The World at the End of Time

CHAPTER 5

Wan-To's interest in the Sorricaine-Mtiga objects (which, of course, he never called by that name) was becoming pretty nearly frantic. He saw a lot more of them than Pal Sorricaine did, because he saw them a lot faster. He didn't have to wait for creeping visible light to bring him the information. His Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pairs relayed the images instantly. The things were popping up all over.

However, he was beginning to have hope. The results from his blue-light studies were beginning to come in.

Blue light was particularly good for looking for starspots. Although the spots seemed relatively dark, they were quite bright enough to be seen by Wan-To's great and sensitive "eyes"—particularly if you looked in the blue. Because the spots were cooler than the areas around them, their gases were ionized in a somewhat different way; and it was the spectral lines of the singly ionized calcium atoms—the ones that had lost just one electron—that stood out in blue.

When Wan-To found blue-light images that were not natural he knew just what to do. He summoned up the necessary graviphotons and graviscalars and hurled them in a carefully designed pattern at that star.

That would have been quite a wonder to human physicists, if they could have known what Wan-To was doing. It would have been a marvel for them if they could even have detected any of those particles, though they had sought them as long, and as unsuccessfully, as any medieval knight had sought the Holy Grail.

It was in the early twentieth century that Theodor Kaluza and Oskar Klein formulated the human race's first decent model of how gravity worked. It wasn't a wholly successful model. There was still a lot to learn. But it managed to relate electromagnetism and gravity as manifestations of a higher-dimension space-time in ways that seemed to fit together pretty well—in ways, in fact, that Wan-To had understood for many billion years. His own understanding of gravitation was more or less a Kaluza-Klein model, though with considerable important amendments. He understood that the three basic mediating particles of the gravitational interaction between masses were what human scientists of the Kaluza-Klein faith would call the vector bosons—the graviton, the graviphoton, and the graviscalar. His command of them was perfect. With the resources of his star to draw on, he could generate any or all of those particles at will. He often did—in copious amounts. He found them all very useful.

He didn't bother much with the simple graviton. That was the uncomplicated spin-2 particle that seemed to pull masses together at even infinite distances—the only one that Isaac Newton, for instance, would have understood. Of course, the graviton was highly important in holding stars together and keeping galaxies rotating around their common center, but you couldn't do much with it. The others were rarer, and more fun, especially when you wanted to attack a colleague's star. A dose of graviphotons, the spin-l repellers, would churn up the star's insides in a hurry; no organized system of Wan-To's kind could survive inside a star that was tearing itself apart that way. Alternatively, or better still, in addition, he could pull at the star from outside with one of the other particles. The more useful of those was the spin-0 graviscalar, which pulled matter and energy toward it just as the humble graviton did, but only over finite distances. The graviscalar was a very local kind of particle.

The great virtue of the graviscalar, in other words, was that it couldn't be detected by Wan-To's enemies unless they were right on the spot—and then they wouldn't be in any position to do anything about it.

When Wan-To saw his target star erupt—very satisfyingly—he began to relax.

Nothing could have survived in that utter holocaust, of course. Wan-To was pleased. He wondered which of his competitors he had killed.

It would, he thought, surely have been one of the dumber ones. The others—the ones he had first made, the ones who were almost as smart as Wan-To himself—would, like Wan-To, have figured out that they shouldn't give their locations away by playing in the convection zones. But at least one was gone—one possible threat, but also, of course, one possible promise of companionship.

Philosophically, Wan-To turned his mind to his next step.

There was no help for it. It would be matter. He was going to have to work with nasty matter.

Wan-To had made copies of himself before. That was why he was having his current problems, in fact—if he hadn't wanted company he would have been alone and, therefore, safe. There was no particular problem in preparing a pattern of himself for occupying another star. He knew exactly how to organize inanimate plasma into a living, reasoning being like himself, because he had himself always at hand as a model.

