sketch of a Solar System, with a dark, brooding sun at the centre, around which orbited bright pinprick ‘planets’, and around these in turn circled glowing clouds of crimson gas, speckled with sparks. A strange orrery, Coton thought. He saw how the light of the Virtual stars reflected from the sheen of the Marshal’s electric-blue jacket.
Vala said, ‘We don’t think Beta has galaxies of the kind we have here. Primitive gas clouds would implode violently and fragment, and you would quickly end up with massive black holes and an undergrowth of miniature stars. So you get a different sort of clustering, different hierarchies.
‘The centre of the system Lura sees is this mass they call the Core of Cores. We suspect this is an extremal black hole – a black hole of the largest possible mass.’
‘I didn’t know there was a limit,’ said Sand.
‘The larger a hole the more eagerly it consumes infalling matter, crushing it in the process. You reach a point where the resulting radiation blasts away any more infall. That limit’s pretty high, at around fifty billion solar masses in our universe – a good fraction of a galaxy’s mass. In universe Beta you’d expect to find many holes pushing at that limit. Here such a hole would span the Solar System, out to the comets. In Beta, an extremal hole is only a few hundred kilometres across. Lura is pretty far out, on the fringe of the gravity well.
‘Star formation probably starts with interstellar birth clouds of the same sort of mass and density as here – like the Carina nebula. But instead of Sol-sized stars spaced a few light years apart, such a cloud will collapse into many more comet-mass stars, as close to each other as the planets in the Solar System. We think these are the “big-stars” Lura sees orbiting the Core of Cores.
‘Such stars don’t have planetary systems like ours. Instead you have these quite dense gas clouds – nebulae, Lura calls them – orbiting each star, and centred on their own smaller black holes.
‘The nebulae are held together by gravity balanced by internal heat, generated by lesser stars inside the nebulae – the ones Lura sees falling through the air. We call them “flare stars”. They seem to be mountain-mass splinters, but with stellar fusion going on in their cores. The flares form at the edge of a nebula and then fall inward, as you see. Whereas the big-stars and the Core are analogues of objects in our universe, scaled according to the gravity constant, the flare stars aren’t like anything we have. Well, you’d expect some exotic objects.