Working with cold, dead, tangible matter—that was another problem entirely. He had done that, too—well, there wasn't much Wan-To hadn't tried, in the ten or so billion years he had been alive. Once he had made a nonplasmoid copy of himself to live in a cold, diffuse cloud of interstellar gas, once even out of solid matter, on an asteroidal body orbiting the star he had occupied at the time. Both were disgusting failures. The gas-cloud doppel was terminally slow—it simply had too little energy to work with to be any kind of real company. The one made of matter was just matter, and thus repellent to Wan-To; he had obliterated it after a mere century or two.

But at least he knew how to do the job.

The distance of the star system he was working on didn't present any problem. He had long ago planted an Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky set in each of the places where he now wanted them to be. (Wan-To always planned ahead.) The problem was that matter was no fun to manipulate. In Wan-To's opinion it was slow, it was unfamiliar, and it was pretty nasty stuff all around. What made the work even harder was that he wasn't there, so he had to perform all the complicated operations involved through the limited signals that could be carried through an ERP pair. In human terms, it was like a paraplegic trying to play a Space Invaders video game with the kind of controller that responded to puffs of his breath, or like a cardiac surgeon trying to snip and stitch and ream a dammed-up ventricle into shape with a flexible probe that snaked up through the blood vessels from the femoral artery in the patient's crotch.

The limitations of the Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky pair made it all harder, of course. The ERP effect was a probabilistic, quantumlike event.

That meant that there was no guarantee that the message received at one end would be identical to the one that had been transmitted at the other. In fact, it almost certainly wouldn't be.

Naturally Wan-To and his brethren knew how to deal with that problem. Parity checks and redundancy: If the parity check showed nothing wrong, then the message was possibly intact. Then it was compared with the same message transmitted three times. Majority ruled.

All that meant in the long run was that it took longer than it should to carry on a conversation—not because of travel time, but because of processing.

But Wan-To didn't have an alternative.

He didn't want to construct another plasma intelligence. That could well attract attention. Matter would not; beings like Wan-To didn't pay much attention to matter, and there was little chance that any of his feuding relatives would see what was going on on this little satellite of the stellar system he had chosen. He had plans for that system and its neighbors. To make the plans work, he needed some very potent particle-generators.

It would have been possible to create the particle-generators directly, but Wan-To was cleverer than that. What he was constructing wasn't the generators, it was a sort of little Wan-To, a matter analogue of himself, which when completed would do the job of constructing the generators and running them as long as necessary, in just the ways that Wan-To desired.

That little matter Wan-To wasn't anything like an exact copy of himself, of course, and it certainly didn't have all of his powers. What Wan-To was building was only a kind of servomechanism. It had exactly as much intelligence as it needed to do what Wan-To wanted it to do, and no more. It would do what Wan-To himself would have done—up to the limits of its powers, anyway. But by human standards those powers were vast.

Working with solid-phase matter was even a kind of intellectual challenge. So he was pleasantly occupied at his task, like a human terrorist whistling as he puts together his time bomb, and happily contemplating the success of his plans, when a signal reached him.

It was wholly unexpected, and it came through one of his ERP complexes. It wasn't an alarm, this time. He experienced it as a sound—in fact, as the sound of a name—Haigh-tik.

That was Wan-To's "eldest son"—which was to say, the copy of himself he had made first and most completely. As a natural consequence, that was the relative who gave Wan-To the most concern; if any of the eight intelligences he had produced was capable of doing their creator in, Haigh-tik was the one.

So Wan-To paused in the labor of creating his matter analogue and thought for a moment. He knew Haigh-tik very well. He didn't want to talk to him at that moment. It was tempting to start a conversation, in the hope that Haigh-tik would inadvertently say something that would give away his location. The trouble with having a little chat was that Haigh-tik was as likely as Wan-To himself to learn something. But there was a better possibility, Wan-To reflected. He knew quite a lot about Haigh-tik's habits—including what sort of star he preferred to inhabit.

So Wan-To took time to study some of the fairly nearby stars.

Of course, he had done that before—many times, over all the billions of years he had existed, because looking at the outside universe was one of his principal recreations. He saw them quite clearly. In fact, he saw everything quite clearly for, though Wan-To's eyes were no more than patches of sensitive gas, they worked extremely well. What they looked at, they saw. They could trap a single photon, and remember it, and add it to the next photon that came in from that source. And it didn't matter how long the next photon took to arrive.

A human astronomer on, say, Mount Palomar would have been wild with jealousy. A Palomar astronomer might take an interest in a particular star, or a particular remote galaxy, and turn his 200-inch mirror on it for a whole night's observation. If the night sky were really cloudless—and if the cars and filling stations down the hill and the streetlights of San Diego didn't pollute the seeing with too much extraneous light—he might get twelve whole hours on a single charge-coupled plate. He wouldn't do that very often, of course, because there were too many other astronomers clamoring for time to gaze at their own precious objects.

Twelve hours!

But Wan-To's eyes could soak up photons from the faintest object for a thousand years. And if a thousand years wasn't long enough, why, then those eyes would stay unwinking on that single object for a million.

Nor were they limited to the so-called visible frequencies. All the frequencies were visible to Wan-To. He could "hear" a lot at radio frequencies, particularly when studying the great gas clouds, some of them a thousand light-years across, up to hundreds of thousands of solar masses. In the clouds, atomic hydrogen shouts at 1.4 gigahertz; molecular hydrogen is mute. But there are other compounds in the molecular clouds that speak right up: Carbon monoxide is noisy; so is formaldehyde; so is ammonia. He could easily pick out, in the clouds, the things that dirtied them with single molecules and clumps of silicates (rock) and carbon (graphite, charcoal, diamonds) all frozen over with water ice. If radio and optical studies weren't good enough, he had high-energy X rays and gammas that went right through dust.

He saw everything.

On Earth, the early stargazers named the bright points of light they saw overhead at night. The Arabs of the Dark Ages did it best. They had dry air and thus clear night skies, and no power plants or oil refineries to dirty the air, or illuminated highways or shopping malls to fill it with unwanted glow. Before Galileo invented the telescope they could see as many as three thousand stars, and they gave most of them names.

Wan-To could see many more stars than that. One way or another, he could see just about every star in his own galaxy (which at that time was also Earth's)—roughly two hundred and thirty-eight billion of them, depending on which giants had just gone supernova and collapsed into black holes and which new ones were just beginning to shine. He didn't bother to give them names. Type, distance, and direction were good enough for him—but he knew them all, and most of those in the Magellanic Clouds and quite a few in M-31 in Andromeda as well. And he also "knew" just about all the external galaxies this side of the optical limit, too, right down to the "blue fuzzies." He was himself a catalogue far better than Harvard or Draper or the Palomar Sky Survey.

So to survey just the nearest stars didn't take Wan-To long at all. After all, there were only about twenty thousand of them.

The important thing was that he had a piece of useful information about Haigh-tik. Haigh-tik was known to prefer young stars, probably of the kind Earthly astronomers called T-Tauri objects. Therefore Wan-To sought ordinary-looking stars with a strong lithium emission at 660.7 nanometers.

He found three that were close enough to be possible residences for his undutiful son.

Giving his equivalent of a humorous shrug, Wan-To zapped them all. In one sense, he thought, that was a waste of two stars, at least. Still, there were plenty of stars, and anyway, in just a little while—no more than a million years or so—they would have settled down from being wrung out and so be habitable again if wanted.

After he had sent the instructions on their way he went back to his other project, feeling more cheerful. A dozen other stars had flared up and died while he was working. If Haigh-tik had been the one directing that probing fire, maybe he was now out of the game.

But whoever it was, Wan-To did not want him to know he had missed.